Noor(2)

The sunrise was a warm one, the breeze wafting into my open window. I liked the heat; when it was hot, I felt languid, effortless, good. I slept naked, unbothered by mosquitoes. They never seemed to like me. A hawk soared past my apartment window. Or maybe it was a vulture. The beating in my head seemed to surge. “Ah,” I groaned, rolling over.

Then I was watching my ex-fiancé Olaniyi’s back as he walked out the front door into a lush undulating jungle, a fantastic drum beat rolling up the green, red, and yellow leaves of trees and bushes. I looked up and the sky wasn’t really the sky because I was dreaming. It was like looking at a sky that was a blue leaf under a strong microscope and you were zooming and zooming in to see that it wasn’t a blue leaf at all; it was millions of blue eyes that made up the leaf. All those eyes were looking at me. And then they weren’t blue, they were red, like the eyes of lizards looking. Blinking and looking, blinking and looking.

When I blinked, I awoke, my heart pounding and my head aching so badly that I winced. I should have known the day would carry its own basket of strange. I should have known to be prepared. It was Friday, but I should have stayed home.



* * *



—

The auto shop expected me in at eleven AM, so there was time. This would be my first weekend without Olaniyi. He’d come by and taken his things days ago, and when he walked in, he was holding heavy black charm beads in one hand and he refused to look me in the eye. He moved quickly, grabbing his clothes, laptop, chargers, his moldy old books. I said nothing, but inside I was weeping.

Now, fiancé gone, my life plans in unexpected ruin, I intended to spend much of the weekend weeping. I was going to wipe all of him away with a delicious meal of egusi soup heavy with shrimp, beef, and fish, smoothly pounded yam, perfectly fried plantain, sliced sweet mango, a coconut cake and hot tea. I was going to not call any of my friends. I was going to work on a sand repelling device called an “anti-aejej,” which a man from up north had brought me to repair. I’d only seen and fixed one, all using guess-work. I was sure I could fix this one, too, and I was excited because I was going to fully understand how it worked. All of this I could do in my spotless incense-scented, quiet roomy apartment with no man I loved staring at me as if I were a demon he’d been jujued into loving.

The evening and then the weekend were mine.

But first, I needed to do some food shopping before work. When I’d lived in Lagos, just getting to the market early would have been a whole morning affair. However, I’d followed my fiancé here to Abuja because a good mechanic (especially one with a cybernetic left arm and thus a hyperdexterous hand) can find work anywhere and a good man is hard to find. And so my life was a different story where I could go to the market in the morning and still make it to work on time.

Abuja was slower, lazier, yes. It’s only a few hours’ drive from the Red Eye, but a few hours’ drive is a long drive when you are just trying to live your life. Despite its relative closeness to the abomination in the north, Abuja was a thriving city that rivaled the fast-paced, clean innovative ones in the south like Lagos, Owerri and New Calabar. And in Abuja, men were less likely to run over a woman like me crossing the street.

Today, I could make it to the market and back before work. I drove, as I always did, and I went to my favorite market, the one that was about a mile away. I knew where everything was. Finding all the ingredients I needed would be easy. They knew me there, too. Or so I thought.

It actually was a really warm morning. So my dream was right about that, at least. It was also right about the refreshing breeze. I wore no make-up. No earrings. I’d braided my shoulder-length dreadlocks to cover the silver nodule that was the tip of my neural implants. Weeks ago, I’d even dyed my dreadlocks jet-black, so no one questioned how “clean” they were (for some reason, people always thought brown dreadlocks were dirty). And for extra cover, I wore a rose-colored veil over my head. I wore a light but long sleeved green silk top. My skirt was thick, covering my ankles and part of my feet, so neither my legs nor my arms were in view. They shouldn’t have caused any trouble.

Granted, by definition, to many Nigerians, I was trouble. Even in Abuja, though it wasn’t as rabid as in the south, I was a demon. A witch. An abomination. Priests, reverends, bishops, pastors and imams, holy men all over West Africa said so. To replace an organ or two with cybernetic, 3D-printed, non-human parts was fine. People needed pacemakers, new limbs, skin grafts, etc. But if you were one of those people who seemed to be “more machine than human” for whatever reason, one of those who “refused to obey the laws of nature and die,” you were a demon. I’d seen people like me fall victim to jungle justice in viral videos, murdered (or “shut down” as people liked to joke), attacked in the streets and, in less extreme cases, shunned. We were supposed to die; what we were doing instead of dying wasn’t living.

Then there are those who clump all of us into the same group. And when you do that, we all became “those Africans so deeply affected by twisted western ideologies that we’re obsessed with perfection and what money can buy.” We are cultureless children of the filthy rich corrupt elite class that has nothing better to do but augment our bodies with bullshit just because we can. We aren’t real Africans, we are the bootlickers of the United States, China, or the Emirates.

People here in Abuja have thought I was the daughter of an energy tycoon or the mistress of an Ultimate Corp exec simply because of what I am. Me. As if. I just wanted to live my life. As I was. As what I chose. As what I was. I was born and raised in Lagos, like 90 million other people. It’s not too much to ask.