CHAPTER 10

Wazobia

I knew so little about the world and so much. As you listen to me, you should take that into consideration. I would, if I were you. I was two when I decided to escape Tower 7. How long was I in Ghana? A year? And once I crossed the Atlantic after leaving Africa, time stopped meaning anything to me. I had died three times, and I had learned to slip outside, between, through time into other times. And I had lost two men that I loved and gained one of them back.

It was quiet where I was, but inside I was burning with fury. I carried it with me into the darkness of death, and when I brought it out into the light of life, it had evolved, matured, intensified, grown wings. I would free the others. I would crush those who had the nerve to make me. They had no respect.

The winged man had kept me from killing myself. Thus, he’d kept me from doing the worst: killing my soul by killing a million other souls with my heat. As I became ash for the third time, I wondered yet again, Who is he? I didn’t wonder what he was.

I never had any control of when I returned. This time, it took me a month. Mmuo and Saeed were happy to tell me how it all happened. “When you were nothing but ash, there was a final flash that nearly blinded us,” Mmuo told me the night after my full return. We sat in the living room of the apartment Mmuo rented in Soho. “He took most of your heat in his wings but we could feel it, too. It felt like a burst of hot wind.”

Saeed had turned back first and fallen to his knees before the winged man. On the ground were grey ashes. In death, I looked like any of earth’s flesh when burned. The winged man stepped back as Saeed gathered my ashes into a pile, tears falling down his cheeks. He hadn’t been there when I burned the first or second time. Such a thing is always worse when you actually experience it.

“She will be back,” Mmuo had told Saeed. But he wasn’t sure.

The winged man flew off without a word. Mmuo and Saeed just sat there in the jungle of Tower 7. Mmuo said they spoke words over my ashes. They’d mourned me. Seeing me as ashes made it nearly impossible to not assume the worst. Nothing natural becomes ash and then returns to life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Neither Saeed nor Mmuo would tell me what words they spoke over my ashes.

“A few minutes later there were lights in the sky,” Mmuo said. “And I swear to you, they made a weird whooshy almost musical sort of sound. Saeed denies hearing it, but I know he did. The whole city did, even above all the city noise.”

He didn’t know what they were but I did. I’d read about them while imprisoned in Tower 7, and I used to wonder what they’d look like. They were called Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis. As I died, I’d flared like the sun and the atmosphere over the city was reacting to me. Later that evening, though there had been no previous recent activity spotted on the sun, the meteorologists and geoscientists speculated that the strange auroras and the blackout right after that killed service to computers, jelli tellis, skyscraper screens, and all portable devices for two days were caused by a solar flare. And the newsfeeds mentioned the noise, too. I guess they needed some sort of explanation after the resulting twelve hours of rioting and stockpiling.

 • • • 

Mmuo and Saeed guarded my ashes for the entire month. At all times, at least one of them was there. I do not remember a thing, not until that last three days when I started to . . . reappear. That’s how Saeed described it.

“It was the dead of night and I was in my tent,” he said. “It was raining.”

They had left my ashes. It had rained many times, the wind had blown, my ashes washed away, scattered far and wide. But Mmuo and Saeed stayed there, using a camouflaged tent, though the cover of the wildly growing and twisting trees was enough to hide them from the Big Eye when their surveillance cameras flew by. Saeed and Mmuo waited, in the very place I had burned while enfolded in the winged man’s wings. They patiently waited.

Then one dark rainy night, Saeed heard a loud sigh. He heard it even over the noise of the rain. He crawled to the tent entrance and looked outside. Creeping over the spot where I had died was a soft mist. The wind kept blowing it away, but then it would return to the same spot. “The mist was warm and smelled like concrete cooking in the heat,” Saeed told me. “That’s how I knew it was you.”

Soon, Mmuo returned to give him a chance to go to the apartment to bathe and eat a hot meal. But Saeed didn’t want to leave me. I was now more than mist. I was a softly glowing, slowly shifting shape. Like a nebula. Red orange yellow. Always warm.

“Go and wash, at least,” Mmuo told Saeed. I remember him saying this because it was at this moment that I came back to myself. I could hear, see, and smell. Saeed did indeed need to bathe. “Is that how you want her to see you after all these weeks?” Mmuo added.

I listened, reveling in their voices, the scent of the jungle around me, the after-scent of exhaust, the warm night air, the wetness from the rain, and the sight of the magnificent Backbone. I’m sorry, I thought as I looked at it. I’m sorry I ever sought to destroy you, magnificent creature. It looked wider and taller than ever. I could see three hundred and sixty degrees around me, from the dirt below my non-body, to the stars in the sky, to the jungle around me, and the skyscrapers beyond.

It was when Saeed had finally agreed to go bathe and sleep, when it stopped raining, that Mmuo started to tell me the story I had twice asked him to tell me: the story of what he did in Nigeria that landed him in Tower 7. The first time I’d asked was just before my escape from Tower 7. I’d asked again before I burned, cradled in the winged man’s wings. Both times Mmuo refused. Maybe now he hoped the story would bring me back faster. I could not move. I could not feel. I could only listen. I so wanted to hear his story. Finally. What did Mmuo know about going up against a government? I remember every word. Mmuo is an interesting man . . .

 • • • 

Phoenix, you must be very bored there, unable to move and cause trouble. You look like a sleeping bolt of lightning. Power at peace.

I remember you well in Tower 7. Whenever I came to the 28th floor to meet with Saeed, you were the only other person that I always made sure I saw. Sometimes I let you know I was there, other times, I just quietly peeked in to make sure you were ok. I was often nearby during mealtimes. I used to steal whole roasted chickens, like a fox in a hen house. I saw you when they took you to the lab. Once I made their equipment cart fall over. Do you remember that? Phoenix. You are special. Come back to us. Wake up.

I know you like stories, so I will tell you mine. There is not much time. Your Saeed will be returning soon, so I will try to keep my story moving. I may tell Saeed these things in due time, but for now, I will only tell you. Because you asked me twice. I am Mmuo, and the man I will tell you about is long gone, but I will tell you of him. I was my father’s fourth child and third son. He named me Ikenga Emezie Nnachukwu. My mother was a schoolteacher and she loved books.

She met my father when she was about twenty. He too loved to read, but he liked books that were worlds away from the literary canon. He read things by legendary agitating African writers from long ago, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. And he listened to old old tunes from Fela Kuti, and he loved the American golden era rap music. He’d learned the meaning of colonialism and about the “colonized mind” from the deep Internet when he was twelve years old.

Ah, Phoenix, mentioning these musicians and writers seems to have gotten your attention. Of course you read them. What haven’t you read? You glow more strongly now, and you have added a hint of blue to your orange, red and yellow light. Yes, you would have liked my father and he would have liked you, my mother, too.

You know what he told my mother when he first met her? “I never had to DE-colonize. I’ve never been colonized.” You were the opposite of him when you were in Tower 7. How you have changed.

My father instantly liked my mother, and my mother liked him. And soon they were both angry militant young people intent on taking back the “motherland.” My father went on to become an engineer and a local politician. But though he put faith in science, he put his greatest faith in what he called the Old Ways. These included things he’d learned from his own father, the masquerade secret society he belonged to and the Old Ways of other ethnic groups like the Yorubas, Efiks, Ogonis. He took what he could use. And he knew it all very well.

I had two older brothers and one older sister. Whenever we travelled anywhere during election season, my father would take us behind the house to the shrine he kept there. He’d cover us with a special shea butter he mixed himself.

Phoenix, what is this lightning that you just tried to kill me with? You zapped me with a thread of electricity when I mentioned shea butter. My hands are shaking and the air smells a bit acrid, but I am still here. I will make sure that your Saeed brings you some when you return. Would you like me to keep telling you my story? Ok.

My father said his special shea butter would stop bullets. He’d learned how to make it from a close friend of his who was Yoruba. This friend had covered himself with the shea butter and then made my father shoot him. My father said that after he shot him there was nothing but powder on his friend’s chest and that the bullet had fallen to the ground, hot and spent. We all believed my father.

And we were right to, because one night during the time when my father was running for Imo State Governor, we were driving to one of his speaking events. My mother was already at the place where my father would speak, waiting for us. We were in my father’s black Jaguar and my siblings and I were in the back. My father was in the front seat. I remember this well. The driver, whose name was Endurance, was driving.

I was laughing at my sister, who sang along to the song Endurance played in the car radio when she suddenly stopped singing and gasped, looking past me out the window. After that, I only remember screaming, noise, and the sound of the tires screeching as Endurance mashed the brakes and swerved off the road. Some people had opened fire on our car. Several of the windows were open when they began to shoot. There were holes in the car doors, the windows that were closed were shattered, but not one of us was hit.

We’d all been covered with the shea butter, even our driver Endurance. Earlier, my sister had complained about how shiny it made her skin and how she could never apply the proper make-up. But she knew to put it on anyway.

My father won that election, easy.

By the time I made it to university, I had learned everything my father knew. I was his favorite because I was the one who took a vested interest in the two things my father loved— juju and politics. I learned how to make the shea butter that stopped bullets; my father initiated me into his masquerade secret society; I knew how to make a man hurt, forget his name, and stop chasing women; and I could speak to the goddess Ani, that’s the goddess of the land.

You are an American, Phoenix. So though you know Africa well, you will believe in the power of science over all that we know. But you are an African, too, so you know it in your flesh, your strange flesh, that the spirit world rules the physical world. Where is it that you are returning from as I tell you my story? Is it from a test tube? Or from somewhere else? They made you, yes. But something made them make you, Phoenix.

Anyway, by the time I went to university there was something else that I had learned to do. My father taught me about the mystical, but I came by this knowledge on my own. I was not at the top of my class, but I was one of the smarter students. I loved and understood the spiritual, yes, but I also loved the sciences. I loved nature’s structure, rules, logic, its playfulness and the sheer scope of its creativity. Science has always been aligned with Ani. It was clear that my path of study would be engineering.

One night, I was pondering the laws of physics and the will of Ani as I stared at my bedroom door. I’d been lying on my bed for an hour, thinking and thinking. Maybe at some point I’d fallen into a trance or meditative state. Something came together in my mind as I stared at the door and considered the flesh of it, the tree it had once been a part of, its power, its weakness, its dead cells, molecules, and atoms. The space between them. The spirit of the tree that clung to this piece of tree flesh.

I got up, walked up to the door, and I walked right through it. I emerged outside of my bedroom, and there stood my father staring at me, shocked. He’d been on his way to the kitchen. He smiled and I smiled too. After that, I did it over and over again, walking through wooden doors. Now you see how it started for me.

In university, I became like a miniature version of my father. I didn’t do it on purpose; it was just a natural progression of things. I was my father’s son. Like him, I was drawn to mysticism. As he did, I believed that Nigeria could be better if it just changed. I loved Fela, as he did. I wanted to walk around half-naked like a real African and spit in the face of the West. I joined the student government, and by the end of my second year was its president. By the end of my third year, I was one of the top engineering students but I was most known for being a part of WaZoBia.

“WaZoBia” means “come, come, come” in the three most widely spoken Nigerian languages. Yoruba, Hausa, and Ibo. Wa in Yoruba means “come,” Zo in Hausa means “come,” and Bia in Igbo means “come.” The word “come” is an invitation of togetherness, and represents unity and diversity in community. Phoenix, WaZoBia was a radical student group bent on challenging the ever-present and meddling oil companies and corrupt military Nigerian government. No campus cults for me. I wanted to join a group that was about more than wahala, petty trouble. I really did want to change Nigeria.

At some point, WaZoBia decided to overthrow the government. Maybe it was after the fuel riots. How can you be one of the world’s last leading producers of crude oil, and yet still have a shortage of kerosene and vehicle fuel? In Nigeria, we use solar generators but solar powered cars are rare, and it’s next to impossible to find a place to recharge an electric car, especially outside of Lagos and Abuja. Hybrid vehicles are still quite popular, some even still use fuel-powered cars. So fuel is still in demand there.

But no, no, I remember now, it wasn’t the riots that convinced us that it was time to overthrow the government. It was the introduction of the Anansi Droids 419. The Anansi Droids were, how do I explain them? They were digital android killer soldiers! They were the size of dogs and looked like shiny silver spiders. They were robot spiders. The Nigerian government’s engineers created the prototype. Can you imagine? We came up with these things ourselves FOR ourselves. We’re so colonized that we build our own shackles. Some young engineer by the name of Obinna Ukamaka came up with the idea after reading a science fiction story about robot spiders guarding the pipelines of the Niger Delta. Life imitated art, except this particular story was actually critiquing the government not giving them a blueprint. The author must be rolling in her grave.

Chevron, Shell and a few other oil companies helped fund the project. The purpose of these machines was to prevent pipeline bunkering by guarding them . . . by any means necessary. Though the machines were supposedly artificially intelligent, they killed senselessly. If you so much as touched a pipeline, they came running and tore you apart. These pipelines ran right through the backyards of villages. They ran alongside roads, past schools. Within the first month, hundreds of people were killed.

None of us in WaZoBia could live under a government that would sell out its people so thoroughly, so brutally. We were strongly united in this understanding. We’d grown up with technology. And everyone knows that after the prototype is put to use successfully, they upgrade and then they upgrade that next generation and so on. The Anansi Droids were a slippery slope, especially with Nigeria possessing a still sought after resource.

The daughter of Nigeria’s Vice President was a member of WaZoBia. Three of us could build bombs. Four of us had fathers high up in the military, five of us had been area boys before entering the university and had only recently shrugged off bad habits, one of us was a mistress of the Nigerian president himself, and one of us could walk through wooden doors.

Our plan was perfect. We had guns. We could get in. And none of us was afraid to kill or die. We were idealists. We’d all seen our parents, families, ourselves, suffer. And we knew we were capable. But there must have been an informer. That is the only way to explain what happened the night before we were to put our plan into action.

We’d gathered at Rose de Red’s house. She was the leader. She could shoot a gun like her soldier father, and she could shout like her Minister of Communications mother. She had a small apartment in the capital of Abuja close to Aso Villa, the office and residence of the president. We’d all travelled there, some by air, others by car or bus. None of our parents knew where we were. They all thought we were at the University of Lagos preparing for exams.

We sat in that room on the 4th floor with white walls and expensive leather furniture. Rose de Red came from an oil rich family. She knew so much. We were all accounted for. Everyone in WaZoBia. We were smiling, young, excited. Right outside the window you could see the Aso Villa. It was a warm night. Our weapons were ready. WaZoBia’s most charismatic member, Success T, was getting everyone excited before Rose de Red spoke by shouting, “Victoria, Victoria, Victoria acerta to the great of the great Nigerian students, both home and abroad . . .”

And that’s when the door banged open and masked men in black suits burst in with AK-47s. Without hesitation, they opened fire. I was sitting in a chair near the balcony window right in front of Success T. The lights stayed on so I saw it all.

Success T’s chest exploded. Rose de Red’s left eye popped as a bullet smashed through it. WaZoBia members tried to run, but there were too many men in black with guns. The room that moments ago had been immaculate and full of optimism now smelled tangy with gunpowder, blood, urine, and was full of death. The window behind me shattered. And through it all I just stood there. Right before the meeting, in my hotel room, I’d taken a shower and the soap dried my skin. It was itchy, and I realized that I’d forgotten to bring lotion. So I’d used some of my special shea butter. I’d brought it for the next day, when we planned to storm the capital.

But I don’t think I’d have been shot even if I hadn’t put the shea butter on. They didn’t want to kill me. How else can I explain the people who grabbed me, put a sack over my head, and dragged me out of there? How can I explain being cuffed, blindfolded and shoved onto a plane by men and women with badges on their chests of a hand grasping lightning? How else can I explain why they took me across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States without a passport and drove me straight to Tower 7? Was that an accident?

The Big Eye agreed to serve as the strong arm of the United States and Nigerian governments and the invested oil companies who wanted to prevent a coup d’état for their own various greedy reasons. And the Big Eye got to grab the engineering student they’d heard could walk through wood. They killed two birds with one stone.

Who are the Big Eye? Are they a secret part of the American government or a powerful private corporation? Is there a difference? To me, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same ends. So while they did what they did to me over the years in Tower 7, fusing and altering my body and forcing me to show them how to use my father’s juju, Nigeria remains under the latest crippling military rule as oil companies suck the last of its black blood.

I knew I could escape them once they succeeded in enhancing my ability to the point where I could walk through all matter. I only learned that they’d coated all the outer walls with their “just in case Mmuo escapes” substance when I ran face first into the wall and lost consciousness. The only way I escaped was because I came to in time to sink to the room below. I was trapped in Tower 7 until you got me out, Phoenix. I’ve never been able to properly thank you for this, dear.

Come back to us. We need you.