Lizzy was at the bus stop, on a queue in the hot sun. Once again, she remembered what Deolu did to her and she was on fire, livid with anger. As usual as her anger, she could hardly see and her head was aching. She knew that if she didn’t get away from that place immediately, she’d kill someone or damage something.

Chinedu.

A picture of him flashed through her mind. After their hot argument last year, how he fell headlong into the well, with a little help from the strength of her own arms. She could still recall his wail as he fell. And how he became silent. Recalling this, her own heart suddenly became silent too.

“You killed him”, she heard her own voice say. She looked back in fear, the voice was so audible. Turning round again, her eyes met the cold eyes of the guy who appeared in her front. He could read her mind. Everything. And he was still wearing that same red T-shirt and brown jean trousers he wore last year. Chinedu was ready to tell everyone of her guilt. Then fear took over her mind. She had to run away again. Somewhere. No one had to know.

“See this girl o!” screamed a mechanic in black overalls as he dove and yanked her off the road in the nick of time. She had narrowly missed being crushed by the jagged KAI (Kick Against Indiscipline) vehicle as it arrived out of the blues, swerving like the road maniac. Their mission was to arrest traders on the highway, a practise banned by the state government. The traders were usually wary of them, but a new KAI “second-wave” strategy had been developed: a vehicle would cause the usual disturbance and after everyone had scuttled and were settling back in, another vehicle would suddenly appear and take advantageous control of the unstable position.

In the pandemonium as traders fled with as many goods as they could hoist, she bit the stranger hard in the shoulder and tore off as he yelped and cursed, twisting in agony.

She ran across the road and flagged down a taxi. It was a posh taxi, the windows were wound and the insides were well air-conditioned. As she leaped into the taxi and jammed the door, she looked across the road and saw that Chinedu - or his apparition - was no longer there. Sighing in relief, she caught her breath and suddenly realized that the taxi driver never asked for her destination. She looked at the driver in the rear-view mirror. He was still wearing the same faded red shirt and brown jean trousers, but now he had dark sunglasses.

As she screamed at the top of her voice, she heard him say “We need to talk. We’ll go somewhere really quiet, ”

Then he pulled on a nose-mask and tossed an exhaling canister in the backseat. Spluttering and covering her nose as she tried to talk, Lizzy inhaled the fumes and passed out.

When she recovered from her fainting spell, she was seated in a very large deep blue couch with feather cushions. For a bachelor, this guy surely had some taste. Some few feet away, Chinedu, in his faded red T-shirt and dirty brown jeans, was sitting on a wooden chair, right beside a table that was rather untidy – but not untidy enough to reveal the fact that if she tried anything funny he could reach for the abandoned knife, the screwdriver, an odd-looking stick that could pass for a club, and whatever else was concealed on the table in the midst of heavy books and remnants of a bachelor’s breakfast. On the other hand, her own soft seat made it impossible to spring into action, she would just be much too clumsy.

As she took in the environment, she averted his eyes. Until, having decided that there was no better option, she looked at him. He was staring at her, as solemn as he always used to whenever he was about to assume the wussie mode and declare his undying love for her. But only the living ones love, Lizzy concluded.

Chinedu was sipping some strawberry juice from a tall glass tumbler, and his lips, tongue and teeth were blood-red, as if his mere post-mortem existence was not grotesque enough. That was when she noticed the neatly-folded straight-jacket and the tranquilizer set on the rug right beside him. He was too intelligent and street-smart for his own good.

“I need to use the silent room”, she said, smiling away to conceal her furiously thumping heart. With a wave of his left hand, Chinedu indicated that the lavatory was right behind her. She grunted thanks and walked slowly to the commode, her mind running in circles as she schemed.

After finding out that there was no window in the room, all the fittings were made of fine glass and uninterrupted ceramics, the door was a solid wooden piece and no metal piece was in sight, she dug her hands in her hair. Of course, her hairpin was missing too. She couldn’t commit suicide, let alone defend herself. So she flushed the can, washed her hands, braced herself for the worst; and looked in the mirror. Then she noticed that her own mouth was also stained with the same red color. She did not know for sure if she had been drugged. She swore in an Igbo dialect and accent and returned to the lounge.

“I am certain that you have many questions. I am ready to begin answering them”, declared her captor.

“Where am I?”, she asked, looking around.

“Brilliant. That is a question you ought to have asked roughly a year ago, shortly after the time you killed me.”, he replied in his usual condescending and didactic manner; one of the very things that had annoyed Lizzy and made her push him down the well that day.

He stopped for effect before continuing his lecture and sipped from the glass with an affected drool, then displayed his blood-red teeth as he nodded and advertised, saying “This is very good stuff”. He belched.

“You are in a complex tangle right now. The human nature is rather complicated, actually. For instance, in psychoanalysis, there are defined theories about the human id. It is the sum of the primitive instincts and energies underlying all the psychic activity of a human being. A certain Liebermansch hypothesis states that this id is not made of random instincts as we often believe, but rather it draws from a bank of experiences of a fuzzy id that is linked to the particular human being. This is why many have believed in reincarnation (as false as it is), and it also accounts for the common déjà vu in which one thinks their present situation has occurred before. Oh, yes it has.”

As it happened once in a while, Chinedu was talking over her head, and Lizzy looked more confused. But she was also very intelligent, and that was one of the things that had brought them together years ago. So he explained further in order to let her apprehend the meaning.

“Our each and every action, inaction, choice and decision generates a new path for our lives every moment. Within an hour, for example, in one person, millions of such paths are generated but only one is attained by the prime id, which is the id of the person on the particular path we are focusing on. For each of the other paths, a fuzzy id of the person progresses along the path, generating more fuzzy ids as it continues. The fuzzy id is like a surrogate , it carries the alternatives to the prime id’s selection and continues with it, acquiring knowledge and accumulating energy until a critical point is reached. This so-called critical point is a place where one or more paths intersect.”

“What this means is that at these critical points, one may willingly or mistakenly derail from a path and enter another path. Of course, the knowledge acquired and the energy accumulated will not balance out across all the paths, but the variation will afford similar opportunities. And then the human being ignorantly declares déjà vu or reincarnation, thinking an abstruse thing has occurred. But it’s not so, one or more of their fuzzy ids has gone through the experience before and at that time the prime id is exchanging information with each fuzzy id.”

“So is this a kind of alternate future then, in which you are not dead?” asked Lizzy.

“I was just coming to that part, Elizabeth. There is a strong link between human emotion, conscience and rational logic. As a result, over time, each particular fuzzy id has specialized in a particular emotion, is as objective as its gradually developed conscience, and as such makes decisions based on the attendant logic. At the critical points, the human being makes a choice and the newly elected prime id forces all the fuzzy ids into relegation for the moment. In rare cases, a chance of one in five billion, a renegade fuzzy id refuses to be forced into the background, and it usurps the prime id. Then the human being appears to be a one-track identity with a particular strong unquenchable emotion, the emotion’s associated conscience, and all the rational logic the conscience requires to operate.”

“In your case, Lizzy, your rage took over when we were at the well. You decided not to push me over into the well, but you have a fuzzy id that had grown very strong from murderous and evil thoughts that you had wallowed in since childhood without carrying them out. Your RAGE fuzzy id was stronger than your prime id, so after you made the choice, the fuzzy id derailed the path and usurped the prime id. If you think back, you will see that from that point, you have never been able to control your anger any longer. Think about all your victims…”

Lizzy could remember. She had killed her neighbours, poisoned the whole family, by injecting a colourless hysoscyamine in the toothpaste tube when she visited their bathroom - and all because she hated the heavy-metal rock music they indulged in every evening. Most of the others were men. Twice, late in the night, she had snapped some taxi drivers’ neck from the backseat, killing them because she felt they were chauvinists and she was being cheated on the cab fare. She had killed a former colleague by applying a poisonous powder to a book she borrowed from him, because he pinched her bum, denied it and refused to apologize – the same fingers killed him, for he was known to lick his fingers before turning any book’s pages.

Then there was the Satyr, the ugly old man plaguing her with his many intimate innuendos: he relentlessly wanted a bit of the action so she visited him and simply suffocated him with his heavy pillow. She got some scratches, but fortunately the Nigerian Police were too short-sighted to make proper enquiries concerning the flesh under the dead man’s fingernails. And the annoying young man she drowned at the beach for staring too hard, being too cocky and over-assuming – he couldn’t even really swim and while he was trying to prove a point, she mistakenly tipped him over the edge into the deep end and screamed for help from the distant lifeguard. And there were so many others after them, she had lost count.

The last attempt was that morning, when Deolu, her new 2-day old boyfriend, laughed in her face. He had refused to sign the huge cheque as she demanded, so in her rage she held his own silenced pistol to his head and threatened to blast his head off - only for him to laugh and tell her that he had suspected her from the start, so he had emptied the gun’s barrel the night she arrived. She had fled the place, scheming how to get back at him when she saw Chinedu again, for the hundredth time at least in less than a week.

Chinedu.

He was sipping a strawberry drink. There was no way in hell he could be dead, she thought.

“So why do I keep seeing you everywhere if you are not dead?” Lizzy asked.

“Simple. Your rebellious enraged fuzzy id is trying to add credence to the fact that you killed me and I am now a ghost haunting you. When that fact is embedded fully in your subconscious, your prime id will be fully erased. But my murder by you is not true, in the true nature of truth because it happened in another variation, another version of life. This person that I am speaking to, i.e. yourself, is not the real Lizzy. Your experience has been affected by the enraged id. The real Lizzy is lost somewhere out there, and I am here to help you reconnect at the next critical point, which should be in a matter of some minutes. We can force a critical point by staging something that involves important decisions for you to make, Elizabeth.”

“How do you intend to do this, and what if I refuse?”, queried Lizzy.

“You will close your eyes, I will describe a serene scenery on an Island and you will make decisions about the things you observe and experience on the island. It is a very painless process. It will be better if you do not refuse, because I want the best for you, even though in your mind you attempted to kill me last year, but I have forgiven you!”

“You know I love you Chinedu, and I would never have harmed you. Only one thing is still confusing to me. How did you know all of this? Are you not a skilled accountant? How is it that you have a straight-jacket and tranquilizer set and you know so much about psychoanalysis?”

Chinedu laughed a long and hearty laughter. “Do you not truly understand that simple point? Just like this is a fuzzy id of yours sitting before me, this is also a fuzzy id of mine that I learnt from at the same critical point where your rogue id usurped the prime id beside the well. This very fuzzy id of mine never studied Accountancy, but is a doctor with summa c:um laude distinctions in psychiatry! Your rogue id caused it, but even I would gladly return to Accountancy!”

Once again, she looked at the straight-jacket and the tranquilizer set on the floor beside Chinedu. Then she saw that the room had only one exit asides the dead-end lavatory behind her, and that exit was far from her own end. The other window was overlooking a large water body, and it was beside Chinedu’s table. There was simply no escape route. She shrugged and sighed.

She indicated that she was disturbingly pressed and once again she went to the lavatory. After many minutes of an intermittent retching sound as she vomited, she flushed the can and returned. She looked sober and dejected.

“Okay, I’m game. You may continue. Let’s do this and get it over with”, she said.

With joy in his twinkling eyes, Chinedu excused himself and stepped out of the room through the exit.

“How did it go?” queried Chinedu as he, Lizzy’s parents and the make-up artist rose to see Dr. Okafor, the renown psychiatrist.

“She bought the whole theory; hook line and sinker, and I have somewhat explained to her that inasmuch as she didn’t kill me, or rather, Chinedu, she had other victims. She’s a tough one, and my methods have not been so procedural, but I know that in some hours she will be very much better. And in some few days at this rate, Elizabeth will be back in your loving arms.”

Elizabeth, daughter of a wealthy and influential Nigerian businessman, had snapped in her mind – she developed a mental illness while arguing with Chinedu, her boyfriend, beside the well in Chinedu’s compound roughly a year earlier.

Right after she lost it, she was so certain that she had killed Chinedu by pushing him down the well. Chinedu communicating with her only made things worse because she would misconstrue it as a visitation from a ghost. She had written notes about it, and told everyone about it, until after some days she kept quiet and eventually turned into a passionate serial killer while her concerned family trailed her at a distance. She had been captured a number of times and committed to an institution or the other but she kept outsmarting the psychiatrists, evading treatment and escaping again. At least until now.

“Was the make-up adequate?”, asked the anxious professional make-up artist.

“Not to worry, at the extent of Lizzy’s delusions, anyone with Chinedu’s build, clothes, and a similar pedantic deep voice will accurately pass for him.”, replied the psychiatrist. "Her supposed guilt makes her want to recognize him easily".

“Thank you, doctor. You were our last hope. Now I am glad we didn’t fly her all the way from Nigeria to the States for nothing!”, said Lizzy’s father as he hugged the softly sobbing  and Lizzy's younger sister.

“It’s really nothing; it’s all in a day’s work. We’re still at a slippery point, so I need to resume right away.”

But as he stepped back into the room, he found the window open and the wind was gloriously rushing into the empty room. There was a note on the table, weighted down by the half-empty glass of strawberry juice and scrawled onto scrolls of tissue paper with post-emesis (vomited) strawberry juice.

“Nice. You almost had me fooled there, but my IQ is way higher than yours. The guy I saw on the bus queue looked very much like Chinedu, I was sincerely scared. Then I ran across the road, flagged down the taxi and was shocked to see him again, so I screamed. With a big difference - when he opened his mouth to speak. The driver’s mouth stank like rotten raw fish. I was about to figure it all out when he gassed me.

Then I woke up here and saw you : yet another double, but this one was closer than the guy on the queue. I almost believed it was Chinedu until you raised the glass to drink and I saw your elbow. There were too many wrinkles there for a 28 year old man like my friend Chinedu. The strength of your laughter indicated the strength of your heart’s muscles as well. You’re roughly 45 years old!

I also wondered why I was feeling sick, until I realized it had to be a form of circadian rhythm disruption due to a jet lag. I asked you where I am, and you begged the question. But you forgot to change the time on my wristwatch, which didn’t tally with the one in the lounge. So I know I am in a GMT minus 5 time zone, I guess it’s in the United States but I will find out in some minutes.

And again, Chinedu NEVER called me Elizabeth. Your research was poor in that respect. Try harder next time. O, I forgot, there will never be a next time. Oops. Hope you get paid for this mistake of yours.

The only point where I agree with you is that I know that Chinedu is alive and I killed all those other people, because when I kill people they stay dead, they don’t keep popping up here and there like Chinedu and all his staged doubles. Believe me, I am an expert at that so I know what I mean. Dead men stay dead, the ones that are alive are living lovely.

I need to find Chinedu. In case you see him, tell him he has a second chance to die for real, for keeping me in the dark all this while. Meanwhile, I’m returning to Nigeria. Deolu is next on my hit list, tell whoever put you on my case – whoever you will soon leave the room to declare your progressive victory to - that Deolu should start running, but he can’t hide. I will make him an example to people who try to resist me. And that’s a warning to you too.

Regards to my parents. Tell them I love them and I’m doing my best to make them proud, but so many bloody ninnyhammers won’t just let me be, so I’m getting rid of them all; I’m just doing what I can to help make the world a better place.

N.B. For your own good, don't drink the rest of your strawberry juice in the glass. Haha. I'm just joking. Or am I?

P.S. Now you should know why I spent so long in the lavatory the second time. I was writing this for you…

Written with my earring, dipped in the strawberry juice I regurgitated by vomiting”

(c) Mavenbox December 3rd, 2009

Okay, I know it's very long but I hope you have the patience to read through it all!

I made up the whole fuzzy id and Liebermansch hypothesis, there is no such thing in existence. And that's why I had to spend so much time explaining my idea.

I am not sure if this story will stay put here, or will be the first part of a series. Your comments may just help me make a choice!

Cheers.

This is great and outstanding. I am still reading it sha.

Finished reading it, i will give you an A+. However, because i know a great deal of psychology/psychiatry, i was able to fully follow
the story, and i was able to figure out the fuzz id was a fiction - but you did great justice to it. and i actually find it very interesting.
I have bookmarked this page already. But for those that know little of psychoanalysis, i am not sure how well they may follow it.

Technically speaking now, so is lizzy suffering from pure schizophrenia or it is mixed with some degree of mania?

I loved this! A new type of writing for the Nigerian audience.

^^yeah right, i love it too, i am waiting for the next episode.

@dhtml: thanks sir! Yes, Lizzy is schizophrenic with some degree of mania. I really hope people follow the story beyond the pschoanalysis. The psychoanalysis is just to give my claims some solid foundation. It's all part of the twist.

@Myne White: Thank you! I'm really glad you like the story. Long read, I must say, but I'm glad you found it worth your time!

P.S. Can you believe I thought up and wrote this story in less than four hours? I have other stories I have written, and whenever I have spare time I write more. maybe I will post them on NL too when I'm done (Not to worry, I'm working on a fantasy series that will not be published for free, but maybe NL will get teasers for that one!).

you are welcome jor. Even without the psychoanalysis stuff, it is a pretty interesting story, and i can even visualize it (thanks to my photographic memory). Seriously, i wish to say more than i have said here, i am wondering if i will be able to get you through chat or email.
Please try dial my email diltony@yahoo.com/support@mwebng.net

@Dhtml: Thanks, I will store the email for reference purposes, since chatting takes up so much of my energy most times (when I do not know the person well enough). 

I gerrit, i wish to make a very straight forward request. chatting will be faster. but i do not wish for other ppl to see it.
But it will be faster to chat sha, 'cos it is rather short. I will prefer chat, but whichever is better for you.

@dhtml: Not to worry, I'm mailing you right away! Besides, the email box Im using is gmail so you cant chat by YIM eitherway

I am wondering if i can write a chapter for this book. possibly the prologue or something. . .i have some ideas

@joker2k: Really?

Nice . I mean what goes on in that head of yours . I love the drawing, I can bet you did it . Like me I guess you like to illustrate your work. Fantastic stuff anyway.

Thanks maedan!

You're welcome . Looking forward to more of your stuff!

“Thank you, doctor. You were our last hope. Now I am glad we didn’t fly her all the way from Nigeria to the States for nothing!”, said Lizzy’s father as he hugged the softly sobbing and Lizzy's younger sister.

I'm just seeing this! What on earth is Nairaland turning into? In between those two words outlined above, I had typed "m.other" but Nairaland has removed the word. Tell me o, is that now a derogative word?

I assume we all have one, one way or the other!

I like this. This is simply unputdownable. Good job!

Thanks sir. Unputdownable? I like that word, I will use it someday