"Caught"

You can tell the price of a Lagos neighbourhood by what you can't hear in it.

Old Ikoyi at night has no generators. No horns, no hawkers, nobody's fuji bleeding through a shared wall. The houses here run on inverters, and the silence comes included in the rent. That night, the loudest thing for three streets was Chief Obiora Okeke on the other side of a glass door, toasting his sons.

I couldn't make out the words. I didn't need to. A toast has a shape even through glass---the slow climb, the pause where the room leans in, the landing. He was on his second climb. A father with plenty to say and a room that had to sit there and let him say it.

Downstairs was a listening dinner. The twins' album, finished at last, played once through for family before the world got it. An album with my hands all over it. I was the reason for half that toast, and I was out on the balcony, hiding from it.

I stood at the rail in the shirt Luísa had bought me, the cream one she said made me look like a man with secrets, a glass of champagne going warm in my hand, and rehearsed a sentence.

Luísa, I can't do this anymore.

Six words. I never got past the third. It wasn't even a brave sentence. It didn't say why. It didn't say who. It made me a man who couldn't instead of a man who wouldn't. And still, alone, with nobody to win over but the dark, I couldn't land it.

I arrange other people's words for a living. Bring me your verse and I'll find the one line that's lying and make you sing it true by morning. My own six words, out here, no audience---nothing. They refused direction.

My fingers had started up on my thigh without consulting me. Index, middle, ring. Index, middle, ring.

I set the glass down on the rail to stop them and caught my other thumb riding the scar in my eyebrow. Both hands busy telling on me.

Under the toast, I heard a machine keeping strict time.

There was no machine. There had been no machine since February. Some sounds don't care.

You've been hiding inside other people's songs since we were boys, Kene said, in the last voice he had, the one with the machine under it. Stop hiding. Promise me.

He said it in Igbo. Kene never trusted English with anything that mattered.

I promised.

The machine kept time a while longer. Then it stopped, and I came back to Lagos, and now here I was on a rich man's balcony, hiding.

The night was too still. Even for Ikoyi.

The door opened behind me and the party spilled out---her brother Iago's laugh, high and pleased with itself, silverware, a woman somewhere deep in a story saying não, não, escuta---then the door shut and sealed it all back in.

Bare feet on concrete.

I didn't turn. There are people you learn by the sound of them not wearing shoes.

She came and stood at the rail. Silver rings clicked down on the concrete, one hand, then the other. There was dried paint on the inside of her wrist, yellow gone brown at the edges. Everyone else in that house had dressed for a portrait. Ana had brought her work with her, the way she brought it everywhere. Mostly on her skin.

"You've been out here long," she said.

"I'm pacing myself."

She tilted her head. A quarter-turn she used behind a camera. Then---

"There. You did it again."

"Did what?"

"The smile. It came late." She touched the corner of her own mouth, marking the spot. "One second after it was supposed to. I have photographed you enough to know your timing."

"Maybe it's the champagne."

"Huh," she grinned.

"Mhm." I looked at the glass. "Expensive things confuse me."

Her shoulders moved. No sound came out. She laughed like that when a thing was too foolish for noise. Then the laugh left, and she didn't.

"Your mouth was moving before I came out," she said. "I watched you through the glass. Rehearsing."

Below us, her father's voice began another climb.

"They are toasting the album," she said, when I gave her nothing. "Papa has learned to say lead single in the middle of Igbo. It is very serious. Nobody is allowed to laugh."

"And you left before you did."

"I left because the window shows this balcony from exactly one seat," she said. "And I was in it."

I picked the glass up. I put it back down.

A sentence dies against glass. A name walks right through. Mine came up through the floor in her father's voice, and the room made a warm sound around it. Ana watched me hear it.

"He is toasting you now," she said. "You should be inside."

"I know."

Neither of us moved.

My fingers found my thigh again. Index, middle, ring. She looked at them, then out at the garden, and let me keep the lie that she hadn't seen.

"Say it to me," she said. "The sentence you are building out here."

"Ana."

"Say it. Words are less heavy the second time."

I looked at the garden. Rake lines in the grass you could only see from above.

"Luísa," I said. "I can't---"

The rest stayed where it lived. Wherever that was.

"I do this all day," I said. "Other people's words. It's the whole job. Mine don't take direction."

"Because they are yours," she said. "You have never met them before."

My fingers went still.

"Go back inside, Ana. Before somebody counts the chairs."

"You are doing the producer voice." She turned to face me fully, and her rings stayed on the rail. "I am not a session."

"Where is she?"

"Kitchen. Telling the caterer the small plates are late." She stopped. The rings pressed flat on the rail. "Don't make me talk about her out here. It puts her in two places."

The toast climbed on beneath us. In the quiet between his sentences you could hear the house itself---the low breath of air conditioning, ice settling in a bucket somewhere, money at rest. I had spent months learning to walk into that sound like it was mine.

"Tonight," Ana said. "When you tell my sister. Tell me which part will be true."

"All of it."

"Nwoke."

"The part where I---"

The toast landed. Applause came up through the floor, crystal ringing on crystal, Iago whooping over the top of it. The door rattled once in its frame. By the time the room settled, my sentence had gone wherever my sentences went that night.

I never finished it. Not that night, not any night after. I'm no longer sure I ever knew how it ended.

She bit the corner of her lip and let it go. She was looking at me the way she looked at things right before she photographed them.

I ran my hand over my jaw.

I've gone over that half-second more times than any take I've ever mixed, and there's no clean edit in it. One breath we were two people standing at a rail. The next there was no rail, no toast, no house under us keeping score.

She kissed the way she talked. Nothing performed in it.

Then, sound so quiet it was almost not there, she hummed against my mouth. A few notes, low, climbing toward an ending that wasn't there. It was not a song I knew.

I heard it before I understood it. The ear gets there first. It's the job.

A small breaking. Expensive. A stem snapping, then a second stem, then the wide bright sound of everything else reaching the tile. Glass broke while her mouth was still on mine, and by the time I turned, I already knew what I would see.

Luísa stood in the doorway.

Behind her the party carried on without its manager. Champagne ran across the tile and found my shoes. She had carried out two glasses. One of them was mine. She had crossed her whole family to bring it to me.

She didn't speak. She didn't move. Her hands stayed curved around the shape of what they had been carrying.