Open City: A Novel by Teju Cole

Author:Teju Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Anthropology, New York (State), Social Science, Nigerians - New York (State) - New York, New York, General, Urban Life, Nigerians, Literary, Race, Physical, Fiction, Cultural Heritage, Identity (Psychology)
ISBN: 9781400068098
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

I was running across Lagos with my sister. We were doing a marathon, and having to push vagrants and street dogs out of our way. But I have no sister; I’m an only child. When I suddenly awoke, it was to total darkness. My eyes tried to adjust. From the warmth of the bed, the sound of traffic reached me. As always when one wakes up like this, it was impossible to tell the time. But a deeper terror immediately gripped me: I couldn’t remember where I was. A warm bed, darkness, the sound of traffic. What country is this? What is this house, and who am I with? I reached out a hand; there was no one else in the bed. Was I alone because I had no partner, or because my partner was far away? I floated in the dark, anonymous to myself, lost in the sensation that the world existed but I was no longer part of it.

The first question that found its answer was about the partner: I had no partner, I was alone. The fact arrived, and it calmed me immediately. The distress had been in not knowing. Then other information came: I was in Brussels, Belgium, in a rented apartment, the apartment was on the ground floor of the building, and the rumble outside was from the garbage trucks. The trucks came on Fridays, before daybreak. I was someone, not a body without a being. I had slowly returned to myself from a distance. The effort of gathering this ballast for my identity, trivial-seeming ballast without which my heart might have given out, was exhausting. I fell back to dreamless sleep, and the trucks continued to rumble outside. When I finally woke up again, it was almost noon. The natural light that filled the room was diluted by rain. It was the seventh day of the rain, which had been nagging, trickling, falling without biblical grandeur. But its longevity reminded me of the only other rain I could recall that had lasted for days. There must have been others, but only that solitary incident stood out now in memory. I was nine at the time, so it was the year before I was sent away to boarding school.

That day had started with clear weather, hot, like any in the endless blur of hot days normal to us in all months of the year. I had come home from school at two, had lunch, and taken a nap, which was unusual for me. When I woke up, my mother had gone out, to the market, or to the bank. My father would not return from work for a few hours yet, and only my mama, my father’s mother, was home. Her room was at the back of the ground floor of the house, in the section behind the kitchen, in the same part of the house where the study was. I went to see her, but she was still asleep. The electricity was out. If it hadn’t been, I might have watched some television.

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