I had started waking up at odd hours from some horrible dreams.
This was two, sometimes three in the morning, coming out of sleep with my chest tight and my eyes open, and the particular silence of the hostel at that hour pressing in from all sides.
I never remembered what the dreams were about.
That is what I always told Kunle and Emeka, when they began to notice that I was barely sleeping, and sometimes screaming out of my sleep. When I in fact knew, but it was a part of me I’ve chosen to intentionally bury. I’ve told the lie so much that I’ve even begun to believe it.
Sometimes I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, and for a few seconds something would be very close to the surface. Then it would sink back down. And I would turn over, and tell myself it was the stress of a new semester, the pressure of trying to recover a GPA that had started badly.
I was good at that. Turning things over. Moving on.
By the second week of first semester, second year, I had established a new routine. Lectures until three or four. Reading in the room until the hostel got too loud. Then, when the noise became impossible, I would take my books to the quadrangle.
It was quieter there in the evenings. The students who used it during the day, eating, gathering, wasting time in the comfortable way of people who felt at home, had mostly cleared out by seven. What remained was the kind of stillness I could think inside. I had found a concrete bench near the old mango tree that caught enough of the security light to read by, and I had made it mine.
That was where I found him or better still he found me.
It was a Tuesday evening and I was sitting on my bench, textbook open, reading the same paragraph for the fourth time. I had just come from a particularly difficult Control Systems lecture that had left me with four pages of notes I did not fully understand. And it was my second year. I started having more difficulties understanding concepts. And that has never been. I understood almost as fast as I listened. I was still in my train of thoughts, when a voice beside me said:
“You are holding the book correctly. You are reading it incorrectly.”
I looked up.
He was standing a few feet away, an older man, somewhere in his early fifties perhaps, in a deep burgundy agbada with gold embroidery at the collar. He was not a small man, but he carried himself with a stillness that made him seem like he took up exactly the space he intended and no more. His face was the kind that had been serious for so long that seriousness had become simply how it rested. But somehow he looked kind at the same time.
“Sir?” I said.
“You have read that same passage four times,” he said. “I have been watching you. Your eyes go to the end of the paragraph and then return to the beginning. You are not reading, you are waiting for understanding to arrive on its own. It does not work that way.”
I looked at him, still trying to fathom what he was saying. He looked back, unbothered.
“Do you mind if I sit?” he asked.
I gestured at the bench. He sat, unhurried, and looked at the textbook in my hands.
“Control Systems,” he said. “Second year.”
“Yes sir.”
“What specifically is the problem?”
I did not usually talk to strangers about my academic struggles. I had not even talked to Emeka about how badly the previous year had shaken me. But there was something about the directness of the question, no preamble, no pleasantries, just what is the problem, that matched the way my own mind worked, and before I had consciously decided to answer I was explaining the concept I was stuck on.
He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: “Explain it to me again, but this time pretend you are teaching it to someone who knows nothing.”
“You don’t know Control Systems?”
“Humour me.”
So I did. Slowly, haltingly at first, then with more structure as the act of explaining forced me to organise what I knew and locate precisely where the gaps were. He asked three questions during the explanation, each one targeted at exactly the point where my understanding broke down. By the end of it I had found the gap myself and understood how to fill it.
He stood up.
“You think the problem is the material,” he said. “It is not the material. The problem is that you have stopped trusting your own mind. Come back here tomorrow by this time if you like.”
He walked away before I could ask his name.
I came back the next evening. And the one after that. He told me his name on the third night; Professor Adeyemi. Computer Science, retired. He came back for personal research work and some unconventional experiments. I asked him if it was to make electric vehicles in our school. He laughed and said that was already in UNN. I remember, I asked him various times, what the experiment was. His only reply was, I would find out soon enough.
And I really did!
He said he came to the quadrangle in the evenings because he had always thought better outdoors, and at his age, he said, there was no reason to do things any way other than the way that worked.
Our sessions settled into a pattern without either of us formally agreeing to one. I would arrive at the bench around seven with whatever I was struggling with. He would arrive shortly after, sit, and ask me to explain my understanding of the problem before he said anything about it. He almost never explained things directly, he asked questions, relentlessly and precisely, until I had explained my way into the answer myself. It was frustrating and effective in equal measure.
He ranged widely. We began with whatever technical material I brought, but he would take a concept and pull it sideways into philosophy, into logic, into the history of how certain ideas had developed. He talked about the relationship between discipline and understanding. He talked about how the mind, under pressure, retreats to pattern recognition and stops genuinely thinking.
It was, I realise now, precisely what I needed to hear.
My mind had retreated. I had been studying without actually thinking. I knew the dreams played a huge role in my predicament, but I chose not to believe it then, and something about being asked the right questions by someone who was not going to accept a surface answer was pulling me back to the thing I had been before I arrived here and started drowning.
My grades improved. Not immediately, real improvement rarely works that way. But by the middle of that semester there was a steadiness to my work that had been absent for over a year, and by the time results came out I had not just passed, I had passed well. Well enough that Emeka raised an eyebrow and asked what had changed.
“I found a good reading spot,” I said.
That was all I said. I am not sure why I did not mention Adeyemi. Perhaps because the tutorials had become something I was protective of, something that belonged to a private part of my effort that I was not ready to share or explain or have someone else’s questions complicate. Perhaps for another reason that I was not yet ready to look at directly.
It was about four months into our sessions that things started to take a weird turn. But I was so blind to it, even when Emeka pointed it out. It was one of those nights I wanted to leave and Emeka stopped me at the door. He had been complaining subtly, but that night he decided to take action.
“Bro you are not going anywhere tonight” He stated firmly.
“Emeka, what is your problem? I said I’ll be fine?”
“T, this is madness. At first you go out every night to read, and come back very late at night. I get you were trying to bounce back academically. Haven’t you? You can’t sleep at night, because of your incessant nightmares you can’t remember, you dedicate all your time and day to reading. Now you want me to allow you to go out by 11pm and read until 4am? Outside!?
“Emeka, calm down. I’m not there alone. Professor Adeyemi is there with me”
“As your guardian angel or assistant Holy Spirit right? Who on earth is this professor we’ve never heard of in the department? And you just told us last week, he’s been the one private tutoring you for over 8 months now. For free!
“He’s retired. And I don’t know why you are making a big deal out of these things. He’s a good man, and he says he sees prospects in me and he’s desire is for me to become as successful as he is. Bro he is just 54, he’s retired and a multi- millionaire. He’s mentoring me to greatness. That’s why I have to work extra hard”
“Is it his mentorship that made him give you Seven Books of Moses, Book of Mormon and Dreams and their interpretation?” It was Kunle that spoke this time around. I assumed he was already asleep, turns out he was listening all along.
Emeka looked at me with confusion. “I thought you said you weren’t into all this religious Church stuff?”
“They’re not church stuff” Kunle interjected. “Did they not teach you that these books are demonic and can affect your reasoning?
“Ahh Ahh Kunle! I don’t know that one too.” Emeka mocked. “But that’s besides the point” He turned to me “What is the connection between Computer science and these demonic books?”
“They’re not demonic books bro. Professor Adeyemi has a Master’s degree in Philosophy and he taught me to broaden my knowledge. Besides I happen to complain about my dream problem to him, that’s why he gave me the dreams and their interpretation.” I argued
“Look Emeka, allow him to go. Until they’d rob him or he sees a witch reading with him one night, his brain will correct. Please I want to sleep, I don’t want noise again. Abeg.” Kunle covered himself with his wrapper and faced the wall.
That was the last time I ever spoke with them about Professor Adeyemi. I started to give them a lot of distance. I began to give everyone distance. I always looked forward to my meeting with Professor Adeyemi. He was a man of deep wisdom and he brought out and sharpened the boy that my mathematics teacher testified about. My mates suddenly looked like childish babes to me.
Little did I know what I was really getting myself into.
A few months later I began to notice some small details. Each one was individually dismissible. Together, they formed something I kept choosing not to assemble. The first was Emeka.
I was just concluding my first evening session in the quadrangle with professor Adeyemi. I noticed Emeka at a distance. I wanted to pretend like I didn’t see him, but he was already waving at him. I just gave a rushed smile and focused my attention back to the professor. After some time, I turned to where I saw Emeka, hoping he was gone, but he was still standing there, looking at me weirdly. I looked at him for a moment, but focused my attention back to the Professor when he called my attention.
That night, we couldn’t meet the professor and I. He said he had an assignment to finish up urgently. It was originally someone else’s, but he proved incompetence, so the professor was going to complete himself. I admired the man so much. Though he was retired and rich, has no reason to work, but still, day and night, he was active. During the day he focuses on his research and experiments. During the night, he focuses on me. He calls me his project and for that i felt so honoured.
Emeka barged into the room, thinking I was already on my way out but was surprised to find me lying on my bed. That was his first shocker. He came to me and touched my temperature. I pulled back like his touch repelled me.
“You didn’t go out today?”
“We rescheduled” I responded coldly
“Tayo, I’m really worried about you. I think you are taking this reading thing too far.”
“Emeka, Kilode? I’m I not resting now?”
“What’s with all the attitude bro? Why are you behaving like a girl?”
“He doesn’t need rest. The guy needs to go to church. He needs deliverance.” Kunle interjected again. I honestly always think this guy is sleeping.
“Since when did you start doing church?” I asked
“Since he started mingling with those church girls in class” Emeka responded.
“Look I’m fine guys. Professor Adeyemi is helping me become a better version of myself. Soon you’ll see a version of me that would be so shocking.” I said.
Emeka sighed deeply, “Okay,” he said in the way a person says okay when they have decided this is not the moment to pursue a thing further.
That night I woke at two in the morning with my heart moving too fast and the feeling again, that residue, that smoke-smell of something I had dreamed and would not look at. I lay there until it sank back down. Then I opened my textbook and read until morning.
The second thing was the registrar’s office.
I went in the following week, telling myself it was purely practical. I wanted to thank Professor Adeyemi properly, perhaps find out if he held any official office hours I had not been using.
The woman at the desk had been working in that office for what looked like many decades and had the particular patience of someone who has answered every possible question a student could ask. I gave her his name.
She looked through her records. She looked through them again. She asked me to spell the surname. “We don’t have Professor Adeyemi in our current faculty,” she said. “Retired, you said? Let me check, ” She went to a different file. Came back. “No. I’m not finding that name.”
“How about the philosophy department,” I said.
“I heard you.” She was not unkind. “I’m telling you what I’m finding.” I thanked her and left.
Outside, I stood in the corridor for a moment. Then I decided, as I had been deciding for weeks about various small things, that there was a reasonable explanation. Retired faculty were not always in current records. Administrative systems in Nigerian universities were not exactly known for their precision. Adeyemi had told me himself that he was retired, perhaps his records had simply been archived somewhere the registrar’s clerk did not think to look.
I went back to my studies. The grades continued to improve. I held onto that.
What I did not handle and had been not handling since before I even met Adeyemi, since before I arrived at this university at all, was the thing that woke me at two in the morning.
There was a boy at the edge of those dreams. I knew that much, in the way you know things you have decided not to look at. A boy I had known a long time ago. A night I had not thought about in years, that I had filed somewhere very deep and covered over with enough time and enough distance that it had almost stopped being a real memory and had become something more like a story you heard once about someone else.
I would lie there in the dark, at two, at three in the morning, and I would feel him there at the edge of my sleeping mind, this boy, this memory, this thing I had done and not done, and then I would turn over. And I would tell myself it was stress. The pressure of recovery. The accumulated weight of a year of failure and the slow effort of climbing back.
I was good at that. I went back to sleep.
