Noor(26)

My feet were made to adapt to any terrain from icy to uneven gravel, and I want to say I walked more easily than DNA did. I mean, he wore only a pair of thin flip flops. However, this was more his terrain, and his gait was as smooth and unhindered and probably just as painless as mine. Then the sharp rocks graduated to sand and we were trudging up the first dune when the sand storm swirled around us. And still we kept walking, slowly, beaten by the sand. When we reached the bottom of the dune, the steer refused to go any further, simply sitting down, all pressed together as they groaned with confusion.

“Come on,” DNA shouted. “They’ll stay here. We go a little further.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he is always just beyond the worst of it,” DNA said. “That’s what they say.”

“Who is this guy?”

He shouted something in Pulaar and trudged on, leaning into the sandy wind. I followed him. I’d come this far, I would keep going. Plus, though the wind and sand whipped the exposed parts of my body and collected in the folds of my clothes, my cybernetic parts moved me on as if it were a clear sunny day with no breeze. Yes, these parts of me loved the desert and dust. My human parts were what suffered.

At some point, I grabbed his hand and his responding grip was strong. We moved into it. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I was in the dark and in that darkness everything disappeared, except me and what I was left with. Those men had had it coming, but so had I. I’d always had it coming. In the dark this was all clear. I emerged from the warm protective darkness of my mother’s womb poorly made. A mess. And then years later, fate had unmade me. How dare I embrace what I was and wasn’t, and build my self? Arm leg leg arm head, I am my own Allah, I thought in the dark. Three years ago, I’d made this argument to my ex-best friend Dimmy who was Muslim and he had slapped me for blasphemy. I’d never talked about it with him after that day, after that moment. And the idea had grown stronger in me. But I had a lot of nerve. And now I was in the dark.

The madness stopped. It stopped so suddenly that I will never forget the sight of it. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. That was the sound of every grain of sand in a thirty-foot radius suddenly stopping its tumbling motion and dropping. Both DNA and I were showered with sand, our feet and legs buried nearly to our knees. DNA coughed and stepped out of the mound, letting go of my hand. I looked up, seeing the clear blue sky above, the dust storm whirling outside the radius. We were in the eye of a tornado in a hurricane, or maybe it was the radius of a powerful anti-aejej.

“Fuck!” I shouted, kicking my way out of the falling sand trying to bury me.

“Quiet,” he hissed, despite the roaring of the wind around us. And somehow above it all, I heard him. I shook sand from my skirts and hair and was just beginning to feel like the worst was over when I looked up. I shuddered and grabbed his hand, pressing close to him. He was already also looking up, and he responded by pressing close to me, too. “I could have happily lived my whole life without seeing this,” he said.

Together, we waited for gods knew what. I noticed first. The fact that the storm seemed to be opening, expanding, widening, without shrinking or slowing down. And there was something that looked like a tent yards away. But how was that possible. Though it was fairly calm, it was still windy. And inside, the tent seemed to have a glowing heart. A fire.

“There,” I said, pointing. “You see it?”

After a moment, he said, “Let’s wait a few minutes.”

I pulled DNA with me. “Come on. That’s why we came here and you know it.”

Reluctantly, he yielded to my pulling. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

I felt a tingle in my left arm and I let go of DNA to rub it. It seemed every body part that I had chosen was achy and warm. My legs, my arm, my bowels, there was even an ache at the top of my head where the implants were. It didn’t make sense. I was alive because of logical science. I’d only been able to support myself back in Abuja and Owerri as a mechanic because of logical science. Up to this point, everything, wild as it was, made sense because it was all really just logical science. But now here I was in the middle of a sand storm looking at a tent with a warm fire burning in its bowels. None of what was happening right now in this moment was logical or scientific.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go meet this wizard and see what he has to tell us.”





CHAPTER 11


    Baba Sola



When we reached the tent, DNA stopped so abruptly that I ran into his back. “What are you doing?” I snapped.

“Never met him,” he said. “But I’ve heard . . . stories. You’re a southerner. You don’t know.”

True. But I wanted to. If there had ever been a time in my life where I wanted to meet someone like this, it was now. “DNA, you should be dead.”

His eyes widened at me; my words had slapped him.

“You were there the day before yesterday, with all your best herdsman friends. You were in range. They shot and . . .” I licked my lips and had to push myself to be blunt. I felt dizzy before the words even came out of my mouth. “They shot and h-h-hacked your people dead. Except you. They didn’t even seem to see you. You said it yourself.”

“I’ve heard this man moves backwards in time or something,” DNA said.