❦
ANYTIME MR. ORVANGEGBILIN IS FREE, HE TRIES to add more words to his numerous, unfinished short stories. Besides this, he is an ordinary and ambitionless man ruled by monotony. So, one morning, it is unusual when he passes in front of his mirror and doesn’t see his reflection. He rewinds his movement to make sure he isn’t in a dream, to make sure his body is still prone to gravity. But the mirror is obstinate to his wish. So he goes into his bathroom to wash his face and clear the rheums in his eyes. But in the glass frame above the sink, the culprit who needs to stare back at him doesn’t show itself.
Mr. Orvangegbilin lives somewhere in the axis of Maraba, and it is a cruel trip every day to his office in Central Area, Abuja. He has to be up early. Now he has worn his suit. The keke that picks him from the interior to the main road has dropped him off. He’s in luck today. He’s seen a private car pull up asking for Central Area. He rushes and enters the front passenger’s seat. There is comfort. He wouldn’t have to be sandwiched in one of those sad commercial cabs and buses. While he enjoys the ephemeral comfort, the rearview mirror keeps telling him objects in it are closer than they appear, and he tries not to lean too close to see if his face appears closer in it.
Now, as he sits in front of the desktop computer in the insurance firm he works in, the blank screen stares at him. He boots the computer, enters the password and begins another cycle of going through spreadsheets and clients’ accounts, pie charts, business magazines and reports, more reports, academic papers, and stealing time to add one or few sentences to his purloined short stories. “The warden at the prison in Kuje finally granted me my wish of a pencil and paper as long as I wrote poetry for him, for his lover.” He always remained stuck after stealing other writers’ openings. As a consequence, he has too many unfinished short stories, only completed in his head, even winning imaginary awards.
As usual, the female intern comes to flirt with him. Ooooo! he exclaims within, this one has come again.
She sits on his desk. “Hello, sweetheart,” she says, and pats his head.
He feigns warmth and answers, “Hi. How was your night?”
When she leaves him by himself, work, as always, as it does every day, opens up its big mouth and swallows him. He forgets his little disturbance from earlier in the day, his face sealed to the office computer.
Office hours over; Mr. Orvangegbilin goes home.
To prepare for a later visit to the bar, he has a siesta. He also does this in hopes that he may wake up to a different fate; perhaps, his reflection will return after the short sleep. For, by sleep, he had lost it; maybe by sleep, it will return. It is not as if Mr. Orvangegbilin is not worried about his problem; he is. But he treats it like the symptom of a terminal disease one senses in themselves but is scared to go for a check-up.
He sleeps longer than is expected, during which he also dreams.
It is violently white. Everywhere is violently white. In his dream, he sees himself sleeping. The violent whiteness begins to contour into the shades of other colours, carving things into the shape of a familiar room. He sees the Virgin Mary sitting on the chair close to him; she’s saying, in a hallowed voice, “I know you’re a good boy. Grow up to be a good man.” You’re a good boy. Boyyy. Boyyyyyyy. It turns into a song. An echoing song. He begins to float from the bed in the dream. He remembers in his dream that he is in his late grandfather’s room in Tor Donga. And he begins to answer, “Yes, I’ll be a good boy.” I will be. I will. I—
“Terfa!” another dream starts. Terfa was name of his nephew many years ago. Mr. Orvangegbilin, this time, is half-conscious about himself dreaming. In his dream, they are calling Terfa because Terfa had gone missing for too long. Mr. Orvangegbilin’s grandmother is calling “Terfa.” A young Orvangegbilin joins in calling. The neighbourhood joins. Young Orvangegbilin goes to all the usual places where Terfa would have gone to. But Terfa had fallen inside the well of the abandoned compound opposite theirs. Young Orvangegbilin remembers this in his dream and goes to the well. But when he peers into it, there is only blackness, so he wakes up.
He found Terfa that day in the well, and would always think about why he looked into the well that day. Anytime he recalled this, it puzzled him. There was Terfa sitting on water, like the famed rabbi. Calm. There was Terfa, unspeaking, unanswering, even after hearing his name many times. “Yes, I’m in this well,” was all he had to shout and say. But why had he been quiet? What had he been thinking about when he sat alone on the water, lost for hours, surrounded by a silent, round wall, half his body submerged? It was only years later that Mr. Orvangegbilin grasped the profundity of the event. But in the dream that resurrected the memory today, he’d stared into the well and found nothing, as blackness lurched at him, jolting him awake.
And so, awake, his trepidation continues.
There is still time to head to the bar, and on any other day he would have done so. But he waits awhile thinking of what he’d done, whom he offended, or if he is living in an alternate reality. When he stares in the mirror once more, nothing stares back at him still. He closes his eyes and opens them. But the electricity goes off, so he is admitted into darkness. As he gropes for his phone he left on a stack of books, to put on its light, his fingers feel the smooth cover of his forlorn pocket King James Bible. He picks it up. When he finds his phone, he opens the bible to a random page. “I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress . . .” For the Lord is my refuge and my fortress . . . He goes on his knees and tries to pray, but every sentence he starts doesn’t sound like a supplication, so he ends each halfway.
He knocks on his neighbour’s door. A lady who entertains different men at odd hours at night. She’s excited when she greets him.
“Ahn-ahn, my brother, you visit me today?”
“Abeg, you get anointing oil,” he asks her.
She smiles coyly. “Abi e get wetin you wan ask me wey you dey fear?”
“No o,” he answers. “Just anointing oil, abeg. My own is finished. And I really need some. I dey do special prayers.”
She goes into her room and returns with a measly bottle. “Just manage am. E don dey finish.”
“Thank you.”
Back in his room, Mr. Orvangegbilin knows it is an exorcism he has to perform. It is still dark with the power out. He puts on his phone light and searches his cupboard for a small container of holy water forgotten in an abandoned travel bag. Holy water which was bequeathed to him by his mother. His mother, he thinks. Had he called her in long time? There is the bag, covered in dust, smelling of cupboard and abandonment. He dusts it and swallows some dust. Sneezes. He rummages through it and feels the contour of the holy water container in the bag’s side pouch. He is relieved. As he drops the bag, something in a Santana nylon falls out from it. He points his light at it, picks it, feels the contents. Tinder and wax. It takes a while before the epiphany hits him: incense.
He is about to take his bath and has burnt the incense. His house is like the coal chamber of a steam ship, smelling like beautiful Jerusalem and heaven, the dense smoke of the incense inspiring a weird, celestial lust. He empties the holy water and pours some of the anointing oil in his bucket of bathing water. As he pours the first scoop of water over his head, he prays: the name of the Lord is a strong refuge and the weak runneth into it, so bless me O Lord, my soul . . . His bath is holy and he emerges from it, cleansed and absolved, like from a baptism. Before he sleeps for the night, he downs the remaining anointing oil, like liquor to expel any chthonic existence within his body seeking to claim him.
He wakes up the next day and doesn’t recall dreaming. Neither does he recall himself, so that once again it is only when Mr. Orvangegbilin passes before the mirror that the world spins again. His exorcism had failed. Curiously, he approaches the mirror and stares burningly at it. The short story about a man who lost his nose emerges in his mind and he imagines if it was something similar happening to him; maybe this is soon to pass and his reflection will return to him: . . . and his nose, too, as if nothing had happened, stayed on his face, betraying no sign of having played truant . . . He imagines if the words are as exact as he’d memorised them. He feels his nose and stares at the mirror, conjuring an image of himself, then stretches his hand to feel the smooth glass surface of the mirror, when his hand falls in—wah—with unexpected vertigo. He continues to fall, his weight unbroken by the obstacle of the mirror’s glass.
He lingers at the phantom, pushing his hand forward as his body draws nearer to the mirror. He doesn’t think before he makes further steps. And before he can tell, Mr. Orvangegbilin enters his mirror, and falls through it as if pulled in by a force waiting all along for this time to pull him in. Before Mr. Orvangegbilin recovers from the sensation of his body disintegrating into atoms and reassembling into solid mass, he finds himself in a different world. When he turns around, there is no mirror, no trace of his apartment. Instead, he’s surrounded by towering trees, like the baobabs of Madagascar, stretching endlessly into a skyless expanse.
The trees stretch in all directions Mr. Orvangegbilin turns. He can’t place their colour but they appear desolate, foreboding, and as if scared of something nameless beyond the grove. Straight ahead, a light glimmers, and from it the shape of a gate with an arc above it. He begins to walk towards it.
When he reaches the gate, three spirits with jet-black, Nubian skin appear before him. Frightful, he stops.
“For a man who just fell into his mirror, isn’t it a bad idea to just walk into a gate without knowing what you’re getting into?” one of the spirits ask.
Mr. Orvangegbilin stops. “Who are you? Where am I? Is this purgatory?”
The second spirit, in the likeness of a young woman, starts, “He still has the decency of catechism in him to wonder if this is purgatory.”
Hahaha, they let out.
The third spirit, in the likeness of an old woman, welcomes him. “Welcome to your trial, Mr. Vange. We’re the Three Deacons.”
“My trial?”
“We pronounce you guilty of the seven deadly sins.”
“Vainglory”—they take turns in listing the sins. Avarice. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. And Sloth.
He falls to his knees. “Just tell me I’m dead.”
“He is dead he who is without a conscience,” the spirits say in unison.
“What?”
“For you feel horrible about your station and wish you were not dead.”
“So am I alive?”
“Mr. Orvangegbilin, your trial. You do not contest it?”
“Contest what? I can’t be guilty of all seven sins.”
“Surely, you are.”
“But certainly, I doubt.”
“Then you must contest them.”
“Is that the rule?”
“There are really no rules.”
“I have never been angry.”
“But you have stolen.”
“No, I have never—”
“There’s no man who has never stolen nor been angered or lusted.”
“I have never been covetous—”
“But that is a big lie you know in your heart.”
“What?”
“The stories you steal—”
“I don’t steal them on intention. Everyone knows whose story I imitate and can easily make the reference. I do not claim them to be my original stories.”
“And yet your sloth doesn’t allow you write anything original or publish even a single short story since you got that one story published in Sentinel six years ago. Who are you fooling? What makes you think you’re a genius?”
“I never said I was a genius—”
“But you think it in your heart. Vainglorious is what you are. You want it all, don’t you? To be all the great writers in one person.”
He begins to weep. “No, I don’t. I am not greedy.”
“Is that what you say?”
“I’m not greedy. I contest.”
As he says this, the gate glowing in white dissolves into a straight line, from its arc to the base, which splits, revealing an entrance. At this, the Three Deacons point to the light opening up, and chorus to him—
“Then you must enter and face the test.”
“But what of the other sins? You haven’t mentioned them,” Mr. Orvangegbilin answers.
“Go now,” they chorus.
His feet are light as he rises to walk. The effused particles of light swallow him as he reaches the gate. He steps in hoping to walk into a garden, an otherworldy paradise resplendent with waterfalls and Precambrian flora, but as he steps into the gate he is greeted by a gallery of three doors in display. The first reads “Become A Famous Writer.” The second door, “Get Married and Build A Beautiful Family.” And the last, “All The Riches You Want.” He doesn’t linger on the choice to make; he walks to the first door, turns the knob and walks in.
A table and a chair are set before him. A man in a suit sits opposite an empty chair waiting for him.
“You’re highly welcome, Mr. Orvangegbilin,” the man says.
“Am I?” asks Mr. Orvangegbilin.
“Please, sit.”
The man presents two options to him. One is a contract for Mr. Orvangegbilin to sign and become an instant, famous writer. The other is a stack of empty pages and a pen for him to start writing the story that will make him famous.
“Mr. Orvangegbilin, you don’t have to stress yourself writing the next Great Nigerian Novel. If you sign this, you can choose to become any of the greatest writers in the world.”
“How do you mean?”
“You can go back and live their lives instead, all their glory and fame, their achievements. You can be Ekwensi, Fitzgerald, Achebe, Oscar Wilde.”
Mr. Orvangegbilin thinks for a second. It would be great to be the author of The Great Gatsby or Things Fall Apart. He thinks. But he chooses the stack of empty pages and the pen instead.
“Are you sure, sir?” the man in suit asks.
“I will write my own story.”
Pen in hand. Mr. Orvangegbilin meditates. Meditation. The opening sentence, the story, what kind of language, who is the narrator? He begins after much thinking—“This is the tale of Mr.—”
He feels apprehension. It is a bad opening. “My name is Mr. . . . Orvangegbilin . . .” But his thoughts diverge once again to the greats. His opening must be great; they begin to float in his head again: I was a palmwine drinkard . . . It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . Pause. He contemplates if there was a more profound opening than that. Then it explodes in his head—a brilliant opening from a William Golding novel: I have walked by stalls in the market-place where books, dog-eared and faded from their purple, have burst with a white hosanna. He fashions it endlessly, attempting to make it into an opening of his own, but when he finally decides to write his adapted opener, he feels a dash of guilt and sloth and filthiness. So he writes instead, “Manual on the Myth of the First Sentence, by Orvangegbilin Tartswem”:
There is no first sentence. This is the first myth. Neither is there a perfect one. What is lasting is the rhythm of the beginning, for stories neither begin nor end, so the author must find a point from which to start. And it is so that from time immemorial—this phrase “time immemorial” aptly captures the point I just made, about no story ever having a beginning—the best opening shall be and always remain, Once Upon A Time. Time neither has beginning, nor end, so the wise griots of old knew better to say “once upon time.” The writer should not be tricked to finding an opening sentence lest he labour in futility. Great writers know this and it is why they have always known the right pulse for originating a story, where to pick it from, from once upon a time. E.g. Once upon a time, Florentino Ariza was in love. Or any other variation that works for that Marquez novel. Writers should rather think about how to end stories. This is where the greatest writers show themselves . . .
He keeps writing, the dopamine in his brain surging, scribbling furiously, page after page after page, till he hits the last full stop. A strong wind rushes from him, a litgasm, a purity, a catharsis, as he finishes. When he looks up, the man in the suit is not there. He suddenly becomes acutely aware of the very reason he’s in the room—to become a famous writer. But he has only written an essay so far. A good one, no doubt, he prides himself. Worthy of publication anywhere on earth. He looks at it again; the title—and crosses out “Manual on…” so that he has “The Myth of the First Sentence.” He picks the pages, folds them neatly and puts them in his shirt pocket, and returns to the remaining, fresh blank pages on the desk. He stares at them for a brief intermission, ponderous. Then he writes down a title, The Eve of a New Decade, and begins his own story, his unique opening: “When grandfather died, there was no space in all the vehicles carrying us from the city to the village, so I sat in the belly of the ambulance and placed my hand on his coffin. Thus, began a journey I’d recall as very significant as I was also at the precipice of entering—” But as such anointing of words begin to flow, the pen is snatched from Mr. Orvangegbilin’s hands by an invisible force, the page levitates and evaporates; the table, the room, then the chair, all evaporate. He falls back, his buttocks hitting the ground.
Three mirrors hang in the air. He rises up to them and lo, he sees his reflection in all three mirrors. He is overjoyed. He has done it! He’s been vindicated. He begins to walk to one of the mirrors, but it recedes as he reaches it. He pursues it and it recedes some more. He turns to the next mirror which also recedes. Then they begin to play a game with him where he keeps running after them as they flee from him. He cries. He shouts, “why?!” The mirrors stop all at once, then come together and meld into one solid rectangular frame, facing him. At the same time, his reflection on them disappears.
The shape of the face of the intern at his office appears on the mirror surface and asks, “Am I not beautiful enough for you?”
He pulls back. “I don’t want to marry.”
The shapes of the faces of the Three Deacons appear on the mirror surface and speak in unison: “Why won’t you marry?”
“Where is my story? I need my story back. I passed your test. Isn’t that why you took my story away from me?”
“The intern is a fine woman, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
“So what is stopping you from taking her as a wife?”
“This is absurd.”
“No. What is absurd is a gifted writer like you wallowing in mediocrity and complacency and masturbating every day you return from that useless bar.”
Pause.
“It is my life.”
“A shitty life.”
“You are oppressing me.”
“Man is an oppressor of himself.”
“The whole world. Society. Oppresses us to fit into things, like you asking me why I haven’t married. Why must I marry? Give me back my story. My story!”
“No, the question is, Why must you die unaccomplished, unknown, without a life, without a family, without real joy and love?”
Pause.
“Why do you get angry at yourself? Why do you lie about your talents? Why is your life so mundane? Why are you timid? Why are you nothing? Depressed—”
“Stop it—”
“Why are you an incel and hate yourself for it? Aren’t you unmarried because you never overcame your anxiety of becoming thirty?—”
“Stooooop!”
The chorus stops and the mirror morphs into a door. It opens and from it emerges the intern from his office in a wedding gown, holding a bouquet. She grabs his hand and leads him through the door, onto a verdure where empty seats are in attendance for a wedding ceremony. At the front, she stands beside him; he stands without words, as she. She turns and smiles at him. He stares blankly at her and they wait for a priest who is nowhere in sight. They wait. No priest. She turns and looks at him. He wants to take a leap of faith and ask, “Do you really want to marry me?” Her face in the veil gives the impression of Mary the mother of God and his mind jets to his erstwhile dream. His first dream was a memory, too. He had gone into a trance at thirteen after reading a copy of the Deeper Life’s Women Mirror magazine from start to finish at a go. He had always thought about that trance many times, if it was real. Whenever he thought of it, he felt he was having a siesta that day when he had the vision of the Virgin Mary. But he always concluded within himself it was a trance because as an adolescent he never had siestas. Suddenly a door materialises before them. This time, he leads.
When he steps into the door, it is into his popular bar he walks into. The door shuts behind him and there is no intern from his office, nor the lush green scenery, nor the Virgin Mary, dreams, deacons or mirrors. A slow song from WuRlD, Wayo, oozes from some speaker into the tinted ambience of the bar. Everything appears normal. He sees familiar faces. The bartender. The odd guy always with a laptop and bottle water in the corner. The old Samsung television the bar has refused to change even when they’ve hung flat-screens everywhere else. Instinctively, he walks to the restroom. He stops at the door and wonders what he’s about to walk into, if it was still part of his trial. It has been a day of doors and entrances after all. He pushes the restroom door, enters, exits, and repeats this pattern three times to be certain. He unzips his fly and begins to urinate into the water closet. He stares at himself in the restroom mirror and smiles. It is just as he thought . . . his reflection had returned, betraying no sign of having played truant.
He returns to the bar’s lounge, to the counter. “A shot of Jameson, please,” he orders.
As the liquor electrocutes his tongue, he feels alive, although different within himself. He asks the bartender if he can get a pen and paper. When these are given to him, he exhales after a small thought about how to write about his experience. He writes: I died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know—but discards it.
He tries again: My disappearance was unknown in all the city and beyond. No . . . he thinks. Again: My trial was known in all the city and by the spiritual beings. But it still doesn’t capture aptly what he has in mind. He feels the sentence without euphony, packing unnecessary load. He tries again: Call me a man without a heart (for his name “Orvangegbilin” really meant “a man without heart”). But he discards this as well. There’s a divine spark at last, and the sentence forms in his mind; so he pens: I, Mr. Orvangegbilin Tartswem, must have slandered The Spirituals, for one morning, without reason and having done no wrong, I was arrested by them. He thinks for a while, after relishing his masterpiece opener, that “The Spirituals” should be replaced with “Tralfamadorians”; this way the sentence would have more oomph. But he thinks again, too, that he may need to add the rider “So It Goes” to make the appropriation complete. So he settles with what he has, content that it suffices. Yet, in the restless ear of his mind, he hears the opening of another sentence.❦
Carl Terver was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024 and is the author of the photobook Glory to the Sky. His fiction has been published in The Stockholm Review, Iskanchi, and Kreative Diadem. He has a BA English from Benue State University, Makurdi, and writes about literature, film, and music.
READ MORE FICTION
