After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  She dimmed the lights and played back the recording as they lay on the bed. The singer’s voice sounded eerily close by, as if she were in the room with them. Bracket thought he could hear what Seeta heard, how the singer’s subtle voice blended with all the sounds around her. Here a car horn; there a cricket; an okada motorcycle wheeling away into the night as the musician plucked at her lute. They listened for a while, intently, until they lost the will to make love and drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 17

  Bracket awoke from a dream about his ex-wife, a recurring dream that he’d had since they’d gotten married. He was supposed to meet Lorraine at a movie theater at their local shopping mall but she didn’t arrive when they had agreed, and when he finally found her in the food court, she was kissing another man. The dream had an almost laughable simplicity that didn’t require any Freudian insight to understand. From their first date he’d felt as if she was slipping away, and all that was missing was the final time and place of the severance. The divorce hadn’t cured him of the nightmare. It was as if a deep berm had been carved into his mind that his subconscious would flow through forever. It didn’t matter either that he was sleeping in Seeta’s quarters.

  She was already dressed. “I’ve got to get to the platform,” she said, pulling him in for a warm hug before leaving. That, at least, was different from his failed marriage. Lorraine had liked affection in the afternoon. Mornings were off-limits.

  He pawed at his eyes to wake himself up, swiping through messages on his G-fone. Most were automated updates about various operations at the spaceport. But one read:

  Mr. Kwesi Bracket. I am waiting to receive you at your office.

  There was no signature, and the metadata had been stripped, so he couldn’t guess who sent it. Only Nurudeen Bello called him by his full name. Thinking—hoping—that Bello might have returned from his trip, which would set Josephine and everyone else in a better mood, Bracket showered and dressed quickly, putting on a freshly pressed shirt. At Naijapool, two astronauts were preparing for their next EVA on the pool deck. A former fighter pilot from the Nigerian defense forces switched poses from a sturdy downward dog into warrior pose. A young neuroscientist from Port Harcourt had her nose buried in a large mug of coffee, trying to flush out her system, most likely, before she spent the next six hours confined in an EVA suit. On the second floor, he found a gigantic bear of a man standing outside the operations room wearing a black suit. He puffed out his chest as Bracket approached. He didn’t look like Bello’s security guard.

  “You can’t go in there.”

  The accent: cont instead of can’t.

  “That’s my office. I’ll go where I damn well please.”

  “Hold on,” the man said, barring Bracket’s way with a club of an arm.

  He opened the door and whispered some words into the operations room, Bracket becoming more enraged with every passing moment.

  “All right, you can go in.”

  “If you get in the way again, I’ll have security throw you in the brig.”

  Seated at Bracket’s desk, as if it were his own, was an older man in a double-breasted, pin-striped suit with tightly combed silver hair. He held a titanium cane topped with an ebony wood handle. All his suit buttons were cowrie shells, and gold rings adorned his fingers. There were cowries woven into the suit itself, such that he clattered with each movement, an extraordinary display of wealth. He did not appear to have a biomimicry device with him, and Bracket’s G-fone confirmed this. Upon spotting Bracket, the man stood up and, with some effort, swapped the cane to his other hand.

  “Mr. Bracket, I’m Dr. Olufunmi. Dr. Wale Olufunmi.”

  “How did you get in here?” Bracket demanded.

  “I needed a place to rest. It’s difficult for me to stand for too long.”

  He sat down again, somewhat heavily, using his free hand to unbutton the cowries on his jacket and remove a slip of paper. He handed it to Bracket. “You sent me a message about an artifact you found.”

  Bracket looked at the man again. He had just sent the message—at least that’s what it felt like. He had expected a reply eventually, but not to meet the man in person. How had he gotten there so quickly?

  “I don’t recall sending you an invitation.”

  “We’ve had a problem with the uplink near Yaoundé for the past few days. So I hopped in my plane.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Didn’t think to let me know you were coming?”

  “There was no way to send you a message. Sadly, jet travel can move more quickly than a message these days.”

  Bracket was still reeling from the intrusion into his office. Bodyguard or not, Olufunmi should not have bypassed Op-Sec so easily.

  “Forgive me for being forward,” the man continued, “but do you have it?”

  “Have what?”

  He stabbed his finger into the printout. “The artifact you wrote me about.”

  “It’s not here. First, I need you to explain yourself.”

  “I am at your disposal, as they say.”

  “Call off your man here. He’s making me uncomfortable.”

  Olufunmi nodded at the bodyguard. “Wait by the plane, Clarence.”

  “By the plane? That’s too far away for me to protect you—”

  Olufunmi banged his cane on the ground: “By the plane!”

  The bodyguard turned and left the facility, giving Bracket an angry look on the way out.

  “Clarence is a former Springbok. Played sixteen games for his country before a fly-half knocked out his knee. He responds to the coaching mentality.”

  Bracket was relieved that the bodyguard had left the room, but he was still wary of Olufunmi. “We found two artifacts.”

  “Two? You only sent me a photo of one.”

  “That’s because one of them was stolen from us. We found both of them while building the facility you’re in right now.”

  Olufunmi looked about with appreciation. “Is that right? This must have been quite an undertaking. It’s very impressive. Only I doubt a meteorite came from this area. There have been no known recordings of meteorites striking northern Nigeria. In all likelihood it came from somewhere else, transported across the Sahara perhaps.”

  “Could be. You know something about meteorites?”

  Bracket was racking his brain to remember what his friend Onur in Houston had said about this man. He was obviously wealthy, but his friend hadn’t said anything about that, certainly nothing about a private jet.

  “I was a scientist at NASA’s Lunar Geology Lab in Houston. I’d like to think that I made some modest discoveries during my time there.”

  “But you’re not living there anymore.”

  “Oh no, I’ve relocated to South Africa. That’s my home now.”

  “You weren’t hit by the Flare?”

  “Of course. But the old apartheid mentality remains. The country still thinks of itself as being cut off, a trauma, if you will. Certain transformers were shielded, and the solar grids survived. You could even say that I was in the right place at the right time.”

  Another thing: Bracket could see that one side of the man’s face was slow to move, or not slow—paralyzed. His right arm appeared to be paralyzed too, but the other half seemed to be functioning all right. Bracket had a million things to do, and he wanted to know if the scientist could tell him anything about the artifact he had found, but he didn’t like the fact that the man had so easily bypassed Op-Sec. He mistrusted pushy people as a matter of course.

  “I can see that I’ve interrupted your schedule, Mr. Bracket. I have no desire to get in the way—we can wait until you’ve finished your work for the day before you show me the artifact.” He smiled a half-smile that must have taken a lot of effort. “I’m eager to see your simulation tank.”

  “I don’t have time to give you a tour.”

  “I’m happy to follow along. I promise not to get in the way.”

&
nbsp; Rich pushy people were even worse. The two scientists moved slowly down the corridor, Dr. Olufunmi leaning heavily on his cane to prevent his bad foot from dragging along the ground. Bracket pointed out the hyperbaric chamber, which would be used by the divers in the case of decompression sickness; the briefing room; and the diving equipment room.

  “This is all excellent,” Dr. Olufunmi kept on saying. “All excellent. It’s like a modernized version of the NBL in Houston.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Many times. I visited whenever I had a free chance to watch the simulations. It’s where they practiced before launching the Hubble the first time. I saw many of those test runs.”

  “Then you probably saw me too.”

  “Oh no, that was too long ago. I left in 1993.”

  They reached the entrance to the changing rooms, where two astronauts were getting ready for their next simulation. Bracket held out a hand to block the scientist. “I can’t let you in unless you tell me more about what you’re doing here, and more importantly, how you got here. You can’t just fly into Nigeria Spaceport without high-level clearance.”

  Dr. Olufunmi drew his breath in, suddenly annoyed. “I doubt you would understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s of a highly technical nature.”

  “I’m the director of this facility. I can handle technical issues pretty well.”

  “But you don’t have a PhD.”

  “You’d better start talking or I’ll put you back on that plane.”

  Something in the tone irked him, the implication being not only that he didn’t have a PhD but he could never achieve one. The structural failures of his people imputed to him.

  “I can see that you took offense,” Olufunmi said. It did not feel like an apology. He curled over suddenly as if in pain, leaning on his cane. “Can we sit somewhere?”

  Bracket grabbed two chairs from the briefing room—where the astronauts were now receiving their orders for the day before the EVA—and set them down in the hallway.

  “You’ve got five minutes.”

  “All right. Five minutes. That should be enough time. I suppose I should start at the beginning. I should have been here twenty-five years ago, because I was one of the scientists recruited to lead Bello’s program.”

  “What program? I’m a part of Bello’s program.” But he was remembering now something that Josephine had told him. The last time, she had said. Bello had done something wrong the last time.

  “You’re a part of his second program. What else do you know about Bello?”

  “I know he was a whistleblower who was jailed, a man who exposed the human rights violations in this country. He’s now one of the most powerful politicians in Nigeria.”

  “That’s right, he unearthed the Ibeji counterterrorism organization. That’s the official story. What you have failed to ask is why Bello was arrested in the first place.”

  There it was again: the professorial tone. The man was determined to make a student out of him.

  “The official story does not include the part about how Bello himself was stealing money from the government. His dream was to create a space program in Nigeria, and he had planned to do so with funds he’d hidden from his own department, funds that were tied to oil revenues. He invited scientists like me to come run the program for him. I was to be stationed in Jos, but others were supposed to be stationed here.”

  “So you’re claiming that he was a criminal. That’s quite a story.”

  “That is the simplest explanation but not the correct one. You must still be new to Nigeria. The ministers in power were equally corrupt. They weren’t worried about Bello stealing money so much as how he intended to use it—to build a space program. He planned to invest the money back in his people. It would have given him a real shot at joining the political elite.” Olufunmi winced again in pain, but Bracket felt no need comfort him. “The timing could not have been worse. Abiola won the general election, and the government clamped down on all opposition. Canceled the elections. They placed Bello under house arrest. And the Ibeji operation killed everyone he had recruited.”

  “But not you?”

  Olufunmi slowly unbuttoned his dress shirt with his good hand. He peeled back the seam and showed Bracket three scars that curled around his body, the skin thick and striated. “I survived.”

  “That does not explain what you’re doing here. I sent you a message about an artifact I found. I didn’t invite you here.”

  “I’ve known Nurudeen Bello for twenty-five years. He is all the security clearance I need. He knew about my expertise on meteorites and approved my flight.”

  Bracket caught the lie. He’d never told Bello about the meteorite. He took a long look at the doctor slumped before him, and for all the dignity he was striving to impart, Bracket sensed another, more desperate need lurking beneath. The man’s wounds were more than physical. He seemed like someone who was still picking up the pieces after something had shattered him; whether it was the space program or the physical wounds, Bracket couldn’t tell. Anyway, there was no way to verify the doctor’s story because Bello had disappeared.

  “All right, Doctor.”

  Olufunmi’s eyes lit up. “You’ll show me the artifact?”

  “First I’m going to do my job.”

  “Of course! I won’t tell anyone. I’ll only watch.”

  Bracket went through his work plan for the day as the doctor shadowed him. Olufunmi asked numerous questions about the simulation and the qualifications of the astronauts in the water, pleased beyond measure.

  “It happened,” he kept muttering. “It truly happened. Bello did it.”

  Dr. Olufunmi avoided eye contact with the other staff in the operations room, wary of their attention, almost as if trying to stay out of view. This was the fifth time Bracket had watched the simulation and three more were scheduled that week, but Olufunmi celebrated each maneuver with joy. “Fantastic!”

  Bracket normally didn’t speak to the astronauts directly and instead monitored the various machines. The same people speaking to the astronauts in the water would remain in contact with them in space, only there wouldn’t be divers hovering like pixies to protect them. And they would shift to the Nest—Josephine’s mission control room—during the actual mission.

  “You probably think I’m too old to have any interest in outer space,” Olufunmi said quietly, “because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. like you.”

  “Never said that.”

  “Nonsense. Americans think of others traveling into space as a concession. When I was ten years old, I volunteered for Operation Moonwatch in Agege, outside Lagos. It was run by Dr. Whipple at the Smithsonian, a way for amateurs to help track satellites in the night sky. My mother bought me some binoculars—for a king’s ransom at the time—and I would climb onto my neighbor’s veranda at night to spot satellites. That was when Agege was still farmland. If I spotted a satellite, I’d wire in a message to Olifantsfontein in South Africa.” He smiled. “That was before the days of radar, when scientists hadn’t solved the acquisition problem and thought that the best way to track a satellite was to spot it with an optical telescope. There were five thousand of us volunteers all around the world. That is when I knew I wanted to go into space.”

  “I thought you were a lunar geologist.”

  Olufunmi scowled and straightened his tie. “Everyone has the right to imagine.”

  Aware that he’d somehow embarrassed him, Bracket volunteered: “I guess I caught the bug at a young age too.”

  “You’re still young.”

  “I’ve got a daughter who’s twenty-four years old. You should tell her that.” Bracket laughed. “Anyway, my mother used to work for Raytheon up in Massachusetts. They hired her to weave core rope for Apollo’s memory guidance computers. She joked that she was one of America’s first space programmers.”

  He’d visited that Raytheon plant many times too and been thrilled by the acres of advanced m
achinery and precision. That was before his father’s diagnosis, Bracket recalled, when his parents had seemed immortal. But he suppressed that thought. Nothing good could come of that memory. It was hard-woven into him, tangled and knotted, with no programmer to delete it. Instead Bracket told a few more tales about his mother and her love for everything African. The dashikis, Kwanzaa holidays, forced greetings in Swahili.

  Olufunmi did not seem too impressed by these tales. It might have been that he didn’t want his dream to mingle with Bracket’s—one African, one black American. The destination was the same but the vision was a deeply personal and creative act. It was like being deep asleep and having a total stranger walk into your dream.

  Bracket ran through some checks with the operations room staff, and when he looked back at the doctor, he was asleep, his head drooped to his side. That was when Josephine called Bracket on his Geckofone. He could see staff in the Nest scurrying about behind her. She was wearing thick black-rimmed glasses, having shed her contact lenses. “Where have you been, Kwesi?”

  Bracket used a Kalibari identity, as Ini had advised him. “I’ve been in the operations room, right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “I’m sending you a new work plan for the day.”

  “Why? We’re on schedule.”

  “Schedule’s changed.”

  Bracket stepped into the hallway, motioning with his chin for one of the other staff to watch Dr. Olufunmi.

  “I think Bello’s in real trouble,” Josephine said. “He appears to have stopped using his G-fone altogether. I’ve confirmed the Jarumi are returning—and soon. We don’t know how much time we have, so we need to advance the test launch. It’s happening in seventy-two hours.”

  “You’re going to cause a revolt after the hours you’ve already been forcing people to work,” Bracket warned.

  “What do you want me to do?” she hissed. “Wait until a group of murderers attacks us?”

  “No,” he said, thinking it through. “Tell everyone Bello’s going to be overseeing the launch personally. They need inspiration.”

  “But it’s not true.”