The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Teacher walks the man back in the direction of his house while they talk about the social pressure to conform in order to give one’s family a high standard of living. Back in bed, the man pushes his fingers into Oyo’s vagina while she’s asleep, and he hopes both for a sign of her sexual arousal and for the illusion of a stranger’s body. However, his hand brushes a scar on her belly from childbirth, shattering the illusion.

The man wakes after a dream in which he loses a female companion to men in American vehicles coming from a set of bright, white towers. He goes to bathe, noticing the rot and mold in the bathroom. On his way to work, he slips in vomit in front of the train station. The man has a bout of diarrhea at the office bathroom, where he notices the excrement and written messages on the bathroom walls. The man sees the timber-cutting contractor with the allocations clerk and his supervisor (who he notes is a corrupt former Minister of Education). The man walks by the harbor, where he sees a ship with Black laborers working underneath the gaze of two white men above the deck of the ship.