The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6

by Libba Bray

  Salt instead of sugar. Iveren loved looking as though she had given the family its first son. It looked good as they lined up in church. But she had no milk for him. Jacob Terhemba Shawo spent his first five years loveless in a war.

  My father died three days before Matthew’s first child was born. Matthew and his wife brought her to our house to give our mother something joyful to think about.

  The baby’s Christian name was Isobel. Her baby suit had three padded Disney princesses on it and her hair was a red down.

  Matthew chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mamamimi, this can’t be Grandpa, it’s a girl.”

  Raphael smiled. “Maybe she’s Grandpa born in woman’s body.”

  Matthew’s wife clucked her tongue. She didn’t like us and she certainly didn’t like what she’d heard about Raphael. She drew herself up tall and said, “Her name is Iveren.”

  Matthew stared at his hands; Mamamimi froze; Raphael began to dance with laughter.

  “It was my mother’s name,” the wife said.

  “Ah!” cried Raphael. “Two of them, Matthew. Two Iverens! Oh, that is such good luck for you!”

  I saw from my mother’s unmoving face, and from a flick of the fingers, a jettisoning, that she had consigned the child to its mother’s family and Matthew to that other family, too. She never took a proper interest in little Iveren.

  But Grandmother must have thought that they had named the child after her. Later, she went to live with them, which was exactly the blessing I would wish for Matthew.

  Raphael became quieter, preoccupied, as if invisible flies buzzed around his head. I told myself we were working too hard. Both of us had been applying for oil company scholarships. I wanted both of us to go together to the best universities: Lagos or Ibadan. I thought of all those strangers, in states that were mainly Igbo or Yoruba or maybe even Muslim. I was sure we were a team.

  In the hall bookcase a notice appeared. DO NOT TOUCH MY BOOKS. I DON’T INTERFERE WITH YOUR JOB. LEAVE ALL BOOKS IN ORDER.

  They weren’t his alone. “Can I look at them, at least?”

  He looked at me balefully. “If you ask first.”

  I checked his downloads and they were all porn. I saw the terrible titles of the files, which by themselves were racial and sexual abuse. A good Christian boy, I was shocked and dismayed. I said something to him and he puffed up, looking determined. “I don’t live by other people’s rules.”

  He put a new password onto our machine so that I could not get into it. My protests were feeble.

  “I need to study, Raphael.”

  “Study is beyond you,” he said. “Study cannot help you.”

  At the worst possible time for him, his schoolteachers went on strike because they weren’t being paid. Raphael spent all day clicking away at his keyboard, not bothering to dress. His voice became milder, faint and sweet, but he talked only in monosyllables. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Not angry, a bit as though he was utterly weary.

  That Advent, Mamamimi, Andrew, Matthew and family went to the cathedral, but my mother asked me to stay behind to look after Raphael.

  “You calm him,” Mamamimi said, and for some reason that made my eyes sting. They went to church, and I was left alone in the main room. I was sitting on the old sofa watching some TV trash about country bumpkins going to Lagos.

  Suddenly Raphael trotted out of our bedroom in little Japanese steps wearing one of my mother’s dresses. He had folded a matching cloth around his head into an enormous flower shape, his face ghostly with makeup. My face must have been horrified: it made him chatter with laughter. “What the well-dressed diva is wearing this season.”

  All I thought then was, Raphael, don’t leave me. I stood up and I pushed him back toward the room; like my mother, I was afraid of visitors. “Get it off, get it off, what are you doing?”

  “You don’t like it?” He batted his eyelashes.

  “No I do not! What’s got into you?”

  “Raphael is not a nurse! Raphael does not have to be nice!”

  I begged him to get out of the dress. I kept looking at my telephone for the time, worried when they would be back. Above all else I didn’t want Mama to know he had taken her things.

  He stepped out of the dress, and let the folded headdress trail behind him, falling onto the floor. I scooped them up, checked them for dirt or makeup, and folded them up as neatly as I could.

  I came back to the bedroom and he was sitting in his boxer shorts and flip-flops, staring at his screen and with complete unconcern was doing something to himself.

  I asked the stupidest question. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? It’s fun. You should join in.” Then he laughed. He turned the screen toward me. In the video, a man was servicing a woman’s behind. I had no idea people did such things. I howled and covered my mouth, laughing in shock. I ran out of the room and left him to finish.

  Without Raphael I had no one to go to and I could not be seen to cry. I went outside and realized that I was alone. What could I say to my mother? Our Raphael is going mad? For her he had always been mad. Only I had really liked Raphael and now he was becoming someone else, and I was so slow I would only ever be me.

  He got a strange disease that made his skin glisten but a fever did not register. It was what my father had done: get illnesses that were not quite physical. He ceased to do anything with his hair. It twisted off his head in knots and made him look like a beggar.

  He was hardly ever fully dressed. He hung around the house in underwear and flip-flops. I became his personal Mamamimi, trying to stop the rest of the family finding out, trying to keep him inside the room. In the middle of the night, he would get up. I would sit up, see he wasn’t there, and slip out of the house trying to find him, walking around our unlit streets. This is not wise in our locality. The neighborhood boys patrol for thieves or outsiders, and they can be rough if they do not recognize your face. “I’m Patrick, I moved into the house above the school. I’m trying to find my brother Raphael.”

  “So how did you lose him?”

  “He’s not well, he’s had a fever, he wanders.”

  “The crazy family,” one of them said.

  Their flashlights dazzled my eyes, but I could see them glance at each other. “He means that dirty boy.” They said that of Raphael?

  “He’s my brother. He’s not well.”

  I would stay out until they brought him back to me, swinging their AK-47s. He could so easily have been shot. He was wearing almost nothing, dazed like a sleepwalker, and his hair in such a mess. Raphael had always been vain. His skin Vaselined with the scent of roses, the fine shirt with no tails designed to hang outside the trousers and hide his tummy, his nails manicured. Now he looked like a laborer who needed a bath.

  Finally one night, the moon was too bright and the boys brought him too close to our house. My mother ran out of the groaning gate. “Patrick, Patrick, what is it?”

  “These boys have been helping us find Raphael,” was all I said. I felt ashamed and frustrated because I had failed to calm him, to find him myself, to keep the secret locked away, especially from Mamamimi.

  When my mother saw him she whispered, “Wild man!” and it was like a chill wind going through me. She had said what I knew but did not let myself acknowledge. Again, it was happening again, first to the father, then to the son.

  I got him to bed, holding both his arms and steering him. Our room was cool as if we were on a mountain. I came back out into the heat and Mamamimi was waiting, looking old. “Does he smoke gbana?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t think so. “But I no longer know him.”

  In my mind I was saying, Raphael, come back. Sometimes my mother would beseech me with her eyes to do something. Such a thing should not befall a family twice.

  Makurdi lives only because of its river. The Benue flows into the great Niger, gray-green with fine beaches that are being dug up for concrete and currents so treacherous they look like molded jellie
s welling up from below. No one swims there, except at dusk, in the shallows, workmen go to wash, wading out in their underwear.

  Raphael would disappear at sunset and go down the slopes to hymn the men. It was the only time he dressed up: yellow shirt, tan slacks, good shoes. He walked out respectfully onto the sand and sang about the men, teased them, and chortled. He would try to take photographs of them. The men eyed him in fear, or ignored him like gnarled trees, or sometimes threw pebbles at him to make him go away. The things he said were irresponsible. Matthew and I would be sent to fetch him back. Matthew hated it. He would show up in his bank suit, with his car that would get sand in it. “Let him stay there! He only brings shame on himself!”

  But we could not leave our brother to have stones thrown at him. He would be on the beach laughing at his own wild self, singing paeans of praise for the beauty of the bathers, asking their names, asking where they lived. Matthew and I would be numb from shame. “Come home, come home,” we said to him, and to the laborers, “Please excuse us, we are good Christians, he is not well.” We could not bring ourselves to call him our brother. He would laugh and run away. When we caught him, he would sit down on the ground and make us lift him up and carry him back to Matthew’s car. He was made of something other than flesh; his bones were lead, his blood mercury.

  “I can’t take more of this,” said Matthew.

  It ended so swiftly that we were left blinking. He disappeared from the house as usual; Mamamimi scolded Andrew to keep out of it and rang Matthew. He pulled up outside our gates, so back we went past the university, and the zoo where Baba had taken us as kids, then down beyond the old bridge.

  This time was the worst, beyond anything. He was wearing one of Mamamimi’s dresses, sashaying among construction workers with a sun umbrella, roaring with laughter as he sang.

  He saw us and called waving. “M’sugh! My brothers! My dear brothers! I am going swimming.”

  He ran away from us like a child, into the river. He fought his way into those strong green currents, squealing like a child, perhaps with delight, as the currents cooled him. The great dress blossomed out then sank. He stumbled on pebbles underfoot, dipped under the water, and was not seen again.

  “Go get him!” said Matthew.

  I said nothing, did nothing.

  “Go on, you’re the only one who likes him.” He had to push me.

  I nibbled at the edge of the currents. I called his name in a weak voice as if I really didn’t want him back. I was angry with him as if he was now playing a particularly annoying game. Finally I pushed my way in partly so that Matthew would tell our mother that I’d struggled to find him. I began to call his name loudly, not so much in the hope of finding him as banishing this new reality. Raphael. Raphael, I shouted, meaning this terrible thing cannot be, not so simply, not so quickly. Finally I dove under the water. I felt the current pull and drag me away by my heels. I fought my way back to the shore but I knew I had not done enough, swiftly enough. I knew that he had already been swept far away.

  On the bank, Matthew said, “Maybe it is best that he is gone.” Since then, I have not been able to address more than five consecutive words to him.

  That’s what the family said, if not in words. Best he was gone. The bookcase was there with its notice. I knew we were cursed. I knew we would all be swept away.

  Oh story, Raphael seemed to say to me. You just want to be miserable so you have an excuse to fail.

  We need a body to bury, I said to his memory.

  It doesn’t make any difference; nobody in this family will mourn. They have too many worries of their own. You’ll have to take care of yourself now. You don’t have your younger brother to watch out for you.

  The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot, unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.

  I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.

  Whenever I felt weak or low or lonely, Raphael spoke inside my indented head. I kept his books in order for him. The chemistry book, the human genetics book. I went out into the broken courtyard and started to lift the iron bars with balls of concrete that he had made. Now I look like the muscular champion on his netbook. Everything I am, I am because of my brother.

  I did not speak much to anyone else. I didn’t want to. Somewhere what is left of Raphael’s lead and mercury is entwined with reeds or glistens in sand.

  To pay for your application for a scholarship in those days you had to buy a scratch card from a bank. I had bought so many. I did not even remember applying to the Benue State Scholarship Board. They gave me a small stipend, enough if I stayed at home and did construction work. I became one of the workmen in the shallows.

  Ex-colleagues of my father had found Matthew a job as a clerk in a bank in Jos. Matthew went to live with Uncle Emmanuel. Andrew’s jaw set, demanding to be allowed to go with him. He knew where things were going. So did Mamamimi, who saw the sense and nodded quietly, yes. Matthew became Andrew’s father.

  We all lined up in the courtyard in the buzzing heat to let Matthew take the SUV, his inheritance. We waved good-bye as if half the family were just going for a short trip back to the home village or to the Chinese bakery to buy rolls. Our car pulled up the red hill past the church and they were gone. Mamamimi and I were alone with the sizzling sound of insects and heat and we all walked back into the house in the same way, shuffling flat-footed. We stayed wordless all that day. Even the TV was not turned on. In the kitchen, in the dark, Mamamimi said to me, “Why didn’t you go with them? Study at a proper university?” and I said, “Because someone needs to help you.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. Not long afterward she took her rusty green car and drove it back to Kawuye for the last time. She lived with Uncle Jacob and the elders. I was left alone in this whispering house.

  We had in our neglected, unpaid, strike-ridden campus a mathematician, a dusty and disordered man who reminded me of Raphael. He was an Idoma man called Thomas Aba. He came to Jide and me with his notebook and then unfolded a page of equations.

  These equations described, he said, how the act of observing events at a quantum level changed them. He turned the page. Now, he said, here is how those same equations describe how observing alters effects on the macro level.

  He had shown mathematically how the mere act of repeated observation changed the real world.

  We published in Nature. People wanted to believe that someone working things out for themselves could revolutionize cosmology with a single set of equations. Of all of us, Doubting Thomas was the genius. Tsinghua University in Beijing offered him a Professorship and he left us. Citations for our article avalanched; Google could not keep up. People needed to know why everything was shifting, needing to explain both the climate-change debacle and the end of miracles.

  Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it. Science undid itself, in an endless cycle.

  Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work. Who knows, maybe we will get faster-than-light travel after all?

  Thomas still writes to me about his work, though
it is the intellectual property of Tsinghua. He is now able to calculate how long it takes for observation to change things. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun is so rooted in the universe that it will take four thousand years to wear it out. What kind of paradigm will replace it? The Earth and the Sun and all the stars secretly overlap? Outside the four dimensions they all occupy the same single mathematical point?

  So many things exist only as metaphors and numbers. Atoms will take only fifty more years to disappear, taking with them quarks and muons and all the other particles. What the Large Hadron Collider will most accelerate is their demise.

  Thomas has calculated how long it will take for observation to wear out even his observation. Then, he says, the universe will once again be stable. History melts down and is restored.

  My fiancée is a simple country girl who wants a Prof for a husband. I know where that leads. To Mamamimi. Perhaps no bad thing. I hardly know the girl. She wears long dresses instead of jeans and has a pretty smile. My mother’s family knows her.

  The singing at the church has started, growing with the heat and sunlight. My beautiful suit wax-printed in blue and gold arches reflects the sunlight. Its cotton will be cool, cooler than all that lumpy knitwear from Indonesia.

  We have two weddings; one new, one old. So I go through it all twice: next week, the church and the big white dress. I will have to mime love and happiness; the photographs will be used for those framed tributes: “Patrick and Leticia: True Love Is Forever.” Matthew and Andrew will be here with their families for the first time in years and I find it hurts to have brothers who care nothing for me.

  I hear my father saying that my country wife had best be grateful for all that I give her. I hear him telling her to leave if she is not happy. This time, though, he speaks with my own voice.

  Will I slap the walls all night or just my own face? Will I go mad and dance for workmen in a woman’s dress? Will I make stews so fiery that only I can eat them? I look down at my body, visible through the white linen, the body I have made perfect to compensate for my imperfect brain.