"Race"

Thursday was two days away. Forty-eight hours to not think about the twins and their wahala. I needed my head light. The run was supposed to help. It usually did.

Before the sun turns hostile, the Lekki-Epe Expressway has one good hour.

Horns, but not yet the angry ones---the early horns, finding their rhythm, more greeting than threat. A hawker somewhere behind me: "Pure wọtahh! Cold pure wọtahh!" My own breath. My own feet. Left, right, left, the flat slap of old trainers on broken concrete.

By half past seven the road had done its usual trick. It had stopped.

Lagos traffic is the only democracy this country has ever fully committed to. A Range Rover sat dead beside a danfo missing its back door, and neither of them was going anywhere the other wasn't. The average speed of the Lekki-Epe between seven and ten in the morning is roughly the speed of a man who skips leg day. I am not that man. I kept my pace, and the road handed me car after car.

An Uber came up on my left. White Corolla, dusty, a cracked phone mount on the windscreen. A back-seat passenger I clocked as a shape bent over a phone.

I passed it the way I'd passed forty cars already, without meaning anything by it.

Then the road opened a car's length ahead, and the driver---I could see him grin in his side mirror---nudged forward just enough to draw level with me again.

The idea was foolish. A grown man racing a Toyota through gridlock, thirty-three years old, no job, a dead man's voice note sitting unopened at the top of his chats.

I raced the Toyota.

First pass, I took him clean. A gap opened, I lengthened my stride, and I went by the passenger window close enough to read the fare on the driver's screen. He laughed and tapped his horn twice---playing. A keke driver stuck in the next lane leaned out and shouted, "Athlete! Olympic dey come!" Somebody else took it up. Free crowd. Lagos will spectate anything that isn't its own problem.

The traffic clenched again and swallowed the Toyota behind me. Forty brake lights went red down the length of the road at once, the whole expressway agreeing to stop. I eased off, let my breathing sit where it belonged, and waited for the red to let go and give him back.

Running stride-for-stride beside a moving car---there's a specific feeling to it, your body matched to a machine, close enough to touch metal.

I had done it once before, at a dead sprint, chasing a taxi that was never going to stop out of a compound in Lekki Phase 1, the airport dust still on my shoes. Two bedrooms. A kitchen table with rings burned into it from where we set the laptop when it overheated at 3 a.m. The flat too quiet when I got back from putting my father in the ground, and one name where two used to be, signed while I stood at a graveside four hundred kilometres away.

The gap opened. My legs had never stopped---left, right, left---and I went back to the race.

Second pass, the whole jam was in on it.

The Toyota crept, I overtook, and a man selling gala from a cooler pointed at the car and yelled, "Driver, you dey shame us! Add fuel!" The driver threw his hands up, all innocence, then floored it three feet into the next car's bumper zone and braked. A bus conductor hanging off his door called odds. Somebody's radio was playing something with too much reverb on the snare. For about ninety seconds, the deadest road in Lagos became the most alive one, and all it took was a jogger and a Corolla and a city bored enough to care.

I was grinning.

Third pass, she looked up.

She'd been a shape and a phone the whole time, and now she wasn't. She looked up because the driver was laughing too hard not to be sharing a joke, and she followed his eyes out the window, and found a man in a faded shirt keeping pace with her car, grinning like he'd just remembered what joy felt like.

The laugh started as an accident. A short one, startled out of her — the sound you make when something is funny before you've agreed to find it funny.

Then it caught. Her head went back and it came out full, no hand over the mouth, no checking who was watching. She said something to the driver. He shrugged, delighted. She looked back at me and laughed harder, pressed one knuckle to the corner of her eye, and kept laughing until it blurred her.

Then Chevron Drive.

The Toyota's indicator came on, orange, patient. The road bent left and the driver took it, one last tap of the horn as a salute, and the car slid off the expressway and into the side street and was gone.

I pulled up at the junction, on the expressway side of it. Hands on my knees. Chest working. The stitch I'd been outrunning finally caught me now that there was nothing left to chase, and I stood there breathing at the mouth of a street I had no reason to look twice at, watching a white car shrink into ordinary Lagos morning.

I didn't know her name. I hadn't asked for it. The whole thing had lasted a few minutes, and it was over, and I knew---even standing there, chest heaving, sweat cooling---that I would never see her again.

My hands hung quiet at my sides. No count on my thigh. Nothing in them reaching for anything.

I ran home smiling. I couldn't have told you at what.

⁂

Steve wasn't back.

The flat gave me the evidence anyway: one slipper by the door and its partner three feet away, the kettle still ticking as it cooled, half a loaf open on the counter with the butter knife left standing upright in the margarine tub. Steve eats bread the way he does everything---fast, and gone before questions.

I drank straight from the bottle in the fridge, which is an offence in this house, and stood in front of the fan while it clicked at me. The blade of afternoon light hadn't come yet. Too early. The wall was still just a wall.

The phone rang in my pocket while my heart was still coming down.

Unknown number. 0708-something.

I let it ring once and looked at it. My cousin's wife had lost two hundred thousand the month before to a voice that said it was calling from the bank's "verification department." Since then I let unknown numbers ring out and waited to see if they'd send a text. A real person texts. A scam calls back immediately, because a scam is on a schedule.

It rang a second time. A third.

That run had loosened something. The noise was staying quiet longer than usual. I was bolder than I had any business being for a man with nothing in his account but a folded mattress and a friend's charity.

I answered.

"Hello?"

"Am I speaking with Nwoke Ugwu?" A young woman. Efficient. Something under the efficiency, an accent I couldn't place---a lilt that made the question land soft and still expect its answer. Studio noise behind her: a monitor humming, someone tuning a guitar in another room.

"You're speaking with him."

"I'm calling from the studio in Lekki Phase 1. You were coming to see the twins on Thursday." A small pause, papers moving. "We've had a cancellation this afternoon. The session's opened up. Is there any way you could come today instead?"

My thumb went up to my eyebrow and I made it come back down.

"Today."

"Today. In about two hours, if you can. They're---" she lowered her voice, the way you do when the person you're discussing is in the next room, "---they're difficult about who they let in the room. When the door opens, it's better to be standing in it."

Two hours. No time to talk to Steve. No time to rehearse a single thing.

"I can come," I said.

I said it faster than I meant to.