What the hell, Bracket thought. “You still got your equipment?”
Soon, they were back at her trailer, and he could see that he had activated something joyful and liberating in Seeta as she set up her broadcast equipment.
Bracket had tried listening to Pyper DJs, who walked around spinning songs over a hyperlocal mesh network, and if you were tuned in, you could follow along. Some of them were famous and made money walking the streets or riding on bicycles. If you had the frequency and the passphrase, you could listen in. Now they were totally illegal because of the wireless spectrum they used, which was strictly controlled by governments after the Flare. But he was willing to hear her play if it meant he could keep talking to her.
“I call this one ‘Aesop,’” Seeta said.
“Aysop?”
“Like the fables.”
She gave him some earbuds and began spinning. At first he heard what he thought was a raven calling, or a crow. Then the throaty call seemed to get absorbed into the crow’s chest. A slow beat like pebbles dropping into water carried the music forward with flutes fluttering over top, and the rhythm began to build into a subtle union of chords and water, all stitched together by filaments of soothing sound. Abdul’s theft lost its grip on him, the empty depths of the still-empty Naijapool vanished, and Bracket drifted with the music.
When he awoke, Seeta was kissing his neck. She had stripped down and was rubbing her breasts against his chest. Her belly spilled over the line of the black string of her thong. She had changed the music now to something more primal with pulsating groans and a gritty, electronic beat. He opened his mouth and let her tongue in, feeling the fumes of the beer on his own breath as she pulled at him. The softness. He grew stiff under the weight of her body, and he could see her hand on her spin table, her belly ring gyrating, and her playing song after song and beat after beat until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Her breasts gleamed with sweat from the exertion. But she wouldn’t let him enter her and instead rubbed against his stiffness until she came, and he did too, grabbing her full buttocks in his hands. Afterward she was gentle again, and she played more songs that brought him down until he fell back to sleep.
CHAPTER 6
The spaceport was situated about ten kilometers outside Kano on a flat plain that soaked up the heat, with wilted bushes whose leaves seemed to curl into themselves, preserving whatever moisture they could. The engineers had built scintillating fields of solar arrays that tracked the sun. Kwesi Bracket biked along the entrance road and smelled the dank odor of the yellow-green neem trees as he passed security guards at their checkpoints. Max stood outside the gate in an old navy-blue Nissan pickup truck with the windows down.
“Hey, oyibo.”
“Hey, Max.” He realized there would be no shaking the moniker. In Max’s eyes, just like the others, he was a white man. He locked his bike up and climbed into the cab of the truck.
“Where are we going today, oyibo?”
“Two stops, Max. We need to find some cable.”
“What kind?”
“One-hundred-millimeter cable. Threaded rubber.”
“All right, no problem. I’ll fix it for you.”
Max started the ignition and rolled up the windows to flip on the air-conditioning. The natural gas engine sputtered alive.
“Let’s leave the windows open, Max. It’s still cool this morning.”
He shoved the plastic bag with the bloody cloth in the glove compartment.
“What’s that, oyibo?”
“It’s for the second stop.”
“And where is the second stop?”
“Not sure yet, Max. That’ll be decided at the first stop.”
“All right, you tell me when you want to,” Max said, and shrugged. “I’ll fix it.”
“Can’t fix this one, Max.”
They drove straight along the access road to the spaceport until they merged with traffic headed into the city. The cars ignored the lane markers, and the relentless blaring of car horns had no apparent purpose. Bracket felt the wind push against his brow through the open window, appreciating the cool energy of the morning before the heat blanketed the Sahel into idleness. They followed the crest of a hill until the corrugated rooftop expanse of Greater Kano spread out before them, the sun steaming its presence over the land in searching tendrils of pink and cream.
The engine of the pickup suddenly chortled and bucked, and Max pulled over to the side of the road.
“We running out of gas?” Bracket said.
“No, it’s something else.” Max was looking around the cab of the truck. “Where is that thing of yours?”
“What thing?”
“Your G-fone.”
“My Geckofone? It was right here in my pocket.” But he pressed against his shirt pocket and didn’t feel anything.
“Hold on,” Max said. He opened up the fuse box beneath the steering column, and sure enough, the Geckofone was sucking on the power cables. “These things use too much energy, man. You have to turn it off. It’s draining my battery.”
“I could put it on the roof to catch the solar power.”
“No, we don’t want people to see it. Only big men carry G-fones.”
“All right, I’ll turn it off.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find you a battery, oyibo. That will keep it happy.”
Without the Geckofone’s navigation and communication systems, Bracket felt vulnerable—if something went wrong he wouldn’t be able to deal with the situation appropriately. But it also meant that Josephine wouldn’t know where he was going, and this thought was mildly liberating.
Bracket had first met Max during a tour of Kano for managers at the spaceport, and they had visited the Kofar Mata dye pits to watch the artisans dip cords of cotton into potash and water in deep concrete wells. Max was waiting outside the gate in his pickup truck, holding a bottle of Blanton’s, a fine single-malt bourbon that Bracket hadn’t even realized he’d missed until that moment. Bracket had never liked how the black official SUVs attracted attention, with the slow, self-driving vehicles running their sirens like a presidential motorcade. Now when he needed to go into Kano, he told Max to drive him around, preferring the anonymity of the humble pickup, which allowed him to move about the city without drawing attention to himself—at least until people noticed his light skin through the window.
They drove through the ancient wall that surrounded old Kano, ten thick, ponderous meters of fortifications that had been erected a thousand years ago, which formerly surrounded the city for twenty-five kilometers with fifteen imposing gates. The older buildings in the city were one-story dwellings crowned with cupolas and low-flung arched roofs opening onto interior courtyards and winding streets. There were numerous houses designed in the Hausa style, with walls the color of river silt and small turrets and thick wooden doors studded with silver and tin. These were eclipsed by new construction sites that broke ground after the Flare, when the spaceport made the city into a boomtown—already the first garish behemoths of glass and steel were rising above the city. Women carrying calabashes of fruit and vegetables sauntered past on the side of the narrow road, while goatherds swished their bleating animals to graze on weedy ditches along the roadside. He saw young men fanning burning coals to cook suya, a seasoned meat delicacy like a kebab. They were watching a soccer game on the screen of a tablet with malflies buzzing around it.
Digital technologies had flooded Nigeria, which could still use them, and the tech had found eager consumers in a country with a high degree of education. But as the goods flowed in, the borders were shut to non-Africans by the government, goaded on by Bello, who feared losing the chance for the country to press its temporary advantage. So instead of hordes of American and European immigrants, malflies came in, which tried to turn the cheap devices into botnets. Mostly the botnets were used by jobless American coders to peddle medicines to rich northerners who were starved for prescription drugs. That’s why a scientist at the University of Niger
ia at Nsukka had invented the G-fone, to secure devices against malflies—wedding artificial intelligence to the most advanced antivirus programs—but only the rich could afford G-fones, which fetched what was considered a princely sum even in the Silicon Territories. Indeed, Bracket’s ex-wife had been begging for him to send one to her for months, as if it would ever make it there.
As if he owed her anything.
Once Max veered the pickup onto the main highway, traffic slowed to a crawl. Max talked them through a checkpoint, chatting cordially with a heavily armed police detail. Then came another checkpoint. And another.
“What’s going on, Max?”
“Boko Haram. The police think an attack is coming.”
Bracket had heard the muttering at the spaceport about the rising tide of violence. He tried to ignore the rumors because they distracted him from his work and he couldn’t do anything about the situation.
“Jarumi,” he said. He’d seen this all before.
Max nodded, gripping the wheel tighter. “That’s right. They’re called the Jarumi now. They go away for a while and then come back with another label. It means ‘the courageous warriors.’ ‘The heroes.’ Last week, a bomber attacked the market in Maiduguri.”
They drove through the Kurmi market, a sprawling center of commerce where people sold everything from fresh fish pulled from Lake Chad to strings of handmade beads, fuel cells, leather sandals, soccer jerseys, and car parts. The truck inched its wheels through the throngs until they passed some women sitting on woven karauno mats.
“Stop here for a moment?” Max asked, as though remembering something.
“What about the Jarumi?”
“Sure, sure, oyibo. I’ll be quick.”
Max swung open the door and got down from the pickup before Bracket could protest. He picked through the crowd and approached the women, who were tall and thin and had bronzed skin with narrow, almost aquiline noses. They had rows of hoop rings pierced through their ears and alluring brown eyes lined lightly with kohl. One of the women had laid out a half dozen cracked calabashes and was drawing a string through the broken pieces. Another with a scarlet head wrap had set down several herbs in front of her. Max spoke briefly with her, and the woman mixed up the herbs before pouring them into packets of folded newspaper. The women weren’t as aggressive as the other market sellers, and everything about them made them stand out. They wore clothing from a different time, the kind of garb you saw in documentaries of Africans living in huts.
“Who are these women?” Bracket said, as Max stepped back into the pickup. “They look different.”
“They’re nomads.” Max chuckled. “Herders who only come to the city to make money during the dry season. They’re from an old clan in the north called the Wodaabe.”
“So they’re not Fulani?”
Fulani was one of the major ethnic groups in the Kano region, along with the Hausa. Many others, like Max, came from other tribes in different regions of the country.
“They’re Fulani,” Max explained. “But the Wodaabe are a subclan that keeps their old traditions. You don’t see them much because they spend most of their time in Niger. It’s a bad sign that they’re this far south. But they sell excellent medicines from the bush.” He held up one of the packets. “This is for my son. He suffers from congestion. The other one’s for me.” Max patted his groin. “After a long day, I can’t always get my pecker to work in bed. This will help me get it up.”
“Ha! Well, those women turn some heads. That should give you some inspiration.”
“No, no! I don’t touch them. They’re Wodaabe. I stick to Igbo girls.”
Bracket considered this insight, thinking that tribalism in this country was as much an affliction as any other illness. Except there seemed to be no cure for it, and certainly no medicine woman from the Sahel would be solving its virulence. You could switch your tribal identity online—if you could get online—but you couldn’t forget your own history.
Max swung the pickup into the industrial district, where auto mechanics raised ancient, rusted-out danfo minibus taxis from the dead and reassembled electric okada scooters with parts sourced from all over the world. Technicians resurrected modded tablets to control drip irrigation systems or to serve as unregistered nodes on Naijaweb, Nigeria’s national Internet. Bracket checked first with a Chinese supplier named Xiao he’d dealt with before, but the man didn’t have the right kind of cable. Max, meanwhile, used his time to find an extra battery for Bracket’s Geckofone, a gummy polymer that wrapped itself around the device like a second skin.
“Let’s try Musa,” Max advised. “I heard he has cable now.”
“Last time he charged way too much for my rebar,” Bracket said.
Ibrahim Musa’s compound was three blocks away. At the front gate, an armed guard carrying a machine gun patted them down and the trader accepted them into his dirt courtyard, which sat in the middle of three one-story buildings with arched doorways. Bracket caught a glimpse of a large swimming pool in the rear of the compound through the windows of one of the buildings, a luxury by any standard. Musa was a portly man whose flowing white gown opened wide at the neck, revealing a mass of black chest hair. He was doted on by three slim young women: one was his daughter by his first wife, while the other two were his second and third wives.
Bracket was thrilled to learn that Musa had enough quality cable to ship, but the price was ridiculous as usual.
“Fifteen per meter is way too much, Mr. Musa.”
They haggled for a short while, but Bracket couldn’t make any headway.
“I can give you what you need, my friend,” Musa finally said. “But for that I need groundnuts.”
“Groundnuts?”
“I understand that you are growing them at your facility.”
“We have some greenhouses that provide food for the staff. I’m not sure about groundnuts.”
“You have them. I’ve tasted them. And they’re delicious. It so happens that the groundnut supply has dwindled this year because of the drought. I would be willing to sell you the cable for eight cowries per meter and one hundred kilos of your groundnuts.”
Bracket looked over at Max. He had no idea if that amount was a lot of groundnuts or not, or if the greenhouse even grew many groundnuts. Max just stared ahead, fulfilling his duty as a fixer. He didn’t negotiate, he arranged.
“I’d be happy to promise you one hundred kilos of groundnuts,” Bracket said. “Except I don’t know how many we have.”
“That’s no problem, I’m willing to accept future crops as well. You can provide me with thirty-five percent of your yield until it measures one hundred kilograms. I don’t charge interest, as it is against my principles.”
“That sounds fine to me.”
“That weight does not include the stems. I would also like the first option to buy the supply from your next crop.”
“Sure, we can do that. Only problem is I don’t have any cowries. I’ve only got Naira.”
“Not to worry. I have an imprinter.”
“Here? In your house?”
Imprinters were extremely valuable and rare. The entire rocket site had only one imprinter and it was closely guarded by Nurudeen Bello, who kept it under lock and key in a vault. Musa was living humbly if he had such means at his disposal.
“I can offer you a rate of one to four-point-one.”
“Last week it was one to three-point-eight.”
“We do not trust Naira. We want to feel something in our hands, Mr. Bracket. Naira is our old currency and its value used to disappear overnight from inflation. Cowries are valuable by themselves.”
Bracket went through the calculations in his head. He had about forty thousand Naira stored in his Geckofone, which should be enough.
“Okay, it’s a deal.”
Ibrahim had his first wife draw up a contract in Arabic. As they waited and sipped tea, Bracket asked the trader about the Jarumi and the police checkpoints.
“It’
s best not to talk about such matters,” Musa said curtly.
“But, I mean, is this something we should be concerned about at the spaceport? I thought the terrorists were all gone.”
“They are never truly gone, Mr. Bracket. The way to destroy Boko Haram is to destroy the mentality. But the conditions are the same as before. Poverty and shame. Nothing has changed. The army claims to be monitoring them with drones, but the Jarumi can hijack the cameras of the drones so they know when they’re coming.”
“If they’ve got that kind of technical knowledge, the government should give them jobs instead.”
“The emir has tried. But it’s hard to overcome their ignorance. There are generations of people here in Kano whose parents mistrusted schools—any schools—as promoting colonialist thought. Technology does not solve every problem. I remember when some foreigners—from Germany, I think—came to Kano promising thousands of free solar lamps. It was a logical idea because there is plenty of sun in northern Nigeria, and they trained people how to fix them. Today most of those solar cells, if they work at all, are used by the Jarumi to charge their mobile phones in the bush. These men are ignorant but not stupid. Their struggle has made them inventive.”
Musa took a sip of tea, his eyes on one of his wives, who slipped past them in an aquamarine wrapper into a different building. Bracket noticed dozens of cowrie shells woven into the fabric of her clothing.
“My advice to you, Mr. Bracket, is not to discuss them. I have counseled young men to stay away from the Jarumi, and Boko Haram before them. Their thoughts about modernization are incoherent and based on a corruption of the Koran. I’ve seen Igbos from the south—like your driver here—get murdered before my very eyes in Kano, and I wholeheartedly condemn those attacks. My father was a member of the Izala reform movement, and he taught me that there are problems with graft, and that a lack of education is the real cause of our troubles in the north. Abandoning education just because some of the ideas are from the West is foolhardy. Algebra was invented by us Muslims, inshallah, and it’s the foundation of modern mathematics. But I won’t deny that these fanatics are observing truths about our poor leadership.
After the Flare Page 5