Evidence of this process, however, is not easily found.
Clearly, dangers lurk in the shadows and at the edges for scholars who find themselves stretching beyond tangible and reproducible pieces of evidence, reconstructing conversations, the physical movements of people long gone, whenever they presume to obtain an understanding of the thoughts of great and horrible figures from history. Scholarship is scholarship. Art is art. To shoehorn one into the other is to invite confusion and bedevilment, and yet, there are times when one must push forward, must offer a narrative if only because there cannot be a void.
Nature abhors a void.
And so: Oyemi’s great-uncle died, money was passed down, and an office in Queens was illegally sublet. Then for six weeks, Oyemi and Mr. Niles sought out their first Oracle.
By whatever means — the reading of auras, probing the young woman’s mind, trying to see into her future based on the pattern of freckles on her face, etc., etc. — Oyemi peered at, judged, and found wanting what must have been over five hundred young women in the first six weeks she and Mr. Niles hunted for their Oracle.
An advertisement was not placed, flyers were not posted all over the city, girls did not line up outside the offices of Oyemi and Mr. Niles, though what a lovely image, the line of them circling the block as if each girl were hoping to be cast in some strange and dark Off-Off-Broadway show, or to care for the Banks children before Mary Poppins swooped in and blew them all away.
But no. They walked the city together, Mr. Niles and Oyemi, as Oyemi cast her new mystical glance down dark alleyways, in brightly lit lobbies, at girls on the subway or walking through the Sheep Meadow, or in a coffee shop or in a library or hailing a cab or anywhere at all, really.
Everywhere, in fact. She looked everywhere.
By the end of each day, Oyemi had exhausted herself so completely that Mr. Niles had to carry her home — to conserve the money she had inherited, they had decided to live in the same office they’d rented — where she would fall asleep on the sagging, smoke-stained love seat they had found on the street the day they had moved in. She fell into a heavy sleep no later than six o’clock each evening, out of which she could not wrench herself until nearly ten the next morning.
She lost weight. The dark, unearthly sheen of her skin turned a sickly, lackluster pale green. At night, while she slept, her nose bled, so that she would wake with a face crusted over by her own blood and snot. Her eyes watered and her ears itched and she broke out in hives once or twice a day, and Mr. Niles told her to stop, begged her to stop, worried that she was draining herself looking for whatever or whoever it was she was looking for. But Oyemi would not quit, until finally Mr. Niles told her, “One more time, I will go with you one more time and then I’m done, tomorrow is the last time, and after that, I’m gone, and you can come, too, and we can do some other thing with the money and power, or not, I don’t care about any of it, I care about you, but no matter what, this is the last time, because I’m not going to bear witness, not to this, not to the end of you.”
The next day, they found Nell.
She was walking out of a Duane Reade.
The procedure, up until that point, had been for Oyemi and Mr. Niles to walk around various neighborhoods and wait for Oyemi to “get a feeling,” and then Mr. Niles would approach the woman attached to this feeling and ask her questions — they had written a fake survey on the increased cost of living — with the idea being that Oyemi could then examine the woman unnoticed (despite how un-unnoticeable Oyemi had become), as all of the young woman’s attention, all her psychological and emotional defenses, would be trained on Mr. Niles. Oyemi, then, could sneak up behind the mark and close her eyes and proceed however it was she proceeded and then a minute or so later, open her eyes and shake her head and they would move on.
It is safe to assume that Mr. Niles understood little of what was going on and that, to him, the entire procedure was slipshod and inefficient and doomed to failure. So when Oyemi spied Nell stepping out of the store and tapped Mr. Niles on the shoulder and told him, “Her, quick, her,” he failed to notice the urgency in her voice, the heat from her hand when she tapped him.
Mr. Niles walked over to the young woman, smiled his charming, useful smile, and asked her if she would mind answering a few questions for his survey. The young woman barely had time to answer “Yes” or “No, thanks,” before Oyemi clubbed her on the head from behind, catching her just as she fell.
“Don’t just stand there,” Oyemi said. “Grab her, quick. We need to get her to the office.”
They brought the woman back to their building. Oyemi carried her into her office and laid her on the floor, still unconscious. Mr. Niles searched her purse, found a wallet, and in the wallet found a handful of receipts; a photograph of a little girl, which he tucked into his pocket; and a driver’s license, which was how he discovered her name was Nell. He also discovered she was twenty-four years old (two years older than himself at the time) and lived on East Tenth.
It’s unclear what Oyemi had done to the girl when she hit Nell over the head, how hard she’d hit her or with what. Regardless, Nell didn’t wake for almost three hours, during which time Mr. Niles and Oyemi sat in the front room of their office, Oyemi quietly and expectantly on the couch, and Mr. Niles, unsure what to do or where to sit, pacing around the room.
It is safe to say he became increasingly nervous.
Then Oyemi perked up and looked at the closed office door and said, “She’s awake. Finally.” Then she rushed into the room, closed and locked the door behind her, and didn’t come out.
Let us conjecture that, at this time, Mr. Niles decided to go, to leave, to go where? Anywhere, really, and to seriously consider whether he could ever come back.
When Mr. Niles first met Oyemi, the two of them had been children. Her name hadn’t been Oyemi and his name hadn’t been Mr. Niles; those were names they adopted to play a game, a prescient game in which they took over the world, or, rather, she took over the world. Oyemi, supreme ruler of the planet Earth, and her butler, Mr. Niles. Well, her butler at first, and then her superpowered butler, and then not a butler at all but her right-hand man, unless she was mad at him for any of a number of reasons that children become mad at each other, and then he was her butler again.
Mr. Niles didn’t know what a butler was, so Oyemi pointed him to Alfred, from Batman, as a reference and that was who he pretended to be. Mostly, though, Oyemi had an odd sense of humor and thought the idea of a supreme ruler of the planet with a butler named Mr. Niles was funny, and while Mr. Niles didn’t always quite understand, he played along anyway.
Then and until his death, he played along anyway.
But knocking a woman unconscious, kidnapping her, that was where the line was drawn, obviously. This is what he must have thought to himself as he walked out of the office, down three flights of stairs, onto the street. What he must have thought to himself as he looked left and right, looked for signs of having been followed — even then, Mr. Niles would have been, to some degree, paranoid — looked for some piece of this world that still looked familiar as he operated under a new understanding of Oyemi, of this project he had signed up for, of the life forward he was staring at, and at his not unreasonable decision to leave it behind. But then something — the sound of Oyemi crying out, perhaps, a deep-welled, anxious, mournful sound in her voice, maybe, or a crash of glass and brick, or the welling up of some deep-seated and unfaded and urgent love he had nearly forgotten — called him back.