After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  She felt the coming of the Jarumi with a dread of the inevitable, felt that she was drawn to them now and that they would be drawn to her, as if they knew what she carried inside her. The other women avoided mentioning what was happening to Balewa’s body, the nausea that plagued her from morning to night, the malevolent energy swirling within her that enveloped her whole being, turned even sweet scents against themselves. Pure-smelling herbs made her want to retch; the wispy scent of wild blossoms disgusted her no end. In the marketplace, she fled the smell of porridge boiling in a pot, yet became ravenous for grilling suya meat.

  In the end, it was revulsion she felt, nearly always.

  If the child was born it would be a hellspawn of a jiini who would sully the world. She couldn’t allow it to live. But the herbs she needed to suffocate the thing in her womb did not grow near Kano.

  She would bring the child back to the Jarumi, she decided, make them kill the very thing they had created.

  One afternoon, she heard her customers mention the words again, the Jarumi, the Jarumi are coming today. The other sellers packed up their wares and went home early for the day. When the police shifted their checkpoints to the soccer stadium, Balewa knew she would have to move quickly.

  “They aren’t coming to the marketplace,” she said to the others.

  “We should get away from here to be safe,” Durel said. “Let’s stay out of sight. Everyone agree?”

  “Yes,” the others said.

  Balewa did not argue with them this time because she didn’t think they could possibly understand, but she didn’t acquiesce either, a form of resistance she’d learned from growing up in a clan in which most decisions about her life had been made by other people.

  She was tired of running away. With the stone, she could stop the Jarumi from harming anyone and kill the child too, a valiant act of sacrifice that would end her suffering. She let the other women walk ahead of her, then ducked down an alley. Clutching the stone close to her chest, she paced quickly to the soccer stadium, scanning the crowds.

  She began softly singing the notes she’d learned. The stone warmed to the touch.

  She paused to watch the police checkpoints from a distance, observing the officers as they inspected each vehicle. She looked for cruel faces in the crowd to see if she recognized any of them. But the Jarumi were nowhere to be found. She was hoping, she realized, for something terrible.

  Then she heard the yelling at one of the police checkpoints. There! Her heart began thudding against her chest.

  She moved through the crowd as people parted for her, chanting the notes to the stone more loudly, building the field, and soon she could see it surround her, glistening in the late-afternoon sun. A merchant was grazed by the field and cried out as if he had been bitten. Another shouted out in fear. Her voice rose, making the stone grow hot now, the energy building upon itself. When she saw the attacker, she would expand the field around him as she had practiced, enveloping them both within it. They would die together.

  She saw blood pouring from a police officer’s hand and raced faster. But she stopped cold just before reaching them, when a girl stepped out of the car. It was all wrong. Balewa had expected a man, a monster from the Jarumi. Not a girl. And not one who was younger even than Balewa herself. She looked terrified, her eyes darting around her like a frightened animal.

  I’ve made a mistake, Balewa thought. It’s only a girl.

  She stopped singing to the stone, and the field dissipated into thin air. The stone grew cold in her palm. She was starting to turn away when she noticed a red tag dangling from the girl’s clothing and a bulge around her midsection.

  Now she watched everything as if from a great remove. She could see the officers lunging for the girl. The horrified look on the girl’s face.

  If I die, Balewa realized, they’ll take both of our lives. They’ll get what they want.

  And Balewa hummed the notes again, welling up from a place in the back of her neck. The song! She raised the stone before her. She pushed out the melody from within her belly, faster than she ever had before.

  The girl was pulling the red tag. The girl was coming apart.

  I will stop this, Balewa thought, as the stone burned her palm. I will stop it all.

  CHAPTER 8

  The glass lodged itself into every crevice of the pickup, into Bracket’s clothing, into his shoes. And the larger shards—they broke into splinters, the sharpness branching endlessly in a cruel fractal of pain.

  Something dangled from the roof outside the window, something that should not be there. In a haze, Bracket opened the door to pull it down: a strip of brown flesh seared into the paint. He ripped it off and threw it onto the ground.

  The terrified look in the young woman’s eyes as she detonated herself and then, as Bracket ducked his head beneath the dashboard, the final glimpse of the explosion tearing the young woman apart, the chest-heaving force of it. Her torso splitting open in an orgy of grime, where it had stopped suddenly, as if captured in the air in front of him before falling to the ground. The stench of carbide and the sound of the screams.

  Bracket and Max stumbled into the road, where they discovered a woman trapped beneath an overturned fruit cart. A small brushfire had started behind her and it was spreading in her direction. Max dug up a thin berm of dirt as a makeshift fire break, while Bracket lifted the cart off her legs. The woman thanked him, dusted off her wrapper, and stacked the fruit back on the cart before pushing it away, disappearing in the smoky haze. Outside the car, Bracket saw that only the cars behind Max’s pickup were still intact. The rest—in every other direction of the blast radius—had been utterly destroyed. Some force of luck had saved them, protected them from the explosion as if by a miracle.

  Another hour passed before the fire department doused the rest of the flames. They cleared the way for police officers to interrogate witnesses who had been near the blast, and eventually they ambled over to Max’s pickup truck as they were waiting for the traffic to clear. A Hummingfone circled about the truck, its mini propellers pivoting this way and that, snapping photos.

  “Did you see what happened here, sir?” the officer asked.

  “I saw a girl arguing with the police.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “We were far away. She was wearing a hijab.”

  “Would you recognize her if I showed you a picture?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  The Hummingfone buzzed in close to Bracket’s face.

  “Anything else?”

  “She pulled on a string to detonate the bomb,” Bracket said. “It had a red tag.”

  “How do you know she detonated the bomb?”

  “What do you mean? Look around you. What else could have happened?”

  “The tag could have been attached to a radio,” the officer explained. “The bomb could have been triggered remotely. That’s often the case when they use children.”

  It was a point Bracket hadn’t thought of. He had assumed the girl had decided on her own death.

  “One more thing,” Bracket added. “I’m not sure if this is important. We saw another woman running toward her.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Tall, thin. I believe she was Wodaabe.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We bought something from her earlier in the market.”

  “And what did she do?”

  Bracket paused, considering how to answer. The woman had begun to sing as she rushed forward, and something seemed to expand around her—a presence? an emptiness?—and then there was the blast. He shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

  Bracket realized it sounded specious even to himself.

  The officer examined the herbs that Max had bought and then ordered them to hand over their passports. Max argued with the officer for a while before eventually producing his national ID, since he didn’t carry a passport.

  “I’ve got diplomatic protection,” Brack
et insisted.

  “If I could have a cowrie for every time a Yankee told me that, I’d be a rich man.” The officer laughed. “Don’t leave the spaceport. If all is well, we’ll return them to you in a few days.”

  Bracket smoldered in his seat as the officer walked away, trying to remember the song the woman had been singing, the music that had touched him in all of that chaos. Two hours later, the police removed the fence and allowed Max to drive through the wreckage. All that remained of the woman’s car was a burned, crumpled chassis with the steering wheel still attached. The police had removed most of the bodies, and Bracket could see blood splattered on windshields and coagulating in the dirt. As they drove past, the same officer was bagging a severed foot, the toes callused and the toenails cracked.

  Bracket returned to his quarters to find the interior of his trailer coated in a fine layer of silt. He had left the window open again. The Harmattan winds began offshore and chilled a belt of West Africa for a thousand kilometers, causing tornadoes and violent rainstorms throughout the region, which Josephine Gauthier had long warned might delay the rocket launch. One more reason she insisted they stay on schedule. His quarters were generous compared with those of the astronauts, with a double bed, a broad desk, and a bathroom with a steam shower. He had rigged his bike on a pulley from the ceiling, and he had enough room—barely—for a small raffia armchair with an indigo cushion.

  He picked the glass from his skin piece by piece and poured a bottle of rubbing alcohol over his body in the shower, his skin flaming so hot that he thought he would pass out from the pain.

  After toweling off, he collapsed on his bed and surfed around on the Loom for a Nigerian show. He had been put off by the poor production quality of Nigerian movies—called Nollywood—when he arrived eight months ago, as scenes would cut in the middle of dialogue or the music would repeat the same electronic keyboard melody again and again, regardless of the emotional content. But eventually, the melodramatic story lines began capturing his attention and distracting him from the day’s pressures, and the programs had become a critical sleep aid.

  He sought out his favorite, Mrs. N Hires the Help, which followed a wealthy, strong-willed, and fiercely intimidating woman, Mrs. N, as she manages the domestic servants in her opulent home on the Calabar coast. She was constantly receiving visiting dignitaries and pop stars from around the country, and she expected the hired help to fulfill their duties, but if she caught you sleeping—wham!—she would fire you with her catchphrase: “You’re terminated.” The phrase must have been cribbed from Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, yet Mrs. N had made it her own, adding a layer of frightening vindictiveness. When she said “You’re terminated,” you felt as if she were talking directly to you and you had to quit whatever you were doing. She had a Pythonfone that she kept curled around her right arm, and she allowed it to slither into the servants’ quarters to monitor their business. Bracket found it fascinating to watch how she treated her servants—more cruelly, it seemed, than the rich in America—and while he’d never enjoyed reality television back home, Mrs. N was so menacing and vicious that he anticipated her confrontations with her staff as if he were about to watch a track sprint in a velodrome. But Mrs. N always won. Her Pythonfone would record some offense, the staff would be held to account, the party would go off without a hitch, and her guests would enjoy her sumptuous meals while she observed them from the head of the table with a look of quiet conspiratorial pleasure.

  After the day he’d had, Bracket could have used a new episode of Mrs. N Hires the Help, but he couldn’t find one to download. He swiped through films of priests praying and young men dancing to hip-hop with auto-tuned singers and an evil archbishop from Lagos, and it all blended together until the buzzing in his ears from the explosion rippled through his mind.

  Where was the reality show about the poor, uneducated girl from the northeast of Nigeria who blew herself to pieces in Kano? Where was the episode that explained why she did it? Or why she was forced to do it?

  He thought he heard otherworldly sounds in the wind of the Sahel as it buffeted his trailer, but when he popped his head outside he just saw an Op-Sec guard making the rounds in the occluded night as a minor storm swept in, maybe the first one of the season.

  The drums. They were pounding in his ears as if the music troupe was walking past the pickup outside the stadium. What had become of the musicians? Had they survived? Surely the bomber would have waited before blowing up some drummers. What about that Wodaabe woman? The one who had run toward the suicide bomber? Why would she sacrifice herself like that? To what end?

  He messaged Seeta Chandrasekhan on his Geckofone:

  Hey Seeta. Can you play me something nice?

  She ignored him or she didn’t see the message. He actually wanted to talk to her right now, to tell her about what had happened, but he didn’t know if she would respond to that kind of honesty. He’d left that morning with her scowling at him like he had stolen something from her, her pride maybe. He didn’t know.

  He thought about what the trader Ibrahim Musa had said, that the Jarumi would spare only the lives of people who were worth something. If they were to come to the spaceport, who would they come for? Bello? Maybe.

  Then it struck him. Of course. They would come for the very people who were being trumpeted all around the world: the Naijanauts. The true heroes. If the Jarumi came, they would come for the Naijanauts.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bracket awoke feeling he needed to find the peloton, to reach the slipstream after the chaos of the last few days had sheared away his momentum. So he went riding around the spaceport before dawn, looking for the slip, and when he couldn’t find it, he pedaled until his lungs felt like they would burst. The wind from the previous night’s storm had swept the landscape bare. The sun was yawning rays of denim blue and gold over the bronze statue of the Masquerade as he cleaned the dust from his bike’s gears with an old toothbrush on his doorstep. He schemed how to improve the bike, whether he could upgrade the shifters to give him more speed. Speed could get him there, where he needed to be, back on track. Gliding again.

  His Geckofone slid along the wall outside his quarters, lifting itself up and down to attract his attention. He grabbed it.

  “Mr. Bracket, it’s Detective Idriss. I’ve finished looking into the matter we discussed.”

  “Detective.” In the background, Bracket heard a bird squawking, a parrot maybe.

  “Next time, Mr. Bracket, I suggest you use something other than your own clothing when you want to preserve evidence from a crime scene. It will keep matters from becoming confused.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “We ran a DNA test on the blood, but we don’t have other samples to compare it to, so it does not help us very much. The man was not in our database. But what we did find, Mr. Bracket, is that the blood most likely came from the Kanuri ethnic group.”

  “So it was human blood?”

  “Yes, Kanuri are very much human. They are mostly located in the northeast of the country.”

  “Well, that’s where we are right now. That shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  There it was again, the bird cry, but this time the call was drawn out, attenuated. More of a screech than a squawk. Detective Idriss didn’t seem bothered by it. He wondered if Idriss would object if he placed him on speakerphone, so he could finish cleaning his bike. He picked up a rag.

  “Most members of the Jarumi also tend to come from the Kanuri tribe.”

  Bracket set the rag down again. “You’re saying Abdul Haruna was a member of Boko Haram?”

  “It’s possible. If he was, then he was on the base for one of two reasons: either theft or sabotage.”

  “Theft?” Bracket blurted out.

  “The Jarumi need money to operate. Money to buy food, weapons, explosives, and whatever else they need. They don’t have a functioning economy of their own, so they prey on others. Maybe there was something there that they hoped to sell on
the black market.”

  It added up: Abdul had taken off with the pottery after one look. There was little chance the emir would find out about it—unless, that is, Abdul planned to tell the emir to sabotage the project.

  “So you are saying there could be Jarumi at the spaceport?”

  “It’s only a suspicion. But don’t jump to conclusions yet, Mr. Bracket.”

  “Why not?”

  “My cousins are Kanuri. And they are not members of Boko Haram. If you could provide me with more information about your employee, we may be able to learn more. Right now it’s a suspicion. Anything is possible. He could be a common criminal.”

  “Thank you, Detective. I’ll do what I can.”

  But he already knew that Josephine had deleted Abdul Haruna’s employment files. It was a dead end.

  “Your passport will be ready in a week, I should add. And you can tell Mr. Obinna to fetch his identification as well.”

  “I’ll get word to Max.”

  “Now I’ve done you a favor. I’d like to ask the same of you. You said you saw a Wodaabe woman at the explosion. Would you be able to identify her in a lineup?”

  “Surely she was killed.”

  “And if she wasn’t? Your car was right next to the explosion, yet somehow you escaped with your lives. Everyone else within the blast radius died.”

  It seemed impossible, but Bracket told him he could, thinking it wasn’t exactly a fair request. The man had his passport, and Yankees without papers, he knew, did not fare well in Nigeria.