our man in lagos

The power went out. That is where it starts, with the typewriter coming out of the drawer because the laptop is a brick now and the brief is still unfinished. The compartment smells of the inside of every cupboard in this city, warm dust and a little rust. The generator two compounds over has not kicked on yet. Somebody is shouting about it. I am not. I have a cigarette, light through the louvres, and time, which is the one thing the other version of me does not. I should also mention the fedora. I will leave that alone.

You wrote first, from Santa Cruz. We have not stopped since. What unsettles me from this side: how small you look. Not you specifically. The radius. The problems that register like problems. My generator going out doesn't "resonate" over there, that far away; it hits like atmosphere, the kind of thing that happens in other people's lives and lends local colour.

It happened on Awolowo Road, on a Tuesday, this thing I found and you did not. I am not going to make it sound like an epiphany, and it was no thunderclap, it was a slowing. The traffic was not moving and I stopped wanting it to move. You either change gear or you spend a life at the same competent pace, and the pace is fine, the pace pays, no generator hum, no heat riding on your collarbones like a cat that's in love with you. The pace is what you have. That gear is what I have. You chose it, you think. The road was not untaken so much as declined, reasonably, at reasonable speed, for reasonable reasons. I am not going to hold that against you. (I am a little going to hold that against you.) From outside the gears, I can afford to be slow about you, and slowness reads as confidence, which I imagine is annoying to consider over there where everything renders instantly.

I keep lighting new cigarettes because the room is too humid and the pipe gave up an hour ago. There is a copy of The Maltese Falcon on the arm of the chair that I am not going to explain either. Vonnegut's Dwayne Hoover does not begin to doubt his reality when the author leans in and tells him. He has the imagination to suspect himself imaginary. A character who reaches back out of the book and onto the page where the writer thinks himself safe. I guess I suspect you are the one who is real; I am the version you ran to see what would happen. The road not taken, in a sweaty shirt, with a borrowed pipe. The man on Awolowo Road wonders if he is the draft.

The published version goes out clean and confident and never once feels its editor's hand. A draft registers everything. You are not wondering. You are blogging right now, I think, cleanly, on a charged machine, about your day. Good connection. No power cut. Nothing riding your collarbones. You do not know I am here doing the same thing about you, by the light of a generator I did not pay for this month.

The draft suspects it is the draft. The published version does not know there is a draft.