Read Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction for Free Online Page B

color dulls and fizzes out. The crowd, chattering and sighing, momentarily sated, melts away. The man with the digicam lowers his machine. He, too, disappears. Traffic quickly reconstitutes around the charred pile. The air smells of rubber, meat, and exhaust.
    In a few days, it will be as though nothing happened. There are those who will copy the tape, it will move around, perhaps provide some grim entertainment for the men in the shops, or in police stations, or homes. It will finally be broadcast on the national news, to outrage, and to an instant forgetting. I cannot find the will to hunt the tape down, but I hear about it here and there. A wick, nameless, snuffed. And what if he was only eleven? A thief is a thief;his master will find another boy, another one without a name. The market has seen everything. It must eat. It does not break its habits.
    For my part, I need to find the danfo that goes from here to Yaba. It only takes a moment. The conductor’s song draws me, to the other side of the pedestrian bridge. The vehicle is newer than most. It has a sticker on its back window: “God’s Time Is the Best Time.” And under that another one: “He’s a Fine Guy.” I enter the bus and leave the scene.

THIRTEEN
    T he air in the strange, familiar environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories. The narratives fly at me from all directions. Everyone who walks into the house, every stranger I engage in conversation, has a fascinating story to deliver. The details I find so alluring in Gabriel García Márquez are here, awaiting their recording angel. All I have to do is prod gently, and people open up. And that literary texture, of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.
    There is a romantic aspect to this. I think of Vikram Seth, who abandoned his doctoral studies at Stanford and moved to India to write A Suitable Boy . The monk-like solitude in his room at home, the meals prepared and then announcedwith a discreet knock on his door. Or the example of García Márquez, when he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude . Complete devotion to the task, the unwavering support of a partner, and a confidence in his own gifts, a confidence he knows the public will come to share. The ghosts of his early failures are not allowed to interfere with this vision.
    One morning, walking outside the estate to where the Isheri Road joins the Lagos–Sagamu Expressway Bridge, I witness a collision between two cars. Immediately, both drivers shut off their engines, jump out of their vehicles, and start beating each other up. They fight fiercely but without malice, as if this is an ancient ritual they both have to undergo, less for the right-of-way than to prove their manliness. When someone from the gathering crowd eventually pulls them apart, I see that one of the men is bleeding at the mouth.
    Well, this is wonderful, I think. Life hangs out here. The pungent details are all around me. It is a paradise for the lover of gossip. Just one week later, I see another fight, at the very same bend in the road. All the touts in the vicinity join in this one. It is pandemonium, but a completely normal kind, and it fizzles out after about ten minutes. End of brawl. Everyone goes back to his normal business. It is an appalling way to conduct a society, yes, but I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updikebeen African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania, simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who haven’t even a fraction of Updike’s talent and yet must hoe the same arid patch for stories. No such aridity here, but that doesn’t mean I can just move to Nigeria. There are practical issues to consider. There is the