Rosewater

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Rosewater Page 11

by Tade Thompson


  I take more nuts and say, ‘I’ll think about it.’

  I already know I’ll work with him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rosewater: 2066

  A few days after the Opening there’s a parade of sorts.

  You know about this. You have seen the photos and the almanacs and the Nimbus entries. There is even reconstruction art now. The healed are miraculous, the deformed a tragedy, and the reanimates a horror, but the reconstructed are perhaps comedy or … whatever. The bank is closed for two hours. This is how long it takes for the parade to pass. It will go all around Rosewater slowly, all day long. Closing the bank might seem unprofessional, but this is Nigeria.

  We all watch from above, us bank employees. Clement is kissing my ass, bringing me coffee. I don’t know why. Hero worship? I’m not that impressive. I’m suspicious. Bola has a cough, says it kept her awake the night before, seems unrested but has time to murmur, ‘I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee.’

  Down below someone drums. Not stretched goatskin. Upturned plastic containers. It begins. The lead: a man with wings. He has latched hawk wings to cuts in his back and the xenoforms smoothed it over, probably built muscle and blood vessels to make it work. The wings are unimpressive but the man seems elated. I think briefly of the gryphon and Molara pops into my mind. Not that she’s in the xenosphere, just the thought of her.

  A woman who might have been bow-legged or something now has knees which point backwards. She seems like a statue of Caliban or a demon. A man hobbles along with a gigantic goitre hanging down from his neck as large as a football. There are scars on it to suggest he has tried to cut it open. He probably expected the goitre to shrink, but what I think has happened is the xenoforms have instead rebuilt the goitre bigger and better.

  There are men and women with multiple and displaced orifices, like a girl with two mouths, one above the other. The pattern of scars makes me think she tried to remodel her lips. There’s a guy on a trolley dragged by two teenagers. I assume it’s a guy. What’s left of him is a jumble of too many limbs and tufts of hair here and there. I count five hands and three feet, all left inexplicably. A single, desperate eye looked out from the central fleshy mass, leaking tears. I cannot theorise as to how he ended up like that. Industrial accident involving more than one person, perhaps.

  Many wrap themselves up like Egyptian mummies, hiding whatever grotesque changes they have brought upon themselves. People throw them money or laugh at them. There is a periphery of the curious normal following them: kids, some police, jesters, Area Boys.

  I get up to leave.

  ‘You haven’t finished your coffee,’ says Clement. His eyebrows are raised in that hopeful-expectant way. I want to pull on his metal-encrusted braid just to see if his façade of niceness will crack, but I resist. What does he want from me?

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  I go into the toilet on this level. I walk all the way to the end stall. There is nobody else with me. The smell of strong disinfectant mixes with that of cheap liquid soap and urinal cakes. I enter the stall, flip down the lid and sit on the seat. What I need to do is tricky, especially from here, but I don’t want to wait. I have been worried all night, thinking about what Femi Alaagomeji said about sensitives getting sick and dying. If it occurred to me at home I would have done it there, but it did not.

  I close my eyes, and put out a call. It is complicated because I have to shield the call from reaching the ears of Bola, Clement, and any of the other bank sensitives. This also contravenes the agreement I signed with the bank not to carry out any personal xenosphere activities on the premises. Since I don’t really give a shit about the job, I’m not concerned about what documents I may have signed.

  I send a single, simple message, a broadcast.

  Who is out there?

  I feel it go out in a wave, and I feel it bounce off the neurotransmitter blocks I place on local distribution. I open my eyes and colours flow downwards across my field of vision like an insane Van Gogh. Someone walks in and the footsteps stop before a stream of fluid begins and there is a hiss of an automated flushing system on the urinal. The man farts and I hear the tinkle of his belt as he shakes off. He leaves without washing his hands. I close my eyes again and my query is still flowing outwards. Five minutes, ten minutes, no response. Granted, I have not had to do this in a long time, and I am in a firewalled location, but the firewall is down, watching the procession of the grotesque. The problem is worse than I thought.

  ‘Hello, Gryphon,’ says Molara. She has appeared and is followed by a swarm of houseflies. They do not land on her, but fly around her. Her wings are fully restored since our last … encounter. She does not talk, but kneels in front of me and crawls under my forepaws. She folds her wings to fit, and I feel her mouth on me. It is so fast and unexpected that I gasp and open my eyes. The colours swirl and shift and it is hard to tell which is reality and which is xenosphere. Where is the coat hook on the door? There are flies everywhere, crawling over the door, orbiting the overhead light like planets, dropping into the gap between my collar and skin. I feel them just as vividly as I feel her mouth and—

  And there is a problem with Molara’s self-image. It is too distinct, too together, too unified —

  And I feel each of my hairs stand on end and instead of a gentle mixture of colours in my mind it becomes a riot, a splash of one against the other without admixture. My blood is a cricket’s hiss in my head. After la petit mort Molara is gone, but left in her place is a feeling of mouldering doubt. I clean myself and think.

  What you think of as your self is actually many things. At the core is your true self, of which you may not even be fully aware. Wrapped around this are several false selves that are used at different times in different situations, social-selves that serve the function of translating your true self to the world. We swap between these effortlessly as we grow up, but they are elaborate fictions. Or they are real but alternative selves. It depends on where you stand epistemologically, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is when I look into someone I see these shifting selves as blurred boundaries of the mental image. Molara’s boundaries are too distinct.

  It might not mean anything. I’ve met two or three autistic children with vivid self/non-self demarcations, and sometimes a member of the Machinery, but this is different. Molara is not just a wild sensitive with succubus tendencies.

  Something else is going on here.

  Later that day I have to fight for my life.

  I am walking towards the train station, wondering if having sex in the xenosphere constitutes cheating. I am not paying attention to my surroundings and essentially sleepwalk to the ticket office. Utopicity gives off an orange hue, which it does at times. There is a kaleidoscopic colour display to rival the aurora borealis on nights like this.

  I am on my way to Ubar to continue the interrogation, but I decide to surprise Aminat with some flowers. I am waiting at her gate when some men walk up to me from a parked car. The driver remains inside, and I can see his hands on the wheel. It’s not clear to me if the engine is running. The two men stay on either side of me, as if waiting for a response to the doorbell.

  ‘Hello,’ says the one to my left, and I turn to him. He is slightly shorter than I, with smooth, dark skin, short hair, small eyes, and accompanied by a cloud of cologne. The other guy is taller and broader than I, with the look of hired muscle. A bodyguard then.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  ‘Delivering flowers?’ he asks.

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The man looks round the street, and back at me. ‘You don’t know who I am?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t get out much and I don’t watch TV.’

  Whatever he is about to say is lost to me because I feel pain all over my body and my limbs jerk like they are not my own. The flowers fall to the ground and my head follows. I watch three pe
tals settle before losing consciousness.

  When I come to, my first thought is that I have been tasered. I’ve been tasered before and the feeling is similar. My muscles ache and there is blood in my mouth. I did not dream. I am in a dim room, ten, maybe fifteen feet square. I have not been here long because I am on a stone floor, unfettered, but the parts of me in contact with it do not feel cold. I suspect I may have been thrown here and woken on impact. I am lying on my face and when I get up I am relieved to find none of my bones broken. I move my jaw around, test the range of movement in my limbs. I spit into the corner. There is a window, but it is covered in old newspapers. Light makes its way through, but not a lot. I walk to it and pick at the unravelling edges of the paper. There are bars across the window and under the paper there is a dilute smearing of whitewash. I will not be escaping that way. There is a distinct smell of rotten eggs. They have taken my shoes and I regret not wearing my gun holster. I test the door, which is made of heavy oak. There is nothing on the floor but small pebbles and dirt. I idly wonder if I can use the pebbles, collect them, rip my clothes, make a cosh, an idea squeezed out of the layers of time-dust covering my self-defence training. I’ve picked up three before I realise they are not made of stone. I examine them in the sickly light.

  They are bone fragments.

  I drop them in disgust. They are all over the floor and this does not bode well for me. I feel for the xenosphere. In an effort to sound proof the room, the builders have limited the airflow. I can’t reach anything outside the room. Within the room, though, there are echoes of previous occupants. Residual neurotransmitter patterns. I relax, breathe, and taste the channels.

  I feel fear, death, and predation. I see snatches of faces: black, white, Pakistani, male and female, all terrified. I can feel each person reaching for images of their loved ones. I can tell that they all died in here, some begging, some unconscious, some fighting, all in fear. The last thing they see is a pale demonic image. Distorted and different for each person, but that is normal as well. We don’t all see the same thing, especially when fearful. This does not fill me with reassurance. When the images and emotions become recursive I tune out. No new information.

  The door clicks, clacks, and slowly opens. I back away from it. The smooth guy and his bodyguard come in. Smooth guy has a blue rope wrapped around his right hand and it trails behind him and up, as if attached to a balloon.

  ‘Why have you been visiting my wife?’ asks smooth guy.

  Oh.

  ‘Do you mean ex-wife?’ I ask.

  Bodyguard slaps my face. It feels like a punch. I hate violence, especially when it’s done to me. The smell of rotten eggs follows them through the open door and mingles with his cologne. It is sickening in the extreme. Someone is playing “Gimmie The Loot” somewhere in the house.

  ‘Aminat is not for you,’ the smooth guy says. ‘Not at all for you.’

  I am not going to argue. I get into the bodyguard first. His thoughts are simplistic, but he has a clearer image of … Oh, fuck. Rotten eggs, bone fragments, pale demon, balloon. I know what it is. I send signals to the bodyguard’s brain. I convince his brain that he is underwater. He begins to choke, and he holds his breath. He thrashes about. I enter his employer’s mind, but as soon as I do that he lets go of the rope. I know what’s coming next.

  It sweeps through the narrow door, knocking Aminat’s ex-husband down as it flies into my cell and floats to the ceiling. The rope is around its neck and it snarls wordlessly out of my reach.

  It’s a floater. S45 taught me all about them, but I have never seen one. I’d rather not be with one right now, truth be told.

  It’s pale, like a white man drained of all blood. It has elongated limbs, claws for grasping prey, long, sharp homodont teeth, large compound eyes, and is mostly devoid of hair except a few strands randomly placed on its body like an afterthought. The penis between its legs is almost vestigial. It flies, but without wings. There is a gasbag between its shoulders. A chemical reaction creates gas that causes it to float soundlessly.

  Oh, and floaters are carnivorous.

  I assume they use it to dispose of undesirables, hence all the ones who died in this room. It is bony and its belly is entirely concave. It’s starving. It spots me, but is deciding between me, the bodyguard, and Aminat’s husband. It’s about four feet away from me and I do not wait for it to make up its mind. I run out the door. I hear screaming, but I do not look back.

  I am in a large boys’ quarters. During colonial times in Nigeria these were slave quarters. We thought this is how all houses should be built, and so all big post-colonial homes have a satellite bungalow. I unlock the door and find myself in a compound with twelve-foot walls. It is still afternoon, and the sun bears down on me. I have no phone and no shoes. Behind me, there are sounds of violence and conflict. No more screams. Sorry, Aminat, I may have killed your husband.

  The architecture of the main house is all slopes and strange ramparts. I cannot scale the wall, it’s too high, but I can follow it to find the gate.

  This is the house of a bandit and he is bound to have dozens of armed men in residence. I find an alcove and press myself into the space. I start to access the xenosphere, but I hear breaking and rending of wood and glass. The floater breaks free of the BQ. There is blood on the lower half of his face and on his claws. He sniffs and looks in my direction at the same time. Floaters don’t see well, but they do combine visual and olfactory stimulus with auditory input to create a devastating composite.

  He charges me, the rope from around his neck flying in the air behind him like a torn umbilical cord. The inflated gas bag looks like a fleshy parachute or rucksack and the silent flight makes me underestimate the speed. He is in my face before I can react, and grips me with both fore and hind claws. As he lifts me from the ground I ignore the needle like pain of his grasp and place both hands under his chin, pushing back. I hope this will keep him from biting me, though the blood and the crazy jarring motion makes it difficult to keep my grip. A gurgling sound and powerful stench comes from the bladder. We rise slowly because of the combined weight. He may just want to raise me up and drop me, dash me against the concrete to make a softer and more cooperative prey. I try to see his mind, and that is a mistake. I feel the raw, unknowable alien mind and it stuns me. Maybe it uses different neurotransmitters or the direction of impulse is different, but connecting sends a shaft of pain through me. It is like a head full of broken glass. His thoughts or impulses or whatever pick at my neurones one at a time and I nearly lose my grip on the chin. He snaps his jaw and through my headache I see flecks of flesh between his teeth.

  Just as we rise above the fence the floater’s head bursts into pink mush. I hear the gunshots seconds later and its limbs are still jerking. The remnants of the rope fall away. The floater shits, adding a surreal and human smell to the mix. I still feel the vibration of the bullet impact in my arms.

  The floater is headless and dead, but I am still hanging fifteen feet in the air because the gasbag still works. I am holding on to blood-smeared, slippery, jerking, dead flesh and some motherfucker is shooting at me. I am at the mercy of the wind which is picking up. As I drift away from the property, gunshots zip by and I hear shouts. The plot behind Aminat’s husband’s house is marshland. I see the dome of Utopicity in the distance, to my right. I’m not far from Ubar and my employers will be looking for me.

  I slip, reach for the floaters ankle, catch it, but am unable to hold on because of the blood. I fall and land hard on a mound of moist earth.

  I don’t lose consciousness, but I chose not to move. The creature hangs in the air, bleeding on me. I am horrified, and sputter to clear my mouth, but my pain is more than my revulsion. I stay there, baptised in alien blood. After a time, this stops. A mammal investigates me, something furry and friendly, with a cold nose, but I shoo it away. I plan to get up and run through the swamp like a movie fugitive, but I must have passed out because I am suddenly aware that the sun has moved and shad
ows are longer.

  ‘Mr. Kaaro, are you there?’ says a voice on a public address system. Nobody calls me that. I sit up, and fall back down. Pain.

  ‘He’s over there!’

  Someone obviously has spotted me from the movement, but I cannot move or fight anymore. I am tired, hurt, and out of energy. Fuck it.

  I feel for the minds around me, preparing for a last defence, some kind of mass-seizure effect that Ileri taught me.

  Aminat, what have you done?

  Aside from a science prodigy in Afro-puffs, you have been the most troublesome woman I have ever been involved with.

  When I touch the first mind, I find it to be friendly. It is the cavalry. S45 agents have come for me, tracking my chip.

  ‘About fucking time,’ I say aloud. I lie back down.

  I am in a hospital.

  I’m not hurt that bad, no broken bones or anything, but I do need a bit of time to rest and heal. Lots of soft tissue injury, sprains, infections where the floater bit into me. Incidentally, they found a mildly raised blood pressure. Nothing major, but enough to concern the doctors. I’m not complaining. The last week has been a little more exciting than I usually prefer.

  Aminat’s husband is still alive.

  ‘Is this him?’ says the agent who comes to my bedside to debrief me. He shoves a photo in my face.

  I nod.

  ‘His name is Shesan Williams. He’s a local criminal linked to a number of investigations, but no convictions in adulthood. He kept the unauthorised life form like a pet. The bones you found were both human and animal. They generally fed the floater pigs, but Williams may have used it for body disposal. Can’t prove anything yet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We can prove that some human bones are there, but not who they are. We can’t prove that Williams fed the humans to the floater. At most we can charge him with keeping an illegal life form. The relevant law concerns genetically modified lifeforms because there is no law about keeping extraterrestrials.’

 

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