Noor(5)

So I helped myself.

I was down, then I got up. No, I didn’t just get up. There was a feeling in my head, a warm liquid itchy pain, like something had ruptured and was now freely bleeding at the back of my skull. But he’d slapped me in the face, why would I feel it in the back of my skull? Then there was what I could only call a . . . a difference. Something felt different. That’s when I got up. I glanced at the sky, past the tops of the market booths. At the sun that shined down on me. The heat. Dry and clear, arid, Abuja was not the desert, but it wasn’t far from the deserts of the north. It may sound strange, but to me, deserts were always a place of optimism and possibility, not death. I could always smell the desert in the air, more nearby than far away. I felt electrified. Solar energy is powerful.

I took on the beautiful man first. I don’t believe in the traditional aesthetics of beauty. Not for me. For me, it is not in the look, it’s in the function, the kinetics, the motion, the fluidity of moving in space and time. My body could never be beautiful by traditional human aesthetics.

I was born outside of beautiful, with a gnarled stump where my left arm should have been, my legs withered and misshapen. On the inside, I had intestinal malrotation and only one lung. When they’d seen the state of me on the sonogram in my mother’s belly, they’d said that my mother’s body would reject me and that would be that, but it didn’t. I stayed. My parents and their church felt obligated to keep me. I don’t think either of them will ever forgive me for not dying, nor will my father ever forgive my mother. So why revere the aesthetics of traditional beauty? It’s like worshipping a god who cannot see you. It is choosing to never be celebrated. I wanted to be celebrated.

I was given an artificial 3D-printed second lung that expanded as I grew. They gave me the prosthetic arm and intestines made of genetically grown and enhanced spider silk. They gave me leg exoskeletons that allowed me to walk while using, and in spite of, my withered legs.

But that wasn’t the only physical challenge the universe had in store for me. When I was fourteen, I was in a rare automated-vehicle accident, the only one of its kind. To this day, even the best engineers could not get to the bottom of what happened. My withered legs were crippled even further. I’d had to finally have them removed and get full cybernetic leg transplants. Because it took so long for my nerves to fuse with each leg, I learned what it was to sit or more often lie down for weeks at a time. I was in too much pain to be a wheelie.

When I was seventeen and able to give my consent to remove the arm stump, over my parents’ pleas to keep this withered useless piece of flesh and bone, the doctors gave me my cybernetic limb. When they explained the procedure and showed me the robotic arm, I asked, “Why cover it with flesh?” My parents couldn’t afford it, I didn’t need it. I am part machine. I am proud to be part machine. I was born twisted and strange by their standards. And after so much recovery, I was somehow amazing.



* * *



—

I smashed my machine fist into his flesh face. Why did these men think they could treat me like one of their women and suffer no consequence? Because I was polite? Because I yielded to them? Shrunk myself for them? They didn’t know respect when it was given. My ex-fiancé Olaniyi was the same way.

When the beautiful man went down, the dirt of my local market place mixed with his blood. Another of the men jumped up and angrily knocked over the stool he’d been sitting on. This man’s white agbada shined in the sunlight. His mouth hung open. He was shouting, a fist raised. He flew at me, and I saw a white wraith. I smelled dust and blood. I jammed the heel of my flesh hand into the underside of his chin and then crushed his ribs with a hard kick. People fled. There were five men total. Five men in agbadas and sokoto. Five men I destroyed. Everyone else ran, except for some teens who recorded it all on their phones.

And the market dirt mixed with more blood. They knew me there. As well as they could. Until I stepped out of line. Out of their knowledge. Now they know me there. This was my home. The woman on the far end sold palm oil pressed by her husband, a man who got angry with her if she talked to me for too long. The woman who fried the salty spiced termites always laughed when she saw my dexterous metal hands, but she never insulted me. These men were sitting and eating food that used fresh herbs and vegetables she grew in her own garden. The woman whose peppers I’d been looking at had been trained to be a barrister but gave all that up to live with her husband here in Abuja.

My market’s dirt was mud with blood now, a blue Imam Shafi Abdulazeez flyer mashed into it. I stood over their bodies, the taste of metal in the back of my throat like smoke. I felt both destroyed and indestructible. My left arm. As I’d fought all those angry men, someone had smashed at my arm with a brick, just below the demarcation where flesh became metal. Now my left arm felt electrified. I briefly wondered if touching my left arm to my leg would create an electric current. Would the metal on metal kill me when the current jumped to flesh and rushed to my heart?

I turned. I ran.





CHAPTER 2


    GPS



I couldn’t stop looking at the sky as I drove. Occasionally, I spotted drones above, but they were all carrying delivery packages, so that was okay. None turned and followed me. The nightmare was over; at least the one at the market. I’d tripped my car offline weeks ago at the shop. Olaniyi had used the tracker on his phone to force connect to my car and monitor me during one of the few times I’d asked him to give me some space. I’d driven to a small hill not too far outside of Abuja. It was a dry hill where trees and plants refused to grow for some reason, maybe there’d been some chemical dumped there. It was my secret place to sit in the sunshine and just stop thinking. I don’t know what he thought I was up to but thirty minutes after I arrived, he showed up, his nostrils flared, his eyes bulging, full of suspicion.