3
Down and Out in Exile Park
Tade Thompson
I hadn’t heard from Cosmo for twelve years, so seeing him on my door stoop was . . . an event. With the bushy, uncombed hair, ratty beard, Steelers T-shirt, battered jeans, and army boots on his feet, any change in the wind blessed me with a pungent smell that told me his relationship with soap was tenuous.
“Can you do me a favor, Francis?” he said, like we were midconversation, like he hadn’t fallen off the edge of the map over a decade ago, like we were still friends.
“Really? No ‘hi, how are you?’ Cosmo?”
“It’s been a long time, Francis Cotillard. How are you? How’s the family? Can I ask you a favor?” Delivered in a flat monotone. He’d never been a warm, fuzzy person to start with.
“You coming in?”
He seemed to hesitate, but then he stepped past me into the house.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked.
“Exile Park.”
I fed him.
Exile Park. The rock bottom of rock bottom. I knew Cosmo had things bad, but this was a surprise.
I watched him shovel down the food. Microwaved rice and tilapia stew. He ate like people in war zones do, soldiers, correspondents, and the like, not pausing to speak, not fully chewing the food, just getting it into the stomach as efficiently as possible. I got him seconds before he could ask. I sat across from him, smoking.
Cosmo Adepitan. We went to university together, though always at the periphery of friendship. He was always the friend of a friend, so our orbits overlapped, and we knew of each other rather than knew each other. He was a socialist, maybe an anarchist back then, I can’t remember. I know his girlfriend at the time had a sugar daddy who happened to be an officer in the military. I know soldiers with guns came for him one night and he disappeared. Whether it was his politics or his woman that led to the attack was unclear, but he was never seen or heard from again. People thought he had been Erased.
“Nobody gets rich until nobody is poor,” I said.
“What?” asked Cosmo.
“Isn’t that what you say in Exile Park? Nobody gets rich until nobody is poor?”
Cosmo swallowed the last morsel the way he did the first, savoring nothing. He wiped his mouth against the back of his right hand and turned to me.
“Francis, can I ask a favor?”
I nodded.
“I need you to come see something.”
“In the Park?”
“Yes.”
“I’m never setting foot in there, Cosmo. Donna would kill me.”
“Bring her,” said Cosmo. “We could use her expertise.”
“It’s not that simple. We have a child now.”
“There are children in Exile Park. Your child won’t burst into flames.”
I giggled. “You clearly don’t know Janet.”
“Will you come?” Cosmo was always so earnest and he hadn’t changed.
“Can you tell me what it’s about?”
“I’ll tell you when you get there.”
I laughed, dragged on my cigarette.
“Well?”
“Let me talk to my family.”
“No,” said Donna. “That place is made of plastic. No. There’s microfibers in the water, even. No.”
Okay, Exile Park is and isn’t made of plastic.
Back in 2077, we had plastic mega-islets. Don’t ask me why they didn’t just call them islands. The convention was the country in whose national waters the mega-islet drifted was responsible for cleaning it up. Which sounded fair, but wasn’t. Most of the plastic came from highly industrialized nations, and when one drifted close to Lagos, Nigeria simply refused to play ball. They disavowed the mega-islet and the entire area, which was a risky thing to do. Anyone could plant a flag on it and claim the waters. Nobody did, but they could have.
This thing drifted sluggishly in the Gulf of Guinea for years. It was so big, you could see it from Tarkwa Bay and Victoria Island. It had its own ecosystem and the ocean flora and fauna, who waste nothing, accreted, claimed it as home, further tied it together. A lot of that part of Lagos was full of reclaimed land anyway, so you can see where this is going.
Donna was a consultant in public health or community medicine as she insisted on calling it. Cosmo knew this.
True story, Donna proposed to me by miming Marva Whitney’s What Do I Have to Do to Prove My Love to You. You had to be here. She was such a serious person most of the time, and I didn’t even know she took me that seriously in our sporadic relationship.
“You can come with me,” I said to her. “You’ll keep me out of trouble.”
“Where are we going?” asked Janet, sweeping in.
And that is how Cosmo got three of us to follow him back to Exile Park.
The one thing I remembered about Cosmo is he had a problem with figurative speech. He didn’t get metaphor. He had no imagination and I think he had no mental imagery at all. Aphantasia. As we made our way over water, Janet sketched his profile a number of times. She was excited and not taking no for an answer and I should have been harsher in my discipline, but I wasn’t. Life was hard enough and she was just a few bus stops away from adulthood where the usual horrors awaited. I would give her the things she asked for that I could give, all under Donna’s disapproving glances.
There were no checkpoints. The coast guard was not in evidence, and even if they were, nobody harassed those coming from or going to Exile Park, not even bribe-hungry Nigerian officials.
When the islet loomed, Janet changed her subject from Cosmo to the edifice. We were headed south and it was sunset, the dying light casting an orange hue on the west side, leaving much of the rest in shadow.
From this direction, at this distance, at this time of day, it looked like a natural rock formation poking accusingly into the sky. At God, maybe. A multitude of antennae gave it a hairy appearance, with solar panels forming bald spots of sorts. The buildings grew organically, sideways, and one upon the other, rising from the plastic foundation. Each living space was boxlike, rhomboid in cross-section, and precarious. No architect had planned this, no municipal services from the mainland had contributed.
Getting closer, the external surface was covered in bamboo scaffolding from which cables and wires hung. Thicker cables plunged into the sea and, at some distance, towers for tidal energy plants loomed in silhouette. Exile Park did not admit to siphoning power from the mainland, but it was rumored to be a significant percentage of their energy use. I couldn’t see it, though. It seemed such an undertaking would be impractical.
Closer still we encountered other boats returning to the mainland after a busy working day. Whatever else it may have been, Exile Park was a market and people plied their trade while floating in the artificial bay created by plastic arms. Commerce must commerce. These boat traders were never allowed on the island. On the other hand, fishing boats returned to the island in the same direction as us, tooting horns and ringing bells, maybe to warn loved ones of their impending arrival.
Perhaps because of Cosmo, other vessels parted to let us dock first. We ducked under the chicken wire that skirts the structure like an apron, and on which rubbish had accumulated, no doubt thrown from above.
“Follow me,” said Cosmo. “Don’t stop for anybody. Don’t answer any questions.”
I brought up the rear so I could keep an eye on Janet and Donna. We were in a tunnel, wet floor, moist air, dimly lit for the most part. The floor inclined upward and every few yards or so there would be two steps. The cables coiled in at the entrance and stuck to the ceiling except where they broke off into a doorway or inexplicably dropped to the floor and continued up. Donna crouched quickly and was up before anyone but me could notice, but I’m sure she just took a sample. I heard talking drums start up a beat and hand it off on each floor, following our party. I didn’t know what they said, being white and an outsider, but I could see how they were once used to send coded messages in ancient times.
Without warning Cosmo stopped and opened a door to our left.
It wasn’t bad, as such things go. It was a square space, two single beds on opposite sides, a window, walls of indeterminate color, a cooking unit of some kind in a corner, a wooden table on which a table fan labored ineffectively. A door led into what I hoped was a bathroom.
“I’m sorry, but this is all we have,” said Cosmo. “I know it’s nothing like your home, but you won’t be here long.”
“It’s perfectly fine,” said Donna. No strain in her voice. Hmm.
Janet was quiet, but took pictures. That child can be a pain, but she knows when to shut up, bless her.
“Cosmo—” I said.
“I know, why are you here? You’re here because of crime.”
Six weeks ago . . .
On the various roofs of Exile Park there is grass, more like scrub, but enough to nourish livestock like goats and dwarf cows. The soil was brought to the island in buckets and bowls and bags, all from the mainland. There was, of course, more than enough organic waste for bespoke fertilizer. The raised edges of the roof helped to minimize wind erosion, and the entire windward side was shielded with a metal screen.
On any given day the roof would be calming, with ruminants chewing either fresh grass or the cud. Baby goats frolicked in their way.
On this day, there was no eating or gamboling. The animals all collected on one side of the west roof. On the other side, blood-smeared grass, blood-dampened soil, and a body hacked to pieces.
“I’m not a detective,” I said.
“Oh, we don’t want you to solve individual crimes. This is as close to a sealed environment that you can get. We already know the culprits. That’s not the problem.”
“So what do you—”
“I want you to look at a population effect. Numbers. Quantitative analysis with some qualitative detail. I don’t want to tell you what to look for, because I don’t want to prejudice your findings.” Cosmo handed me a Portable. I hadn’t been sure they had those here.
“The toilet’s weird!” Janet shouted from somewhere. Donna shushed her.
“I could have looked at numbers at home,” I said.
“Look at the numbers first,” said Cosmo. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“How do I reach you?”
“Three-oh-one,” he said. He pointed to the corner. On a rude stand, a wired phone. I tracked the cable down the floor and into a hole in the wall.
After Cosmo left we bedded down for the night to the sound of Exile Park groaning and settling like an old house.
I got up early and sat at the table, going through the Portable.
The pattern was easy to see.
There were raw numbers and narrative contextuals. The amount and ferocity of crime in Exile Park had increased at an alarming rate, although they did not call it crime. They had a term, social harm. This is one of the things that confounds outsiders about Exile Park. It’s portrayed in Nigerian media as lawless, and this is technically true, but only because there are no laws. Exile Park didn’t count crime, it counted Acts of Social Harm, ASH. In Nigeria, crime is about violation of criminal law and law is defined by the State. A corporation might cause widespread contamination of the environment, which may not be a crime, but it’s social harm, and the founders of Exile Park were fans of zemiology. They build their society on a foundation of minimizing social harm. But no matter which way you cut it, a person dead at the hand of another could not go unanswered.
Violence in the last year of Exile Park exceeded that of its entire history combined.
Tethered to the bamboo scaffolding, Aanu Oloja scrambled about on the leeside of Exile Park, which faced the inlet and Lagos. Beneath her, desalination complexes, netting, and seawater. A comms engineer, Aanu connected customers to wireless networks for entertainment and learning. It was steady work, and required maintenance because the exposure to the elements wasn’t conducive to antenna placement, but she enjoyed it and was unbothered by heights.
Any given day her tiny figure could be seen orchestrating insane goings-on with cables and multimeters, with her apprentice Benjamin Woo calling the plays over the radio. What happened next was unclear. Witnesses gave differing accounts, although that wasn’t unusual.
Aanu grabbed a live wire and got electrocuted. It was, as such things go, not a lethal dose of electricity. She fell and should have been pulled up short by her tethers. She wasn’t. All three of her tethers snapped and the discombobulated Aanu plunged into the deep.
Her body was never recovered.
“We could never prove it, but we think her lines were sabotaged,” said Cosmo. “Aanu weighed nothing. It’s often wet out there and she’d lost her footing thousands of times, no problem. She’s as Spider-Man out there.”
“You suspect Benjamin Woo?” I asked.
“Folks in the flats nearby said they heard Aanu confirming the status of the cables with him. He assured her the line was inert.”
“The cables look pretty messy and disorganized.”
“To outsiders,” said Cosmo. “Woo’s the comms engineer now, with an apprentice of his own just in case he takes a swan dive.”
I nodded. I pointed to the figures. “You wanted me to confirm your findings. Violent crime, violent ASH is up. The figures do not provide me with an explanation. There’s no bump in population. I don’t know if there are deprivation changes.”
Cosmo stands. “Come with me. It’s time to show you.”
Janet wandered down where the moisture increased with the width of the passage, taking photographs as she went. Everyone she encountered had well-insulated, water resistant safety boots, the kind she associated with offshore oil workers. They didn’t stare at her. She saw no children, but it was morning, and she assumed they were in school. The wall indicated she was on or near Column III. Janet took a picture of the sign.
The ground lurched, and a heavy vibration rumbled through. Janet grabbed a hold of a cable to keep upright. It sounded like a train, but they didn’t have trains on Exile Park, did they? The sound of metal groaning descended on her and thoughts of a tsunami or undersea earthquake played with her calm. The whole thing lasted eight minutes—she counted. She was rattled, but she had ambitions of being a photojournalist, of not depending on drones and being in the heart of the action herself. This was nothing.
She briefly considered going back to the flat, but continued downward instead.
I tried to keep track of where Cosmo took me. The signage on the wall seemed arcane, but he barely glanced at it. At times people would stop and ask him something and he would answer in soft, rapid tones that I could not keep up with.
As if reading my mind, he said, “There’s a local shorthand we use in speech that might be difficult for you. Everybody speaks pidgin in addition, and most speak English, so don’t be concerned.”
This was a wider passageway than any of the others. It could easily accommodate seven people walking abreast. There were more people too, although it seemed to me like they were loitering, which wasn’t something I had seen in Exile Park. The air was fresher, colors brighter. It was all a kind of green-grey wash of some kind, but the impressions were sharper. Even my own skin seemed radiant. I passed my hands in front of my face and I felt a strong urge to laugh. They strobed.
“It can be disorienting at first,” said Cosmo.
“What can?”
“The euphoria, the sense of well-being.”
I laughed. It came out as a bark. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The low hum of people talking. They seemed cheerful, like the crowd fifteen minutes before a concert. I decided this feeling was abnormal and I started looking for ventilation.
“Are they . . . is someone . . . this is pharmaceutical,” I said.
“You’re not used to it, so it’s affecting you more, that’s all. Nobody from the outside has ever been this close.”
“To what?”
Cosmo points. “To her.”
The passage curved slightly and terminated in a dais on which she was suspended in a glass room. I say “she” because Cosmo did. There was no way of telling. She was old, skinny, and every inch of her skin was covered in visible veins, so much so her skin seemed green on first glance. The skin itself was composed of commodious redundant folds that created sulci, giving it a striped pattern in some areas, reticulate in others. It reminded me of the surface of the brain.
In my mind, I knew there should be some revulsion, but I couldn’t feel it. That sense of well-being from before persisted and became stronger. I looked at Cosmo and . . . Was that a smile on his face? This whole thing felt like religious awe, like I was in the presence of a god.
With great effort I said, “I would like to leave this place, Cosmo.”
Contrary to what my brain was telling me, I had an appetite and ate three fried eggs, two chicken wings, and two large slices of bread and butter. Cosmo drank coffee and watched me, our roles on the mainland reversed.
“What was that? Who was that?” I spoke with my mouth full.
We were in someone’s flat. Hunger was my first sensation after seeing the god, and when I told Cosmo he started looking at doorways to flats. At first they had seemed similar to me, but now I could see subtle differences, and not just aesthetic ones. Beside each door, for example, was a panel, six by twelve inches. There was a column of glyphs, some lit up, others dark. We passed three before we saw one with the combination of glyphs Cosmo sought. This, he explained, was how nobody ever starved and food didn’t go to waste. Those with excess announced it with the glyphs and literally anybody could come in for a meal.
“That was Olokun. Not sure if that’s her real name, but it’s a name we use for her.” Cosmo sipped coffee. “She’s been here from the beginning.”
The host added another fried egg to my plate and I thanked him. “What happens when nobody is hungry for the excess?”
“Livestock, pets, composting,” said Cosmo. “No hunger, no waste.”
“What is Olokun?” I asked. “She’s not human.”
“She’s human.”
“Cosmo, I’m not stupid. I know what I saw, and what I felt.”
“It’s hormones, Cotillard.”
“Explain.”
“Olokun secrets agreeableness hormones into the air from her skin and from her bodily fluids. I can get you the studies, but last count she had forty-three volatile and two hundred nonvolatile hormones that she exposed all of us to.”
“How?”
“As far as I know she was born that way. The folds of her skin increase the surface area of secretion. The veins efficiently transport her blood.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. Then something occurred to me. “She’s sick, isn’t she? That’s why you brought me here. Her volatile secretions are . . . my god, they’ve kept the cohesion of your little experiment. Now she’s sick, it’s not working, and people are getting violent with each other.”
“She’s not sick,” said Cosmo. He dragged his chair back and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “She’s dying.”
He left the room to smoke.
Donna took a shitload of blood from me for testing.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’ve been exposed to god knows what compounds that made you euphoric and then gave you the munchies. You are not fine until I say you’re fine,” said Donna.
“You’re overreacting. The folks here are exposed to this every day,” I said.
“Where’s the child?” Donna liked to change the subject when she didn’t like the direction.
“Off taking photos. Her beacon is loud and clear. I think you should examine Olokun.”
“If I get protective wear. Why does Cosmo want you here?”
“He wants to know what happens when Olokun dies. He wants to know if this place will disintegrate into chaos. He wants to know what to do about it.”
I could smell her hair and see the hair follicles on her skin as she worked. I experienced a sudden and powerful urge. “You know, Janet’s going to be gone a while—”
“From the results I’m looking at, your arousal is not because of me. You’re feeling frisky because there’s a chemical in your system that causes a sexual response. I’m not sleeping with you, Francis.”
“What? No, I’m just watching an intelligent, powerful, competent woman doing intelligent, competent, powerful things. It’s a turn on.”
“No.”
“Fine. Don’t blame me if I go and have wanton sex with the socialists, woman,” I said.
“Be sure to get me some genital swabs if you do,” said Donna. “I’m going to see if I can isolate a marker whose concentration I can measure in the air. What are you going to do, besides taking a cold shower?”
“Cosmo wants me to attend their parliament.”
“They have a parliament?”
“Euphemistically, yes. For one thing anybody over sixteen can attend, comment, and vote. It’s not based on representation at all. No one person outranks any other, except by competence. Competence means you get listened to and your opinion is weighted in your area of expertise. But only in your areas of expertise.”
“Smart. No halo effect.”
“So it would seem.”
It was a warmer night. Warm nights in Exile Park were noisy affairs because a million air conditioners would come on at once. Most of the flats had no windows and had two, sometimes three air conditioners with no soundproofing. We got used to it, by which I mean Donna and Janet got used to it. I couldn’t sleep so I poked through Janet’s photos. Her camera had a device that sent all her photos to me and I told Janet she could disable it but she didn’t. She wanted me to think she didn’t care about what I saw, and I wanted to see what she was up to. Win win.
Janet and about seven of the local kids. Arms around each other’s necks and carefree like only youngsters can be. One or two of them had the bowlegs that told me they weren’t getting enough sunlight, but not as many as I would have expected. They seemed happy and well-nourished, for the most part. Good skin, too. Their clothes were clean, but I noticed signs of repair and reuse, which was good, I supposed.
She took a close-up of the ubiquitous collections of cables. They were bound together in places by wire, duct tape, even cloth. Sometimes alone, sometimes yoked with water pipes and slapdash signage.
She got shots of the massive support columns and their numbering. How far did that child wander? Most of the external walls of Exile Park weren’t load-bearing. The flats and box-dwellings all connected to each other, but the weight was transferred to gigantic columns numbered I to VI. Each was ribbed with heavy-duty bridge cables, some of which coiled away and disappeared into walls and ceilings.
Janet even got into nurseries for the roof farms. Powerful lights shone down, ersatz sunlight for the delicate budding vegetation. The farmers smiled up at the camera.
She took a selfie and it made me sit up. I had to look at her asleep to assure myself she was safe. In the photo, behind and above her, hidden between girders on the ceiling, was a face.
Parliament.
Since everybody was allowed, I brought Janet and Donna with me. The room had a capacity of a few dozen, but it was also streamed through closed-circuit. Nobody sat in particularly lofty positions and there was no sense of rank or office. I did my thesis based on original fieldwork with fringe religions in Nigeria like Ekcankar, Guru Maharaji, and the Quakers. This was a free-form, no agenda meeting, like the Quakers. Silence, then someone speaks, then response, then silence as responses died down, then someone would suggest voting, they would vote, and the motion is dealt with. The only consistent action came from the people taking the minutes.
Cosmo stood up in a lull and introduced my family. “For recognition, Cosmo Adepitan. I introduce Francis Cotillard, invited by majority vote of this house on the Olokun matter. Accompanied by Dr. Donna Cotillard and Ms. Janet Cotillard.”
All present banged their chairs, a welcome gesture.
“Do you feel up to giving your opinion on the data?” asked Cosmo.
I did.
My report, though dull, technical, and full of caveats, surprised nobody. I confirmed what they all suspected, and demurred when they asked for recommendations.
They adjourned, and we had the rest of the day to ourselves.
Donna, in spite of anything she might have said before, was intrigued by Olokun and, clad in protective wear, examined the god. Independent air tank, no part of her skin exposed, it looked like Donna was cleaning nuclear fallout. I didn’t think it was necessary. Exile Park had its own doctors and nurses, and they’d already examined their god. Donna liked first-hand information and primary sources. She wasn’t going to stop now.
“I estimate her body surface area is 300 percent that of a person of her average mass. The folds of skin can be stretched and the veins are pulsatile,” said Donna.
We talked through a radio she rigged. I was walking the passageways looking up. Janet was off doing some busywork I gave her—photograph the ships coming in, something like that.
“Pulsatile?” I wasn’t paying full attention, but I had read somewhere that if you repeat the last word someone says, they think you’re listening.
“I know you’re not listening, Francis,” said Donna.
Shit.
“I really want to know. Why is pulsatile noteworthy?” I shone a torch between the cables on the ceiling. There seemed to be space there.
“Superficial veins don’t usually have a pulse. Arteries do. There are exceptions, but I think this is an adaptation of some kind. The high pressure helps force out the hormones.”
“The hormones, huh?” There was space up there, a gap between cable bundles and hard ceiling, one that a man could hide in. But why?
“Hepatomegaly. Liver’s large,” said Donna. Mostly to herself.
“Does she not mind you poking about her innards?” I asked.
“I don’t think she’s even aware I’m here. Her eyes aren’t tracking me. Her motor reflexes are barely there.”
I tried to find a foothold. I jumped, grabbed the wrong pipe, and screamed.
“What?” said Donna. Concern now.
“Stupid. Hot water pipe. Nothing to worry about.” I was definitely expecting a scald on my left palm. If it was that hot, then anybody crawling around up there would have to know what to avoid. It didn’t make sense, but the face was there. I didn’t draw Donna or Janet’s attention to it.
“Douse it in cold water as soon as you can,” said Donna. “I think I’m done here.”
At night, outside, in what passed for a bay, people set up flame grills and sold the day’s catch as fried fish snacks. Donna, Janet, Cosmo, and I sat on an iron bench, eating piping hot fish and watching the lights. Drums played, people sang.
Cosmo, who had looked derelict when he came inland, cleaned up well. He was like a different person, although still driven.
“Does she ever talk?” asked Donna.
Cosmo shook his head. “No. The last coherent word from her was fifteen years ago. There’s a book floating around, Awon Oro Olokun, but I think some of it is cribbed from Nietzsche.”
“I agree with your doctors, Cosmo. She’s dying,” said Donna. “And soon. The marker I set up . . . well, the levels are falling precipitously.”
“If the hormones Olokun releases are what keep us . . . docile, will our way of life survive her death?”
“That’s a question for Francis,” said Donna. “But you have options.”
“Such as?” Cosmo seemed to have blocked out every other stimulus except Donna.
“Life-support machine, keep her alive indefinitely,” said Donna.
“Doesn’t she have to consent to that?” asked Cosmo.
Donna shrugged. “I’m a ‘needs of the many outweigh that of the individual’ kind of person.”
“Here we value both the individual and the many equally. We take individual freedoms seriously. The collective won’t want to survive by trampling on the rights of the individual.”
“I’m just naming options,” said Donna. “Francis? Wanna weigh in?”
“I’m thinking.”
I looked out at the lights of Lagos, twinkling, reflected on the sea, beckoning with the simplicity of my normal life. I fiddled with the bandage on my left hand.
“I’m thinking.”
They told me their stories, the people of Exile Park. The gay couple who had escaped stoning in the North. The one who had dared run against the president as an independent. The man who, inspired by Reich, rigged up an orgone energy transmitter on the highest roof. The ones who provided a free internet plug-in that thwarted surveillance. The repentant gun runners. The journalists, the many, many journalists. The osu, outcasts from the East, a resurgence of something thought forgotten. The painter of a hundred Madonnas, all subversive in some way or the other, either of corrupt visage, or corrupt implications, tainted halos, sexualized, covered in filth, cadaverous. A guy shot to death and dropped in the sea who washed up stuck on a plastic rock in the inlet, twenty-seven bullet holes in him, but still alive. People like Cosmo who escaped assassins. People who were assassins, reformed of course. The people who fled rival gangs. The people driven out by aggressive developers. Filmmakers who made films of the wrong kind, political or pornographic. Or both. The thug who had knuckle tattoos; THOUGHTS on the right, PRAYERS on the left.
They all heard of Exile Park by word of mouth and risked everything to get here. Everything was forgiven once you were doused in brine and passed through the pearly gates of the inlet and took the communion of Olokun, the plastic god of exiled Nigerians.
I showed Cosmo the photo, focusing on the face.
“I don’t know who that is, or why he is up there,” he said.
“Do you have dissidents? Insurgents? Sexual predators?” I asked. “Is there an underclass here that I don’t know about?”
“This is new,” he said. “I’ll flush him out. It might be an example of the new aggression.”
Cosmo gives me a copy of The Words of Olokun, the English translation of Awon Oro Olokun.
“Great. Homework,” I said.
The young Olokun got around.
She visited the north of Nigeria, where there was a persistent rash of suicide bombings. She quietly moved into an abandoned property and waited. They stopped within a week, according to her.
She traveled the world, masked, robed, because she was self-conscious about her looks.
She did know love. All who came close to her loved her, and the ones she chose for physical pleasure almost died of it. Some went mad from too much dopamine, and she realized she could not tell those who loved her for herself from those who just reacted to the chemicals she secreted. She restricted herself to carnal pleasures and left her heart untouched.
Back to the south, but warned by the Nigerian government. Stay out of our affairs. She could have brought peace to the whole nation, but that wasn’t what they wanted. So she left. She had to keep moving. Egypt, Tanzania, Ghana, DRC, even Cape Town. If she stayed too long, people suffocated her without knowing why they were drawn to her.
Everywhere I went, there were those who were drawn to me and those sent by the State to follow me. I was an antidote to the war machines, which meant some factions would not make money out of manufactured outrage. They sent assassins after me. Tearfully, each of the killers confessed to me and asked for my forgiveness. One of them dedicated a shrine to me in Cuilacán.
But it was exhausting for her, and lonely. She wanted to disappear and rest.
Exile Park was perfect. When she heard of the disputed plastic mass, she moved there and settled. She had purpose.
It might be that the translation was off, but Olokun seemed to say a lot about peace.
This is my total art.
I am your kick start. What you do next is up to you. My gift is peace, a moment to breathe.
What do you do with the gift of peace?
Total art.
Did she know she was dying? There was no indication in her writings.
Reminded me of an architecture term, gesamtkunstwerk. Is the society in Exile Park Olokun’s art? How will it continue without the hormones?
Tremors. The rattle woke Janet briefly, then she turned over and was asleep again. Donna didn’t stir. Both of them, the sum total of my love.
I went back to reading.
Cosmo had been exploring the roof and cable systems for two hours when I joined him.
“Can’t sleep,” I said.
Cosmo shrugged. “I’ve been over this length and breadth. Nothing yet.”
Janet’s photos were geotagged, however, and I took Cosmo to the exact spot the photo was taken. Cosmo stared. Then he looked at my belly, checking how fit I was. Not very.
“I’m going up there,” he said. “Give me a boost.”
“Watch out for the hot water pipe,” I said.
Cosmo pulled himself up and I watched his boots disappear into a tangle of black, grey, and red serpentine shit.
Silence, then scuffling sounds.
“Oh, fuck!” Not Cosmo’s voice.
I was still trying to decide what to do. Who do I call? I couldn’t get up there without help.
“Francis! Look out!” yelled Cosmo.
“What?” I asked.
I heard a creak, then a loud vibration. Cracks appeared in the ceiling and it ruptured, caved. Dust, water from burst pipes, sparks from electric cords. The lights in the corridor flickered. And a compact camouflage-green jeep fell out of the roof into the passageway right in front of me. It bounced on its springs before coming to rest. Internal combustion energy, two-seater, madman in the driving seat. The engine was running and acrid exhaust filled the corridor. Screeching as the wheels spun. It came for me. I made myself small on the side wall and it spun me around as it passed. The driver’s eyes . . . same as in the photo.
It gunned down the corridor, hit one of the corners, corrected itself, powered on out of sight.
Talking drums broke my spell and people started to arrive. Did they have police in Exile Park?
“Francis,” yelled Cosmo from upstairs. “You’re going to want to see this.”
According to accounts that I pieced together later the jeep went all the way down, scratching the walls, hitting four men and two women in its path till it smashed into the netting at the exit. It hung over the water for a time, but the net couldn’t hold its weight and it broke free with a generous section of the barrier before it plunged into the dark waters.
Nobody dove after, even though I know they have an on-call rescue team. Emphasis was on looking after the injured and repairing the fence.
Everybody kept looking out for a floater over the next few days, then weeks, but nothing came back up or clogged the pumps. People assumed the driver escaped by some other means or a bloated body was trapped in the car on the seabed. Which was a shame. I had many questions for him.
Cosmo told me people spotted Nigerian gunboats hovering a few nautical miles out, but never engaging. There were stories of special forces diving, maybe searching for the body, but the tales were as substantial as smoke.
They expelled us from Exile Park. Here’s why.
I crawled up into the space Cosmo invited me to. It was . . . a nest, I guess. A spy’s nest. Saboteur. Saboteur-spy. In the nest were charts, sixteen high-quality cylindrical tanks with timers, and keypad security. High-gain radio hardware. No identifying information, some coded writing that the best cryptographers Exile Park had to offer couldn’t crack. There were some diagrams, though, that very clearly spoke to the support structure of the plastic island. All the columns identified, plus how to reach their lowermost points, where they sank into the island’s “crust.”
The one word that was recognizable out of all this guy’s shit was ideonella, and that scared folks, for good reason. Way back in 2016, before living memory, scientists discovered ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that digested common bottle plastic. Prior to that plastic had been thought to be nonbiodegradable. We’ve come a long way since then, and though it’s hellishly expensive, with the help of ideonella species variants, we can digest most plastic polymers now.
Including the ones that formed Exile Park.
It seemed our saboteur was an agent of the Nigerian government, although we couldn’t prove it.
I followed the expedition into the bowels of the island, at the bases of the columns, and there were plastic liquefaction pools everywhere. Columns III and IV were out of alignment, the engineers said.
Parliament was packed full, oversubscribed. Panic first, then anger, then calm.
Could the damage be reversed or would they have to evacuate the Park? The vote against exodus was almost unanimous. They would fix the problem or die. Nobody wanted to go back to Nigeria.
“But we have to be more careful of outsiders,” said a vocal fifteen-year-old.
Everyone turned to me and my family. I had seen it coming and I didn’t wait for it to be put to vote.
In three hours Exile Park receded in the view above the frothy wake of Cosmo’s skiff.
Janet took no pictures.
I wrote a strongly worded essay about Exile Park when I got back to the world. It was published, but nobody read it. I was critical of the Nigerian government, but I don’t think they throttled it. I think most people were uninterested in what was an artefact of disobedience at best, an example of an anarcho-socialist existence that worked. So unthreatening was my article that nobody came for me in the night, or summoned me to CID at Alagbon Close.
Cosmo contacted me a few months later, told me Olokun died, sent me some screen grabs of her funeral at sea. That left me deeply sad for some reason.
I wrote this out of that grief, to purge it, and to create some kind of record.
It didn’t work.
I’d forgotten all about the Park, and I wasn’t paying attention when Janet selected shots for her latest exhibition. She talked it over with Donna, though.
I wore my good suit. I shouldn’t have because everyone else was casual, including Donna.
She called it Down and Out in Exile Park. Ironic, of course, because of the joy on the faces of the subjects. One hundred shots, half of those in black and white. She had an eye, that offspring of mine.
She brought a tear to my eye with the final piece: A six-foot shot of Cosmo in his skiff at sunset, looking toward Exile Park, squinting from the ocean spray, and a plaque with excerpts from my essay.
Home that night and I did a search to find out what happened to Exile Park. Not only was it still going on strong, it had inspired the Exile Park Experiment, spaces in seventeen countries where communities were built along Exile Park lines. They seemed to be thriving.
Olokun’s dream.
She would be proud.