I dreamt of the road. That it was night and I was driving and driving in a dark my headlights could barely light. And I wasn’t afraid. If I drove into a car-sized pothole, so be it. If I drove over spokes set in the road by armed robbers and I was forced to stop, so be it. If I ran out of electrical charge, so be it. And if everything became dust because I’d driven so far north that I’d finally reached the beginning of Africa’s greatest disaster area known as the Red Eye, so be it. For some reason, I didn’t fear any drones. I just kept driving.
When I awoke, the first thing I remembered was that I had no car to drive. I stretched, feeling so rested that I wondered if I’d slept for two days. I sighed without opening my eyes, filling my lungs with fresh air. So I hadn’t gone so far north that I’d entered the disaster zone. Good, I thought. It wasn’t windy yet, but there was a strong breeze now. I flared my nostrils and inhaled it more deeply. The air flowed smoothly down my nasal cavity into my lungs. It smelled of . . . body. I frowned. And manure. Then, I caught a hint of something else. Sweet and earthen, woody. I gasped, my eyes shooting open. I sat up.
Then I froze, my mouth open. Too many things. The most immediate was that I was looking down the barrel of a gun. The cow I’d been sleeping against slowly got up. I got up with her, keeping my eye on the man holding the gun. He was dark skinned with dark pupils, the whites of his eyes so so white. He barked something in a language I couldn’t understand, and I immediately raised my hands. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” I screeched. “I’m sorry!”
“Eh!” he gasped and I realized my sleeves had fallen back when I put my hands up. Now he was shouting in a language that I couldn’t understand. I stared at his mouth, as if doing so would make me understand him. His teeth were white, perfect, his tongue pink as he shoved his gun at me. He stopped shouting, scrambled forward and pressed the gun to my throat, his eyes wide.
“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t shoot . . . was just resting.” Then I shut my eyes. I’d killed all those men. There were consequences. Of course there were. Up to yesterday, I’d lived my life by the philosophy of “do no harm.” Even when it came to my transplants, if flesh had to be used, I only allowed my own flesh to be cultivated and transplanted into my body, never the flesh of any other animal. Yesterday I had broken my deepest most golden rule. I waited for the end.
He was yelling again. Then he lowered his voice and was speaking. Rapidly, as if rushing to get the words out before they escaped him. I opened my eyes and we just stared at each other. I moved my eyes from his mouth to his eyes, and he stopped shoving his gun at me.
“What are you doing to my cows,” he growled. He spoke English like someone who had been taught in school and enjoyed the teaching.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was . . . I was just resting.”
“What kind of woman are you?”
I blinked, irritation so intense flooding into me that I lost my fear for my life and resignation to my death. I dropped my hands and he flinched. Even then I wasn’t bothered. I slapped his gun to the side. “Why do you all keep asking me that?” I said. I stepped back and fell over the rump of the resting cow behind me. “Ahhh!” I exclaimed, then I just lay there, as he ran around the cow and pointed his gun at me.
“You’re an abomination,” he growled. “Maybe that’s why you are going toward one.”
“You’re an abomination!” I screamed back. I rolled to the side and couldn’t hold it in anymore.
He stood there and watched me cry. Then he sat down and just kept watching. My brain was finally processing the last twenty-four hours. I saw my hand smash the beautiful man’s face. I was grabbing my purse as I left my apartment for the market. I was driving in the night. The men were staring at me. I was getting into my car. Time seemed to have both stopped and was happening all at once. I wept harder, my cheek pressed to the dirt. I covered my face with my hands and the cool of my cybernetic hand in the heat of the growing day was soothing. But I couldn’t fully raise my left arm.
“Are you . . . alive? Like a human being?” he whispered. He put his gun down.
I glared at him. I could move faster than him. I could have smashed his face as I’d done to three of the men at the market yesterday. His face gave me pause and I stopped crying as I studied it. He couldn’t have been much older than me, if he weren’t actually younger. His skin was weathered and deeply bronzed by the sun, but he didn’t look like one of those northerners who needed water. There was no worry or helplessness on his face. Instead, there was a freshness to him. And he had large dark brown eyes that were wide and observant in a way that made me think of an owl. He had sharp high cheek bones and a large scar running up the side of his left cheek. I knew what his question meant, so I answered it. “I am alive,” I said.
A bull nearby awakened and stood up, mooing loudly. “How?” he asked.
“Science,” I said.
He picked up his thick cattle-herding stick instead. I stared hard at it. It had no glowing tip; it wasn’t a Liquid Sword, the infamous and very illegal sword-shaped Taser-like weapon that all the herdsman-turned-terrorists carried and used to kill people. It was just a stick. Phew. We stood eye-to-eye, we were both tall people. I considered sending a mental signal to my legs, making them extend so I’d be taller. “Only bad Fulani herdsman carry Liquid Swords . . . or guns,” I said. “Or so I’ve heard.”
“Times aren’t what they used to be,” he said. Now he picked up his gun. He slung it over his shoulder as he added, “And I don’t carry a Liquid Sword, those are torture devices. But a good Fulani stays alive. Now go away. Leave me and my cattle in peace.” He started walking away and that was when the strange thing happened that had happened to me a few times over the years.
Years ago, not long after I’d had my bionic legs attached, I was sitting in my mother’s yard and a swarm of dragonflies had zoomed around me like wasps and then landed on my arms, head, shoulders, and become still as if someone had hit pause. I loved dragonflies and this was both a terrifying and a delightful moment. After about a minute, they’d zipped off and were gone.
Something similar happened again with hens last year. I’d been walking home with two friends, and we’d cut through someone’s yard. There were five chickens there and they’d blocked my way to the point that my friends both started laughing. They wouldn’t move, rushing at my feet every time I tried to take a step. Then they just surrounded me and stopped. My two friends got scared and ran to get help. But by the time they’d returned, the chickens had gone about their business.
And now here it was happening again. With a white cow and a bull with horns as long as and thicker than my arms, which was scarier. They both stepped in front of me. “What are you doing?” the man asked, turning around.
“I’m not doing anything!” I snapped, backing away from the large bull directly in front of me. The man started speaking in his language at the two cattle, but neither animal responded. “What is happening?” he asked.
The cattle seemed to relax, the bull mooing and the cow backing away from me a bit. But not enough where I could leave. “Fine,” the man said. “You come with us.”
“Huh? Where?”
“Where were you trying to go?”
I paused. Then I just grinned sheepishly at him knowing how I sounded when I spoke. “I have no idea . . . I was . . . I don’t know.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “So close to the Red Eye, with no anti-aejej, nothing, and you . . .” He clucked his tongue and nodded. “Is this suicide?”
“No,” I said.
“So why are you going north without any guide or supplies or plan?”
I looked away. “I don’t know.”
“What are you called? What’s your name?” he asked.
“Unit 83204” I said.
He frowned deeply, cocking his head and stepping back from me. “You’re sure you are alive?”
I raised both my hands, laughing. “I’m just joking.”
“Today is a bad day to joke with me,” he muttered.
“For me, today is the best day to joke,” I said. “If I don’t make jokes, bad things happen. My name is AO Oju.”
“AayOh?”
“Like the two letters, then Oju,” I said. “AO stands for Autobionic Organism. I changed my name when I was twenty years old. My parents were so angry. They prefer the name they gave me, of course, Anwuli Okwudili.”
“You legally changed your name to two letters? Or you just abbreviate your real name to . . . ?”
“My name is AO,” I snapped. “And it stands for Autobionic Organism.” I paused, taking a breath to quell my annoyance. I hated when people questioned what I told them to call me. My name is my name. “What do I call you? Or shall I ask, ‘What did your parents name you?’ ”
He paused, pursing his lips, then for the first time since I’d met him, he smiled. Then actually laughed, looking at one of his steer who looked placidly back at him. Then he looked right at me. “My name is DNA.”
I blinked and then laughed so hard that I stumbled back and my left arm started twitching. “What!” I shouted and then fell into gales of laughter. What a relief it was to look up at the blue clear sky and laugh and laugh. I laughed until there were tears in my eyes. I looked into the eyes of one of the steer and laughed even harder.
“It’s just my initials,” he said, when I finally started calming down. He was leaning on one of his steer. “My name is Dangote Nuhu Adamu. I’m a man of tradition, a son of the sand, I’m fully human.”
“Yet, you still ended up with an acronym for a name, just like me,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me, waiting for me to say more. When I didn’t, he swiftly turned and said, “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Do you really care?” he said over his shoulder.
I watched him go for a few moments, until the cow came up behind me and shoved me into walking right behind DNA. The male walked beside me, its huge horns easily reaching feet higher than my head. I watched his hooves as we walked, grounding into the gravelly sand with each step. I glanced up at the clear blue sky. Not a drone in sight.
I’d been following the stranger who called himself DNA across the dry land for over an hour. At about the time that I finally stopped thinking over and over “What are you doing, AO? What the fuck are you doing??” I noticed his hands. His left hand. His right carried the stick, which he swung side to side as he walked, lost in whatever thoughts were plaguing him. I say plaguing because of what his left hand was doing. It was shaking.
“Are you all right?”
“Eh?” he said, turning around, clearly irritated by my voice. His two steer were trudging along beside us, completely uninterested in our exchange. “Your hand is shaking, o,” I said. “Is something bothering you?”
“No.” He turned around and then tripped over his feet and nearly went sprawling.
“Hey,” I said rushing over.
“Don’t,” he nearly shouted, holding both of his hands up. He stood up and started walking. “Don’t touch me!” He started speaking what I was sure was Pulaar, his people’s language, and walking faster. I strode up beside him and matched his gait. For several minutes, we walked like this. Fast and silent. The steer had no problem keeping up. Ahead of us was arid land with sprays of dry bushes or palm trees here and there. It was amazing that this was still Nigeria, a Nigeria that I could drive to myself in less than 24 hours. I grew impatient.
“Hey,” I said.
He kept walking.
“Hey!”
Still kept walking.
“HEY!” I shouted. Even the steer stopped. The land around us was now so vast and flat, that it seemed to swallow my voice. Not a road in sight. It was like being on another planet, no atmosphere, or so much atmosphere that everything about you is swallowed, from your sins to your voice. He stood, staring hard at me.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“I don’t know you, either, but I still want to know. Why are your hands shaking? Are you ill?”
He paused and then said, “ No.”
We stared at each other, the breeze swirling around us hot but nowhere near as hot as it could get out here, I was sure. I wiped sweat from my brow. He wasn’t sweating at all. The bull sat down beside me and snorted softly.
“Why do you care?” he asked.
“Why am I out here with you in the middle of nowhere?” I said.
“We are somewhere. You come from nowhere.”
“What happened to you, DNA?”
He started walking again, his back stiff, his gait holding that steady pace. In another hour of walking, the gravelly sand would submit to shifting sand dunes, the only voices on the wind the occasional mutter of one of his steer. And I’d be completely alone with this man . . . and him with me. I sighed. My left arm twitched, and the ache of it reached the flesh of my shoulder. “Hey,” I said more firmly, stopping. “What happened to you? Why is there dried blood on your shirt?”
He kept going, hunched and practically stumbling forward.
“Look at you. You’re not even walking properly, now.”
He stopped and turned to me and the sight of his face took my breath away. His face was wet with tears, his eyes squinted with a pain so sharp I could have sworn I could hear it in my ears. “What happened?” I asked yet again. DNA dropped his herdsman’s stick. And it seemed like DNA died right there on his feet.
My father once told me about how his grandfather had died standing. He’d gotten up that morning, kissed my grandmother, fed their dog Bingo, picked up his mobile phone, and checked his email. He’d gone to the porch and looked out across the city of New Calabar, and at some point he just died. And that was how my grandmother found him. Standing and looking at the city. However, my great grandpa died happy. In this moment, DNA looked like the most broken man on earth.
“Ah-ah, are you going to faint?” I asked, tapping him on the chest. He roused from wherever he’d gone. He leaned toward me and narrowed his eyes all the way to slits. I leaned back. “What?”
“Are you a spirit?” he asked. “You must be because only a spirit would stay around me when I am feeling like this.”
“I’m not a—”
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re more machine than human. It’s because you are a spirit that you can animate cold metal.”
“No. It’s because of science,” I said flatly. “And I’m actually mostly human.”
He kissed his teeth. “Science is mostly witchcraft,” he said. “See what it has done to humanity, and the more science there is, the more there is to see. You are a spirit.”
“Whatever,” I sighed. “But tell me, what happened to you?” We’d started walking again, my legs taking me ever forward with this man with blood on his ankles and shirt, toward a disaster, leaving my life behind. Maybe I was becoming a spirit; that would explain a lot. I held my left shoulder and worked my arm. As the dry hot wind rushed past bringing up tumbling grains of sand, I could have sworn it felt better. A little. Maybe.
“Fine,” he finally said. One of his steer mooed loudly. We trudged along for another minute, then he started talking. The tale DNA told was grim. And it all happened yesterday, too. As I listened I thought two things. 1. Nothing is a coincidence 2. When you decide to leave all things behind, you begin a new chapter.