BUREAU OF LIFE [PART V]

...continued

For five days and five nights Benjay had swum in innumerable quagmires of hallucinations, nerve-splitting dreams and brain-banging visions. On his several trips to the ethereal reality, that was soon to become his existence, he had witnessed his body divorced from his soul. While his body writhed in eye-bulging spasms and gold-melting fevers, his soul was wreathed with streams of imagery that he couldn’t make any sense of.

The imagery was attendant to a voice with the audacity of crashing waves in a typhoon. The voice recited every bible verse Benjay had ever seen, heard and read. The weight of the voice still drummed in Benjay’s thrashed consciousness, rendering his heart palpitations rhythmless. Benjay could not finger any memory responsible for how he got home five nights ago and could not discern any taste that could testify to his consumption of any meal within that period.

Yet he felt alive. Alive with so much essence that he was scared the overdose would end his existence. In his sojourn into the inexplicable realm, he had seen faces. Faces he recognized but was confident he had never met in person. They were mostly attention-seeking, shallow-minded folks he’d seen on TV - celebrities.  Those fools he hated for wasting their talents. They had the opportunity to quake a cataclysmic change across the nation, yet spun the teeming toddlers of their audience to the advantages of their already green accounts.

Only few said the truth. Like Fela and Lagbaja. That’s why he had invested long nights in creating his afrobeat and afrohop mixtapes. He was going to be the next voice of his generation. His dread-locked brand look would be pegged on a reggae artiste any day and he loved the confusion everyone wore whenever he clarified that he was no Rastafari.

While he hustled Gbagada and Ilupeju bus-stops as a tout by day, he spent most nights recording hits and mastering his art. He had over twenty recorded songs, but none had been released because he felt he wasn’t ready yet; strange for a bristly twenty-nine-year-old with ambitions of international impact.

Benjay’s eyes fluttered open and the fog of confusion dispersed for a wee bit. He became aware that he was lying prostrate and that his entire body felt drenched. The dingy foam was soaked through vertically and horizontally. He pushed his dead-weight up as he rose and water gathered around his hands. Had his room flooded again? Lagos floods were no respecter of the high or low.

He looked at the room floor and dispelled that thought. There were dry sheaves of paper on the ground with his writing on them. He looked closely at the sheet closest to him and saw Lathan Luciano, 4-time NGMA winner, raised in Aba-Ngwa, sexually abused at 12, started ministry at 15 when his dad died from consumption of petrol, sold everything he had to record his first album, lives on 11 Glover road, Ikoyi, Phone number…

Benjay’s palpitating heart ceased in freight, when he looked at the next sheet. Statistics about another person he had never heard of - then the next sheet and the next one. All the sheets scattered about the floor had data about people. Then he saw a blank sheet with a bic pen on it.

“Pick it up and write,” the same audacious voice broke into Benjay’s dread.

“Who are you?” Benjay screamed. His confusion and frustration at the string of events clawed at the helms of his sanity. Was he running amok?

“Mosun Akinola, wife of the late Gbenga Akinola, who died of cocaine overdose while on his praise west-Africa tour…"

To be continued...

Image credit: Courtesy - jasonshen.com