What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(30)

She directed Amadi to go to the store first. They drove through the wide streets of Enugu and passed a playground full of sweaty egg-white children. It wasn’t that Nneoma had a problem with the Britons per se, but some of her father had rubbed off on her. At his harshest Papa would call them refugees rather than allies. He’d long been unwelcome in polite company.

“They come here with no country of their own and try to take over everything and don’t contribute anything,” he often said.

That wasn’t entirely true.

When the floods started swallowing the British Isles, they’d reached out to Biafra, a plea for help that was answered. Terms were drawn, equitable exchanges of services contracted. But while one hand reached out for help, the other wielded a knife. Once here, the Britons had insisted on having their own lands and their own separate government. A compromise, aided by the British threat to deploy biological weapons, resulted in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance. Shared lands, shared government, shared grievances. Her father was only a boy when it happened but still held bitterly to the idea of Biafran independence, an independence his parents had died for in the late 2030s. He wasn’t alone, but most people knew to keep their opinions to themselves, especially if their daughter was a Mathematician, a profession that came with its own set of troubles. And better a mutually beneficial, if unwanted, alliance than what the French had done in Senegal, the Americans in Mexico.

As Amadi drove, he kept the rearview mirror partially trained on her, looking for an opening to start a chat that would no doubt lead to his suggesting they swing by her father’s place later, just for a moment, just to say hello. Nneoma avoided eye contact. She couldn’t see her father, not for a quick hello, not today, not ever.

They pulled up to ShopRite and Nneoma hopped out. Her stomach grumbling, she loaded more fruit in her basket than she could eat in a week and cut the bread queue, to the chagrin of the waiting customers. The man at the counter recognized her and handed over the usual selection of rolls and the crusty baguette she would eat with a twinge of guilt. The French didn’t get money directly, yet she couldn’t stop feeling like she was funding the idea of them. Ignoring the people staring at her, wondering who she might be (a diplomat? a minister’s girlfriend?), she walked the edges of the store, looping toward the checkout lane.

Then she felt him.

Nneoma slowed and picked up a small box of detergent, feigning interest in the instructions to track him from the corner of her eye. He was well dressed, but not overly so. He looked at her, confused, not sure why he was so drawn to her. Nneoma could feel the sadness rolling off him and she knew if she focused she’d be able to see his grief, clear as a splinter. She would see the source of it, its architecture, and the way it anchored to him. And she would be able to remove it.

It started when she was fourteen, in math class. She’d always been good at math but had no designs on being a Mathematician. No one did. It wasn’t a profession you chose or aspired to; either you could do it or you couldn’t. That day, the teacher had shown them a long string of Furcal’s Formula, purchased from the Center like a strain of virus. To most of the other students, it was an impenetrable series of numbers and symbols, but to Nneoma it was as simple as the alphabet. Seeing the Formula unlocked something in her. From then on she could see a person’s sadness as plainly as the clothes he wore.

The Center paid for the rest of her schooling, paid off the little debt her family owed, and bought them a new house. They trained her to hone her talents, to go beyond merely seeing a person’s grief to mastering how to remove it. She’d been doing it for so long she could exorcise the deepest of traumas for even the most resistant of patients. Then her mother died.

The man in the store stood there looking at her and Nneoma took advantage of his confusion to walk away. The grieving were often drawn to her, an inadvertent magnetic thing. It made her sheltered life blessed and necessary. The Center was very understanding and helped contracted Mathematicians screen their clients. None of them were ever forced to work with a client or provide a service they didn’t want to. Nneoma worked almost exclusively with parents who’d lost a child, wealthy couples who’d thought death couldn’t touch them, till it did. When the Center partnered with governments to work with their distressed populations, the job was voluntary and most Mathematicians donated a few hours a week. There were exceptions, like Kioni, who worked with such people full-time, and Nneoma, who didn’t work with them at all. Mother Kioni, Nneoma had called her, first with affection, then with increasing malice as things between them turned ugly. This man, in the tidy suit and good shoes, was more along the lines of her preferred clientele. He could very well become a client of hers in the future, but not today, not like this.

At checkout, the boy who scanned and bagged her groceries was wearing a name tag that read “Martin,” which may or may not have been his name. The Britons preferred their service workers with names they could pronounce, and most companies obliged them. The tattoo on his wrist indicated his citizenship—an original Biafran—and his class, third. No doubt he lived outside of the city and was tracked from the minute he crossed the electronic threshold till the minute he finished his shift and left. He was luckier than most.

At the car, she checked her personal phone, the number only her father, her assistant, and Kioni knew. Still no message. She hadn’t heard from Kioni since she’d moved out. She had to know Nneoma worried, in spite of how they’d left things. None of their mutual New Kenyan contacts knew where to find her, and Kioni’s phone went unanswered. Maybe this was what it took for Kioni to exorcise her.