Evenining Screwdriver
My Thug of Night: Reflection on Crisis
Part I:
November 26, 2005
Owerri, Nigeria
Her innocence shone like a candle in the black thug of night. She lay on the earthen floor, silently, counting the stars, trying not to think, waiting for her consciousness to fade. A draft of cool air streamed through the makeshift shelter where she slept. Her father had fashioned it a few days ago using dry-rotted wooden planks he had gathered. They now called it home.
The girl’s father had gone to the neighboring city of Enugu the day before. “Chilme ebá uamu wahi,” (Stay here, darling) he had instructed her. “Niga naita á hechi chilme.” (I’ll be back tomorrow; just stay here.) He had used his last 170 naira to buy some fruit for her and left. Earlier in the month, the natural rubber farm where he had worked closed, leaving him destitute, leaving his daughter destitute.
Some old coworkers of his had speculated that he might be able to find a job at a coal mine in Enugu, so he had hitchhiked his way north about 140 kilometers to see if the rumors could possibly be true. Meanwhile, his daughter stayed home, as instructed, orphaned for a couple days.
She had waited and waited, but her father did not come home the day after he left, like he had promised. The girl’s mind raced and raced, unable to be soothed, unable to quit. Speculating what may have happened to her father, contemplating what she should do, her mind was like the draft of air that streamed through her shelter, growing and strengthening itself, hastening into a full swirling gust. Her body trembled.
But then, as if God ran out of breath and couldn’t keep blowing, it hit her, and she stopped thinking. It overwhelmed her, a crash into unconsciousness. And she slept.
Part II
October 14, 2005—32 days earlier
Montrose, Michigan
“Let’s play PLINKO!!!”
“Yes. This one’s my favorite,” Susan said to her friend Dianne. Dianne came over to Susan’s house every day to watch The Price Is Right starring Bob Barker. 11 am, not a minute later. They were both housewives. Neither had children, although Susan and her husband Matt were thinking about starting a family.
Susan and Matt were living their version of the American dream. They had recently married and bought their first house. Everything seemed to be drifting in the right direction for them.
At age twenty-four, Matt had started to work as an entry-level assistant at a State Farm insurance office. At church one Sunday, he met Susan, and they began their relationship a few Sundays later when he invited her to after-church brunch.
A coworker at the insurance agency told Matt about how he had been making a bit of money by playing the stock market. Better than those scratch-offs, he thought. So he read up a bit online about how to get started and opened an account on www.scottrade.com. After just four months of studying daily market trends, Matt decided to go all in. He quit his job at the insurance office and started to day-trade with serious amounts of cash, his life savings in fact. Eighteen months after he began day-trading full time, he had made a small fortune for a man his age and proposed to Susan shortly thereafter.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Matt from his office, “Turn Bob Barker off. Go to the business channel!”
“God damn it, Matt. What is it? She’s about to play her final chip,” responded Susan. “Fine. Here’s your business channel. Why can’t you just work from your office, like on your computer?”
“Do you see that? Look right there, bottom of the screen. NRCX. It’s down 78 percent today!”
“Are you serious? And you picked that stock? How much money did you lose?”
“I didn’t lose any money, dear,” rebutted Matt with a perked grin. “I shorted that stock, baby. I put four grand in.”
“Wait. What does that mean? Shorted…?”
“It means if the stock goes down, you get money instead of the other way around. It means that we’re going out to dinner tonight, baby.”
“That’s like $3000,” stated Susan’s friend Dianne with hidden envy.
“I know,” said Matt. “I got a good tip. It was some rubber company from Nigeria that’s reconsolidating or something like that.”
“Well they should have known there was no rubber there. China doesn’t have any rubber,” said Susan.
“Yeah, I know,” replied Matt, “Those crazy Nigerian-Chinese people. Well, where are we eating tonight, baby? How about Applebee’s?”
Part III
November 27, 2008
Owerri, Nigeria
The morning’s light crashed over Owerri. The girl’s father, who had been in Enugu the day before to look for work, was finally arriving back. After having waited outside a manager’s office at a coal mine in Enugu for almost the entire day, he had left empty-handed and in a state of disillusionment. With no steady traffic of vehicles on the roads, he was unable to hitchhike back that night as he had planned.
As he approached his makeshift home, he gazed perplexedly upon a crowd of white people surrounding the shelter in which his daughter was to stay until he arrived. A group of Red Cross aid workers had been on their way to deliver supplies to a local school when they stumbled upon the shelter housing the little girl.
“Are you the parent of this girl?” asked one of the aid workers frantically. The father looked at the aid worker in confusion. “Do you speak English?” said the aid worker loudly, slowly, as if raising his voice and decreasing his pace would allow the man who only spoke Igbo to understand. In the same manner, the aid worker spoke at the man, “A rotten board fell from this hut’s roof and onto this girl while she was lying down. Are you the father? Sir, do you understand? I don’t think she is still with us, sir.”
Still not knowing what had happened, the father shoved the white people away and went to the side of his daughter. The makeshift home he had fashioned collapsed during the night. The aid workers had cleared the dry-rotted timber from the girl’s body, leaving her visible. A deep, gaping gash spanning from the girl’s left eye to the top of the right side of her forehead was still moist. She lay there. Motionless. Cold. Dead.
The girl’s father dropped to his knees and placed his hand on the girl’s cheek. His head sunk to the ground. And he wept.
To front of issue: Broken Record