A Bed of Feathers

Eli Osei

My grandfather liked to fill the silence by telling us about the day he fell asleep on a stranger’s ass. Each time he began just like that, setting up his punchline with a guilty smile, recounting the story like a man who knew he was about to reverse it, taking his time to prolong the image, to maintain this version of himself that did not exist, the man who lay on another’s backside, who would never use ass like a farmhand would, who dealt always in deception and never in donkeys. 

That we’d heard the story dozens of times meant nothing to him. He told it like he was writing it before us. He fell asleep on a stranger’s ass. Yes, children, in his fourteenth year, when he was just a boy, he fell asleep on a stranger’s ass, and woke up to its oppressed bray. He thinks it was late March, when school was out. He knows it was 4:15. It was at this time the sun sat just above the river he spent his afternoons in front of. At noon each day, he walked down from the hilltops of his youth with a bucket, a notebook, and a pen. His daily chore was to bring home the cooking water, but his mother gave him the whole day to do it. He’d fill the bucket in the river, dip his toes into the water, and write until he sat below the sun. 

Ask him what he was writing, and he’d laugh with vigor. He’d laugh slow and hard until he felt a pain in his chest. The chair would shake with the force of his joy. He’d tug at his shirt to give himself air. He’d stop as suddenly as he began, and then somberly say: what else might a child write but the story of his life?

On this particular day, that story would change. Until then, it had been fairly uncomplicated: he was an only child—he was spoiled and chided. His parents didn’t have much, but they did all they could to provide. He worked with his father. He was schooled by his mother. He had his luxuries (solitude, freedom, movies) and his woes (solitude, illness, fatigue). 

Leaving the house on the morning of his story, he felt more tired than he could ever remember being. So tired that it was difficult to remember. It had been thirty hours since he’d been greeted by sleep and it showed no signs of welcoming him now. His body moved slowly, as if blown back by the wind. He was a sleepwalker, moving through Lagos as though the city were not there. 

In fact, he hardly recognised it. This was the beginning of the seventies, or the dawn of industrialisation—a new building sprang up each time you turned away. As he walked through the streets, it was clear that the Lagos he knew was disappearing. But the 24-hour markets, the high-rise apartments, the soft whir of progress that sat above it all: these things were here to stay. 

When he tried to recall the previous night, he remembered that he went to bed no later than eleven. It had been a regular evening. His mother cooked. His father ate. Then, wrapped in each other’s arms, the two fell asleep in front of the TV. He remembered bringing the duvet down from their room and laying it over them, propping up his father’s head with a pillow and gently kissing his mother’s cheek, before sitting down at their feet to watch television alone. In those days, the family’s network had three types of channels: sports, news, and European. He flipped between the three, through transfer updates, and poll results, and the oldest, whitest, European dramas. Godard. Tarkovsky. The Network had it all. His parents had bought the package from an uncle who’d recently gone broke in France, and fearing that it would poison the mind of their son, they’d been immediately filled with regret. 

But now they were asleep. And now he was awake. And now 8 1/2 was playing on channel twelve. The movie is about an aging Italian film director who is stuck in a creative rut. He wants to make a movie that brings purpose to his life, but the critic he has commissioned to provide notes on the script says that the early scenes land flat. Now the director is ill. Years of filmmaking and womanizing have destroyed his liver, and after receiving feedback from the critic he realizes he’s built a career on gestures. As he lies in a rest spa, he has a series of dreams about the events of his life. He sleeps and dreams, then wakes and dreams, and we come to realize that these surrealist visions are the very scenes that were once called flat. His dreams are the movie. His movie is 8 1/2. My grandfather, being fourteen and fairly stupid, had no idea about any of this. 

In fact, it took him only ten minutes to turn the movie off. He found the opening scene pleasing. The director’s first dream takes him floating through the sky, weaving between the mouths of clouds, as he travels towards the sun. But when the critic, who’s tied a rope around his friend’s shoe, begins to pull the director down and the director, waking up, soon passes into his second dream, a nightmarish encounter in which his parents ask him to bury them, my grandfather switched the channel. 

Ten minutes later he was in bed. An hour later he was still awake. He tried everything, but sleep would not come. He threw off his duvet, and took off his shirt, he turned and writhed, sandwiched his face between two pillows and tried to sleep with none, but it was as if he had forgotten how to sleep. Then he began to wonder if he had. If somewhere over the course of the day, the knowledge of the night had left him. He laughed. Idiot, he thought, close your eyes, close your eyes and dream. And after ten more minutes of lying in the dark, he began to dream while awake. The sound of a voice echoed through the room. It spoke in a whisper he struggled to understand, but it rang in his ears and then traveled through his body. Then it screamed, and there was no confusion now. 

Wake up, it said, wake up. But he was already awake. Then voice, which might have been his voice but could just have easily been the voice of god, told him that if he fell asleep he might miss his life, so it was good that he had forgotten how to. Then the voice laughed. Then he laughed. Then he rolled over, and rolled over, rolling through a sweat so hot it might have burnt, and suddenly it was bright. 

Morning passed in a fog. He was exhausted. He had to try very hard just to stay up, but he could not fall asleep. He heard noises and saw figures, so when arriving at the river he stood face-to-face with an ass, he struggled to say if it was real. 

If memory served him correctly, and who could say it didn’t, the donkey was black on top and white below. It had a full set of teeth, and dark, human, eyes. But what shocked him most was not its character, but its near astounding height. It was the size of a man who was raised well, he said. The size of a man who came from real men. Six feet, if not taller. Seven feet, if you measured its ears. When he reached out to touch the top of its head, my grandfather was a small man, he had to do so on his toes. Its fur felt like silk. It was the softest thing he’d ever touched—as though he were the only who’d ever touched it. It was the realest thing there was. 

Then after a full five minutes of stroking the donkey, touching its fur and observing its majesty, circling it like a child at the petting zoo, my grandfather began to question how it arrived there. What was a donkey doing by the river? Better yet: What was a donkey doing in Lagos? There was farmland, yes, my grandfather worked on it. He knew it like a monkey knew its own hide. But there was no space for donkeys. Not for a hundred miles. 

The donkey moved with a care that felt foreign to him. It fed on the grass as though savoring each bite. It laid its head before him and waited for my grandfather to respond. 

He petted it. It brayed. He rubbed its snout. Furiously, it shook. The donkey dropped its body lower, brayed into the dirt, shook its back and stomped its hind heels, demanding that he step off the earth, that he drop his possessions and mount the mule. My grandfather complied. 

Here, he told the story differently each time. He spent his whole life looking for the words to describe it. A bed of heaven, a bed of feathers, floating feathers, like floating on the clouds, like a cloudy morning, like a cloudy embrace, a gentle hug, a gentle fall, like falling through feathers, like falling through clouds, like falling through beds, into more beds, into more clouds, through more feathers, through another embrace, into a hug, a gentle hug, like a bed of heaven, like what I imagine heaven to be. He said that lying on the donkey’s back, everything disappeared. He said that he truly sank into it. That were it not for the sky above, he would have forgotten about the world. That, however briefly, he wished he had.

Everything moved at a snail’s pace. At a tortoise’s pace. The tortoise and the hare. Were donkeys related to hares? Now, he’d be back on script. It doesn’t matter, he’d say, this has nothing to do with hares. He was on the back of a donkey, and the sky was creeping along above. He began to watch the passing clouds. From all sides, it seemed as though they were traveling towards him. They came in various sizes, but he struggled to identify even a single shape. Formless. That was the word that came to mind. 

The donkey began to move. My grandfather looked down. It was as if the ground was slipping away. He looked up, and the sky slipped too. It was all white now—a soft, welcoming white. He closed his eyes and fell into it. 

* 

The first time my great grandmother beat my grandfather he was three years old. His mother had lit the stove to cook rice for dinner. She moved swiftly through the kitchen, not wanting to waste the gas. When the water reached a boil, she threw in two pinches of salt, licked her fingers and lunged towards the rice. She poured it in, like a chemist at work, and my grandfather watched her from the doorway. 

He remembers being bewitched by her concentration. He wanted to find something that asked everything of him. Something that required total commitment. Of course, three years old, and still in diapers, he lacked the vocabulary for this. But when he told his story, we saw its truth. We saw how much he loved her. 

When he spoke of his mother, he liked to close his eyes. He smiled and spoke softly, as though to make every word count. He’d say that he saw his mother dancing through the kitchen, and he was filled with a feeling he did not understand. He wanted to possess it. The thing that lay in his mother, in the water, in the rice, on the fire, the thing that would disappear if you stopped moving towards it. As his mother moved out of the kitchen, he walked into it. He pulled himself up the cabinets and onto the counter. Then watching the water bubble, he let out a laugh. 

“Ọmọ,” his mother called from the living room, “is everything okay?” But the reply that came was a scream. 

Now the natural response to a child burning themself is to dress and bandage the burn. But the natural response to ruining dinner is a beating. My grandfather’s hands were bright purple. The rice was on the floor. It was clear which problem had to be addressed first. 

My great grandmother cupped my grandfather’s hands into one of hers, and then beat them with her other. She beat them until my grandfather could not stand. She saw his pain, and she dished out more. 

Traveling on the ass’s back, my grandfather dreamed of this day. He saw it just as described, but lit by stage lights. When the beating arrived, his mother stood in a dark room. She whipped him with her hands, but, in the light, only her face could be seen. Each time contact was made, the sound echoed through the room. Each time the echo was heard, his mother seemed to wince. He would cry, and her face would drop. No one found joy in the dream. 

When he awoke, he was on the streets of Lagos. Still in a haze, it took him a moment to realize that he was moving. He was floating on his back like a genie on a mat, and people were looking at him like the simile held true. Of course, there was no mat, only an ass, and my grandfather felt he had to dismount it. It must be getting late, he thought. His mother would start to worry. Not about him, he knew that, but he felt that by now she must be anxious about the water. He climbed off, and began to walk through the streets. The crowds pushed him from side-to-side, and he hadn’t a clue where he was going. The time, he felt that if he could find the time, he’d be able to come up with a suitable plan. He turned around to ask someone for help, but he now stood face-to-face with the ass. 

“Jesus!” he yelled, feeling his frustration. “Leave! Leave!” But the ass did not move. 

They were in the city’s center now, and even back then, the area was packed. Large white buses moved along the road, bumper-to-bumper like a slowly running chain. Crowds of people marched alongside them. They bled onto the road, as though there were no pavements. They carried briefcases and baskets full of fruits and vegetables; they haggled and proselytized with posters and music; they sang about the days to come, the beautiful days, when the city of Lagos would be saved. 

But these songs were gibberish to the ears of the ass. The chaos was too much to bear. It shook its head as if to knock the noise away. People stopped to watch. My grandfather grew embarrassed, and then his anger told him to act. He began to pull faces at the animal. He lunged forward as if to startle it away. Nothing. He shooed. He scrunched his face into a ball and threw it open with a growl. Nothing. He said, “You need to go. I need the time. I’m sorry, but this won’t work.” And having until now looked at him dead in the eyes, the ass turned its gaze away. Just as he was about to berate it again, the ass threw its head forward and brayed. My grandfather followed its gaze through a crowd and his eyes landed on a man in a wrinkly suit. The man’s tie hung loosely around his neck and a golden pocket watch dangled from his waist. He had a wide face, the face of a bug. He laughed, and when he did, his face seemed to stretch even more. “One o’clock, my boy,” he said, “and show some grace. When you shout, you look like an ass.” The crowd swallowed the man, leaving my grandfather and the mule alone. 

A shadow crept along the road as the clouds began to darken. Looking up, my grandfather decided that it would be best to beat the rain. He climbed back onto the ass, and as he prepared to leave, he was greeted by a girl dressed in rags. She called herself Anne. “Like the Princess,” my grandfather said. “The what?” the girl replied. Anne was younger than him, she must have been around twelve, and she was missing her two front teeth. Her Th’s sounded like V’s and this made my grandfather thankful for his. “That thing’s very violent,” Anne said, and each word sounded the same. 

My grandfather told Anne how he’d met the donkey, and she asked if she could pull them around. Apparently Anne had a way with animals, she claimed that they calmed under her touch. The two of them talked as they traveled: Anne steering them through the waves of people; my grandfather listening to her tales. She, like he, had lived her whole life in Lagos. She, like he, had nothing to do there. She sat in the city center all day as people passed her by. She daydreamed and ate packets of grapes. She would eat a grape and then spit the seeds out. She said that one day people would sit under her trees. 

They were coming into an alleyway when the sky began to rumble. My grandfather said, “Prophetic,” but Anne did not laugh. She stopped walking, and my grandfather started to climb down. “You stay, stay,” she said, “I’ll come up.” 

The ass bent under the weight of a second body, but in the end it did not crumble. It found its footing, and rested against one of the alley’s walls. Anne and my grandfather sat side-by-side, their backs against the wall, too.

My grandfather asked Anne if she had seen 8 1/2, but it was the sky that spoke back. Anne shook her head, looking up at the clouds. He wondered if she had heard him. Talking in Lagos was like talking above someone. You had to compete with the sounds of the streets. There was clanging, and beeping and that ever-present whir, and, closing his eyes, my grandfather listened to it all. He listened until the city disappeared. 

* 

When my grandfather woke up, Anne was gone, and the ass was on its way again. The sky was bright, and there were leaves underneath it. They brushed over my grandfather like a hundred golden hands. My grandfather stuck his hands out to touch them, and losing balance, fell off the ass. With a snap, his shoulder bone made contact with the ground, and he began to yell in pain. The donkey stopped. He screamed at it to go. In tears now, losing his composure, he threw his head back and continued to wail on the side of the road, into the sky, at the waving Autumn leaves. 

This was his least favorite part of the story. He couldn’t bear to tell it. He’d say it softly, without looking at any of us, as though it were a confession. “Everything about it was real,” he’d say, “and there was nothing that I could do.” It took him ten minutes to find the strength to stand. That’s ten minutes at his lowest. Ten minutes of people passing by without offering a hand. He wanted to grab at them, pull them down, ask them to help him, but he felt too weak and embarrassed to try, so he watched them walk on instead. He began to think about how he’d got there. He wondered how he’d arrived on this particular road. What was he doing riding a donkey? Where did he want to go? 

He thought about the second leg of the journey, the one that had left him here. He remembered Anne, her gap-toothed singularity, and then tried to remember his sleep. Had it been dreamless? In all likelihood, it had not. He closed his eyes, trying to remember the dream, moving through the pit of his mind in search of some sort of answer. A raindrop hit his forehead. Then another. And then just as quickly as the drops came down, he was falling through the pit, being rushed through it more so, by a stream of drops, a river of drops, an ocean of drops sent to plunge him into his subconscious mind, returning him to the dream. It was dark. The stage lights were on again. Spotlight on stage right and a hand holding a pot floated above stage. It was unsteady, nervous, as though the body it was connected to had stagefright. It shook. Water spilled out the pot, and the hand moved center stage. 

Now it dumped the water, and there was still water to dump, and it was falling, oh, right, it was falling on him, and there was nothing that he could do. The water—boiling—poured down on him, and he began to scream. It started in agony and ended in ecstasy: it seemed as if the water was endless—it was scorching, ripping off his skin, and he was grateful to have it gone. He began to rub the water into his body, he rubbed so hard that he grated himself apart. When there was only a bit of him left, a speck just large enough to be seen by the eye, he slowed the speed of his rub. Slowed, then stopped, then waited for it to happen: and the water broke him down to dust. 

Lightning. Thunder. The world began to flash, and with the sound of the chaos, the ass took off. It let out a bray and then galloped through the rain. My grandfather sat up watching it. He was soaked, and now alone, just as he’d wished to be, but something inside him told him to run. Now he was after his companion, now he had decided it was his companion, now it was his only companion in the whole world; he was kicking up stones and speeding through wet dirt, tearing up the earth to get back to his ass. His shoes squelched. His shoulder hurt. He grabbed the aching bone with his hand and ran while holding himself up. He drew closer to the ass and lifted his pace. There was a liquid in his eyes: rain, sweat, or tears? Everything grew fuzzy. He was an arm’s length away from the ass but everything was fuzzy. As though in finally reaching the thing he’d wanted, he had discovered that he was farsighted. The ass stopped. He flew into it, and he was on the ground again. 

* 

His final dream involves the donkey. He was riding it. He cannot remember mounting it, but mounted it he had. They were traveling through the dark. Everything was quiet, and with each step it felt like they were sinking. In this dream, the donkey is talking to him. It cannot speak English like you and I do, but it is able to generate sound. Where a human being might cut up their words, roll back their tongue to create an L, the ass’s mouth stayed still. Its speech sounded as though it was coming through fans, a thousand fans, that muffled, and muted, and broke down its words. And yet the meaning was left behind them. Listen, my grandfather thought, I must listen carefully to what it has to say. And the voice began to rattle through his skull. The voice was talking to him, and moving him. It dragged his head away. It shook him off his ass and he realized it was shaking him home. Home, the voice said, it was time to go home. Then in the darkness of his dream he saw the outline of a face. It felt far, far away, as though he could run towards it his entire life without ever seeing it up-close. But as he approached the surface of reality, he convinced himself that it was smiling. He imagined it a soft face, and then this was what he saw. He saw her. He saw her in the kitchen, beautiful as ever, dancing just for him. 

* 

He awoke to the sound of running water, feeling that peace had finally arrived. Pressed against the grass, he closed his eyes again and listened as the world continued to speak. What more could there be to life than this? Lagos in the hot season: the sound of lakes and bugs and diesel-fueled trucks rattling in the distance. He stretched his arms out behind him, and spread his legs out wide, and began to move his body to the rhythm of the noise, slowly, as though creating faint snow angels. A bug landed on his shoulder. He slapped it dead. And as it squished against his skin, he opened his eyes to the sun. 

It was 4:15, and he had to collect the water. He wasn’t sure where the bucket was. He found it in a bush a minute later. Then yes, children, yes, he was running home in a couple more. 

My grandfather was a good man, a gentle man. When he told you about his run home, you got the sense that he believed anything was possible. He’d say that running home it all felt different. It was the route he’d taken a thousand times, but the sound of the streets rang out like music and he ran as if running on air. My grandfather was a good man, but he had no idea about the world. 

Standing at the bottom of the hill, he could see his home. The lights were on in the kitchen, and he pictured his mother standing there. He saw himself running through the door with the bucket in his hands—a smile on her face, and the story on his tongue. An Ass? she would ask. An Ass! he would say. And they would laugh about it as they cooked. 

He ran. He ran with the bucket above his head. He ran so fast that he was not aware that by the time he’d come through the door, he’d lost most of the water on the way, so, when laughing, he placed the near-empty bucket on the island, his mother greeted him with a resounding slap. 

* 

This was all a long time ago. We know the story well. We tell it to our friends and our loved ones, and they ask if the story is real. They ask if he saw the ass again. We say no. They ask if he saw the movie again. We say no. It’s a great movie, they say. We say we know; we say we left Nigeria shortly afterwards, that most of us were born out of it. I say I grew up on Fellini; I lived for 8 1/2, that I’ve only been to Lagos once and it was nothing like I’d imagined. The lake was gone. My grandfather was dead. I spent my days asleep by his grave. 

Did you dream? they ask. 

I laugh. I say we never have.

Eli Osei is a student at Yale University. Eli is a writer from Johannesburg, and an editorial intern at LARB.

ABOUT THE ART | 2 Mas by Thisbe Wu, 2024. Thisbe Wu is a student at Yale University.