What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(29)
Louisa shrugged.
“Do you remember Auntie Ijeoma?” Buchi asked.
Louisa nodded.
“Do you want to visit her?”
Another nonresponse.
“Please, Louisa, I can’t have you not talking as well. Please.”
Louisa finally looked at her.
“Soma,” she said.
The two girls had only met a few times, as distance and time constraints meant that Buchi and Ijeoma didn’t get together as much as they wanted, but Louisa had been at the funeral, knew that the girl was gone. Soma, indeed. So quiet in that way a girl in a family of boys could be. Buchi had often told Nnamdi she wished they lived closer so that Soma could be a tempering influence on Louisa, to which Nnamdi had responded that Louisa was too like her mother. You might as well bite into a diamond.
A light knock preceded Precious’s opening the door—the door that Buchi was never to lock. She nodded in her sister’s direction before walking off. Buchi was being summoned. She looked at Damaris, splayed and boneless in sleep, and knew that the little girl’s problems were ones she could resolve: tears she could wipe, mattresses she could scrub, a distressed body she could clutch close to her as it kicked and screamed. Locks with keys she held.
“You like Auntie Ijeoma, don’t you?”
But the question was just a formality at this point.
WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY
It means twenty-four-hour news coverage. It means politicians doing damage control, activists egging on protests. It means Francisco Furcal’s granddaughter at a press conference defending her family’s legacy.
“My grandfather’s formula is sound. Math is constant and absolute. Any problems that arise are the fault of those who miscalculate it.”
Bad move, lady. This could only put everyone on the defensive, compelling them to trot out their transcripts and test results and every other thing that proved their genius. Nneoma tried to think of where she’d put her own documents after the move, but that led to thinking of where she’d moved from, which led to thinking of whom she’d left behind.
Best not to venture there. Best instead to concentrate on the shaky footage captured by a security camera. The motion-activated device had caught the last fifty feet of the man’s fall, the windmill panic of flailing arms, the spread of his body on the ground. When the formula for flight had been revealed short months before, the ceremony had started unimpressively enough, with a man levitating like a monk for fifteen boring minutes before shooting into the air. The scientific community was agog. What did it mean that the human body could now defy things humanity had never thought to question, like gravity? It had seemed like the start of a new era.
Now the newscast jumped to the Mathematicians who’d discovered the equation for flight. They were being ambushed by gleeful reporters at parties, while picking up their children in their sleek black cars, on their vacations, giving a glimpse of luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing public, who must have enjoyed the embarrassed faces and defensive outbursts from well-fed mouths.
By blaming the Mathematicians instead of the Formula, Martina Furcal and the Center created a maelstrom around the supposedly infallible scientists while protecting her family’s legacy. And their money. Maybe not such a bad move after all.
Nneoma flipped through the channels, listening closely. If the rumor that Furcal’s Formula was beginning to unravel around the edges gained any traction, it would eventually trickle down to the twenty-four hundred Mathematicians like her, who worked around the globe, making their living calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound.
She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year. Alvin Claspell, the Australian, had committed suicide after, if the stories were to be believed, going mad and trying to eat himself. This work wasn’t for everyone. And of course Kioni Mutahi had simply disappeared, leaving New Kenya with only one grief worker.
There were six grief workers in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, where Nneoma now lived, the largest concentration of grief workers in any province to serve the largest concentration of the grieving. Well, the largest concentration that could pay.
It was the same footage over and over. Nneoma offed the unit. The brouhaha would last only as long as it took the flight guys to wise up and blame the fallen man for miscalculating. “Cover your ass,” as the North American saying went, though there wasn’t much of that continent left to speak it.
A message dinged on the phone console and Nneoma hurried to press it, eager, then embarrassed at her eagerness, then further embarrassed when it wasn’t even Kioni, just her assistant reminding her of the lecture she was to give at the school. She deleted the message—of course she remembered—and became annoyed. She thought, again, of getting rid of the young woman. But sometimes you need an assistant, such as when your girlfriend ends your relationship with the same polite coolness that she initiated it, leaving you to pack and relocate three years’ worth of shit in one week. Assistants come in handy then. But that was eight weeks ago and Nneoma was over it. Really, she was.
She gathered her papers and rang for the car, which pulled up to the glass doors almost immediately. Amadi was timely like that. Her mother used to say that she could call him on her way down the stairs and open the door to find him waiting. Mama was gone now, and Nneoma’s father, who’d become undone, never left the house. Amadi had run his errands for him until Nneoma moved back from New Kenya, when her father gifted him to her, like a basket of fine cheese. She’d accepted the driver as what she knew he was, a peace offering. And though it would never be the same between them, she called her father every other Sunday.