The nomad village was about a mile in diameter. Low Bedouin style goat skin tents set up not too close but not too far. It was nearly upon us now. A minute ago, when I’d looked up, I hadn’t seen a thing. “Oh good,” he said. “You look a lot better.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “I don’t know what the hell that was.”
We started encountering DNA’s people and, from the start, it was strange. But before I get to that, let me note how these people lived. I’m used to concrete towers and sprawling buildings. Of course, much of Abuja, parts of Lagos and all of New Calabar are green with government-maintained swaths of peri grass. Most of the lower half of Nigeria is green with it to some extent. And drones and AI-run robots peopled the streets and the air like insects and birds. Their cooling fans are fluffy with dust and dirt, some are missing parts because people pull them off to sell in the black market.
Though I hadn’t lived in wealth, I’ve always lived in relative comfort. Both my parents were gifted and ambitious engineers who were most interested in creating innovations for Nigeria and least interested in participating in strikes or protests. My parents were the two engineers behind the solar roadways and parking lots that powered so much of Imo State.
I’d been a baby at the time, but I still vaguely remembered the smell of asphalt and the adhesive used to seal in the solar panels. My parents were well known back home, though not all that well paid. And the government townhouse I grew up in was a solid strong structure as were all the apartments I’ve lived in since I moved out of my parents’ home. I was a typical southerner.
So seeing how these people lived was jarring. Up until yesterday, I’d never spent a night under the stars, these people lived beneath the stars. They set up tents made from thin but colorful Ankara cloth. They were protection from the winds, not the rain. It barely rained here, apparently.
And there was one huge conical thatch structure in the center of it all. It was this that I set my eyes on because everything else around me was too much. I’m used to being stared at, but not by an entire village. Not all at once. Some wore the traditional long flowing garments, but most wore sun gear, a stylish Ankara clothing made to absorb energy from the sun into a small battery in the side pocket that could be used to power appliances. The women tended to wear sun gear with a blue or black thin veil covering their heads that went all the way down to their ankles. And they spoke English, at least around DNA and me.
“Hello, ma’am,” one woman said to me. “You can’t walk?” I was still sitting on Carpe Diem.
“I can walk,” I said, quickly scrambling off the cow.
“It’s DNA,” someone said.
“Oh my goodness.”
But most of the villagers just stared at us. Especially at me. They crowded around us and I immediately wanted to escape. I narrowed my eyes and squeezed my fingers into fists. I wasn’t afraid of these people, but I was still jumpy from yesterday, when I was surrounded by seemingly nice people who’d then hardened into cruelty.
“Everyone move back,” DNA said. “Farah, Jojo, Mohammed, everyone, it’s me. What is all this?”
I noticed her first because she looked just like DNA except with braids and darker skin. Same deeply Fulani face that peacefully blended remote Arab features and powerful West African ones. And she had the same tall lean frame. She was pushing through the people, an intense frown on her face. “Brother, come on!” she grunted as she shoved two men aside. She wore a long red abaya and a sheer red veil, and she somehow managed not to get it caught on any of those around her. She grabbed his hand and yanked him between two women.
“You people, move,” she snapped. “Always sniffing for gossip. Go to the city if you’re so bored.”
“AO,” DNA said, looking back at me as his sister spirited him away. “Come.”
We followed her into a series of tents with entrances facing each other, not far from the large thatch structure in the center of the nomad village. These tents were all made of the same deep red cloth, setting it apart from the patchwork of tents around it. DNA’s people had money.
“Go in, go in,” his sister insisted, shoving DNA into an entrance covered by two hanging red cloths.
“Wuro, stop pushing me. I’m coming,” DNA snapped.
“Gololo! Mama!” she yelled.
I followed them both in, glancing behind me. Several villagers had followed us, but stopped some yards away, talking amongst themselves. Then I was inside a courtyard in the center of tents lit by sunshine streaming in from above and scented with an incense so strong, no fly would dare try to endure it. Red cloth walls, flimsy yet protective, floors red with thick carpet, red leather travel bags, even the woman staring at DNA as she emerged carrying a large platter of flat bread wore red pants and an embroidered red kaftan. Red, red, red.
It happened to both DNA and me at the same time. We had just met and something had bonded us. Yes, it was mostly the traumas we’d both endured but also something else. Whatever it was, the bond was so true that we both expressed PTSD in the same way, at the same time.
We stopped where we were. DNA stood in the center of the courtyard, facing his staring mother. I was directly behind him, my face inches from the gun on his back. I was looking over his shoulder, seeing only the red cloth of the tent. Only the red.
. . . I was falling into red.
. . . Falling and flailing through time.
. . . Flailing backwards twenty four hours.
Time dumped me at the moment where men’s blood was spilling a stark red onto the dirt of my market’s dirt ground. Reflecting in the rays of sunshine that fought their way through the market booths and stunned hardened people. They were like stone, unmoving and unfeeling as they watched and did not help. The blood on my dexterous robotic hands, my robotic feet. I heard a whimper escape my throat, and I heard a man’s throat crushed by my hands.
“Mama! Look!” Wuro said, rushing to a tall woman in red pants and a red shirt putting a tray of bread right there on the floor. DNA’s mother strode to him, her hands outstretched.
“Dangote, what are you doing here?”
“All dead,” I heard him whisper. His back was to me, but I heard him as clearly as if I were hearing my own thoughts. I reached forward and took his hand. He grasped mine. I caught Wuro’s eye as I did this, and her eyebrows rose.
“Mama,” he said. “C-can’t I come home? To rest? If you’re worried about her . . .” he motioned to me. “She’s off the grid, like us. They won’t find her anytime soon.”
“I don’t know who this woman is,” she snapped waving a dismissive hand at me. “You reject every woman we found for you. Too old, too young, too much school, too much city life. You finally bring one home and she’s mostly machine.” She loudly kissed her teeth.
Wuro laughed loudly.
“Mama, she’s—”
“Dangote!” A man who also looked like DNA but older burst into the courtyard from another tent entrance. “Hey! He is really here!”
“Gololo, I can explain,” DNA said.
“Just tell me. Is it true?” Gololo asked.
Wuro stood beside him, her arms across her chest. She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “One-track minded. Our brother is home, Gololo. Take a breath and see that for a moment.”
“Is it true?” Gololo demanded.
“Is what true?” DNA asked. He looked back at me. We were still holding hands. His flesh to my steel. His eyes, still clouded with the pain of his trauma, asked me, Do I tell them? I looked away.
“I’m not asking about her,” his brother snapped, pointing at me. “I’m asking about you. Is it true about you? Have you really become a terrorist?”
Wuro picked up the tray of bread, clearly anticipating trouble. She ducked out of the tent, and I wished I could do the same.
“Terrorist? Me?? Why would I . . . ?”
His brother stepped closer. “If the stories aren’t true, where are your steer? Just GPS and Carpe Diem? Where is everyone else? Why come home without them? What herdsman would do that?”
“I came home because . . . wait, what stories?”
His mother grabbed his shoulder and thrust a phone in DNA’s face. And in that way, DNA saw himself shooting the woman yesterday. He must have felt as if he’d suddenly time-travelled backwards and landed just outside of his body. I was standing right behind him, so I could see the footage clearly. The point of view was from in front of DNA and close enough to catch the twitchy look on DNA’s face just before he blew the woman away.
The bullet hit the woman in the chest and there was a mist of blood. Then the woman fell. As DNA stared at the footage, his back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face. But I saw his head twitch, and I heard him whimper. He grabbed his head and started screaming like a mad man. Right there in the middle of his family’s nomadic compound, villagers outside eavesdropping, the sun shining down on us all.
Wuro burst back in and tried to grab him, but DNA jerked back, inconsolable. His mother stood there, her eyes wide with shock, still holding up the damn phone. His brother was beside her, mouth agape. “What’s wrong with him?” Wuro screeched, reaching out, tears in her eyes. I snatched the phone from his mother’s hand and threw it down. I heard a satisfying crack. “What the hell are you doing? You think he needs to see that?”
His mother didn’t miss a beat. Her youngest son was still screaming as she pointed a finger in his face. “My own SON! Terrorist! Terrorist! Killing people like they are lizard! Shame!” Her finger was practically in his open mouth and I wondered if, in his hysterics, he’d bite it off.
DNA had stopped screaming and now just stood there, a blank look on his face. I’ve seen people in this state before. They’re wound as tightly as they can wind. If you touch them, if you even try to speak to them, they explode. Like my mother when she learned her father had died. I’d been five years old and sitting in the auto chair I liked to use when the exoskeletons on my withered legs made me tired. I was right beside my mother when her phone buzzed. She had spoken to her mother using the speaker, so I’d heard the entire very brief conversation. Her father had died peacefully in his sleep while sitting in his favorite chair, and her mother had found him.
I stared at my mother as she whispered, “I’m coming, mama. Right away.” Then she’d put the phone down and gone quiet and still. When minutes had passed and she was still frozen and staring off into space, I touched her shoulder ever so lightly with my right hand and whispered, “Mama, are you all right?”
My mother erupted into screams, tears, motion. Slapping and punching the air. My chair sensed the danger and it immediately zipped me across the room to safety, where I watched my mother lose her shit for the first and only time in my life.
DNA was like this now. And this time, I knew to move myself away.
“Why?” his brother asked. “Why would you give up your cattle to become trash?”
This seemed to snap DNA out of it. The word “trash” or maybe it was the sharp way his brother said it. Like a machete. DNA blinked and then grabbed his brother by the collar and started shaking him like a ragdoll. “I am NO TERRORIST!” He looked his brother squarely in the face. He shook him some more. “You believe what you see on the screen posted by people you’ve never met over your own heart? You know me, brother. I WOULD NEVER.”
“I know what I saw with my EYES,” his brother said, tearing himself from DNA’s grasp. “The whole thing was recorded. I saw it live.”
DNA laughed ruefully. “You yourself told me that footage can be manipulated! Anything digital!”
“That was the first thing I checked for!” he snapped. “I know the digital fingerprints of manipulations. That’s not hard to detect with the right tools. Which. I. Have. What I saw had NOT been manipulated.”
“Did you see the whole thing?! All the footage? What kind of journalist isn’t interested in context?” He turned to the crowd that had gathered inside at all four entrances. DNA squared his shoulders, and I stepped to the center of the space, looking around, unsure of what he was about to do. More people were coming in, joined by his mother who’d picked up her cracked phone. She stood behind DNA’s brother.
“I just wanted to be left alone,” DNA said, looking defiantly at me. He turned slowly, addressing everyone around him. “You all know me. Everyone here knows the business of everyone here. We’re family. I didn’t want to leave for the cities, I didn’t want school, I wanted what our earliest forefathers wanted: A wife who was simple like me, children who’d do whatever children did and my cattle. THAT IS ALL. I don’t want big money, big houses, big land, big items. I wanted to grow up and then old as what the gods made me, on the land where the gods put me.” He glanced at me and then turned back to his people. “THAT’S ALL. You all kept bringing me complicated wild women, you wanted . . . ah, why would I of all people turn terrorist? Does that even make sense?!” He rubbed his sweaty face with his rough hand.
“Why don’t you stop with the hysterics? Tell us what happened,” a woman in the crowd shouted.
“Otherwise what?” DNA asked. “If I don’t explain will my own village cast me out?”
“You are all over the clan networks,” an old man said. “They will come for you, son.”
“Only if someone here tells them I’m here, Chief Mohammed,” DNA said. “I’m not a terrorist.” He turned to his mother. “Mama, I’m not a terrorist. I only want peace.” He turned to his brother. “Gololo, you’re one of Nigeria’s top investigative journalists and you’re wrong.”
As he told his people what happened, I pulled the sleeves of my shirt over my wrists and straightened my long dress to cover my metal feet. I adjusted the black veil I’d wrapped over my head and then I hoped for dear life that when their attention finally shifted to me, as it inevitably would, they wouldn’t decide I was an abomination worse than a desert djinn and try to beat me to death as people had sought to do in the Abuja market.
I waited.
DNA was quite the storyteller, thankfully. They did not try to kill me.
All the time he spent alone with his steer in the desert, thinking and not using words, must have sharpened his usage of them when it was time to speak. He told of the incident in the farmer town. He pulled his people in. He enchanted them. He softened then opened their minds. By the time he finished weaving yesterday’s violence into the tapestry, I’d relaxed. No one who’d truly listened could dispute that he’d been wronged.
That night he stayed with his brother and his brother’s wife. They had me stay with his mother. As I wondered and wondered what DNA was talking about with his journalist brother, his mother wondered about me.
“Don’t worry dear, you can undress. It’s just you and me.”
I was holding up the long white sleeping garment she’d given me. I’d been shown to a tiny wash tent, where I bathed in privacy. No one saw my body. But now, she was looking at me, frowning.
“I’m really private,” I said. “Can . . . can you maybe . . . ?”
She kissed her teeth and turned around, picking up her tablet. I removed my clothes and quickly slipped into the night dress.
“I’m an old woman,” she said, her back still to me. “But I’m not blind. I’ve been in this world longer than you.”
I pulled the nightgown to cover my legs as much as possible. My arms however were in full view. “I didn’t want to scare you,” I said.
She turned to face me, looked me up and down and said, “My son has returned without his cattle and with a woman who is not a woman.”
“I’m a woman.”
“Can you lie with a man?”
“Of course.”
“Have you lain with my son?”
“I just met your son today. Hours ago.”
“Yet he brings you to meet his family. You’re special to him.”
“It was just timing. Coincidence.”
“No such thing as coincidence.”
“Trust me. It’s a coincidence.”
“We used to think he was struck with sukugo, a wandering spell few ever recover from. My son has never brought a woman to the village. Never.”
“These aren’t normal times,” I muttered.
“And what are you doing here? The way you speak this English tells me you’re not from the north.” Before I could answer, she held up a hand. “Forget it. You don’t have to explain to me. Get some sleep, robot girl.”
I smiled. I liked his mother. I lay on the mat and was asleep within seconds.
Someone was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes. It was still dark, but someone was holding a small dim light, a mobile phone. I gasped and tried to move away. I’m dreaming. Whoever was standing over me was wearing a veil, like the ones I liked to wear.
“Relax, eh!” she hissed.
“It’s me,” DNA said as I realized he was right beside whoever it was who looked like me. She held the light to her face. It was his sister Wuro.
“And me,” she said. “But I’m going to pretend to be you.”
“What?”
“AO, come. The Elders have to speak with us now. Get dressed. Then we have to go.”
“Why?”
“We can’t stay here.”
“They’re coming,” his sister said.
“The other clans,” DNA said. “Someone couldn’t help himself. Herself. Themselves. Someone talked. Then the news probably travelled fast.”
His brother rushed in carrying what looked like a large raffia basketball. He shoved it in DNA’s hands. “Your two remaining cattle are at South End, waiting. They’re coming from North End.”
DNA and his brother paused, both their hands on the raffia ball thing.
“You really think it’ll come to that?” Wuro asked, adjusting the veil on her head.
His brother nodded. And more unspoken words passed between them. DNA hugged the ball to his chest and turned to me. “Change of plans.”
“I assumed,” I said.