Oil on Water – Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Timothy walked into the meeting room and all those already seated stood up for him. He sat down and they sat after him. Without a kind gesture acknowledging them, he cleared his throat to give the signal for the commencement of the meeting. And the board of directors of Karnack Oil swung into a crucial meeting. 

But Timothy’s mind had flown as soon as the meeting commenced. It hovered without perching on the different agendas of discussion which barely needed his contribution. Karnack Oil could run itself without his input – a multi-billion dollar corporation with more than enough experienced heads and expert hands to run it, all fiercely loyal to him. Few would ask for more, and Timothy didn’t. Instead, he allowed his mind to wander until something drew his attention. It was a movement beneath the large table around which they sat. His mind was arrested as his eyes caught a dark liquid which flowed from the table. He looked at everyone else, but not one of them seemed to be concerned with or even noticed what he was seeing. They were all immersed in discussing the agenda of the meeting.

As the discussion was going on, Felicia, the wife of Henry Cejudo, drank from a bottle of water and returned it to the table. The strange liquid from beneath the table drew to the bottle and seemed to flow around and through it, yet without touching it or breaking any space in its flow. It was as though the bottle was not there, as if the liquid flowed in a space different from the one in which the bottle existed – two spheres of existence welded in his vision. 

And now the shade of the table began to deepen and the brown liquid shot forth from it like a geyser, spilling out into the floor. Yet the discussion of the board was unbroken. They floated past his ear like a radio set to a primeval channel, reeling out historic events in the place of current ones. The words persisted long enough in his ears for him to string them together: profits, expenditures, obnoxious taxes and how to reduce them, what government officials were willing to play, which regulators were being too ambitious and so on. But under his very watch, the table had become a pool. He dipped his hand impulsively into the pool, and his hand sunk in, as if the table was hollow instead of flat. Yet the space into which his hand had sunk into was not in this space, for there was no mistaking the flatness of the table before him, with no pretense of another dimension. As he lifted his hand from the unseen dimension, it came out coated and dripping with crude oil, freshly drilled. 

Then he noticed for the first time the fishes floating on the table-pool, some dead and some dying. One fish escaped from the pool and flopped to the flour, wiggling and struggling. But the discussion continued unbroken at the table, having spread to tactics for using politicians agreeable to the company’s agenda or making them so. They talked more, about suppressing overambitious regulators. 

Suddenly, Timothy saw the body of a child floating in the table-pool, lying face-down, with bits of tattered clothing still clinging to its mostly naked body, now distended and decayed. As it floated down the table towards him, he stood up and backed away. The chair behind him tumbled backwards. Patricia gave him a kindly look while still talking about profits and offshore accounts. But Timothy paid no more attention to the mundane discussions they held.

Then Timothy saw the liquid spread over the table and start running down the floor. The water around the boy’s body parted as it stood up and steadied itself with a decayed hand, and rose on the table. One of its eye sockets had a dead fish hanging from it. When it opened its mouth, Timothy saw that its tongue had been eaten in half by fish. Timothy stood up screaming and ran to the door and pulled it desperately to escape the vision before his eyes. And behind him the dead body called: “Timothy, Timothy.” 

When the door did not yield, he turned back to the hall and met the decayed body of the dead boy standing in front of him, staring at him, one eye socket with dead fish jutting out to eyeball. He started awake, and caught Patricia smiling at him. The table had returned to its original form of a regular mahogany table. But now the meeting had ended and everyone was staring at him with an indulgent look. They were fond of him. He had built a strong, global company and could rest from work and be no less assured that the empire would run on course. 

Patricia said, “Your chauffeur is here to take you home, your calendar says you have a date with your wife. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?”

Timothy leaned closer and asked, “Did I fall asleep immediately, or long after I got here?” 

She looked confused, for the question was as if one had asked for the taste of food after eating it.

“I mean,” he continued, “did I sleep off as soon as I stepped in and sat down?”

She looked hesitant for a while before she spoke. “You were here before everyone else. We met you asleep and didn’t want to wake you, so we started without you.” 

Timothy was more alarmed. It was worse than he thought. All the moments were in fact dreams, but he had somehow welded the dreams and reality into a composite whole. He was losing the ability to tell dreams from the real world. Or when they started or ended. And he wondered if he was even awake at this moment. 

The worried look on Patricia’s face stopped him. He stood up and walked out into his car where the chauffeur was already waiting to take him home.

*

Timothy dreamt again on his way back in the car. He had tried to keep track of his movement but felt it slipping away. Then he found himself in a West African village, South or Nigeria, Ogoni, where he was walking through the living settlements. The ground was muddy and the few tufts of grass blocked his way. He walked past a few houses. Some of the people sat on their verandah or on wooden benches outside, looking emaciated and dejected. The children just sat kicking at the sand, too drained to play. 

A few men walked past him with fishing poles and nets, arguing with one another. He followed them at a distance and could make out some words of their conversation in pidgin. One of them was saying, “All of the fish them don die. Oil spillage don kill them. We no go see anything.”

“Make we just try,” the other man responded. The first one shrugged and they kept going. 

Timothy knew this was a dream. They couldn’t see or interact with him. That was also why he understood what they were saying.

He walked back to the living settlements of small mud and thatch buildings where he had seen the children playing. He was starting to piece it all together now. But he wanted to confirm. They were connected with his earlier dream of a river floating with dead fish on the table. And the dead boy. Timothy saw him now. Only, he was alive here, playing with a tuft of grass, trying to pull it out with his leg. Then he gave up and stood up and started walking in the direction of the two men who had gone fishing. 

“Tamara, where are you going?” his mother called from the hut. 

“To catch fish, mama,” he answered. “I’m hungry.”

“There’s no fish anymore,” the mother said in a hopeless voice. “Come back here.”

He shook his head defiantly and ran on. She shuffled out of the house to see him running off. She stared at him and returned back. Timothy knew. That was how it happened. That was how he drowned, looking to catch fish to bring home. Instead, it was his dead body that was fished out, bloated and full of oil, instead of the fish he meant to down later in a meal of plantain, with fish and edible palm oil. 

Timothy woke to the voice of the chauffeur telling him that they were home. In a way, this dream was just as bad as or worse than the last. Life without the things that made it worth living was as bad as death, was death, eventually. Timothy sat in a daze for a few moments. His chauffeur looked at him worriedly. But Timothy didn”t care. He just sat watching, then suddenly got up and went inside the house. 

*

Belinda understood as soon as she saw him. 

“I’m cancelling the date,” she said and went to get a damp cloth to put on his head after making him sit down.

“I’m all right,” he insisted. “We don’t have to cancel it.”

“Oh come on. There’ll be another fundraising dinner for you to donate at.”

“You don”t have to babysit me, you know.” 

“What other babies do I have to babysit?”

He looked at her quietly for a moment and rubbed her hand against his cheek. 

She turned serious now. “You had the dream again, didn’t you?”

He hesitated before answering. “I had it twice, one at the meeting and one on my way here. They are getting stronger. And I think they are connected.” He paused when he saw the concern on her face. 

“Do you want to talk to someone? Someone different from…”

“No,” he said emphatically. “I don’t need another thousand dollar an hour shrink to tell me they are just nightmares or a manifestation of my guilt.”

“Well,” she said. “If it’s the money…”

“You know damn well it’s not the money,” he said in frustration, waving at the lavish sitting room with paintings, art and expensive furniture all around. “It’s just, I’m not crazy.”

Belinda’s eyes misted and she hugged him. “I know you”re not crazy, my husband.”

“I know I’m not,” he said. 

“I just don’t like to see you suffer.”

“I know love. We’ll get through this.”

They held each other and were quiet for a moment. 

After a while, she said, “Do you remember what the Nigerian babalawo said on our trip to Africa? I always thought it was just gibberish, but now…” 

He knew this time also that he was in the dream, though he didn’t remember falling asleep. One minute he was in Belinda’s arms, the next he was walking down a clearing filled with bodies of people of all ages and genders, men, women, and children. The bodies were strewn across the ground and seemed to have been gunned down from the back as they ran from the force that must have taken their lives. He kept walking at a distance from the bodies scattered around. He reckoned them to be about a couple hundred. He knew this was a dream, but shock broke through the knowing, and a deep sadness seeped into his heart. 

The bodies were broken, mangled by bullets and with the blood from them thick and dried. He felt a rising fear, remembering the source of all the death and pain he had witnessed in the dream scape. They were from oil exploration and crude oil drilling and refining by his company, Karnack Oil, in partnership with British Petroleum. They jointly had the rights to drill and refine petroleum in the oil rich Nigeria that was a British vassal. And it was from their security officials that the shots had come, each body a testament. 

He kept walking through the bodies, wondering. Oil spillage and poisoning of the waters were bad enough, but none as bad as the bullets from heavy duty guns that laid waste hundreds of the villagers. This was the work of a trained armed force. He knew it, and if he didn’t, the answer was right there in front of him in the body of a child he had seen twice in his dreams. He recognised the body instantly, and was unsurprised. 

It was the drowned boy. The face was unmistakable. But now he saw that the boy’s body gaped with a hole in its chest where a burst had caught it. The body stood up at his approach and faced Timothy. Timothy stood silent and unflinching, letting the body gaze on him in silent judgement. He had to face it, for he had found there was no way around it, no escaping the persistent dreams; nothing could he do but face the inevitable. 

After a while, the dead boy morphed into a larger figure, fuller, and taller. 

“Walk with me,” the body said. And Timothy followed and they walked through the village littered with bodies. 

“You wonder who I am?” the body asked.

Timothy did not answer; he knew no answer was expected of him. 

“I am multitudes, each one different to you, depending on who you are,” the body continued. “This body is the older body of the child you keep seeing. This is the older person he would have grown up to be had your company allowed him to grow beyond his childhood.”

“But who is the child?” Timothy asked.

“The child is the potential of this land that you and your ilk have murdered for money. I am that child and I have died multiple times for you, by your hand, by your articles of association, by the bribes you pay, by the armies you command, by the hand of my own people, and at your behest.”

The body stopped walking and Timothy looked around. They were in the center of a group or bodies now. They were literally ringed by death. 

“How?” Timothy managed to ask amidst the horrors around him. 

“It happened when the villagers protested their lack of jobs, while their raw materials were being exploited and their waters polluted and their food sources contaminated. They seized one of your oil installations and your company made a call and paid bribes, and the government stepped in to handle it. General Osibanjo stepped in, and this is how he handled it.”

The dead boy-man waved at the bodies all around. 

“You did this, Timothy. You paid for this black blood of this land for your profit with the bodies of its young and old, as your kind has done for centuries. Nothing has changed. This is your legacy, Timothy Smalls. This is your legacy.” 

Timothy woke up. He was lying on the couch, a pillow behind his head, a blanket on him and his legs on Belinda’s lap. She had stayed by him as he slept, hoping perhaps to ward off the nightmares with her presence. But he was starting to understand. This wasn’t just empty torment. During one of his exploratory trips years ago, near the founding of his company, a Babalawo he consulted had told him that an important message would come from a herald of the gods, the lord of dreams and crossroads. And it would show him his destiny. This was that message, perhaps. And he was just starting to figure it out. 

He put Belinda to sleep gently, covering her with the same blanket, wishing she at least had gentler dreams than he did. Then he picked up his phone and called the office. 

* 

Mr Wesson came into his home office and started answering Timothy’s questions, providing him all the updates he needed. 

“So,” Timothy said at last, “we paid the officials in Nigeria to regain control of the oil installation by any means necessary, even a massacre?”

“Not exactly,” Wesson said rather sheepishly. “The country handles its own security as it sees fit. We don’t control them.” Then seeing the storm cloud on Timothy’s face, he continued, “but the board made a sizeable donation to the army and made clear to General Osibanjo that they would like to resume operations and drilling as soon as possible.”

Timothy shook his head. “And so they have resumed drilling, in this village where they just massacred hundreds?”

Wesson nodded. 

“They have resumed with the task of money making as if all these people didn’t just get mowed down? They complained about dying slowly, so we killed them faster?”

Wesson was silent. 

“And this was kept from me. And you say it’s for my own good?”

Wesson was quiet for a while before he responded. “The board wanted to keep the sordid details of daily operations from you, for your sensibility’s sake.”

“Even though I am the CEO?”

Wesson hesitated, and Timothy continued. “Never mind that. It’s my fault. I have been absent after all, content to accept the unreasonably rising profits and turn a blind eye to the unavoidable costs. I am complicit in these murders.” Timothy wrung his hands as if to wipe away the blood he imagined coating it.

Wesson remained uncomfortably quiet. 

After a while, Timothy thanked him for coming in to brief him, and led him out. He knew what to do and a plan was starting to form in his mind. 

That night when he fell asleep, the dead boy-man came to him. He was much older this time. They stood at a place that hung between places indistinct and hard to identify. But it didn”t matter, as in all dreams in which location was but transient indices of identification. The boy-man was wearing an Agbada. 

“You seem different today,” Timothy said.

“Yes,” the figure replied. “I grow with your realization. As you confront the poison of who you are more and more, my potential – this land’s and its realisation – grows.”

“Who are you?” Timothy asked. “Are you God?” 

“Yes. I am one of the many Orisha.” The boy-man then drew himself to his full height and revealed himself as Eshu Elegbara. “I am Lord of crossroads,” the figure continues. “I am God of messages and dreams.”

“And nightmares?” Timothy asked involuntarily.

Eshu waved his hand dismissively. “There are no nightmares, only the consequences, the price, and the sacrifices for our dreams.”

Timothy bowed his head. 

“It is hard to confront them, isn’t it?” Eshu continued. “To look upon the suffering we cause or contribute to.” 

Timothy nodded. 

Eshu waved his hand and a road opened up before them in the nowhere place. Another road stretched out behind them, and two other roads to the sides of them. And they stood in the middle. Eshu turned around, his arms spread out before him, then said, “We are at a crossroads. You may continue the way you have before you. Down that path lies ruin and death, for others and for you, for their ruin is your ruin. And your ruin will eventually be the end of all things.”

Timothy saw that the path forward was littered with bodies. And at a point it cut off, vanishing into nothingness. 

Eshu took him to the left path, and pointed at the right. “There are other paths for other journeys, if you will walk them. They will bring you joy instead of torment and torture.”

Timothy looked askance. Of course, this was something he wanted. 

Eshu answered his unasked question. “Yes, I can show you what lies in the path, if you want to see and walk the road of possible redemption and leave the proceeds of your greed and destruction behind.”

Timothy thought of the dead boy’s face and of the land and nodded, his eyes wet with tears. He reached out to grasp Eshu’s outstretched hand. And as he held the hand, they fell through a spiral, Eshu’s laughing voice carrying through as they fell.

Eshu sat with Timothy on a stool in the nowhere place, chewing kolanut. He broke one and tossed it to Timothy who bit into it and made a face. “Chew it,” Eshu said. “That is the food of the gods. It will settle your spiritual energy. It’s a better ride than you’ve had, to be the vessel to gift even a fraction of this view to others instead of misery and death.”

Timothy nodded silently, his mind reeling with all he had seen. He looked at Eshu now. “I’m ready to go. I know what I must do.”

Eshu looked at him, then nodded. “You are ready.” 

*

Timothy woke up, and shook Belinda awake. She murmured, still groggy with sleep.

“What is it? Let me sleep.” 

Then she realised that it was unusual for Timothy to be up and so enthused after sleep. She came awake fully and rubbed her eyes, paying attention as much as she could. He was breathing hard, unable to contain himself. He started speaking hurriedly and she rubbed his hand, bidding him slow down. He breathed in and went on more calmly.

“I know the reason for the dreams. I met the Orisha sending the dreams. It is Eshu, the god of dreams and lord of crossroads.” 

He looked at her raised eyebrows and continued. “It is just like the Babalawo told us. I have a grander destiny than to make money and drill oil. I have to make up for my mistakes and sins…crimes. Whatever.” He saw that he was losing her and went on to the interesting part. “Eshu took me on a ride through different realms. I saw the realm of dream, deeper than the one I met him, the realms of particle, of time, of man, of cell, and much more. I saw the creation of the world by Obatala, the god of creation. I know now that what I was doing was wrong. And I know what I must do. I must help showcase these wonders instead of pain and death and loss, all for needless power and profit.”

She looked at him calmly, then rubbed his hand. “If that’s what you want, I support you.”

He looked at her gratefully, then kissed her and got up and started hurrying off to the bathroom. 

“Where are you going?”

“To the office. Send for Matthew to drive ahead of me and call a meeting of the board.” Belinda sighed and climbed out of bed.

*

Timothy Smalls stood before the board of directors of Karnack Oil Company. The atmosphere was cool and all eyes were on him.

“We shall be selling this company,” he said in an indifferent voice. The silence persisted, for the board members were all so befuddled by his news that they didn’t know what to say. And then when they recovered from their shock, they broke out in simultaneous objections.

Timothy waved them to silence as if to address them further. But instead, he walked away from the meeting hall. They knew his decision was irrevocable.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is a speculative fiction writer, editor & publisher from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, specifically the oil rich but exploited Delta State. He has won/been a finalist in the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and World Fantasy awards and also won the Asimov’s Reader’s award. He was a guest of honour at the International Conference For the Fantastic In the Arts, where he created the genre label ‘Afropantheology’. He has been a winner/finalist in the Otherwise, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, NAACP Image awards, and others. His works have been translated to multiple languages including Chinese, Persian, Czech, Italian, Bengali, Dutch & others. He was elected to the executive boards of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and the International Association For the Fantastic In the Arts. He has edited and published hundreds of works in anthologies, collections and magazine issues, some of them the most decorated works of African SFF which have garnered laurels like the Caine Prize, made the Levar Burton Podcast, and been mentioned in The Guardian, Washington Post, NBC, BBC and others. He delivered the keynote speech at the Center For African Literature and Cultures Jadavpur University India and has been a guest of honour and invited to conferences in Europe, Asia and North America. He is listed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, for his contributions to Afrofuturism and Black Literature.

*Image by Arvind Vallabh on Unsplash