How Do We Make Magic?

I am trying to invent the wheel. I stand at the very beginning, on the fringes of time, before anything that ever was to be was even to be conceived in thought. I want to fashion ecstasy from thin air. Yes, ecstasy. Like squeezing thighs tightly together or rubbing up on a pillow or a favourite stuffed animal. It is just thought and then body; and with these bare tools, you determine to make magic.

There is the front half of a taxi, bright and yellow, sticking out against a textured, electric blue backdrop. A model’s legs are draped over the bonnet so that they look endless. Dark, glossy, long, parallel lines cutting across the yellow and kicking out against the blue. The model is wearing big block shoes in black, square in the front, platformed like a stripper’s pleasers, and with a boxy heel to balance it out in the back.

“Yes, angel, yes! Like that!”

“Stretch! Now fold your legs! Open them, wider, wider, even wider! Straddle the bonnet darling!”

When we finish, I stand at a computer with the new production manager, Karim, and the photographer. I ask him, “what do you think?” And he says it’s perfect, novel, visionary. The photographer grins in satisfaction, we nod, we wrap up, we go home.

I missed Estelle then, even more than I’d missed her since she left, and there was a certain, impossible-to-ignore ache even then. I stared at the pictures again on the way home. What magic have we made? What soul have we imparted into these photos?

Estelle never took commissions. She said we could not pour into them. Instead, we laced up our shoes, strapped cameras onto our backs, and went out into the world, happening upon things we absolutely had to capture. Today, I shot an ad for these ludicrous shoes. She hated commissions because “we cannot fashion them out of their predetermined order. We do not make magic for the consumer.”

These dry photos in my hands, an ad for those ugly shoes, which were ‘art’ only in the sense that their practicality was an afterthought and their appeal was in being hard to understand in a way that could be mistaken for depth— are certain evidence that I have strayed from the path that Estelle set me on. A path of semi-frequent hunger for things, if you’re a person who likes things. She was not, but I unfortunately am.

Yes, you can make the hideous tolerable if you’re sufficiently blessed by the branding gods, but often, what’s hideous is just that.

We went to The Gambia in my first year. In my first month. We shook in agreement and then I lugged Estelle’s mountainous backpack on a boat to James Island to see the colonial fort; to the Banjul beaches to see the water, and unfortunately, bright red predatory sex pest tourists, and I watched Estelle make magic.

She made everyone stand behind the camera. Our eyes were different. We saw colour and shape differently. There was me, the assistant to whoever needed assisting, Estelle, who told us what to do; photographer and creative director, and Tobi, photographer. She made even the people who drove us and the tour guide take pictures, just because.

“Anyone well-intentioned enough can capture wonder, beauty, depth, magic.” She believed it, it was her creed.

My pictures of a copse of baobab trees on James Island were chosen by a journal, sold and published, and Estelle insisted that they carry my name. It was my work. Like that, I was a published photographer. My eyes widened then. I saw beauty everywhere and in everything, and learned how to capture it. I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to look at me and tell me ‘good job’ in that way that felt like a desirous stare, a kiss, a tender caress.

I watched Estelle tilt her body and her camera like so to capture the iridescent rays of the sun, or to heighten the light of the moon. I watched her bend so that we would see a man’s legs more clearly, and notice the etchings that ran along them in faint black ink. I looked at things more closely because of her. I wondered what she would think of whatever we were looking at and then I thought those same thoughts too. They became mine.

That year, it was the three of us, travelling, taking pictures, selling them for sustenance only, and to see our names in print. Tobi and Estelle disagreed on how much we should charge, and how we should conduct our business, and Estelle took offence at ‘business.’

We found ourselves in Congo by road, through Cameroon, through Braserville to the eastern province, where I had to rock Estelle asleep for the first five nights as we shuttled between our tent at the bottom of the hill and Rhoe IDP Camp in Ituri. We were all moved and shaken, but none of us like her. She instructed us not to take any pictures.

“This is not art. Political or otherwise. We do not need wide-lens frames of suffering to communicate that the suffering they sponsor has found people where they sent it. We can not sell this to their magazines.”

“We’re bums, Estelle. We have barely enough to travel and work and live, and nothing more. This is unsustainable. What was this trip for then?”

“Can you not see?! How can you look around you and think our purpose here is to point a camera at these people? Do you know what’s un-sus-tain-able?” She dragged the word out as she stood scowling at and poking his chest, “Selling your soul in the hopes that you’ll win a Pulitzer one day.”

Tobi left the next day, and Estelle and I stayed a week longer, doing whatever we could. Doing our best to be useful.

The UNHCR sent aid to the camp by helicopter. When they arrived, Estelle went to speak to the pilot and the people in their blue jackets. They took us to Kinshasa and back in their helicopter and Estelle emptied her account of all but money to buy us flights home and spent it on the things she knew the people needed. If I had any money, I might have done the same, if only to impress her. They stayed for three days, and in that time, we continued to do our best. We even tripped over our own feet less with their sturdy support.

Estelle told me she felt guilty. What could she do? She was no saviour. There was no saviour. The UNHCR offered a necessary bandaid—yes, but it was not a flesh wound. They need more, more, more. An upheaval, an upending.

When she felt we had outstayed our usefulness, we left, but we’d hold them in our hearts forever.

Lagos was hotter than we remembered when we returned, noisier and dirtier than I remembered, but I knelt at the airport and kissed the gravel in appreciation. While the flimsy fabric of our society was rapidly unravelling, what we had seen had given us a new lease on life. Every day alive and fed and free is a blessing.

Work was lighter in Lagos. And it was lighter with just us two. Beyond work, we fused together. We were bonded by our experience. By the way we clung to one another, sweaty, worn, disillusioned with all but the breath that hung in the air between us in our tent at the foot of the hill. On returning, we had a fresh lust for life; and for one another.

Cater to your senses. Eat for taste. Embrace gluttony. For hearing, never a moment of silence; you are delirious in silence. For sight, there is much to see, to touch — the world, and yourself. There is no tomorrow baby, only today. So we did.

We still worked for sustenance only, but that meant something different here. I moved into the three-bed Estelle’s parents never used because they had long left Lagos behind, never to return. I sat on the floor between her legs in their living room as she retwisted my hair. I’d stare at pictures of her with her family at lunch at the country club and with the Girl Scouts and at the equestrian and swim club. She was clearly well-loved. An only child. She told me it was complicated, and I believed her. It often is. She drove me around in the car her parents left behind, a light blue refurbished Volkswagen Beetle that purred like a cat, and people looked at us in bewilderment on the road.

She liked to joke, that she could be my mother. I told her that nobody would look at us and think that. She laughed, “Then what will they think?”

“I don’t care. I know I’m fucking you.”

When she got bored and we couldn’t find any righteous work, she decided to collaborate with an old friend for an exhibit. She’d ideate and execute, and he’d fund. He was happy to do it. He’d reached out to her years before when he heard she moved back to Lagos, leaving her parents behind in London. He dedicatedly hunted her number down, then sent a text with a picture of baby them in bathing suits.

As always, I was her assistant. Her anything boy. I did not like her friend. He leaned in too close when he spoke to her, and I could see him breathe down her neck.

The night before the exhibition, as we set up in the gallery, we got into a fight. Our first one in the three years we’d known each other.

“What do you want with me anyway?”

She responded, “Surely you must think more highly of yourself?”

I started to cry and she dropped the large strips of fabric we’d been hanging from the roof and nestled my head into her chest.

“I’m sorry baby.”

Soon we were tangled together in the fabric. She laughed and said that it looked like clothes the way they wrapped around our bodies. So we arranged the entire collection this way, full of pieces I thought silly. She changed her entire plan in minutes. We worked manically through the night. But she could do whatever she wanted, and I would follow her, so we hung a skirt made of strips of fabric flapping jaggedly in the wind we generated from large Ox fans. We fashioned a large pair of dress trousers from the floor to the ceiling in strips of ten shades of pink. She was ecstatic, and I watched her from the corner of my eye all day at the exhibit and drank it all in. Drank all of her in. The way her eyes lit up at their confusion, at the furrowing of their brows.

I work at an agency now. They partner me with people like Karim and whatever commercial slop peddler they choose for whatever project it is and we fall short every time. Something is palpably missing. But nobody here cares. Estelle would have burned the world to the ground to put the spark in her work. Or there would simply have been no work at all.

Everyone is close at the agency, with the sense that we have been collectively whipped in front of one another. We smile at one another and ooh and ah at our little projects. We give bits of useless advice and share whatever new editing software is the rage. We stand still and do not make eye contact when our boss/manager/CEO/creativedirectorsupreme/overalllordandmaster berates us or tells us things like, “more sex! I want to see pussy on the screen. I want to feel it!” Then we’d go out and do disgraceful work. We’d shoot mediocre commercials, ads for soap and ugly shoes; things of that sort. Soulless work. Estelle would face me squarely and poke me in the chest impassionedly if she saw me now. But the money is good. And there is no more Estelle to fund my life, dispassionate or otherwise.

The three-bed is a distant memory. The only way to proceed, is with caution.