By the time Kunle arrived at Third Mainland Bridge, Lagos had already resumed its nightly argument with itself. Traffic crawled toward the Island in a long red procession, each car carrying its own little cargo of impatience. Conductors shouted destinations into the humid air, hawkers moved between bumpers with bottles of water and packets of groundnuts, and somewhere in the distance a siren complained without much hope of being heard. The lagoon beneath the bridge was black, except where the city had scattered its lights upon it, and the water carried those reflections without appearing to care for them.
Kunle parked and remained in the car.
He had imagined this moment often enough that it ought to have felt familiar. He had imagined fear, perhaps even regret, but there was neither. What he felt was a profound tiredness, the kind that settles in the bones after a man has spent too many years carrying something nobody else can see.
His phone lay on the passenger seat. There were three missed calls from his mother and a message from his landlord. There was nothing from his wife and nothing from his daughter. Once, this would have been unthinkable. There had been a time when his phone seemed to possess a life of its own. It rang in meetings, during dinner, in the bathroom. His colleagues wanted his opinion, his friends wanted his company, his wife wanted to know when he would be home, and his daughter called whenever she discovered some new fact about the world that she considered too important to keep to herself.
Now the phone had become like an abandoned room.
Kunle stepped out of the car and walked towards the railing.
The wind came strongly from the lagoon. He placed his hands on the concrete and looked down.
He did not think of death as much as he thought of silence. Silence from the landlord. Silence from the bank. Silence from the people to whom he owed money. Silence from the telephone that had become an instrument of accusation. Silence from his wife, whose voice had gradually acquired the careful politeness people reserve for strangers. Silence from himself.
It had not begun this way.
There had been a time when Kunle had been the sort of man people described as doing well. In Nigeria, this was not a precise condition. A man was doing well if his children attended a good school, if his car started when he turned the key, if he could pay his rent before the landlord became theatrical about it, and if his relatives occasionally called him for assistance rather than to offer it.
For twelve years Kunle had worked for a company whose offices were on the mainland. He had survived restructuring, new managing directors, new policies and old promises. Then one afternoon, a man from Human Resources sat opposite him and explained that the company was undergoing what he called “strategic realignment.”
Kunle understood immediately.
There were several other men in the room, all listening to the same vocabulary being used to describe the different ways in which they would become unemployed. At home, Kunle told his wife not to worry. He said he would find something. He believed it.
For the first few months, he behaved like a man temporarily delayed. He sent applications, attended interviews and polished his CV until the document became more impressive than the man it represented. He borrowed money only when necessary and repaid it whenever possible. He told his friends he was considering several opportunities.
Then the opportunities began to acquire the mysterious habit of disappearing.
His savings dwindled. His children’s school fees became negotiations. His landlord started calling before the rent was due, as though he had developed the supernatural ability to smell poverty through walls.
His wife watched all this without complaint until complaint itself became inevitable.
She did not leave him because he had lost his job. Kunle sometimes wished she had. That would have been easier to understand. She left because she had watched the loss of the job become the loss of the man she had married. He became suspicious of every conversation, ashamed of every invitation, irritated by every question. He stopped answering friends because he could no longer distinguish between friendship and pity. He sat awake at night staring at his laptop, waiting for an email that never arrived.
One evening, his wife asked him what was wrong.
Kunle told her nothing was wrong.
She looked at him for a long time.
That was the beginning of the end.
When she eventually took their daughter to her mother’s house, she did not make a scene. There were no neighbours peeping through curtains, no plates thrown against walls, no dramatic declarations about the wickedness of men. She packed quietly, and before she left she told him that she needed to breathe.
Kunle understood what she meant.
He simply did not want to understand what it meant about him.
His mother called more frequently after that. She always began with the same question.
“Have you eaten?”
Kunle always answered yes.
His mother was old enough to know that a grown man’s yes could contain an entire warehouse of lies. Sometimes she sent him money, and those transfers wounded him more deeply than the silence of his friends. A man could forgive the world for refusing to help him. It was more difficult to forgive his mother for helping him when she could scarcely afford to do so.
Then came his daughter’s birthday.
Kunle called her in the evening. He could hear other children in the background and the unmistakable disorder of a birthday party. She thanked him for calling and asked whether he was coming.
He said he would.
She asked when.
He said soon.
After the call ended, Kunle sat on his bed and stared at the wall. He knew, even as he had spoken, that soon was not a date. It was a word poor people sometimes used when they wanted to protect children from the truth.
That night he drove to Third Mainland Bridge.
And now, years later or perhaps only moments later, depending on what memory chooses to call time, he stood at its railing with the lagoon below him.
He wondered whether anyone would remember him.
His mother would.
His daughter, perhaps.
His wife might remember him differently, and perhaps that was worse.
The thought came to him that there was no longer anything left to repair. He had become one of those houses Lagos occasionally produced, built with good intentions and gradually surrendered to dampness. From the outside, it remained a house. Inside, everything had begun to rot.
He leaned forward.
Then he remembered his daughter.
She had been seven years old, sitting at the dining table with a mathematics book open before her. She had been struggling with some problem and had eventually abandoned the arithmetic altogether to ask him a question that had nothing to do with numbers.
She had asked whether one bad thing meant that everything afterwards would also be bad.
Kunle had laughed and told her no. Of course not. A bad thing was only a bad thing. Tomorrow could bring something else.
He had spoken with the confidence of a man who had not yet been introduced to certain varieties of suffering.
Now, on the bridge, he remembered the words and almost smiled at the cruelty of them.
Then a voice behind him interrupted his thoughts.
The man who spoke did not know Kunle. He was perhaps a security worker or perhaps simply another Lagosian whose business had ended late. Kunle never remembered his face clearly afterwards. What he remembered was that the man did not shout, did not invoke God, did not speak of Kunle’s mother or his daughter, and did not offer the cheap wisdom with which strangers sometimes attempt to repair lives they know nothing about.
He only asked a question.
“If you knew tomorrow could be different, would you still choose tonight?“
It was an irritating question.
Kunle wanted to reject it because it was too simple. His problems were not simple. His debts were real. His unemployment was real. His marriage had broken. His daughter’s birthday had passed without him. Tomorrow, for all he knew, could bring another rejection email, another debt collector, another humiliation.
Yet the question had slipped beneath all those things and found the one place where Kunle had no defence.
He did not know.
That was the truth.
He did not know what tomorrow would bring.
He had spent so long behaving as though his future had already happened that he had forgotten tomorrow was still unwritten.
Kunle stepped away from the railing.
The stranger did not congratulate him. He did not ask for his name. He simply remained there until Kunle returned to his car.
That night did not cure him.
This was perhaps the most important thing about it.
There was no miraculous employment waiting at home, no sudden repayment of his debts, no telephone call from his wife announcing that she had discovered the error of her ways. The next morning still contained the same problems. Kunle remained unemployed. His marriage remained damaged. Money remained scarce.
But there was a morning.
And then another.
Eventually he found work. He lost it again. He found another. He learned to speak about his troubles without disguising them as jokes. His daughter grew older and learned things about her father that children are sometimes spared until they become old enough to understand them. His wife did not become the woman she had been before, and Kunle did not become the man he had been either. They learned, slowly and without any grand announcement, to occupy a different kind of relationship.
His mother continued to ask whether he had eaten.
Years passed.
And the question remained.
It was the question Kunle remembered when he found Daniel.
Daniel was younger than him, perhaps in his twenties, and carried the particular exhaustion of someone who had become tired before life had given him permission to be. They were sitting in a parked car somewhere in Lagos, although Kunle had deliberately avoided asking Daniel too many questions about where he had come from or where he intended to go. There are moments when too many questions feel like interrogation, and there are moments when one question is enough.
Daniel had told him only that he had reached the end.
Kunle understood.
So he told Daniel about Third Mainland Bridge.
He told him about the job and the money and the wife who left and the daughter whose birthday he missed. He told him about his mother’s calls and the humiliation of borrowing from friends who eventually stopped answering. He told him about the night on the bridge, though he could not remember the stranger’s face anymore.
When he finished, Daniel remained silent.
After a while, he asked what had changed.
Kunle looked through the windscreen at Lagos, which was doing what Lagos had always done. Buses squeezed themselves into spaces that did not exist. Traders negotiated with motorists. Somewhere, a driver was already angry about something that would be forgotten before the evening ended.
“Nothing changed that night,” Kunle said. “I just realised I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.”
Daniel looked at him.
Kunle remembered his daughter at the dining table, her small fingers resting on the mathematics book, waiting for an answer from a father who had once believed himself qualified to explain the future.
Then he remembered the stranger on the bridge.
And he asked Daniel the same question.
“If you knew tomorrow could be different, would you still choose tonight?“
Daniel said nothing.
Kunle did not ask again.
Outside, the city carried on with its ancient business. A bus groaned past them. A woman crossed the road with a child holding tightly to her hand. Somewhere, a generator coughed itself awake. The sky above Lagos was beginning to lose the last of its darkness.
Daniel looked at Kunle.
Kunle waited.
And whatever happened next belonged to Daniel.
Or perhaps to tomorrow.