Noor(6)

Though my car had 360 degrees of camera eyes, he claimed he still couldn’t see my every move. He’d blurted that he’d been sure he’d find me fucking another man right there in the dirt, like some animal. His anger didn’t leave him fast enough to stop the nasty ideas broiling in his mind from escaping his lips. Idiot. I was furious and though I forgave him, I still had to do something to calm my fury. Something quiet that he’d never be aware of unless he had the nerve to try and track me again. Tripping my car offline so he couldn’t track me was the perfect solution. I should have understood then that things were going to go wrong between us eventually. He didn’t try to track me again, though, so he never knew what I’d done. But in a matter of weeks he found another reason to leave me.

In this way, as I fled up the highway, heading north, the authorities could not immediately locate me, not through my car’s cameras or satellite. My car had no digital footprint, I’d sprayed it with a transparent detection scrambling veneer and even before I met Olaniyi I’d tweaked my phone to stay incognito. This was illegal in the way that cracking phones to serve multiple people was illegal, you just made sure you weren’t caught. And most people are too lazy to bother with such things; their privacy wasn’t worth much.

So I was okay for now. Drones wouldn’t find me unless they spotted me when I stepped out of my car or they flew down and caught a glimpse of me through the windshield. My only worry was that they would track me through my implants which were always online. I kissed my teeth. If they could, they would have by now.

I drove fast, but not too fast. This was difficult because I felt such a strong urge to flee where I was, who I was, why I was, when I was. If I could travel through time, I would have happily jumped into the machine and left everything I knew behind. My family, even my brother, my past, my present. Everything but my future. I glanced out the window as I drove past an opening to a street. On the corner sat a large yellow-brown monkey. I caught its eye as I passed, and we stared at each other as if we knew each other’s stories. As the sun set, I spotted a ghost heading toward Lagos, an electric blue purple cloud that looked beautiful against the orange pink sky. It would probably be the last one I saw because of the direction I was going.

Then it was just more dry trees, a small market here and there, dusty parked cars and more dusty trees.

I drove.

And I drove.

The roads grew crumbly and pocked with potholes.

My car used its navigation to avoid them.

And I drove.

North.

When I stopped to buy some water or get a bite to eat or just to take a breath, I saw that beautiful man’s face leering at me. Moments before he tried to smash my face in. I remembered his blood making the dirt into mud. And so I drove some more. My car was solar, but the sun was going down and I hadn’t charged the battery the day before.

I saw a charging station and stopped for a travel-sized supercharge. My charging port was the magnetic kind, so I didn’t have to get out of the car. The card I drew from was connected to my “walking man” account, so there was no record of transaction or, if there was, there was no specific location given. According to my phone and my account, I was in fifty different Nigerian cities all at once, none of them where I actually was.

The hours blended together. My skin grew oily and sticky with sweat and dust. I relieved myself in the bushes alongside the road, wiping with only the napkins and paper towels I accumulated when I picked up food, and this also left me feeling unclean. The terrain and the air grew drier, the roads rougher.

Night fell. I kept going. North. The night deepened. My GPS stopped working. When I’d used up all the charge my car’s battery held, and there wasn’t a charge-or-fill station or even human being in sight, I resigned myself to what I would do. By this time, I was in a state. I was exhausted, but images of what I’d done back in Abuja, what I’d left behind, and paranoid fantasies of what I was—all this was like a demon that had chased me into an underground cave. What was left of me was my technology. My body and my brain.

I reached a place where the road ended and the wilderness began and I got out of the car. I grabbed my small backpack with nothing but my cell phone, its solar charger, two bottles of water and the last of my shelled groundnuts. I was sweaty and stinky and wearing nothing but the clothes I’d worn when I’d killed all those men in the market. I walked into the desert. My legs were bionic, so I didn’t worry about snakes or cold or the eventual heat. I didn’t tire, though I was tired. And so so sad. As I walked, I cried. How far was I from . . . I didn’t think about it. I’d know it if I came to it.

My left arm still tingled. I looked up at the sky and the stars were so bright that I felt as if I were bathing in their shine. I sang to myself, an old song that I used to hear my grandmother sing in English, “Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so deeeeeear.” It was too dark to see much of anything, but when I came across a resting cow, I sat down and leaned against her smooth body. I snuggled my head against her warm side and the cow was fine with this despite the fact that I was part machine and she was not. Sleep descended quickly.





CHAPTER 3


    Zagora



Why did I run to the desert? A desert with a disaster churning in its bowels? I could have fled in any direction. I had a wiped African e-passport on my phone. I could have crossed any continent border without anyone knowing who I was, no questions, no forms. Yet I went due north. I was broken, worse than when I was broken at the age of fourteen. Children are resilient, especially when they find a bright star to latch onto. My star back then was a podcast.