After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

Bracket found Seeta Chandrasekhan scrutinizing a rocket thruster that was bolted into a lattice of struts. Nearby, Indian engineers were scrambling to prepare for the first launch test. Her Nigerian apprentice was eagerly awaiting instructions beside her. They were both wearing white medical scrubs to avoid contaminating the machine, and throughout the gigantic hangar Bracket could see various parts of the Masquerade being carefully assembled—in one corner an air tank was being tested to help the spacecraft navigate in orbit.

  “Morning, Seeta,” Bracket said.

  “I’m busy,” Seeta snapped, without looking up.

  “I need a sec.”

  “I don’t have a sec. I don’t have a micro-sec. I don’t have anything.”

  She was examining the rocket thruster assiduously and ignoring him. Bracket remembered the feel of her hair slipping between his fingers.

  “At least tell me what you’re working on,” he asked.

  “I’m trying to see if a thruster designed for launch over the Andaman Sea will melt a launch platform for thrusters made for launch over the Atlantic. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “I thought the platform was all-Indian. That’s Bello’s plan, right? Indian rockets, African ingenuity.”

  “It might have been Bello’s plan, but it’s not Josephine’s plan. She said that the platform specifications were wrong, so it now meets ESA specifications. ESA specifications using Nigerian concrete, which is different than concrete in French Guiana. The humidity is different, the density is different, and they don’t add gunite to the mixture. And then we’re going to blast the bloody hell out of it with an experimental thruster that has never before been launched into space. Do you have any idea how different the engine is for the Masquerade? It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of the Space Shuttle and the Russian Buran. Now she wants it ready two weeks early.” Seeta glanced at her apprentice. “Simon, you don’t need to hear all this chatter. Why don’t you take a break?”

  “Are you sure, Dr. Chandrasekhan?” her apprentice replied. “I’m here to help.”

  “Give me ten minutes. And bring some coffee if you can.”

  “Two sugars?”

  “Make it three. Or I don’t know, bring the bloody bowl.”

  The apprentice walked away, disappearing behind a hail of sparks and heavy machinery.

  “Difficult man,” Seeta muttered. “It’s easier when he’s not around asking me so many questions. Sometimes you just need to watch, you know? Watch and learn.” She grabbed a clipboard dangling from a truss and marked off a box with a grease pen, finally looking at Bracket. “Bloody hell, what the devil happened to you?”

  “I was in town when the Jarumi set off a bomb.”

  She stepped toward him, her face softening with concern. “Jesus, you were there? We felt the explosion all the way over here.” Now she was running her fingers along the cuts on his face, almost tenderly.

  He bristled at the pain. “I went into town to get some supplies for the pool, and they set it off on our way back.”

  “I heard it was a slaughter,” Seeta said. “Some suicidal maniac.”

  “It was a girl,” Bracket corrected.

  She recoiled. “A girl?”

  “Yeah, we were close. We saw her blow herself up right in front of us. That’s why I’m here, Seeta. We’re about to finish the pool, and I need to know that the walls will hold up to any sabotage. Do you think you can scan it? It’s going to be holding thirty-one million liters of water.”

  “After all you’ve been through, that’s why you’re here? For a scan? Don’t ask me to look at it, ask the structural engineers.”

  “I’ve got their reports and they look good. We’ve been cleared. But that was before the explosion.”

  She sighed, as if she had been waiting for him to say more, and turned back to the clipboard with a humph. “Christ, Kwesi. You can’t just go back to work after seeing something like that. Take a break.”

  “I don’t have time for a break. We’re already behind. We’ve encountered any number of strange things around the pool.”

  “What kinds of things are you talking about?”

  He told her about the electronics that kept shorting out.

  “That’s been happening to all of us,” she said. “Did you find anything else around the site?”

  “Some old pottery,” he said evenly.

  “Like an artifact?”

  “Yeah. One of my crew ran off with it. He got away.”

  She shook her head. “I suppose we should all be more careful around here. Anyway, that wouldn’t affect my instruments. My readings have been unusual. Inconsistent. It’s hard to get a proper fix on anything.” Then she leaned toward him and whispered: “Is that really the reason you want me to come help you?”

  “I value your opinion.”

  “You value me or you want me?”

  “Come look at the pool for me. No one can scan it the way you can.”

  “We made a mistake, Kwesi. I was drunk. You should forget about it. If you want to see me, then I need you to say it. I don’t chase men. I don’t even chase women. They chase me.”

  “You’ve got a girlfriend.”

  She ignored this and tapped her pen on her checklist. “If you need me to examine your pool, make sure it gets on this list. If it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ll make sure it gets there.”

  “You should go see a medic,” she said coldly. “You look like shit.” Of course, Josephine would almost certainly not allow Seeta to spend her day conducting acoustic readings of Naijapool. Seeta was right, all the structural engineers had signed off, and the electrical engineers would too, once he installed the new cable. But they hadn’t been planning for an explosion. Had he gone to see Seeta to woo her back to him? Maybe he had. The bomb had rattled him more than he realized, his emotions feeling viscous and distended. When he looked over his shoulder, she was wearing her headphones and taking readings of the cone of the thruster, her apprentice peppering her with questions to her obvious annoyance.

  He cringed at the thought of returning to an empty pool again, almost expecting to find Josephine glowering at him, but when he arrived he was happily surprised that the trader Ibrahim Musa had fulfilled his end of the bargain and delivered five hundred meters of high-grade cable, spooled perfectly on evenly spaced pallets on the pool deck. He looked over the lip of the tank below, realizing that this might be the last time he saw it without water.

  Naijapool was larger than the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, at about seventy meters by thirty meters, and fifteen meters deep instead of thirteen. Unlike the NBL, though, the pool had been built from scratch instead of being retrofitted inside an existing building. So thirteen of the fifteen meters extended deep into the ground, with only two meters above ground level, mostly to protect against flash floods, which could hit Kano at the tail end of Harmattan season. Nigeria made some of the best concrete in the world, even if Seeta didn’t like that it had a different composition. The richest man in the country had built his fortune on concrete, and Nurudeen Bello had convinced him to donate all the concrete the pool required, not to mention the equipment. In just four weeks they poured enough concrete to build a twenty-story building. Once they completed the pool, Bracket looked forward to watching the Naijanauts move slowly in their weighted EVA suits with the divers affixed to them like remoras, an underwater symbiosis that had always moved him back in Houston.

  He merely had to approve the other tasks for the day, which were managed by highly skilled staff: the installation of the gas lines, so the safety divers could breathe Nitrox; the heating system; and the air-conditioning units for the suit-donning room, where the astronauts were in most danger of overheating as they spent fifteen minutes wriggling into their suits.

  By evening, he should be able to make the order everyone was waiting for: open the taps. So why was he so uneasy? He trusted his designs, and yet he feared that the pool might not be strong enough, that another girl co
uld walk right in and blow herself up and the Naijanauts with her.

  Josephine still refused his request for more time to double-check the integrity of the structure.

  “I’ve already ordered more perimeter security,” she snapped over her G-fone. “And you should never have gone into town without an official escort. You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

  She relented when he told her about the cable and, like Seeta, recommended that he report to the infirmary, seemingly unaware of the fact that she had also just told him to finish the project at the same time.

  Bracket was used to mercurial demands anyway. He had never been totally in charge back at the NBL in NASA. His colleagues had always wanted Bracket on their team, but they’d never wanted him to lead it—or at least the management hadn’t, as his ex-wife, Lorraine, had said. He thought there might be more to it than that, though. Maybe his being black, which Lorraine always brushed off as an excuse. After the Flare, citing his lack of initiative, among a list of other faults, she left him for Ramsey, a lover whom she had barely deigned to keep secret. Bracket had replayed horror movies in his head of stabbing Lorraine’s lover through the heart and then turning himself in to the police, so he was shocked by how little he felt toward the man when he finally met him. That even though Ramsey used to drive a Tesla sports car, before the Flare fried its motherboard, he wasn’t worth the trouble. Ramsey had preyed on another man’s wife and had to look himself in the mirror and say: “I’m a man who breaks apart families. I’m the one who drives in the wedge.”

  Only later when he arrived in Kano did Bracket hear that Ramsey refused to offer a single cowrie toward Sybil’s education. Then he did want to thump the man. Then he did want to plunge a knife into his chest. But it was too late, and they were homesteading in the Silicon Territories, sipping wine or shooting baby fawns or whatever it was the libertarians did.

  He was startled out of his reverie when Josephine’s face suddenly appeared on the security camera of the operations room—and she wasn’t alone. Nurudeen Bello was with her, speaking about something intently, as they prepared to enter Naijapool. Bracket cursed under his breath—there was nothing to show them. He hadn’t prepared for a visit, and ran down the stairs to intercept them before they saw the empty tank.

  Josephine looked attentive and restrained, a sharp contrast from how she had berated him only hours before. She raised her eyebrows at him over a warning glance: Don’t screw this up, Kwesi. Bello stood patiently beside her, inspecting everything with a proprietary gaze. Bello rarely visited Naijapool in person, so Bracket was used to dealing with him through the Loom when he used an ebony-skinned Yoruba avatar. Instead of a traditional agbada gown, he was wearing a heather-gray Western-style suit with tan calfskin oxfords that matched his belt. At the crown of his head Bracket could discern a bald patch.

  “Good to see you, Mr. Bracket,” Bello said.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Bello.”

  “It’s good to be back,” Bello agreed, pumping his hand. “I spent the day courting investors, and I’ll confess I’m glad to get another look at what they’re investing in. The way they talk, you’d think that it was all a pipe dream!” Now he was looking over Bracket’s shoulder at the pool. “We’ve built some of the best facilities in the world at the spaceport, bar none. I’ve assured them that when NASA and the ESA come back online that they’ll still look to us for guidance. This pool is one of the reasons why.”

  Together they walked along the pool deck, until they arrived at the lip of the tank. Bello frowned and looked at Josephine. “You told me that you had started filling the pool today.”

  “We installed the cable today, Mr. Bello,” Bracket interjected. “I had to find a new supplier after we received a bad shipment.”

  “You should have gone through the approved vendor list,” Bello said. “When you go off the books, it makes our auditors nervous. I choose our vendors very carefully, Mr. Bracket. I don’t want the anticorruption auditors taking down our project. Besides, the sister of our cable supplier just won a seat in the House of Representatives. She’s a very important ally of our space program.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Josephine said, before Bracket could argue with his logic. The man clearly had no idea how bad his vendors really were—and how was a supplier with political ties above suspicion?

  They continued along until they stopped at an open space the size of a basketball court that was overhung with cranes.

  “This is where the real money will be made,” Bello observed, his mood brightening again. “Where the contractors will be able to put their equipment before taking it into the pool.” He folded his arms, admiring the empty space. “You know, those contracts will pay for this facility within five years. I’ve already rented out three years to the oil rigs, so their welders can practice deep-sea repairs.”

  “We did the same thing in Houston when Congress cut our budgets,” Bracket reminded Bello. “That’s why I designed this extra space.” If anyone was familiar with the long-term plans for the pool, it was him.

  “But in Houston they never could contain their costs, could they?” Bello corrected. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell the National Assembly in Abuja, that we’ll soon be financially viable. The government has not provided us with all the funds we need. Nor should it. But we need more funds before we reach sustainability, like any successful start-up. I’m being dogged by an especially greedy senator who wants to line his pockets with our money. You see, the only way to overcome someone hell-bent on corruption is through political strategy. Alliances. Hence the reason why you need to respect our vendors—every action turns upon the next. The opposition is looking for any excuse to shut us down.”

  Bracket looked at Josephine for guidance, but she pretended to be engrossed in her G-fone. He marveled at how drastically she could adjust her personality to suit the audience—in Bello’s case she was all humility and silence. Bracket cleared his throat, eager to usher them out the door. There was no sense in arguing with the man if he labeled everything a strategy. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Well, yes. We have some visitors coming here, special guests of mine, and I’d like you to accommodate them here at Naijapool. Actors, to be precise. Some of Nollywood’s most popular thespians.”

  A vision of Bracket’s favorite program, Mrs. N Hires the Help, flashed through his mind. “I’d be more than happy to offer a tour.”

  “Ah, that’s just it, Mr. Bracket. They don’t want to sightsee; they want to film a movie.”

  “At Naijapool?”

  “Yes, it’s a promotional film that will celebrate the achievements we are making here and will generate interest in our work for our investors.”

  “Are they good swimmers?” Bracket asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. Just put them in a space suit. They won’t do any swimming at all. They can come in, film a scene or two, and that will be that.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Josephine intervened before Bracket could object. “We’ll make sure we take excellent care of them.”

  Bello turned between the two of them, a clear look of amusement on his face. But it was unclear what aspect of it amused him exactly.

  “Mr. Bracket, it may seem insulting for you to host entertainers, but we all have to do our part. This film, and others like it, will help convince people to invest in Nigeria’s future. It can make a major impact for the space program. I never would have invited the actors if it wasn’t absolutely essential to this enterprise.”

  “And for saving Masha Kornokova,” Josephine added.

  “Of course! That’s why we hired you, Ms. Gauthier, because of your laser-like focus on our objectives. Masha Kornokova is the beacon that will guide Nigeria to our ambitions.”

  Bracket thought, What ambitions? What ambitions are there besides rescuing Kornokova? He could sense Bello stumbling for once, caught off guard. But he didn’t volunteer more.

  “When are the actors coming?” Br
acket asked.

  “They’ll be here in two weeks. I’d count yourself fortunate. I had to twist some arms to get them to come at all. I’ll be in Lagos, but I trust you will show them our greatest hospitality.”

  Josephine held the door open for Bello as they exited the building. “I’ll join you in a moment, Mr. Bello.” Then she hissed at Bracket: “Start filling the pool now.”

  “That will take more than two weeks at the pressure we can get from the well.”

  “Get it started. I’ve seen your reports, and you’ve been cleared. Why haven’t you turned it on?”

  “I was at the explosion in town. A bomb like that could rip this facility apart.”

  “You survived it, didn’t you? This structure is a thousand times stronger than a car. He’s talking about Omotola Taiwo.”

  “The movie star?” Bracket had watched her in what seemed like countless programs on the Loom: period dramas, fantasies, slapstick comedies, and even a zombie film based on Ogoni burial rites.

  “Yes, they’re an item now. She’s his fiancée, so you’d better keep her happy. Putain!

  “The Indians are even slower than you are. They want everything checked and double-checked. Fill the pool! Act like the white man you have inside you.”

  He didn’t know why Josephine ended her angry rants at him with an epithet, a sort of racial digestif she liked to inject at the end of every disagreement, a reminder of where he stood in the order of things. It’s true he was lighter skinned than Josephine, but he hadn’t waltzed through life by passing as a white man. People always knew. From how he talked, how he dressed, the women he was drawn to. With him, the black boxes always seemed to be ticked. He was never confused for white—especially not by the Wallers—at least not until he came to Nigeria.

  Outside, the sky was rapidly shifting from purple to navy blue, the quick dusk that flitted through this part of the world nearly finished already. A moment later and he would have missed it.

  Seeing that he had no choice, Bracket called his full-time crew back to the pool on an emergency frequency. They would demand overtime—and he’d have to pay it—but there was no other way. They would have to open the taps as soon as possible, at pressures that he would normally never tamper with, for fear of bursting the pipes.