The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  Roxy is fourteen. She’s one of the youngest, and one of the first.

  Tunde

  Tunde is doing laps in the pool, splashing more than he needs so Enuma will notice him trying not to show that he wants to be noticed. She is flipping through Today’s Woman; she flicks her eyes back to the magazine every time he looks up, pretending to be intent on reading about Toke Makinwa and her surprise winter-wedding broadcast on her YouTube channel. He can tell Enuma is watching him. He thinks she can tell that he can tell. It is exciting.

  Tunde is twenty-one, just out of that period of his life where everything seemed the wrong size, too long or too short, pointing in the wrong direction, unwieldy. Enuma is four years younger but more of a woman than he is a man, demure but not ignorant. Not too shy, either, not in the way she walks or the quick smile that darts across her face when she understands a joke a moment before everyone else. She’s visiting Lagos from Ibadan; she’s the cousin of a friend of a boy Tunde knows from his photo-journalism class at college. There’s been a gang of them hanging out together over the summer. Tunde spotted her the first day she arrived; her secret smile and her jokes that he didn’t at first realize were jokes. And the curve of her hip, and the way she fills her T-shirts, yes. It’s been quite a thing to arrange to be alone together with Enuma. Tunde’s nothing if not determined.

  Enuma said early on in the visit that she had never enjoyed the beach: too much sand, too much wind. Swimming pools are better. Tunde waited one, two, three days, then suggested a trip – we could all drive down to Akodo beach, take a picnic, make a day of it. Enuma said she would prefer not to go. Tunde pretended not to notice. The night before the trip, he started to complain of an upset stomach. It’s dangerous to swim with a stomach complaint – the cold water might shock your system. You should stay home, Tunde. But I’ll miss the trip to the beach. You should not be swimming in the sea. Enuma’s staying here; she can bring a doctor if you need one.

  One of the girls said, ‘But you’ll be alone together, in this house.’

  Tunde wished her to be struck dumb in that very moment. ‘My cousins are coming later,’ he said.

  No one asked which cousins. It had been that kind of hot, lazy summer with people wandering in and out of the big house around the corner from Ikoyi Club.

  Enuma acquiesced. Tunde noticed her not protesting. She didn’t stroke her friend’s back and ask her to stay home from the beach, too. She said nothing when he got up half an hour after the last car left and stretched and said he was feeling much better. She watched him as he jumped from the short springboard into the pool, her quick smile flashing.

  He makes a turn under the water. It is neat, his feet barely breaking the surface. He wonders if she saw him do it, but she’s not there. He looks around, sees her shapely legs, bare feet padding out of the kitchen. She’s carrying a can of Coca Cola.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, in a mock-lordly tone. ‘Hey, servant girl, bring me that Coke.’

  She turns and smiles with wide, limpid eyes. She looks to one side and then the other, and points a finger at her chest as if to say, Who? Me?

  God, but he wants her. He doesn’t know exactly what to do. There have only been two girls before her and neither of them became ‘girlfriends’. At college they joke about him that he’s married to his studies, because he’s always so single. He doesn’t like it. But he’s been waiting for someone he really wanted. She has something. He wants what she has.

  He plants his palms on the wet tiles and raises himself out of the water and on to the stone in one graceful movement which he knows shows off the muscles of his shoulders, his chest and collarbone. He has a good feeling. This is going to work.

  She sits on a lounger. As he stalks towards her, she digs her nails in under the can’s tab, as if she’s about to open it.

  ‘Oh no,’ he says, still smiling. ‘You know such things are not for the likes of you.’

  She clutches the Coke to her midriff. It must be cold there against her skin. She says, demurely, ‘I just want a little taste.’ She bites her bottom lip.

  She must be doing it on purpose. Must be. He is excited. This is going to happen.

  He stands over her. ‘Give it to me.’

  She holds the can in one hand and rolls it along her neck as if to cool herself. She shakes her head. And then he’s on her.

  They play-wrestle. He takes care not to really force her. He’s sure she’s enjoying it as much as he is. Her arm comes up over her head, holding the can, to keep it far away from him. He pushes her arm back a little more, making her gasp and twist backwards. He makes a grab for the can of Coke, and she laughs, low and soft. He likes her laughter.

  ‘Aha, trying to keep that drink from your lord and master,’ he says. ‘What a wicked servant girl you are.’

  And she laughs again and wriggles more. Her breasts push up against the V-neck of her swimming costume. ‘You’ll never have it,’ she says. ‘I will defend it with my very life!’

  And he thinks: Clever and beautiful, may the Lord have mercy upon my soul. She’s laughing, and he’s laughing. He leans his body weight into her; she’s warm underneath him.

  ‘Do you think you can keep it from me?’ He lunges again, and she twists to escape him. He makes a grab at her waist.

  She puts her hand to his.

  There’s the scent of orange blossom. A wind gusts up and hurls a few white handfuls of blooms into the swimming pool.

  There is a feeling in his hand as if some insect has stung him. He looks down to swat it away, and the only thing on his hand is her warm palm.

  The sensation grows, steadily and swiftly. At first it is pinpricks in his hand and forearm, then a swarm of buzzing prickles, then it is pain. He is breathing too quickly to be able to make a sound. He cannot move his left arm. His heart is loud in his ears. His chest is tight.

  She is still giggling, soft and low. She leans forward and pulls him closer to her. She looks into his eyes, her irises are lined with lights of brown and gold, and her lower lip is moist. He is afraid. He is excited. He realizes that he could not stop her, whatever she wanted to do now. The thought is terrifying. The thought is electrifying. He is achingly hard now, and does not know when that happened. He cannot feel anything at all in his left arm.

  She leans in, bubblegum breath, and kisses him softly on the lips. Then she peels away, runs to the pool and dives, in one smooth, practised movement.

  He waits for the feeling to come back to his arm. She does her laps in silence, not calling to him or splashing water at him. He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.

  He walks to the stall on the corner of the street to buy a frozen orange drink so he won’t have to say anything to her. When the others come back from the beach, he falls in gladly with plans to visit a further cousin the next day. He wants very much to be distracted and not to be alone. He does not know what happened, nor is there anyone he could discuss it with. When he imagines asking his friend Charles about it, or Isaac, his throat clamps shut. If he said what happened, they would think he was crazy, or weak, or lying. He thinks of the way she laughed at him.

  He finds himself searching her face for signs of what happened. What was it? Did she mean to do it? Had she planned, specifically, to hurt or scare him, or was it just an accident, involuntary? Did she even know she’d done it? Or was it not her at all but some lustful malfunction of his own body? The whole thing chews at him. She gives no sign that anything happened. By the last day of the trip she’s holding hands with another boy.

  There is a shame like rust working its way through his body. He thinks over that afternoon compulsively. In bed at night: her lips, her breasts pressing against the smooth fabric, the outline of her nipples, his absolute vulnerability, the feeling that she could overpower him if she wanted. The thought of it excites him, and he touches himself. He tells himself he is excited by the memo
ry of her body, the smell of her like hibiscus flowers, but he cannot know for certain. The things are tangled together now in his mind: lust and power, desire and fear.

  Perhaps it is because he has played the tape of that afternoon over so often in his mind, because he has longed for some forensic evidence, a photograph, or a video, or a sound recording, perhaps that is the reason that he thinks of reaching for his phone first, in the supermarket. Or perhaps some of the things they have been trying to teach them in college – about citizen journalism, about the ‘nose for the story’ – have been sinking in.

  He is in Goodies with his friend Isaac a few months after that day with Enuma. They are in the fruit aisle, inhaling the sweet fug of ripe guava, drawn to them from across the store like the tiny flies that settle on the surface of the over-ripe, split-open fruit. Tunde and Isaac are arguing about girls, and what girls like. Tunde is trying to keep his shame buried very far down in his body so his friend will not be able to guess that he has secret knowledge. And then a girl shopping alone gets into an argument with a man. He might be thirty; she is perhaps fifteen or sixteen.

  He has been sweet-talking her; Tunde thought at first that the two knew each other. He only realizes his mistake when she says: ‘Get away from me.’ The man smiles easily and takes a pace towards her. ‘A pretty girl like you deserves a compliment.’

  She leans over, looks down, breathes heavily. She clasps her fingers around the edge of a wooden crate full of mangos. There is a feeling; it prickles the skin. Tunde takes his phone from his pocket, flips on the video. Something is going to happen here that is the same as the thing that happened to him. He wants to own it, to be able to take it home and watch it again and again. He’s been thinking about this since the day with Enuma, hoping that something like this might happen.

  The man says, ‘Hey, don’t turn away from me. Give me a little smile.’

  She swallows hard and keeps looking down.

  The scents in the supermarket become more intense; Tunde can detect in a single inhalation the individual fragrances of the apples and the bell peppers and the sweet oranges.

  Isaac whispers, ‘I think she is going to hit him with a mango.’

  Canst thou direct the lightning bolts? Or do they say to thee: ‘Here we are’?

  Tunde is recording when she turns around. The screen of his phone fuzzes for a moment when she strikes. Other than that, he gets the whole thing very clearly. There she is, bringing her hand to his arm while he smiles and thinks she is performing mock-fury for his amusement. If you pause the video for a moment at this point, you can see the charge jump. There’s the trace of a Lichtenberg figure, swirling and branching like a river along his skin up from wrist to elbow as the capillaries burst.

  Tunde follows him with the camera’s eye as he falls to the ground, fitting and choking. He swivels to keep her in frame as she runs from the market. There’s the noise in the background of people calling for help, saying a girl has poisoned a man. Hit him and poisoned him. Struck him with a needle full of poison. Or, no, there is a snake among the fruit, a viper or puff adder concealed in the piled fruit. And someone says, ‘Aje ni girl yen, sha! That girl was a witch! That is how a witch kills a man.’

  Tunde’s camera turns back to the figure on the floor. The man’s heels are drumming the linoleum tiles. There is a pink foam at his lips. His eyes have rolled back. His head is thrashing from side to side. Tunde thought that if he could capture it in the bright window of his phone, then he would no longer feel afraid. But looking at the man coughing up red mucus and crying, he feels the fear travel down his spine like a hot wire. He knows then what he felt by the pool: that Enuma could have killed him if she’d wanted. He keeps the camera trained on the man until the ambulance arrives.

  It is this video which, when he puts it online, starts the business of the Day of the Girls.

  Margot

  ‘It has to be fake.’

  ‘Fox News is saying not.’

  ‘Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune in to Fox News.’

  ‘Sure. Still.’

  ‘What are these lines coming out of her hands?’

  ‘Electricity.’

  ‘But that’s just … I mean …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where’d it come from?’

  ‘Nigeria, I think. Went up yesterday.’

  ‘There are a lot of nut-jobs out there, Daniel. Fakers. Scammers.’

  ‘There are more videos. Since this one went out, there have been … four or five.’

  ‘Faked. People get excited about these things. It’s a what-they-call-it – a meme. You heard about that thing Slender Man? Some girls tried to kill their friend as a tribute to him. It. Terrible.’

  ‘It’s four or five videos every hour, Margot.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘Close the schools.’

  ‘Can you even imagine what I’ll get from the parents? Can you imagine the millions of voting parents and what they’ll do if I send all their kids home today?’

  ‘Can you imagine what you’ll get from the teachers’ unions if one of their membership is injured? Crippled? Killed? Imagine the liability.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘Can’t be certain.’

  Margot stares down at her hands, clutching the edge of the desk. She’s going to look like an idiot, going along with this. It has to be a stunt for a TV show. She’ll be the shit-for-brains, the Mayor who closed the schools of this major metropolitan area because of a fucking practical joke. But if she doesn’t close them and something happens … Daniel will get to be the Governor of this great state, who warned the Mayor, who tried to convince her to do something, but all to no avail. She can practically see the tears running down his cheeks as he gives his interview via live feed from the Governor’s Mansion. Fuck.

  Daniel checks his phone. ‘They’ve announced closures in Iowa and Delaware,’ he says.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘“Fine” meaning?’

  ‘“Fine” meaning “fine”. Do it. Fine, I’ll close them.’

  There are four or five days where she barely goes home. She doesn’t remember leaving the office, or driving back, or crawling into bed, although she supposes she must have done these things. The phone doesn’t stop. She goes to bed clutching it and wakes up holding it. Bobby has the girls so she doesn’t need to think about them and, God forgive her, they don’t cross her mind.

  This thing has broken out across the world and no one knows what the fuck is going on.

  To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just looked like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that’s impossible, right, that’s crazy – the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup. Just for fun, they brought in a couple of marine biologists to talk about electric eels and their body pattern. A guy with a beard, a gal with glasses, aquarium fish in a tank – makes for a solid morning segment. Did you know the guy who invented the battery was inspired by looking at the bodies of electric eels? I did not know that, Tom, that is fascinating. I’ve heard they can fell a horse. You’re kidding, I’d never have imagined it. Apparently, a lab in Japan powered their Christmas-tree lights from a tank of electric eels. We can’t do that with these girls, now, can we? I would think not, Kristen, I would think not. Although doesn’t Christmas seem to come earlier every year? And now the weather on the ones.

  Margot and the office of the Mayor take it seriously days before the news desks understand that it’s real. They’re the ones who get the early reports of fighting in the playgrounds. A strange new kind of fighting which leaves boys – mostly boys, sometimes girls – breathless and twitching, with scars like unfurling leaves winding up their arms or legs or across the soft flesh of their middles. Their first thought after disease is
a new weapon, something these kids are bringing into school, but as the first week trickles into the second they know that’s not it.

  They latch on to any crazy theory going, not knowing how to tell the plausible from the ridiculous. Late at night, Margot reads a report from a team in Delhi who are the first to discover the strip of striated muscle across the girls’ collarbones which they name the organ of electricity, or the skein for its twisted strands. At the points of the collar are electro-receptors enabling, they theorize, a form of electric echo-location. The buds of the skein have been observed using MRI scans in the collarbones of newborn infant girls. Margot photocopies this report and has it emailed to every school in the state; for days, it’s the only good science in a host of garbled interpretation. Even Daniel’s momentarily grateful, before he remembers that he hates her.

  An Israeli anthropologist suggests that the development of this organ in humans is proof positive of the aquatic-ape hypothesis; that we are naked of hair because we came from the oceans, not the jungle, where once we terrified the deeps like the electric eel, the electric ray. Preachers and televangelists grab the news and squeeze it, finding in the sticky entrails the unmistakable signs of the impending end of days. A fist fight breaks out on a popular news discussion programme between a scientist who demands that the Electric Girls be investigated surgically and a man of God who believes they are a harbinger of the apocalypse and must not be touched by human hand. There is an argument already about whether this thing was always latent in the human genome and has been reawoken or whether it is a mutation, a terrible deformity.

  Just before sleep, Margot thinks of winged ants and how there would be just one day every summer that the house at the lake would swarm with them, thickly upon the ground, clinging to the timber-clad frame, vibrating on the tree trunks, the air so full of ants you thought you might breathe them in. They live underground, those ants, all year long, entirely alone. They grow from their eggs, they eat what – dust and seeds or something – and they wait, and wait. And one day, when the temperature has been just right for the right number of days and when the moisture is just so … they all take to the air at once. To find each other. Margot couldn’t tell this kind of thought to anyone else. They’d think she’d gone crazy from the stress and, God knows, there are enough people looking to replace her anyway. Still, she lies in bed after a day of dealing with reports of burned kids and kids with seizures and girl gangs fighting and being taken into custody for their own protection and thinks: Why now? Why right now? And she comes up again and again with those ants, biding their time, waiting for the spring.