The night everything collapsed began quietly with Professor Adeyemi.
Quietly enough that, for a long time afterwards, I kept thinking there should have been some warning. Thunder. A power outage. A voice in my head telling me not to go to the quadrangle that night. But the campus was ordinary. That was the frightening part.
It was past eleven. The university quadrangle was the kind of empty that has weight to it. It was not peaceful, just abandoned. The security lights were doing their usual poor job, throwing yellow pools across the concrete and leaving everything else to shadow. The generator from the staff quarters hummed somewhere behind the buildings. Above me, bats moved around the mango trees in wide, silent circles.
I had been coming to this quadrangle every day for two years. I knew every cracked tile, every broken bench. And standing under the mango tree, the way he always stood when he was waiting for me, hands clasped behind his back, deep burgundy agbada, completely still, was Professor Adeyemi.
I was holding a piece of paper. I had been carrying it for five days. By now, it was soft at the folds from how many times I had opened and closed it. I knew what it said; I had read it so many times the words had stopped looking like words and started looking like a verdict.
I walked toward him. My mouth was dry.
“Professor,” I said.
He turned. He always turned slowly, the way a man turns who is never in a hurry because he has already decided how things will go.
“Good evening, Tayo,” he said.
I stopped a few feet from him and looked at his face. I had looked at this man’s face across dozens of tutorials, in this quadrangle, at this hour, for nearly two years. Oh! How I knew this face. That was exactly the problem.
“I need to ask you something,” I said. “And I need you to answer me honestly.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not alarm. More like the particular attention of a man who has been waiting for a specific question and is now watching it arrive.
“Ask,” he said.
I held the paper out toward him. He looked at it. He took his time; he was always taking his time, that was one of the things about him. Then he looked up at me and said nothing.
“Who are you?” I asked. “I mean really. Who are you?”
The leaves of the mango tree moved behind him. There was no wind where I was standing. I had been noticing things like that for months. Small things. The way the shadows around him sometimes didn’t behave the way shadows should. The way I would turn suddenly and catch something at the edge of what he was, a wrongness I couldn’t name, like a word you recognise but cannot pronounce.
I had filed these things away, and like Mary, I kept them quietly, in a part of my mind I kept separate from the part that needed to pass exams. That part had always won the argument.
Until three days ago, when I found out the truth.
“You already know,” he said. He said it quietly, gently, almost. “You have known for some time. That is why you came tonight.”
“Then say it,” I said. “If I already know, then just say it.
He looked at me with that expression I had seen hundreds of times, patient, steady, the expression of a man who believed in you even when you were struggling to believe in yourself. For two years that look had been the thing that kept me from completely falling apart. Standing there that night, it made my skin crawl.
He smiled. And then he was not there…
I need you to understand what I mean when I say he was not there. I don’t mean he walked away, nor he turned and left. He was standing in front of me, and then he was not, and the space where he had been was just an empty quadrangle and moving shadows, and the mango tree was swaying, and the bats were circling, and the generator was humming the same note it had been humming all night as if nothing had happened at all.
I stood very still.
The security guard found me not long after. Johnson, I had read his name tag on many late nights. He grabbed my arm. Although, His mouth was moving but the sound was reaching me strangely, muffled, like a voice from another room. More footsteps came. Someone was calling for help.
The last clear thought I had before everything went dark was not about professor Adeyemi.
It was about a boy named Rotimi. About a night in secondary school that I had spent three years trying to forget. About the way we had all laughed, and gone home, and never spoken of it again.
Then there was nothing until the clinic.
But I am getting ahead of myself. None of what happened to me, not Professor Adeyemi, not the things that came after, not the way my final years in that university nearly destroyed me, makes sense without the full story. And the full story does not begin in that quadrangle.
It begins with a locked room, a candle, a mirror, and a boy named Rotimi, who should have lived long enough to graduate with the rest of us. But first, I will tell you of the boy I was before any of this. The one who arrived on this campus with his admission letter folded neatly in his breast pocket, certain of himself, certain of what he was worth.
You need to know that boy first. You need to see exactly who he was, before you can understand what was done to him.
