Noor(20)

“Gololo, I can explain,” DNA said.

“Just tell me. Is it true?” Gololo asked.

Wuro stood beside him, her arms across her chest. She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “One-track minded. Our brother is home, Gololo. Take a breath and see that for a moment.”

“Is it true?” Gololo demanded.

“Is what true?” DNA asked. He looked back at me. We were still holding hands. His flesh to my steel. His eyes, still clouded with the pain of his trauma, asked me, Do I tell them? I looked away.

“I’m not asking about her,” his brother snapped, pointing at me. “I’m asking about you. Is it true about you? Have you really become a terrorist?”

Wuro picked up the tray of bread, clearly anticipating trouble. She ducked out of the tent, and I wished I could do the same.

“Terrorist? Me?? Why would I . . . ?”

His brother stepped closer. “If the stories aren’t true, where are your steer? Just GPS and Carpe Diem? Where is everyone else? Why come home without them? What herdsman would do that?”

“I came home because . . . wait, what stories?”

His mother grabbed his shoulder and thrust a phone in DNA’s face. And in that way, DNA saw himself shooting the woman yesterday. He must have felt as if he’d suddenly time-travelled backwards and landed just outside of his body. I was standing right behind him, so I could see the footage clearly. The point of view was from in front of DNA and close enough to catch the twitchy look on DNA’s face just before he blew the woman away.

The bullet hit the woman in the chest and there was a mist of blood. Then the woman fell. As DNA stared at the footage, his back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face. But I saw his head twitch, and I heard him whimper. He grabbed his head and started screaming like a mad man. Right there in the middle of his family’s nomadic compound, villagers outside eavesdropping, the sun shining down on us all.

Wuro burst back in and tried to grab him, but DNA jerked back, inconsolable. His mother stood there, her eyes wide with shock, still holding up the damn phone. His brother was beside her, mouth agape. “What’s wrong with him?” Wuro screeched, reaching out, tears in her eyes. I snatched the phone from his mother’s hand and threw it down. I heard a satisfying crack. “What the hell are you doing? You think he needs to see that?”

His mother didn’t miss a beat. Her youngest son was still screaming as she pointed a finger in his face. “My own SON! Terrorist! Terrorist! Killing people like they are lizard! Shame!” Her finger was practically in his open mouth and I wondered if, in his hysterics, he’d bite it off.

DNA had stopped screaming and now just stood there, a blank look on his face. I’ve seen people in this state before. They’re wound as tightly as they can wind. If you touch them, if you even try to speak to them, they explode. Like my mother when she learned her father had died. I’d been five years old and sitting in the auto chair I liked to use when the exoskeletons on my withered legs made me tired. I was right beside my mother when her phone buzzed. She had spoken to her mother using the speaker, so I’d heard the entire very brief conversation. Her father had died peacefully in his sleep while sitting in his favorite chair, and her mother had found him.

I stared at my mother as she whispered, “I’m coming, mama. Right away.” Then she’d put the phone down and gone quiet and still. When minutes had passed and she was still frozen and staring off into space, I touched her shoulder ever so lightly with my right hand and whispered, “Mama, are you all right?”

My mother erupted into screams, tears, motion. Slapping and punching the air. My chair sensed the danger and it immediately zipped me across the room to safety, where I watched my mother lose her shit for the first and only time in my life.

DNA was like this now. And this time, I knew to move myself away.

“Why?” his brother asked. “Why would you give up your cattle to become trash?”

This seemed to snap DNA out of it. The word “trash” or maybe it was the sharp way his brother said it. Like a machete. DNA blinked and then grabbed his brother by the collar and started shaking him like a ragdoll. “I am NO TERRORIST!” He looked his brother squarely in the face. He shook him some more. “You believe what you see on the screen posted by people you’ve never met over your own heart? You know me, brother. I WOULD NEVER.”

“I know what I saw with my EYES,” his brother said, tearing himself from DNA’s grasp. “The whole thing was recorded. I saw it live.”

DNA laughed ruefully. “You yourself told me that footage can be manipulated! Anything digital!”

“That was the first thing I checked for!” he snapped. “I know the digital fingerprints of manipulations. That’s not hard to detect with the right tools. Which. I. Have. What I saw had NOT been manipulated.”

“Did you see the whole thing?! All the footage? What kind of journalist isn’t interested in context?” He turned to the crowd that had gathered inside at all four entrances. DNA squared his shoulders, and I stepped to the center of the space, looking around, unsure of what he was about to do. More people were coming in, joined by his mother who’d picked up her cracked phone. She stood behind DNA’s brother.

“I just wanted to be left alone,” DNA said, looking defiantly at me. He turned slowly, addressing everyone around him. “You all know me. Everyone here knows the business of everyone here. We’re family. I didn’t want to leave for the cities, I didn’t want school, I wanted what our earliest forefathers wanted: A wife who was simple like me, children who’d do whatever children did and my cattle. THAT IS ALL. I don’t want big money, big houses, big land, big items. I wanted to grow up and then old as what the gods made me, on the land where the gods put me.” He glanced at me and then turned back to his people. “THAT’S ALL. You all kept bringing me complicated wild women, you wanted . . . ah, why would I of all people turn terrorist? Does that even make sense?!” He rubbed his sweaty face with his rough hand.