There was something not quite right about Kunle the day Yasmeen saw him walk into the well-lit hall at the Continental Hotel.

The Petroleum Corporation had put out a vacancy the week before, and those who were shortlisted were called in for an interview. It was for three positions only. Finance Manager, Accountant, and PR Manager. And suddenly, the slow mornings and easy movements accustomed to Abuja’s tranquil stride was taken by a slur of mumbling unease. The air was now crowded. It no longer sprawled out like the typical atmosphere would, giving the illusion of breathing in fresh, uncontaminated air. There was no rhythm either, no cadence. All there was was urgency, and the sense of it.

Just outside the hall, there was a woman who, with fidgety hands, held out her CV to a uniformed staff member. She was imploring, and her piteous voice was caught by other applicants sitting inside the hall. They heard when she confirmed to not being shortlisted for the interview, when she said that although her experience was in customer care, she could still do public relations, and when she said with an even more desperate voice that there was no difference between customer care and public relations.

Inside the hall, seated on the last line of the first row was a young man whose head was buried in the notepad on his lap, scribbling and scribbling and scribbling. Hard. Then, after a while, he looked up at the ceiling, as if to think about what he had just penned down. There was the stocky man with grey hair and dry skin, too, who was mumbling words to himself, and who, at some point, turned to Yasmeen and asked if she had connections in government that could fast-track their employment. And without waiting for her response, said that if she did, she should be nice to point him in the right direction. There were others, too, like him, looking at other applicants, summing them up with the quick-moving eyes of experienced psychologists.

Yasmeen was appraising the ones her lowered eyes could meet, trying to gauge the people with the most potential, the ones with whom she would stand no chance. One stood out. She was dressed in a jumpsuit, but a loosely fitted Ankara Kimono was thrown over it to conceal her figure. It wasn’t just the uniqueness of the Ankara Kimono that threatened Yasmeen’s chance, it how helpless and subtle her beauty was. The unthreatening kind, the kind that an interviewer would look at and be enamored by, while also nursing the frantic need to save her, to rescue her from the clutches of unemployment.

Yasmeen’s mind was in a flux until she laid eyes on him.

There was no exact thought that crossed her mind when she caught sight of the long man lingering by the entrance, hesitant. But she remembered very vividly how he walked because she found it a little queer. His gaze was cast down, his head stooping very low with his jaw sinking, almost, to his neck. It was as though he worried that his head would collide with the lintel of the door if he did not crouch so low.

He moved briskly to the nearest empty seat in the front row, just beside Yasmeen. He sat with a kind of squeezed fold to his body, almost as if he did not want it to touch hers. And when his hand brushed Yasmeen’s in the absent-minded way one would graze a nearby object like a curtain or doorknob, he whispered ‘sorry’ with such quiver, you could tell that not only did he not want to offend, he was frightened by the thought of it.

He leaned away from the chair, with the same body squeeze, and leaned back again until it felt like he was shoulder to shoulder with Yasmeen. His legs started bobbing up and down, increasingly so, before it became just his feet, making tap tap tap noises against the tiled floor. He folded his hands across his chest and very swiftly dropped them to his lap, clasping and unclasping them. His breathing was strained, close to a silent hiccup. And it was this, the laboured breaths, that worried Yasmeen. Then it was his fingers next, tapping his knees with such quickened impatience, it would take a blind man to miss that this man was a ball of nerves. What she felt for him was a surge of indulgent sadness. A flare of empathy. She was conscious enough to realize that it was not him she felt sorry for, but herself. Her years of intense shyness, of shrinking herself, silencing her voice, her years of walking around fearing judgments and recoiling from the possibility of embarrassment. However, as someone who grew up with the familiar sense of shyness, she learned quite early on how to mask hers in such a way that when people meet her for the first time, they don’t notice her nervous tics. Instead, they are met with playful teases or total silence. She had learned, too, what a pleasant question or comment can do to make people feel safe enough to loosen the tightness around their muscles.

“You seem very prepared for this interview,” Yasmeen said, gesturing to the notes he was now reading on his phone.

That was all it took, and the knots were loose, his legs came to a still, and he stopped tapping his fingers.

He told her his name – Kunle – what he was applying for, why he was applying for it, and where he was currently working. All these, he said, before the ultimate confession.

“I have social anxiety disorder.”

He spoke about his first interview experience and how he froze mid-way. Literal freezing, he said. How he never really knew what to do in social situations, how to interact, how to be free. And for a narcissistic moment, Yasmeen thought herself all-friendly, all-compassionate to be able to make this man get off his fidgety, anxious thoughts. He spoke, also, about how although he was not good with social interactions, he had a lot of friends on Facebook.

Something about him did not fit well into the puzzle. He was tall, clean, and olive-skinned, dressed in a tailored black suit, and was carrying a fine briefcase.

At first glance, he was what one would consider confident and good-looking. So, how? Or perhaps the real question was why? Why would a person who looked like this act like that? Now, when somebody like the girl with the Ankara Kimono confesses to having an anxiety disorder, it would be easy to connect the dots. Her rather shy demeanour, albeit only at first glance, and her slight frame. Anxiety should not come in the form of a tall, broad-chested man, wearing a suit and tie.

Yasmeen looked at him, this time with keen observation. Around the corners of his mouth, there were little white patches of dry saliva. Perhaps it was from him breathing heavily through his mouth earlier that tiny droplets hauled to his lips, stayed there, and dried up. Or maybe it was from the mere act of nervous lip-licking. As he carried on with the conversation, his breath was emitting an odd smell. It was not the kind acquired from poor oral hygiene. It was a different kind, a dry kind, something close to metal. A metallic smell. In a way, Yasmeen linked the smell to anxiety. When he opened his mouth to speak again, she did not turn away or squeeze her nose; she just listened, and then at intervals, took small whiffs, to learn, to know what anxiety smelled like.

Her head was swirling with question after question. What she experienced in those years of uncertainty, was it shyness or anxiety disorder? Or was it both? And he, Kunle, how did he first know that what he had was social anxiety disorder? Was he diagnosed? How did it feel like living with this disorder in a world that required people to perform? She wanted to pry his brain open and see what his familiarities were like, how he moved through the world racked with anxiety. But she knew not to. She suspected that asking a person about their glitches doesn’t ease it for them.

During the conversation, Yasmeen was only able to get in a couple of words. Everything else was all his. His voice, his words, his information. And she did not mind. She imagined he was rehearsing, training his vocal cords in preparation for the interview that would require him to put on an act. Again.

And she just let him.

---

Maryam Abdulkarim writes in the same way she observes life: with nostalgia, awe, and a curiosity for the unknown. Born and raised in Abuja, Nigeria, she splits her creative energy between writing, public relations, and voice-over work. Three ways of saying she just really loves stories.
Maryam’s writing has appeared in literary spaces like Afrocritik, Kalahari Review, Orange Rose Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. 
Twitter: @theMar_yam
Instagram: @themar_yam