Lagos, 6 PM

Lagos hums at a frequency you feel in your teeth. Six PM, the heat breaking but only by degrees, the traffic a solid thing you could walk on if you were foolish enough to try, and some people try, weaving between bumpers with a faith in physics that I find aspirational. I love this city the way you love a difficult person — completely, but with conditions. Air conditioning being one. A generator being another. NEPA gives and NEPA takes and the darkness is never a surprise, just an inconvenience we've built an entire economy around. Buy a generator. Buy fuel. Buy an inverter. Buy a battery. Buy a solar panel if you're optimistic. Buy candles if you're not. The candle sellers do well during the rainy season. This is the Lagos economy: someone always profits from someone else's problem and nobody calls it unfair because everyone is both the profiter and the problem depending on the day. The woman selling suya on the overpass makes the best suya in Lagos, which means the best in the world, and she knows this, and her prices reflect this, and I pay them because she's right. Smoke from the grill. Pepper in the air. A man on a motorcycle carrying a refrigerator. I don't ask how. In Lagos, how is never the question. The question is how much and when. The sun goes down like a door closing. No lingering. No gradient. Daylight, then dark, then the generators kick in across the city, a chorus of small engines singing the same note: we will not stop. I stand on the overpass eating suya watching the headlights come on, one by one, until the motorway is a river of white and red and the city is still moving, still humming, still Lagos, which is the only thing it knows how to be.