RETURN OF THE EVIL I

Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns
to appreciate it more from his wanderings.

Charles Dickens

As a teenager preoccupied with images of cars such as the Buckle-Back Cadillac Seville Elegante, the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, and the Smokey and the Bandit 6.6 liter V8 Pontiac Trans-Am, I was amused when my dad asked whether I thought ghosts exist. Mechanical-I felt that a fool would believe in ghosts. In contrast, from the world of Henry Moore and Henri Mattisse, and the classical music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, he shrugged off my response and predicted I would change my mind. My concrete mindset persisted until two incidents shattered it a few years afterward.

HOLOGRAMS AND PREDICTIONS

The first was the sudden materialization of a luminous beheaded corpse along the Port Harcourt-Enugu expressway in Nigeria, as I was driving back from my village with my younger brother at about nine pm. I swerved the vehicle to avoid a head-on collision and the W123 Mercedes 230 sedan skidded off the road, while the passenger-side tires harvested several meters of cassava stalks from a farmland planted on the road shoulder…