We’d passed two more of the monstrous Noors, both times while at a safe distance of a half-mile or so and never in their draft path. And even then, we could feel the strength of the accelerated winds blasting out their north-facing ends. And the sands were nearly unbearable, at least to me. GPS and Carpe Diem had their heads down but otherwise seemed okay, and DNA had wrapped his veil over his face but he didn’t slow his gait. Until this moment.
“It’s going to get very bad soon,” he said, switching on his anti-aejej armband. Immediately, the sand that had been scraping at my clothes dropped and the four of us were in a tight bubble, protected from the sand. The barrier reached less than a foot above my head and inches from around us. If he’d waited this long to turn it on, its battery power must have been limited.
“Better?” he asked me with a smile.
“Much.”
“You looked like you wanted to die,” he said.
“Thought I was going to,” I muttered.
We walked for another twenty minutes. Though the storm appeared to be close, for a long time, it seemed to stay in the same place as we walked toward it. It was that huge. The winds decreased here and he switched off his anti-aejej. While the storm lurked near yet far, we came across another menacing thing: The charred remains of an Ultimate Corp warehouse. Like the head of a great desert djinn, it loomed at the end of a parking lot whose asphalt was covered with a layer of shifting sands.
“Whenever I see this place, I think ‘failure’,” he said, patting Carpe Diem and GPS on their sides as he glared at the warehouse. “The biggest business out here is with the small people—nomads, people escaping, people hiding, the people of the desert have the biggest black market in the world. Not Ultimate Corp.”
As we crossed the parking lot, I squinted at the warehouse. It looked like it had burned long ago, though I could have sworn I still smelled smoke. Minutes and about a half mile later, the winds grew strong and dusty. Somehow, the smoky smell of the burned warehouse withstood the winds for the moment.
“What happened there?” I asked. “Never heard of a warehouse in the north. And it’s so close to the Red Eye.” Across the empty parking lot, where a road ran into the distance, was a large sign with the Ultimate Corp logo, a stylized outstretched blue hand. Several chunks of the tiling had fallen off and shattered to pieces below.
“For a while, even Ultimate Corp tried to get in on business with people living in the Red Eye,” DNA said. “They had these crazy delivery drones that could fly through the wind in the Red Eye. But they couldn’t compete with the black market. Especially when thieves kept breaking into the warehouse and waylaying delivery drones, then reselling the stolen goods. Ultimate Corp tried to fight back; we call that day The Reckoning.”
“Wait, was it that day when those desert black marketers ambushed those Ultimate Corp delivery drones?” I asked. “I saw coverage of that back home! It was the first time I ever saw people of the desert who weren’t, no offense, Fulani herdsmen terrorists.”
DNA looked deeply annoyed. “We aren’t terrorists, it’s those stupid men who sold off or lost their steer. And no one attacked those delivery drones. The Reckoning happened because Ultimate Corp tried to fight black marketers on their own turf.” He laughed. “So so stupid and arrogant. Afterwards, all their employees fled and none came back.”
“There was no Ultimate Corp warehouse on the news or anywhere else.”
“Of course not. How would it look to know that Ultimate Corp was trying to do business with the ‘wild people’ living in the Red Eye. But they were. Those drones that could move through the wind, whipping sand and dust. They tried to use those to attack desert people. That’s when everything went to shit.”
“Interesting,” I said, looking back at the warehouse. It must have been a battlefield back then.
“We come from dust, to dust we all return, even failed Ultimate Corp projects.”
We spread the red cloth right in the middle of the parking lot, using stones we found littered around the place to hold it down. And there we ate a heavy lunch from the food packed for us. He used his small capture station to draw cool water; it was small but still much bigger than the one I had. Mine certainly couldn’t have drawn enough water in minutes to slake ours and the steer’s thirst. Even with the clouds in the sky, my personal capture station was the size of a keychain and would only have drawn a few cups of water. The steer drank noisily from the bag; thankfully, I’d taken water into my cup first. I shuddered when I saw him drink his water after the steer. Fried chicken, goat cheese, dates, something he called latchiri, some kind of vegetable soup he called takai haako—by the time we finished, both our bellies were comfortably full.
“It’s not so comfortable to eat when in the storm,” he said. “So fill up.”
I nodded. “Even now, I feel like three percent of what I ate was sand.”
He laughed. “Get used to that.”
Sitting there was eerie. Since I’d left my car, this abandoned warehouse was the first thing I’d seen that was like home. And it had an apocalyptic feel. When we’d passed the front doors, which were brown from the flames’ heat, I noticed that they swung a bit with the wind. I wondered what we would find inside if we went in there. Would there be charred remains of people who couldn’t escape? Or just a bunch of burned lawn chairs, mobile phones, jars of honey, clothes, warehouse things.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the warehouse parking lot, he had to turn the anti-aejej back on. We were back in the high winds, the sky was dark with dust and the looming storm finally fell on us. It blocked out the sun. It locked in the heat. It made hearing difficult. What a feeling it was to be there. No car. No nearby shelter. Only the sky above. Somewhere. I wished I could have photographed myself in this moment, maybe the photo would capture my conflicting feelings of vastness, smallness, freedom, and doom. But I’d left my mobile phone behind, along with any connection I had to the connected world. I was here. Only in the moment.
When a gust of wind strong enough to pass through the anti-aejej’s barrier made us stumble, we paused, meeting each other’s eyes. He quickly turned to the raffia ball he’d stuffed between the bundles on GPS’s back. He tapped on it and the raffia relaxed. The upper part of the ball collapsed revealing tightly packed items inside. He picked up and threw something white and small at me. I caught it and held it up. What slowly unfolded in my hand looked like a piece of clear gelatin. “It’s a mask,” he said. “Put it on now.”
I unrolled it more and held it up. It looked like it would fit comfortably over my face, but it had no mesh where the eyes, nose and mouth would be. “How am I supposed to breathe with this on my face?”
“Just put it on,” he said. He was holding up his own now. “I live out here. I know what I’m doing.”
I watched him press it to his face and ears. Now they looked covered in a thick layer of oily gel. I pressed mine to my face as he pressed masks over the faces and ears of GPS and Carpe Diem. The moment it was on my face, I felt it go from cool to warm like my own skin. Like it was alive. I frowned, slowly letting myself breathe. There was no resistance at all. I could also hear just fine.
“Without these masks, you won’t last long,” he said, helping GPS step into some kind of protective bright yellow jumpsuit. “Your face, ears, and lungs are now protected from the dust.”
When DNA was done, I looked at GPS and Carpe Diem and stifled a laugh. They looked as if they’d dunked their heads in buckets of water. And Carpe Diem, in particular, didn’t seem to like the mask because her eyes were wide with shock. With the tight yellow jump suits, they both looked like aliens. “Steer suits aren’t cheap,” he said. “If I had all my cattle, we wouldn’t be able to go. I’ve never gone into the Red Eye with my cattle.” He frowned. “Until now.” He reached for the off switch of the anti-aejej.
“Wait!” I shouted. “You’re turning it off?”
“Of course! You think an anti-aejej will be able to hold back Red Eye winds?” He laughed loudly and shook his head. “Oh, no no no. Maybe for a few minutes, but this small solar thing’s battery can’t withstand that kind of weight for long.”
Fumbling with anxiety, I wrapped my veil more tightly around my head, thankfully my heavy long skirt and a layered top were otherwise good for the dust storm.
“If you can’t quite see me, then stay close to the cows,” he said. “GPS will let you hold on to his horn.”
Just before he clicked off his anti-aejej, I looked ahead. I could see where it shifted from high winds to near madness. My God, we are going to walk into that. On purpose, I thought. Yet again, I marveled about how much my life had crumbled in a matter of forty-eight hours. What I saw up ahead reminded me of footage people on the Mars colonies were always posting on their social network accounts. The cloud of dust looming ahead of us was monstrous, spanning the entire horizon and lifting to block out the sun. In a few minutes, it would be like the night. “How the hell do people live in that?”
DNA laughed. “Some people like the dark.”
My heart was pounding in my chest. “Really?” My voice shook. Why did I come out here? There are better ways to die, I thought. But I didn’t really want to die any more. I had no foreseeable possible logical future, but I didn’t want to die.
“Who is this Baba Sola?” I asked. “Why can’t he come out of it and meet us here?”
DNA’s laughter was beginning to unnerve me.
“You’re just asking that now?”
“It’s never too late,” I said, irritably.
He turned off the anti-aejej. The force of the wind would have knocked me over if it weren’t for my ground grasping autobionic feet. I grunted as my body flailed a bit, then I leaned forward, sand slapping at my clothes. The mask was incredible. I felt nothing on my face, though I knew sand was grating at it. I could breathe perfectly. Not one grain of sand got in my mouth, and I could look around without sand getting in my eyes. It was almost like wearing a diving mask underwater, except the gel perfectly fit my face and made dwelling in the dust almost like a natural state. Still, the steer didn’t seem to like this “natural state”; they moaned miserably and crowded closer to DNA.
My feet were made to adapt to any terrain from icy to uneven gravel, and I want to say I walked more easily than DNA did. I mean, he wore only a pair of thin flip flops. However, this was more his terrain, and his gait was as smooth and unhindered and probably just as painless as mine. Then the sharp rocks graduated to sand and we were trudging up the first dune when the sand storm swirled around us. And still we kept walking, slowly, beaten by the sand. When we reached the bottom of the dune, the steer refused to go any further, simply sitting down, all pressed together as they groaned with confusion.
“Come on,” DNA shouted. “They’ll stay here. We go a little further.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he is always just beyond the worst of it,” DNA said. “That’s what they say.”
“Who is this guy?”
He shouted something in Pulaar and trudged on, leaning into the sandy wind. I followed him. I’d come this far, I would keep going. Plus, though the wind and sand whipped the exposed parts of my body and collected in the folds of my clothes, my cybernetic parts moved me on as if it were a clear sunny day with no breeze. Yes, these parts of me loved the desert and dust. My human parts were what suffered.
At some point, I grabbed his hand and his responding grip was strong. We moved into it. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I was in the dark and in that darkness everything disappeared, except me and what I was left with. Those men had had it coming, but so had I. I’d always had it coming. In the dark this was all clear. I emerged from the warm protective darkness of my mother’s womb poorly made. A mess. And then years later, fate had unmade me. How dare I embrace what I was and wasn’t, and build my self? Arm leg leg arm head, I am my own Allah, I thought in the dark. Three years ago, I’d made this argument to my ex-best friend Dimmy who was Muslim and he had slapped me for blasphemy. I’d never talked about it with him after that day, after that moment. And the idea had grown stronger in me. But I had a lot of nerve. And now I was in the dark.
The madness stopped. It stopped so suddenly that I will never forget the sight of it. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. That was the sound of every grain of sand in a thirty-foot radius suddenly stopping its tumbling motion and dropping. Both DNA and I were showered with sand, our feet and legs buried nearly to our knees. DNA coughed and stepped out of the mound, letting go of my hand. I looked up, seeing the clear blue sky above, the dust storm whirling outside the radius. We were in the eye of a tornado in a hurricane, or maybe it was the radius of a powerful anti-aejej.
“Fuck!” I shouted, kicking my way out of the falling sand trying to bury me.
“Quiet,” he hissed, despite the roaring of the wind around us. And somehow above it all, I heard him. I shook sand from my skirts and hair and was just beginning to feel like the worst was over when I looked up. I shuddered and grabbed his hand, pressing close to him. He was already also looking up, and he responded by pressing close to me, too. “I could have happily lived my whole life without seeing this,” he said.
Together, we waited for gods knew what. I noticed first. The fact that the storm seemed to be opening, expanding, widening, without shrinking or slowing down. And there was something that looked like a tent yards away. But how was that possible. Though it was fairly calm, it was still windy. And inside, the tent seemed to have a glowing heart. A fire.
“There,” I said, pointing. “You see it?”
After a moment, he said, “Let’s wait a few minutes.”
I pulled DNA with me. “Come on. That’s why we came here and you know it.”
Reluctantly, he yielded to my pulling. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
I felt a tingle in my left arm and I let go of DNA to rub it. It seemed every body part that I had chosen was achy and warm. My legs, my arm, my bowels, there was even an ache at the top of my head where the implants were. It didn’t make sense. I was alive because of logical science. I’d only been able to support myself back in Abuja and Owerri as a mechanic because of logical science. Up to this point, everything, wild as it was, made sense because it was all really just logical science. But now here I was in the middle of a sand storm looking at a tent with a warm fire burning in its bowels. None of what was happening right now in this moment was logical or scientific.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go meet this wizard and see what he has to tell us.”