Chapter Three

 

If you were the only child to a father who was a doctor and a mother who was a nurse, you had to find a way to adjust to the demand of such a reality which included being a companion to yourself and also finding other things to keep you company when you were not in the company of your cronies.

Arafat didn’t have a lot of friends because he didn’t need a lot of them. His rule for making friends was based on intuition, tolerance and respect for personal space. If you were lacking in those three departments he marked you as an invalid and the problem was most of the people around him were invalids and so was the fool standing before him screaming at him because he had kicked the ball wide instead of putting it in the net.

Today was a Wednesday and school hours on Wednesdays at SISS were split into class hours and sport hours. Sport hours was currently in progress and the captain of the soccer team was already making him feel the wrath of his ever growing ego.

Tunde Badmus famously known as ‘TB’ was a spoilt brat powered by nothing but arrogance, ego and the fact that his father was the Lagos State Commissioner of Police. Anywhere he went he tried his best to make sure he was the center of attraction because the fool was in his final year at senior high and he had done everything possible to become the captain of soccer which was the most prestigious sport in the school. He was also the president of the social club, the leader of the debate team and he dated the hottest girl in school who was the current head girl and holder of the most valuable girl in SISS.

Tunde Badmus was no pushover because he was athletic, intelligent and excelled in almost everything he did but the problem was that he had an ego the size of Mount Everest and his lust for razzmatazz was what Arafat found disgusting. This was the reason they both never got along and the only reason Arafat was still on the soccer team was because nobody in the school was a better goal scorer than him. The main reason Arafat made the time was because during his first year at senior high he had been the star of a match between the final year students and the first year students. He had scored a hat trick and helped the first year students defeat the final year students in the match so the school soccer team coach had seen his potential and automatically promoted him into the school team. It was from that moment that TB despised him because he had considered him a threat to his world of fame. Just like the real TB (Tuberculosis), Tunde Badmus was currently a pandemic at SISS because everyone knew of his existence within the school or at neighboring schools. To Ara’s utmost disgust some of the students referred to him as TB in the making because they say, “He was good looking like TB, athletic like TB, tall like TB, hot like TB and walked like TB.” The comparisons dragged on and on until he got tired and started ignoring them. There was nothing he loved like solitude because it was his strength. Solitude gave him focus which in turn creates the perfect environment for him to explore his potentials.

This was one advantage he had over TB because where TB was intelligent, he was smart and where TB was desperate, he was wise. TB rained words of team discipline on him but his mind was far away from the football field. All he had on his mind was Claudine Douglas.

The coach who was acting as the referee blew his whistle and told everyone to take a break and reconvene in thirty minutes. TB last words to Ara were “Stupid arrogant boy” before him and his ever loyal disciples headed for the audience stand where his girlfriend the head girl and her friends were seated in their maroon volley ball jerseys.

Arafat couldn’t help himself as he let out a smile at the irony of TB words. He walked to the canopy where the reserve bench was situated which was where he left his soccer gears. He sat down on the bench and helped himself to a can of energy drink.

“I hope you won’t need every bit of energy in that can to explain the content of your letter?” Claudine said. Claudine’s words caught him off guard as the can of the energy drink slipped out of his grip. Claudine picked up the can and handed it back to him before sitting beside him on the bench.

Arafat had just gulped some fluid but his throat felt as dry as a desert and his heart beat was accelerating like he had just been injected with an overdose of adrenaline. Claudine was fully dressed in the school female basketball kit which was a maroon vest and short, a black sport boot and stockings, an arm band and a head band that held her sweat soaked curly long brunette hair together. He could even smell the scent of her usual lavender fragrance mixed with her sweat making her look even more sexy and irresistible. The girl seating beside him owned his heart that was an irrevocable assumption.

Arafat’s first words sounded as stupid as his age, a sixteen year old expressing his feelings to his first love when he said, “Hello Claud.” Referring to her by her nickname before losing his vocal abilities to silence.

Claud didn’t say a word as she waited patiently for him to verbally explain the reason behind the letter he had left her at closing hours the previous day after deliberately keeping the whole class waiting. Ara wished he could cease to exist than deal with this moment.

“I am not an apparatus of a reaction Ara,” she said referring to him by his nickname before she continued: “So you have to tell me the reason you wrote me that letter or we can just pretend you never wrote it and this moment is nothing but a déjà vu.” In the letter Ara had used two equations to represent his words as illustrated below:

U + I (compatible)----------US [ ]

U – I (incompatible)———NEVER [ ]

Claudine was to tick the box in front of one of the equations and leave the letter with her reply under her locker this afternoon. At least that was how he had planned it but here he was being threatened to express himself in words or risk losing the chance to realize his dream of a relationship with the love of his life. Whoever said women were difficult to understand got that saying spot-on.

“Claud….Claud….Claud,” was all Ara heard his voice stuttering. Claudine looked at him with those marvellous eyes of hers and he said, “Claud I….” Smiling at him she said, “Ara I am not holding a knife to your throat or a gun to your head all you need to do is relax a little and tell me what’s on your mind.”

The words came out leaving him feeling like his soul had just been drained out of his body, “Claud I love you and nothing can change the way I feel about you not even if you deny me the opportunity to make you a big part of my existence.” After saying the words his heart have been harboring he kept staring at the ground unable to look at Claudine in the eyes because he was now hyperventilating like his heart was about to explode. Claudine stood up and walked away without saying a word.

This was the end for him, he was finished, he had made a fool of himself and she was off to tell her friends so they could all have a good laugh about the whole incident. His reputation at SISS has just been thrown under a truck and he was going to be the latest jester in the school. TB was going to love this one and he was also going to use it as his new weapon in making his life miserable at school.

Ara sighed before turning to stare at the spot where Claudine just vacated and he found his letter lying on the bench. He picked it up and opened it. Ara almost fainted with excitement when he found out she had ticked the box in front of the first equation with her phone number right below the equation. The exciting sensation that surged through him was like nothing he had ever felt before. He felt like he had just conquered the universe. They say not all dreams come through but some do. He could not contain his excitement and he needed to share the news of his emotional achievement with someone dear to him. He needed to find his best friend Victor Charles aka VC at the long tennis court but he froze immediately he stood up and his eyes saw the JumboTron which was displaying a large digital clock and scoreboard. It wasn’t the first time he was seeing the clock because he had seen it more times than he could ever recall but something about the clock seems different today. It was like the clock was using some kind of magnetism to pull him towards itself. At that moment he found himself staring at the large analogue clock in the room with the sick old man eight years ago.

All Arafat recalled from that night was that he had fainted while staring at a clock and when he regained consciousness, he had found his father seated beside him in his bedroom. His father told him he had fainted as a result of a nervous breakdown due to the fact that he had been exposed to the sight of a dead body at such a tender age. The final diagnosis from medical science on that night was that the shock he had experienced had been too much for him to bear and his body had reacted.

Ara also found out from his dad that the dead man was a top Professor from Oxford University and he was in Nigeria attending a seminar in Engineering at Bayero University Kano when he had a seizure and passed away within a short period. Due to his curiosity even at a tender age, Ara had pumped his father with more questions regarding the mysterious dead old man. His dad also told him that the dead old man was a septuagenarian and, one of the best professors in his field of discipline.

That was all Ara knew about the mysterious dead old man but as he currently stared at the large digital clock on the soccer field, Arafat could hear the words of the dying old man echoing in his ears, ’’Listen carefully and look at the clock on the wall. Ignore everything around you including me and open your mind and, soul to emptiness with nothing but an impossible destination on your consciousness and keep your mind completely focused on the clock and it hands. It’s all about being the master of your mind and exploiting the full potential of your nature as a human being. Bond with the clock as one and see beyond its full potential in order to get there.’’

The time was 12:05pm when Ara closed his eyes and opened them again keeping them fixed on the clock and doing his possible best to obey the instructions of the dead old man from 8yrs ago. He was now doing his best to create an atmosphere where only the clock and his self-coexisted. On that night at the hospital, he recalled the clock the sick old man had asked him to focus on was an analogue clock but the running seconds on the digital clock with the scoreboard didn’t make a difference to him as he focused his eyes and mind on it attentively. When it came to shutting out the world and isolating one’s self, he was a master but today he was finding the process very difficult because he had to isolate not only himself but also the digital clock because the old man had told him to bond with the clock as one. Ara could not understand why he had his mind drawn to the words of the dying old man from 8yrs ago but he still kept his mind trained on the clock and obeyed the instructions of the dead man.

No current laws of physics could explain what happened next. Ara gradually found himself fading into a trance 20ft above the ground. It was like he was floating in the air of turbulence. When he looked down towards where he had been standing beside the reserve bench some seconds ago, all he saw was a shadow but he couldn’t quite tell who the shadow belonged to. All he knew was that the shadow was stagnant.

Suddenly he was zooming through the air past the soccer field and all he saw was the large digital clock with it seconds fast forwarding like the pistons of a Bugatti sport car moving at maximum speed. He felt dizzy and like he was going to throw up as he was propelled further by the wave of the trance currently consuming him. Suddenly he stopped for some seconds but before he could get a view of his current location he was whisked further by the trance. It was like he was in the middle of a hurricane.

Ara kept zooming past places like someone using a magic wand to flip through the pages of a book and his head kept spinning like the wheels of a car.

When Ara finally stopped he found himself lying on a sofa and perspiring profusely. He felt like he had gone around the world inside a minute, the energy in his body had drained leaving him exhausted with nothing but a headache.

Slowly his senses started coming back and he noticed that he was no longer on the soccer field but inside what appeared to be a dark room. The room was too dark for his eyes to absorb it features but he felt the presence of a center table when he swung his hand from the sofa.

Slowly he tried picking himself up and locating the rest room but his legs were too weak to support his weight. Channeling all the strength left in him to his leg he forced himself up and started colliding with furniture as he searched for the handle of a door in the sitting room. When he grabbed a handle, he opened it to find out it was the door of a large modern day kitchen. He closed the door and kept colliding with furniture in the dark room before he found another door handle and opened it. He sighed with relief when he found out it was the door of a bathroom with bright lights illuminating its silver background and without wasting a second he rushed to the sink and opened the tap. After gulping and soaking the upper part of his body with water without considering the fact that he was fully clothed, Ara opened his eyes to the image of a stranger in the mirror above the sink and he jerked back as panic gripped him. Ara tried to overcome his panic attack as he slowly blinked and the man simultaneously blinked back at him. The man was neatly shaven with a low-cut hairstyle. The man in the mirror looked like he was in his late thirties. Ara raised a hand towards the mirror and the man simultaneously did the same. The shock at the realization of what was going on dawned on Ara and fear gripped him.

Ara closed his eyes and slapped his face twice but he still opened them to the man in the mirror staring back at him. One thing he was sure of was that this was not a dream as he kept doing his best not to panic because he couldn’t afford losing his sense of reasoning at such a crucial moment.

Fully observing his current environment for the first time, he noticed that everything in the bathroom was made of silver. The walls, the bath tub, the shower, the toilet seats and even the ventilation shaft. The ceiling was made of some kind of silver Fiberglass that was unfamiliar to him and everything in the bathroom looked like it was from another world.

Slowly his eyes started adapting to his new environment as the spinning in his head slowed and his movement which was made up of less gravitational pull became steady. Ara felt less dense and free and, his focus was now steady but his headache persisted.

Ara went back into the sitting room and tried locating the light switch but he couldn’t find it. “Where the hell is the damn light switch?” he said in frustration and the lights came on almost blinding him as he shut his eyes. When his eyes finally adjusted to the brightness of the light, he noticed that the sitting room was a reflection of the bathroom in most aspects because it was an environment created in the image of crystals and silvers. Even the furniture was made up of silver woods that he had never seen and the floor was made of crystals embedded in marbles. The lights coming from the crystals of the ceiling were like a thousand diamonds illuminating the room. There was a dining table and chairs also made of silver woods across the room. On the wall of the room was the slimmest and most compact television he had ever seen with a 32inches screen, a satellite decoder and a full audio system.

Out of curiosity he said, “Lights out” and the lights went out leaving the room dark again. When he said, “Lights” the lights lit up the room again. Although Ara found the whole concept of his current environment fascinating, he still could not ignore the feeling of hysteria building inside him. “Where is this place? And what was he doing inside the body of a stranger?” he thought.

At that moment something caught his attention, it was a file lying on the center table in the middle of the room with a wallet, an automatic pistol and a futuristic looking mobile phone resting on it. Panic gripped him on seeing the weapon but he calmed down and remained focused. Slowly and hesitantly he walked across the room towards the table and grabbed the wallet. When Ara flipped the wallet open, he noticed that it was loaded with $50 and $100 bills but he didn’t care about the money because all he wanted was the ID of whoever owned the wallet. His heart froze when he saw the symbol with the sword on the globe and the identity of the person on card. The photo of the man on the ID card was that of the man he had seen in the mirror and the man was an International Police Officer. The name of the strange man in the mirror was Lieutenant Musa Arafat Amin. Arafat gently set the wallet on the table with his hands trembling as he tried to comprehend what was going on.

The file on the table had just three words on its cover, “THE IM?POSSIBLE DESTINATION.’’ Ara checked his wristwatch, the time was 1am and the date was the 28th but he couldn’t determine the month and year. Without wasting a second he reached for the file on the table but he never made it as far as opening it as one of the door of the room busted open and two deadly looking men in white and black suits holding automatic pistols barged into the sitting room and without saying a word pointed their weapons at his legs. Just as the men were about to pull the triggers of their weapons he found himself being propelled backwards into the wave of trance that had brought him to this mysterious place but this time the movement was being reversed anticlockwise unlike the first time when it had been clockwise. He closed his eyes as he kept going through the same whizzing motion he had experienced earlier but this time in the opposite direction. Just like during his first experience he briefly kept stopping at unfamiliar locations and kept being pulled backward through the trance. The images of everything were in a blur. Ara closed his eyes and prayed as the zooming movements continued.

Finally he started slowing down and he opened his eyes. When Ara’s vision became vivid, he found himself staring at the large scoreboard with the digital clock and he started feeling more dense as gravity pulled him downward towards the stagnant shadow standing beside the reserve bench but this time he could make out two shadows beside the bench. The trance deserted his body, leaving him falling downward towards one of the shadows with his hands and legs flailing as he waited for the impact of his body against the ground.

Ara opened his eyes to the angry face of his coach Mr. Roger Ganiyu. “What is wrong with you? I asked you to take your position more times than I had breathe in the last minute but you are still yet to get your body moving,” the coach inquired angrily. Ara found himself hyperventilating and he felt sick. “I am not feeling too well Sir,” he replied. After closely examining the young man for some seconds “Go see the school doctor you look like you had an encounter with an apparition,” the coach said to him.

Ara picked up his soccer gears and headed for the exit of the soccer field. Before he was completely off the field he looked back at the position TB was occupying and what he got was a middle finger and a smile of satisfaction on the face of his skipper.

The sight of the large digital clock was the only thing on his mind when he walked off the field; it felt like he had just taken a long stressful trip to the North Pole. He knew and believed in the existence of a condition known as ‘Somnambulism’ which was also known as ‘Sleepwalking’ but what he had never heard of was ‘Sleepstanding.’ He could bet his life that what he had just experienced wasn’t a dream or a vision. It was like a trance and a reality within the core of a blur. Finding a spot on a long concrete bench opposite one of the school fountains, he sat down. Currently most of the students were at the sport arena with the classrooms deserted.

Ara didn’t like the distractions from passersby and the buzzing coming from the students around him so he grabbed his gears and headed for the deserted classrooms complex. Sterling International Secondary School was built on five acres of land. It consisted of about four large classrooms complex and each complex had about fifty classrooms with a maximum of thirty students per class. Two of the complex was occupied by the Junior Secondary Section while the other two were occupied by the Senior Secondary Section. There was also an administrative and staff complex.

SISS had about ten fountains scattered around the school and it was the largest secondary school in the state. SISS also had a standard soccer field, a large modern day swimming pool, a long tennis court, a basketball court and other standard sporting facilities. It was a day school but students could go to the school canteen in the dining hall and order any kind of food. It was all on the bill being forwarded to their parents because nothing at SISS came cheap.

The floors of the whole school were made up of tiles, Concretes, Interlocks or Carpet grasses depending on the location. The walls were made of bricks and though most of the facilities, tools and methods used in the school were up to date there was something quite medieval about the architecture of the school.

When Ara finally found an empty class without teenagers using the opening provided by the weekly sport schedule to fondle themselves or try out various sexual acts. He dumped his body on a chair and tried going through everything he had just experienced some minutes ago.

Ara’s mind kept focusing on the two hostile looking men in white and black suits. The questions he kept asking himself was who were they? What did they want? And why did they want to kill the owner of the body he had briefly possessed some minutes ago? Ara was still not buying into the idea that the stranger in his brief trance was him. He was exhausted and reminiscing when he dozed off. Ara didn’t even move a muscle as he took a short nap until the school alarm for closing hours woke him up. He picked up his bag and headed home but instead of taking the school bus, he chose to walk home with a thousand unanswered questions on his mind.