The following morning, the sun rose over the Ashanti Central Prison with an indifferent brightness. Kwesi stood in the visitation line, his heart beating with a frantic, hopeful rhythm. It was the first Saturday of the quarter, and despite the strained silence of their last encounter, he had convinced himself that today would be the day he and Abena found their way back to each other. He had prepared a list of banking theories he wanted to explain to her, a way of showing her that the walls were getting thinner.
When he was led to the visitor’s room, his eyes searched for Abena’s face. Instead, he saw Opanyin Dankwa and Uncle Gyasi. Abena was absent.
The silence was deafening. Kwesi looked at his father’s ashen face and the way his uncle wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Where is she?” Kwesi whispered, the sound raw and desperate.
Opanyin Dankwa closed his eyes for a moment, a single tear tracing the deep lines of his cheek. “She is in Patasi, Kwesi. With her parents.”
“Is she sick? Is she hurt?”
“She is getting married, my son,” Opanyin said, his voice vibrating with a sorrow that seemed to echo throughout the room. “She is marrying Osei. They came to Ejisu yesterday for our blessing.”
Kwesi simply went cold. The room seemed to tilt, the voices of the other inmates and the jangle of the guards’ keys fading into a distant, underwater hum. Osei. The cousin who had sat in this very chair and promised to protect her. The “brother” who had seen his fall and built a life on the rubble.
“She had to live, Kwesi,” Gyasi said, his voice pleading for understanding. “Five years… she is a woman in her prime. She could not wait for a shadow.”
Kwesi didn’t hear him. He stood up. He walked back to his cell in a daze, his footsteps echoing on the concrete like a drumbeat. When he reached Cell 4, he didn’t sit on his bunk. He lay down and turned his face to the wall.
The “North Star” was gone.
The next morning, Kwesi did not go to the computer lab. He did not go to the library. When the guard brought the morning’s watery porridge, Kwesi didn’t move. By the third day, Officer Owusu became concerned.
“Eat, 4405,” Owusu commanded, tapping his baton against the bars. “The OIC is asking about the library logs. You have work to do.”
“I have nothing,” Kwesi replied, his voice a dry rasp.
The “hunger strike” was not a protest; it was a surrender. Kwesi had realised that his intellectual weapons, the code, the banking laws, the forensic accounting, were useless if there was no home to return to. He was forging a sword for a dead man.
For two weeks, he remained in the dark of his cell, refusing everything but the occasional sip of water forced upon him. His skin began to cling to his bones; his eyes, once sharp with the fire of vengeance, became sunken pits of apathy. The “Golden Boy” was finally being consumed by the prison he had tried so hard to master.
On the fifteenth day, during the mandatory yard exercise, Kwesi tried to stand. The world spun in a violent kaleidoscope of grey and white. He took one step, his heart fluttering like a trapped bird, and then the light vanished altogether. He collapsed onto the sun-baked earth, a hollow shell of the man who had once glided through the streets of Adum.
“Guard, Guard!” one of the inmates shouted, rushing to his side. “He needs a doctor! 4405 is down!”
Kwesi was rushed to the prison infirmary, a place of over-washed sheets. It was there, a few days later, as the nurses hooked him to a saline drip, that he heard a voice from the next bed, a thin, melodic voice that sounded like it belonged to a different century.
“Do not be in such a hurry to leave, young man,” the voice said. “The grave is a very patient host, but it is a terrible conversationalist.”
Kwesi turned his head with a monumental effort. In the bed beside him lay an ancient man, his skin the colour of polished mahogany and his eyes bright with an intelligence that the prison had failed to dim. He was known by all at the prison by the name Old Man Forson.
