What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(32)
The boy sat with his arms crossed, pouting. She hadn’t changed his mind, you never could with people like that, but she’d shut him up.
In the quiet that followed, another hand raised. Not her, Nneoma thought, not her. She’d successfully ignored the girl since walking into the classroom. She didn’t need to look at her wrist to know that the girl was Senegalese and had been affected by the Elimination. It was etched all over her, this sorrow.
“So you can make it go away?” They could have been the only two people in the room.
“Yes, I can.” And to kill her dawning hope, “But it is a highly regulated and very expensive process. Most of my clients are heavily subsidized by their governments, but even then”—in case any hope remained—“you have to be a citizen.”
The girl lowered her eyes to her lap, fighting tears. As though to mock her, she was flanked by a map on the wall, the entire globe splayed out as it had been seventy years ago and as it was now. Most of what had been North America was covered in water and a sea had replaced Europe. Russia was a soaked grave. The only continents unclaimed in whole or in part by the sea were Australia and the United Countries—what had once been Africa. The Elimination began after a moment of relative peace, after the French had won the trust of their hosts. The Senegalese newspapers that issued warnings were dismissed as conspiracy rags, rabble-rousers inventing trouble. But then came the camps, the raids, and the mysterious illness that wiped out millions. Then the cabinet members murdered in their beds. And the girl had survived it. To be here, at a school like this, on one of the rare scholarships offered to displaced children, the girl must have lived through the unthinkable. The weight of her mourning was too much. Nneoma left the room, followed by Nkem Ozechi, who clicked hurriedly behind her.
“Maybe some of them will be Mathematicians, like you.”
Nneoma needed to gather herself. She saw the sign for the ladies’ room and stepped inside, swinging the door in Nkem Ozechi’s face. None of those children would ever be Mathematicians; the room was as bare of genius as a pool of fish.
She checked the stalls to make sure she was alone and bent forward to take deep breaths. She rarely worked with refugees, true refugees, for this reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her. The only time she’d felt anything as strongly was after her mother had passed and her father was in full lament, listing to the side of ruin. How could Nneoma tell him that she couldn’t even look at him without being broken by it? He would never understand. The day she’d tried to work on him, to eat her father’s grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your head long enough to calculate it. The attempt had ended with them both sobbing, holding each other in comfort and worry, till her father became so angry at the futility of it, the uselessness of her talents in this one crucial moment, that he’d said words he could not take back.
The bathroom door creaked open. Nneoma knew who it was. The girl couldn’t help but seek her out. They stared at each other awhile, the girl uncertain, till Nneoma held out her arms and the girl walked into them. Nneoma saw the sadness in her eyes and began to plot the results of it on an axis. At one point the girl’s mother shredded by gunfire. Her brother taken in the night by a gang of thugs. Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore. And other, smaller hurts: Hunger so deep she’d swallowed fistfuls of mud. Hiding from the men who’d turned on her after her father died. Sneaking into her old neighborhood to see new houses filled with the more fortunate of the French evacuees, those who hadn’t been left behind to drown, their children chasing her away with rocks like she was a dog. Nneoma looked at every last suffering, traced the edges, weighed the mass. And then she took it.
No one had ever really been able to explain what happened then, why one person could take another person’s grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives and negatives, a type of cellular math. An equation all their own. A theologian might have called it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God’s own mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patients who gave up their sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden and then she did not.
—
The ride home was silent. Amadi, sensing her disquiet, resisted the casual detour he usually made past the junction that led to her father’s house, whenever they ventured to this side of town. At home, Nneoma went straight to bed, taking two of the pills that would let her sleep for twelve hours. After that she would be as close to normal as she could be. The rawness of the girl’s memories would diminish, becoming more like a story in a book she’d once read. The girl would feel the same way. Sleep came, deep and black, a dreamless thing with no light.
The next morning, she turned on the unit to see much the same coverage as the day before, except now the fallen man’s widow had jumped into the fray, calling for a full audit of the Center’s records and of Furcal’s Formula. Nneoma snorted. It was the sort of demand that would win public support, but the truth was the only experts who knew enough to audit anything all worked for the Center, and it would take them decades to pore over every line of the formula. More likely this was a ploy for a payoff, which the woman would get. The Furcals could afford it.