The Beautiful Side of the Moon Read online

  It all came back. Ever since I could remember, my father would toss a one kobo coin and tell me to guess heads or tails. He never showed me which it was and he never checked himself. Sometimes, after I’d picked a face he would say, ‘concentrate,’ and would ask me to guess again, but mostly he just tossed the coin again. He played this ‘game’ with me all the time, for hours on end, or so it seemed to me, a child who just wanted to watch cartoons. And at the end of the game I did not understand, he always seemed pleased with me, as if I’d done something right. Ever since I was a child.

  ‘Heads or tails,’ Daniel said, but the only thought in my perfectly terrified heart was the sphere: it was with Rachel. I had to get it back.

  I left the ninth floor and, compelled by habit, pressed the button to call the lift. I took my finger away but it was too late, I’d done it. I looked up at the camera watching me. I hurried to the door that led to the stairs. I didn’t want to hear the lift opening and find out which one came first.

  My heart beating hard and fast with fear and anxiety and confusion, I flew down the stairs two steps at a time, pursued and propelled by a strong feeling of being in imminent danger.

  I saw Rachel’s head above her monitor. Would I tell her about the lifts? What would I say? I had already told her a lot. Had I put her in danger as well? I mean, she already knew… Well, she knew everything. She knew about the letter, about Adesua, Brother Moses, his hat, the snake, the sphere. She had touched the sphere. She had smelt it – breathed it into her lungs! I had to protect her. But how, and from whom?

  Rachel looked up and saw me looking at her. I continued to her desk. I must not involve her any further in was going on. Even at that moment, I realised that the only way to protect her was to get far away from her. It was me they wanted.

  I passed Ade standing over Moyo’s desk. They were the only open lovers in the office. Ade saw me approaching, smiled and nodded, looked at his watch and said to his lover, ‘Time is moving really fast today.’

  I stopped walking. I looked at him and asked, ‘What did you say?’

  He showed me his watch face and said it again, ‘Time is moving really fast today.’

  I checked my own watch. It was already midday. But how could that be? I arrived at work, sent Rachel a meeting invite and waited for her to arrive, showed her the ball, went upstairs to the ninth floor and came back down. It should be not a second more than ten. Fearful foreboding swept over me. Only I knew what was happening. I was literally running out of time!

  Before I could say anything, Rachel said: ‘Hey, I was thinking. These guys told you they want you to come with them because there are bad people who want you to go with them too, right? That is stupid. Think of it. If all their nonsense is true, how would you know that they are not the bad guys trying to stop you from joining the good guys?’

  ‘What? Never mind. Listen, can I have the ball?’

  ‘Your ball? You have it.’

  ‘No. You have it.’

  ‘Didn’t you take it from the room?’

  ‘No. I thought you did.’

  I turned and she stood and we both looked at the meeting room we’d used. The room had at least seven people in it, our colleagues, all standing round the head of project management who was talking to them. She was known for long meetings.

  I had to get my ball. I started walking to the meeting room not quite sure what I would do. I was aware of Rachel following me but maybe, if I ignored her, she’d go away. I stood before the meeting room and tried to see between the legs of the people in there, whether the sphere was still there. Their backs were to me but the head of project management saw me and gave me a questioning look. I looked away from her eyes and continued trying to see the top of the stool.

  ‘Can you see it?’ Rachel said.

  I had to get rid of her for her own sake. I ignored her. She nudged me. She nodded and I looked. Daniel was on the floor and coming for me.

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘please go to your desk.’

  ‘What did he want from you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you later, just go. Please. Now.’

  She was still standing by my side when Daniel got to us. He was holding up his fifty pence coin, his face awash with the beam of yet another discovery, I feared. And I was right.

  Heaving once before he spoke, as if he’d been doing something strenuous, he began, ‘I know why you didn’t get it right. I said heads or tails, but you guys don’t use coins in Nigeria, so you didn’t know which side was the head and which side was the tail. Do you know the odds of getting it wrong ten times out of ten? It’s the same as getting it right ten times out of ten. You were calling the correct side, you just didn’t know it. And it wasn’t ten times out of ten; it was more like twenty-five times out of twenty-five.’

  He thought I did not know heads from tails. Because I was Nigerian. His condescension grated my soul – almost as badly as when he felt the need to tell me what E.S.P. was. I was starting to hate him – probably first for dis- covering my secret, and then for showing it to me, then for coming to confront me with it in front of someone I was trying to protect from this… this magic. But at that precise moment I hated him with an intensity approaching tipping point because he had rumbled me. I had intentionally called the wrong side each time he tossed his coin. I did it to throw him off. It upset me that he wasn’t fooled for long. It upset me that I hadn’t thought it through and got some right. It terrified me that I was able to intention- ally get it wrong all the time.

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Rachel said.

  I wished he would just go away and not stand there beaming at me as if we were new BFFs.

  ‘He’s got superpowers,’ he said. ‘He can predict stuff.’ Just then, the squeaky voice of the head of project screamed over the shouts and gasps of the others in the meeting room, and the sound of glass crashing onto marble tiles. We all turned. The stool’s glass top was on the floor, directly beneath the frame, shattered into pieces like a glass jigsaw. I searched the ground for my sphere.

  Rachel shouted, ‘The ball!’

  Chapter 11 The Other Men in Black

  There ought to be a word for when everything occurs simultaneously in a momentary convergence of events in time and space, unified by all of these events happening to the same subject. At the exact same moment that my ball became too heavy for the glass, two white men in black suits, black ties, black shoes and white shirts, who had arrived at the lobby downstairs a few minutes earlier escorted by a major in the Nigerian Army and four of his soldiers wielding AK-47s, were given access to the sixth floor by the head of IT, who kept looking at the guns.

  Without thinking, I entered the meeting room and forced my way between my colleagues who were all looking down at the glass top that had inexplicably shattered, apparently without impetus. I crouched before the broken pieces and searched for my ball. It seemed to have stopped where it landed, directly beneath the edge of the stool where it had rolled to before. I reached for it and felt an arm on my shoulder. Looking up, I was staring into the barrel of an assault rifle, which was so menacing that the body of the person holding it appeared out of focus behind it.

  Frozen in place by a force emanating from the gun, I waited to be told what to do.

  ‘Are you Mr Osaretin Osagiemwenagbon?’ a voice said. It didn’t belong to the holder of the gun. I placed my extended hand onto the broken pieces of glass to support my body as I dared to swivel to see who had mispronounced my name with an American accent.

  He was tall and slim. His face was rigid, with the practised lack of emotion worn by the military. His hair was blond, shaved at the sides, and swept forwards in a uniform inch of growth on the top. The other white man by his side was short and stout, his black suit unbuttoned, or unbuttonable due to his large belly, over which his tie rested like a drunk leaning on a bar. His head was shiny bald on top with a shock of curly brownish-orange hair on the sides. He had a pair of round wire-framed glasses, and his face looked f
riendly and nerdy. My eyes also took in the Nigerian major in his smart uniform, and the soldiers peering at me over the shoulders of the white men. Behind the group, my colleagues were gathered, the head of IT in the frontline, watching to learn why they had come to arrest Osaretin.

  I nodded that I was me.

  ‘Please come with us,’ the man said.

  The soldier took his hand off my shoulder and stretched it out to help me up. I looked at the ball, then immediately looked away, hoping I hadn’t given it away. As I was being pulled to my feet I looked about for Rachel. She was standing next to Daniel, just outside the glass wall by the door. She looked steadily back at me. I ever so slightly turned my head and she, just as slightly so as to be unnoticed by anyone not in the know, nodded. She would get my ball.

  Standing, facing the tall white man, I asked, ‘Who are you? What is this about?’

  ‘Come with us.’

  I wanted to say no and stand my ground, but the soldiers, their guns, my colleagues busy-bodying, the madness of the past twenty-four hours, and of course the safe retrieval of my time-machine ball – the responsibility for which I’d delegated to Rachel, made going with them the only option. Also, it was quite apparent that no matter what I said, the tall white man’s response was going to be ‘Come with us,’ so I left with them.

  I think the entire population of the floor followed us as far as the door. The two white men stood on either side of me when we waited for the lift. I looked at Daniel standing by the door with the head of IT. The soldiers had pressed the button. A lift arrived behind us.

  The two white men got in first and stood at the back of the lift. I stood in front of them, the soldiers stood in front of me, and their boss stood in front of them. The lift stopped on the third floor. The doors opened to a dozen or so executives, some of whom had taken impatient steps forward before stopping at the sight of the guns. On the ground floor the people waiting for the lift parted without being told and I was marched out of the building to a waiting black Ford SUV. I was made to sit in the middle of the back seat, between the tall white man and the short, round one.

  The driver was also white and also wearing a black suit. He had one of those curly white wires stretching from his collar to his right ear. He started driving as soon as the doors were closed.

  ‘Where are you taking me? What is this about?’ I asked.

  I knew it had something to do with the night before. But because they had come with soldiers, I was confident they would not start talking about magic or claim to be magicians.

  ‘Are you American?’

  ‘Yes,’ the tall man said without looking at me.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Silence.

  ‘What did I do?’

  The short man spoke. ‘I’m Adrian, he’s Richard, and he (he pointed at the driver) is Jason. Why don’t you tell us about last night?’

  I knew it. Where would I start? They probably knew about Adesua and Brother Moses. The two oddballs were probably, as they say, ‘on their radar’.

  Adrian didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Yesterday, during the anomaly, all electrical devices with any sort of contact to the ground stopped working. Everything. Everywhere. Trains, computers, cars. The lot. They all stopped working. Batteries became… strange. The electricity in them became… fuzzy, unstable, different. It’s really quite… It’s amazing. Contact with terra firma temporarily altered the nature of the electrical charge they stored. All through the event, not one single motor vehicle in any country in the entire world was functional, except two, and one of them belongs to you. How did you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Make your car work?’

  ‘This is what this is about? My car?’

  ‘We have your car. It’s coming with us. Maybe you can help us understand why it wasn’t affected by the anomaly.’ ‘Why are you calling it an anomaly? Didn’t they say it was just a solar flare?’

  ‘Right now, right this moment, trading has been stopped in all major markets. America is at DEFCON 1. Russia warmed up her silos hours ago. The world is one tweet away from global catastrophe. What happened yesterday was no solar flare. What happened was contact.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you believe in aliens?’

  I shook my head, glad I had not volunteered anything about Adesua and Brother Moses, but maybe they already had them too. Maybe the two were in the backs of similar black SUVs, between similar men in black, being questioned about the functioning of cars and being told about flying saucers.

  ‘Yesterday was nothing short of an attack. They were testing our defences. Your car could be the key to saving the world. Once we figure out why your car worked during the event, we’ll know how to prepare when the first wave comes.’

  ‘First wave?’

  ‘That’s right. They’ve probed. They’ve learnt our weakness. Now they will attack.’

  ‘How can you be sure about all this?’

  ‘How? ‘Cus we’ve been dealing with them since Roswell. Heck, since way before Roswell.’

  ‘UFOs are real?’

  ‘They’re real. And they’re getting ready to attack.’

  ‘So, where are you taking me?’

  Before he could answer, the driver pressed the forefinger of his right hand to his earpiece. ‘We’ve got a boogie,’ he said, returning his hand to the steering wheel.

  ‘Where?’ Richard asked. Richard was the tall one.

  ‘Nine o’clock.’

  Adrian grabbed my arm. He looked even more excited than when he told me about an impending alien invasion. ‘Have you ever seen a UFO?’ he said. I shook my head.

  ‘Well, take a look.’

  He pressed a button to wind down the tinted window on his side.

  He squinted at the brilliance of the sun and, shielding his eyes with his hand, began to search the sky.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘Do you see it?’

  I leaned forward to see the UFO. At first I saw nothing,

  then a tiny silvery dot moved from its stationary position and suddenly stopped again, as if to keep up with our fast-moving vehicle. It was just a dot in the sky, reflecting the sun, but the way it moved and stopped was out of this world. I was looking at a real UFO. A real-real UFO.

  Adrian reached behind me to receive something from Richard.

  They were going to engage the UFO with some high- tech weaponry, and I was going to witness it.

  Adrian collected the device and, holding it to his face, aimed it at the dot. I couldn’t wait to see what it was. It was a camera. Was he taking pictures before blasting away at the aliens, or was the secret weapon disguised as a camera?

  ‘They don’t like being photographed, so when we see one of ‘em watching us, we start taking pictures and they scamper real quick. Look, it’s gone.’

  The dot was gone but I hadn’t seen it go and this filled me with such disappointment. I searched the sky but Adrian rolled the tinted window up.

  ‘We’ve got a tail,’ the driver said. ‘Looks like… Looks like the other car.’

  ‘What?’ said Adrian.

  He turned to look out of the rear window. So did Richard, and so did I. Adesua’s car was right behind us. She was driving, and next to her, without his hat, was Brother Moses, smiling and waving at me.

  Chapter 12 A Long Short Ride

  There I was, being carted away, full of angst over Adesua’s whereabouts and whether they’d found her too (unlike me, she and Brother Moses would have had a lot of explaining to do), and what does she do? She turns up behind us on Awolowo Road.

  Straining my neck to look at her through the back window of our SUV, I realised I still liked her. No. I never stopped liking her. I felt it in my heart then in my belly. I really, really liked her. It didn’t matter that Brother Moses had told me it was just a spell. The spell hadn’t broken.

  ‘She’s nobody,’ I said.

  Adrian looked at me. ‘You know her?’ I shouldn’t have said anythin
g.

  ‘What should I do?’ Jason said, looking in the rear-view mirror as he drove.

  I saw Richard pull out a gun from his jacket. ‘Stop the car.’

  We slowly came to a stop. Adesua stopped a few metres behind us.

  As Richard climbed out, Brother Moses also got out of Adesua’s car. I moved to get out but Adrian held my arm. ‘Hold your horses,’ he said. ‘Let the soldiers handle this.’

  ‘Soldiers?’

  ‘Yeah. They’ll bring ‘em in.’

  He looked out of the front window and only then did I realise that the white Hilux bus in front of our car was carrying the soldiers. They’d stopped too. I looked back.

  Adesua stayed in the car. Her hands were on the steering wheel.

  She stared at me, her face giving nothing away, yet in the blankness of her composure I could see that she was seething. At me. I should have followed her and Brother Moses before the men in black got involved.

  What would she say when she found out I’d also lost the ball?

  Richard’s back came into view between the two cars. I could tell he was pointing his gun at Brother Moses. Adesua kept looking at me. Brother Moses, wearing his amazingly consistent smile, started juggling coloured balls that seemed to appear from nowhere. He moved to the front of Adesua’s car and started hopping from one foot to the other as he juggled the balls, smiling.

  ‘What the hell?’ Adrian said.

  I was also wondering what Brother Moses was doing. ‘Alright, that’s it,’ Adrian said. He pressed down on the earpiece in his right ear. ‘Let’s get this clown, and the broad.’

  The soldiers walked onto the scene, led by their boss. The major stopped by Richard, levelled his pistol to the head and bang. Like slow motion, I watched the other side of the agent’s head explode in a spray of red. ‘What the!’ Adrian screamed. He pulled out a pistol from under his jacket, dropped it in his lap and fumbled to hold it up again. ‘Drive, drive, drive!’ he said to Jason.