Frances Ogamba
Homecall
The man cranks the volume of the radio with his right hand and steadies the wheel with the left. The presenting voice analyzing the Gophers game on UMN 108.2 reaches him already coarsened by the radio waves. He spends every alone time in the car revisiting his love for sports. When he rode with his girls, his wife and two daughters, it was always a different program on the stereo. Perhaps an afrobeat sound they loved. His phone trills, sniping off the presenter’s speech flow. He pulls his eyes away from the road and glances at the phone’s display screen. The screen is imbued with a photo of his wife, Hawa, and their girls, Nana and Agozie. In the photo, Hawa’s hair hides in an orange caul. The girls perch on top of her, obviously howling with laughter, their slightly unaligned teeth crowding their dentition like uneven walls. The details of their faces are blurred because the photo was unplanned. Yet, the ghostly effect of the picture and the wavelengths of colour that never reach the correct point are his favorite versions of them. They are his steady ground, and who says they cannot slosh a little in pictures, to be able to hold him up?
The man smiles at his thoughts and taps the green button on the screen.
“Hi, babe.” Hawa’s thick voice fills every inch of the car.
Hi babe, the girls’ voices mimic in the background. The man chuckles and Hawa’s voice drains away a little as she scolds the girls to be quiet. Then, her voice returns.
“Babe.”
“Hi sweetie, what are you up to? The girls are still awake?”
“Are you close to any African store? We ran out of garri.”
“We can’t get it tomorrow?”
“It’s on the menu tonight. I totally forgot. They won’t have anything else.”
“I will check the map. I’m on the highway. I will call you when I find one.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“I love you. See you soon.”
I love you, their girls sing in the background. The man laughs. “I love you too.” He ends the call. Nana, seven, and Agozie, six, never grow tired of mocking their parents’ displays of affection.
Nana seemed to notice it the first time the year she turned four. The constant hugs and touching between the couple jarred her to anger, and then to tears. She screamed each time Hawa made a move to hug the man and launched herself in the middle of her parents, screaming her disapproval, Leave my mommy alone! Leave my daddy alone! As Agozie grew older, Nana took her younger sister along on the rampage. Then, they stopped fighting them and just loved to watch it. If the couple forgot to hug, the girls nudged them to do it. “Daddy, hug mommy. Mommy, go give daddy a kiss.”
He needs to exit interstate 35E and head towards the quiet Saint Paul neighborhood where they live. He might still find a grocery store open, one that sells African food, even if they end up being more expensive than an African store. He swerves into the sharp curve of the exit from the highway and then taps on the map after he advances on the road a little. It is a little past 8 pm. A Laurentian mixed forest stares back at him from the left side of the road. He searches for open grocery stores. He senses the light piercing his rearview mirror before he looks up to see it. The light advances too quickly and is coming at him like a bullet. He considers killing the ignition, but the road has no provisions for parking. He can slow down, and the car with the lights will overtake him. He taps the brake a little and decelerates. The screech behind him is sudden and frightening. Metal gouging through coal tars to disembowel the earth. Before the car collides with his, before the cacophony of noise vanishes from the world around him, he feels pity for the squirrels being startled off their dreys in the nearby forest. He hears them thudding to the ground in their fright, feels all of startled nature huffing down his neck.
At first, star lights come for him. They fall, making mechanical strides towards him as if summoned by the sound of the crash. They litter the smashed windshield and inflated airbags. They settle on the piece of iron lodged deep in the man’s ribs. Next, human voices. People step out of their cars and shut the doors. They pull close to him. They do not touch him. The drone of phone calls circles him. In the company of the stars and humans, he feels less lonely. An ambulance arrives next. He has always dreaded the lengthy and soulless wail of their sirens. Eyes, sharpened by duty rather than feeling, peer at him. He’s breathing! Gloved hands tug at his body. They debate on the least damaged parts of him to hold on to. The hands leave him alone. More phone calls. Silence. The man feels the reassuring strobe of a torchlight asking him to hang in there. He is tired and has never desired sleep so badly, but the pain in his ribs does not let him draw enough air. He understands and does not understand. How much had his body changed? Has the tide of his life gone out of its marsh? What will it take to piece him back together? His body feels sliced into parts, and from each part, a bone bobbles outward and free.
“Another ambulance is here! We will cut you out!” a voice hoping to belt comfort to the man says. The word, ‘cut’, reminds the man of the births of his daughters. Hawa’s breathing grew laboured during Nana’s birth and she started slipping away from herself. A caesarian section was the next viable option, but even that was risky because Nana’s head had already engaged with the birth canal. Either Hawa or Nana would make it out of the theatre. Yet, they both did. The man cried as he held his wife to his chest. He and Hawa swore to have no more children. But as Nana’s charm took hold of their hearts, they dreamed of another baby as entrancing as Nana. They scheduled a second child in four years. Unfortunately, the second pregnancy happened less than six months after Nana. A fearful gulf opened inside them as they waited out the dreary months. What if Hawa’s body succumbed to the pressure, and claimed Agozie alongside? Hawa opted for a caesarian section in the thirty-seventh week, and the maroon-eyed baby that wailed her way into the world doused their nine long months of worrying.
One, two, lift!
One, two, lift!
The sound of iron eating into iron whirs endlessly. The workers grunt as they pull the car apart. A woman’s voice leads the dismantling. Cut around the car seat. Cut around the ‘B’ pillar. The voice has certain timbres of Hawa’s voice. He wonders where the ‘B’ pillar is located, and why they need to circumvent it for his sake. He wishes to get away from the scene and hurry to the closest African store or co-op before they close for the day. It must be 9 p.m., or later. His girls need their garri. It is past their bedtime. Can someone bring him his phone, or help him call Hawa and ask her to wait a little? He wants to call out to someone, but his ribs are plugged tight with something chilly. A piece of steel maybe. Oh, the ‘B’ pillar!
A voice dilates with urgency.
Need extra hands here! A man is stuck in his car! Yes, he’s breathing! Dunno how long he has!
The hands feathering over him withdraw from their tasks. Only the sawing sound continues. Soon, the man feels renewed heat around him as the scene swells with new people. A drip of hopefulness seeps back into the night. The hands and voices of the new people seem to patch up everything that was getting out of hand. The car frame gives way, and they lift the man out while he’s still latched into his seat. Then, hands detach the seat from under him and the man fears plummeting to the ground. They lower him gently, instead, on the hard surface of a gurney and his body winces as they stretch it to fit.
The comfort of being folded in his vehicle dissipates. A blast of air licks his skin. They pile warm blankets on him. Someone massages warmth into his feet. There is a confused beat of silence. Someone activates the cabin with the details of the accident. Questions and speculations rock the cabin. The middle-aged man in the SUV was drunk. He died. Our man here, I hope he holds out.
It is then that the man understands that he’s been in an accident. He feels sad for the SUV man who died, and for his state of dyspnea, which hurts badly. He feels sad for his girls who’d fall asleep without eating garri. He feels sad for Hawa who might be quietly seething in anger at his lateness, or worried that his number has strayed out of range. Maybe he’d still meet up with the stores if someone helps remove the metal hindering him from breathing well. He might be able to go home tonight. He imagines laughing it over with Hawa and the girls, saying: Stars watched over me, can you imagine? It was the weirdest trance ever!
The darkness of the ambulance lifts. A tall building and the letters, Saint Jude Hospital, fizzle in and out of his vision. He cannot tell whether his eyes are open or shut. Many hands come together once more and lift him. A cold breeze caresses the blankets and reaches him under the pile. He sees the sky briefly. The stars do not fall this time, but constellate into a pathway. Before he makes up his mind to glide into the path, the stretcher bearing his body goes into the hospital lobby and a posse of medical staff take over from the ambulance team. The voices around him change, warmer, more doting. They promise to free up his ribs. The tangy taste of blood fills his mouth. He cannot swallow or spit it out. Someone scissors off the clothes on his body. A hand checks for a pulse. They perforate his wrist and insert an IV tube. He perceives the scent of sweet-smelling soap as a hand wipes his body with warm water.
“Is there anyone we can call yet?” The voice has more authority than all the voices ringing around him. Another voice says that a phone was found in the car. They have been able to get a phone number. The man almost chuckles at the irony. His phone survived the impact of the crash while his body did not. They found his state ID too. Ikeobi Isaiah, 44.
The medical staff bat words about in the room. The man gathers that the B-pillar’s continuous presence in his ribs is the reason he’s still alive. But they must open his body to take it out. Only then will his fate be determined. The man is afraid. He wants to entreat them to leave the steel. The surgeons might know a nice way to cover up the sharp angles of the steel or crop it close to his skin. They’d surely find a way to manage his breathing. An oxygen pipe concealed underneath his clothes or something. Cold, relaxing liquid fills his veins and spreads through his body. The pain in his ribs ebbs. He tests his breathing but realizes that he has no need for it. The surgery needs him to be away from his body for a while. Just like when Hawa had their girls. For every birth, he paced the reception, waiting for his wife to return to her body.
Now, he paces all the same, but just outside of himself. He catalogues some of his worries. If he doesn’t get out of surgery early, he’ll be late for work in the morning. His boss, the chubby-faced man with a look of disappointment permanently embroidered on his face will fill his inbox with query letters.
Something circles around him like the midbody of a python and near-wrestles him to the ground. But he does not fall. He is suspended midair as he dangles after the strong grip. He tries to stop himself, to bury his feet in familiar things: in the snow heap that piles outside his home in winter, in the sand of the Mississippi River slitting Minneapolis and Saint Paul into two parts. He circles his feet on the pedals of his daughters’ first bicycle, which now lay in the ruin of storage behind their home missing its tires and pedals. He seeks saving in the warmth of his childhood, in the hands of the children with whom he played a game of flight, where they clutched his feet and twirled his torso around. He locks his thighs around the slender stems of all the trees he has ever climbed. He makes a fist around scutch grasses. The hand persists, tugs gently until his hold on everything weakens.
All the heaviness of worry falls away from him and he floats outside the hospital, and towards a constellation and the intricate route they weave in the sky. He falls into the path like a natural feature and his view of the world begins to transform. A beam of light pours on his two known homes: first, the high-rise building where creases of worry pucker his wife’s forehead as she dials his number, and then, his hometown of rusty-walled houses and green forests. Palm trees tower out of it like multi-webbed limbs. The sand is a frightening red. The resonant, echoing of a gong reaches him and chimes his name: Ikeobi! Ikeobi! Ikeobi! He feels compelled to respond to the second home’s summoning.
Frances Ogamba Frances Ogamba is a 2024 Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice. Her writing has received support from the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the 2024 COGS Research Grant, and the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.