When we reached the tent, DNA stopped so abruptly that I ran into his back. “What are you doing?” I snapped.
“Never met him,” he said. “But I’ve heard . . . stories. You’re a southerner. You don’t know.”
True. But I wanted to. If there had ever been a time in my life where I wanted to meet someone like this, it was now. “DNA, you should be dead.”
His eyes widened at me; my words had slapped him.
“You were there the day before yesterday, with all your best herdsman friends. You were in range. They shot and . . .” I licked my lips and had to push myself to be blunt. I felt dizzy before the words even came out of my mouth. “They shot and h-h-hacked your people dead. Except you. They didn’t even seem to see you. You said it yourself.”
“I’ve heard this man moves backwards in time or something,” DNA said.
“Then we don’t have to worry that much about him, do we?”
“Also heard that he’s a white man who lives outside of whiteness.”
I laughed. “Impossible.”
“I don’t know why they’d send me here.”
“Because you’re wanted, and maybe he can help.”
“They also say he’s the worst kind of sorcerer,” he whispered.
“Okay, I need to meet this guy,” I said, smiling. I lifted the brown tent flap and bent forward to enter. The flap was heavy and stiff like a tarp and it made a dull crackling sound as I pushed it aside. The moment I was inside, two things hit me: Stark stillness and silence. As if the chaos outside didn’t exist. As if we’d stepped into outer space. The quiet was so dense that I instinctively opened my jaw wide, trying to unpop my ears. No change. It smelled of a mixture of incense, smoke, and sweat and it was comfortably cool.
The interior of the tent looked vastly larger than its exterior, plenty of space to stand up straight and walk in before arriving at the large fire. It burned logs of wood stacked in a two-foot-high tower, and though it burned brightly, its flames didn’t scorch or even blacken the cloth above. And then there were the walls of the tent, they shuddered from the wind outside, yet somehow made not a sound and none of the air current entered this strange space.
He sat across from the fire watching us. He wore heavy black robes that covered every part of his body except his face and feet. I frowned. His feet were too close to the fire. “Ah, finally grew some balls, I see,” he said. He spoke English with an accent I could recognize. Maybe it was some form of American.
“I don’t have balls,” I said, before I could stop myself. I hated that phrase.
“Not you,” he said. He pointed at DNA. “Him. I don’t know what you have.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. There are times to bite back and times to hold your tongue. He nodded, resting an elbow on his bent knee. He motioned toward us. “Okay, o,” he said. “Good. Sit. Remove your masks. We will talk unhindered.”
I took my gel mask off with a snap, and it immediately shrunk to a palm-sized blob. I touched my face; the skin was soft and damp. We sat across from him, the fire between us. He was indeed a white man, Caucasian. His nose long and narrow, his lips thin, pink and smirking, his smooth head bald, his eyes some color that was not brown, the fire made it hard to tell exactly what color. His pale yet slightly sun-touched skin made him seem to glow in his black robes.
He could have been sixty or three hundred years old. However, it wasn’t his physical features that made me wonder if I should have left the tent flap shut. It was how close he sat to that fire. Even from where we sat, several feet back, it was hot. He was inches from it, his foot maybe two inches.
I could hear DNA whispering to himself beside me in Pulaar. Most likely praying. I chuckled to myself. There was no room or reason for prayer here. Whatever was going to happen to us now would happen, and probably with the permission of the gods.
“D-N-A the herdsman from nowhere,” he said grandly, looking at him. “And A-O the auto mechanic from Abuja.”
“You knew we were coming?” I asked.
He held up something that might have been a very ancient mobile phone. It was small and black, but thick. It looked like a piece of soap. He flipped it open, and its screen was barely a two inch square. “I get messages just like anyone else.” He giggled as he flipped it shut with a loud thock! “They’re coming for both of you, you know?” he said. He sat back, straightening his robes over his bent leg. He wiggled his toes with delight at the fire. He was a tall man, so his feet were large and spatulated. I noticed that they were dusty and his toenails were nicely manicured. So strange. “Ah, yes, I just figured I’d catch up with you two before the rest of Nigeria does.”
“Catch up with us? We came to you,” I said.
“AO,” DNA hissed. “Don’t . . .”
Baba Sola raised a hand. “Let her talk, let her talk, women need to talk. They are most useful when they talk. If we don’t hear them, the universe suffers.” He chuckled, and in that chuckle I knew, despite his words, he looked down his nose at women. He looked down his nose at everyone. “Yes, let this one talk. Yes, you found me. That’s exactly how it went. And the world will find both of you. But not until I am done taking a look and marking this moment. Marking this story.” He raised a hand and suddenly there was a small cigarette in it. No not a cigarette, a joint. He leaned forward and touched it to the fire and then he took a deep pull. He slowly exhaled and the smell filled the tent.
I glanced at DNA and his face was pinched. He clearly wanted to complain and knew he should not. “Are you going to share that?” I asked. DNA stared at me and I shrugged at him. “Bad luck to break the cypher, or so my grandmother said.”
“Your grandmother smoked this stuff?” DNA asked.
I rolled my eyes. Irrelevant things were even more irrelevant in a wizard’s tent.
Baba Sola held it out, and I had to lean onto my knees to get it. I enjoyed marijuana once in a while, especially when I was in pain. And something told me that this was not the kind grown on corporate farms with corporate pesticides and corporate genetic modifications. This would be organic and very kind. DNA gave me a hard look as he watched me bring it to my lips. A joint from a sorcerer in a tent in the middle of a dust storm the day after I’d killed five men with my bare hands. I took a deep deep pull.
The smoke filled my lungs and within seconds, the world bloomed around me. Opulent, vibrant, and churning wilder than the winds outside. Yes, this was wizard’s brew. I exhaled, and it was like I was exhaling the world, new and refreshed. It shifted and turned before me on its own axis. I frowned, unable to look away. I held the joint out to DNA and his frown deepened. “I am a Muslim,” he said, disapprovingly.
“And you’re a murderer in the tent of a wizard,” I told him, my words leaving my lips with the smoke, smooth and cool like water.
“No,” he simply said, and I shrugged. The world was breathing all around me. I inhaled and exhaled and it was like I was breathing with it.
“The world isn’t all about you, AO,” Baba Sola said.
“Yet the world’s after me,” I muttered. I took another puff and handed it back to Baba Sola.
Baba Sola paused, looking at DNA. “You sure?”
DNA shook his head.
“Ah-ah, he dey try, but what will be is what is, eventually,” Baba Sola said, taking two more puffs before putting it out in the sand beside him. “Mister DNA, you’ve waited so long for a wife who adheres to tradition that you have surpassed the age when it is traditional to find a wife. You’ve fallen from the tradition you fight so hard to stay in.”
The irony of his words was like someone lightly running a finger over my armpit; I couldn’t hold back my laughter. I guffawed loudly and the sound of it made me guffaw even harder. DNA frowned at me. “You’re high,” he said.
“I am!” I shouted, pressing my hands to my mouth, giggles still escaping. In a wizard’s tent, I thought and this nearly sent me to the moon with fresh laughter. I pinched my nose. Both Baba Sola and DNA watched me. For how long, I will never be able to tell you. But by the time Baba Sola spoke again, I had calmed down and was staring at the shuddering tent walls thinking they looked like the fists of people outside punching it. I wondered if those people outside would soon come in. And what they’d do to all of us.
“And you,” Baba Sola said.
“Me?” I asked, looking at him. A white man in black robes who glowed like he had studied his craft with talent and skill for decades. I didn’t believe in sorcerers, jujuwomen, witches and wizards until this moment. I believe now, I thought. What will happen to me? To both of us? Maybe it’s bigger than that. I paused at this last thought, my eyebrows going up.
“Yes, you,” Baba Sola said, his smile broadened as if he knew what had just cracked open in my mind.
“You fled into the desert and are now following a man. As is tradition.”
Now it was DNA’s turn to snicker. I wanted to slap him, but a part of me also wanted to snicker, too. The world was no longer the world.
“You’re both here because this is a meeting,” he said. “You’ve arrived at the same place from different places. I’ve been here before, I’ll be here again. But neither of you will. What I can give you I’ve already given.”
We both looked at each other, afraid to say what I was sure we were both thinking—that juju from this man would be real and true. The type our grandfathers referred to using one word, “abomination.” Both of us leaned forward, listening.
“I had a friend who was a yam farmer in the east. Ndi Igbo,” Baba Sola said.
I blinked at the phrase and just let it go. This white man in the desert was the real thing, nothing like those who’d come before wanting to colonize, appropriate, seize, and destroy. He was a white man who traveled and shared and learned and laughed and observed. Maybe he did live backwards. He probably knew a thousand languages. He probably spoke Igbo better than I could.
“He told me that long ago, two farmers went into the jungle hoping to escape the hard lives they were living on their farms. They met each other on the third day. It was as if the jungle was playing with them, leading them this way and that, deeper and deeper. It would show one a leopard, and he would flee. It would show the other a python, and he would flee even farther into the jungle. Neither was terrified enough to recapture his senses and return home to his good, not so bad life.
“Until that day when they met. By this time, they were each covered in red mud, because it had rained every day they’d been in the jungle. Their bellies were full of roots, wild yam leaves, and roasted bush meat they’d each found and consumed. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness of living below the jungle’s canopy.
“Now, when two farmers meet, normally, one will conquer the other. Farmers are territorial by nature. They cannot coexist on the same land. But this day, there was no fight to the death or battle of well-chosen words. The men could see with the clarity of the jungle and the purity of their purged minds. They hadn’t heard the voices of their wives in days. And so they sat. They built a small fire. They talked of many things. These two men were never seen again after that night. Though some say, they both returned home to their wives and families and lived such rich lives that no one recognized them as the same men.”
Baba Sola leaned back on his hands and crossed his feet at his ankles as he looked at us, clearly satisfied with himself.
“What’s that story got to do with us,” I asked. DNA nodded vigorously beside me, equally irritated.
“Your generation has lost the art of the proverb, the gift of wordplay, the science of fiction, the jujuism of the African,” he said, picking up the joint he’d placed on the sand beside him. He brought out a match and flicked its tip aflame with his nail. He threw it in the fire, relit the joint from the fire and took a deep pull. He exhaled smoke, and I stifled the urge to cough. Despite the fact that we were in the middle of a whipping whirlwind, it smelled like we were suddenly in a tiny poorly ventilated room, and that room was filled with smoke; not marijuana smoke but the kind that rises from burning wood. Beside me, DNA started coughing. “Heh, amateur,” Baba Sola said. “Can’t even take the second-hand.”
“I take what I want to take,” DNA said, his cough subsiding.
Baba Sola laughed. “Only God knows everything in life,” he said with a smirk, as if he didn’t believe there was a God at all. “But I know plenty. Boy, give me your hand.”
I realized DNA and I were still holding hands. All this time, we’d been holding hands. I hadn’t even noticed it. Maybe it was the effects of the marijuana. Whenever I smoked it, time jumped in erratic unpredictable ways. One moment I was looking out the window, the next I was sitting on the couch with no recollection of the few seconds it took to turn, walk, and sit. I quickly let go of DNA’s hand, for some reason embarrassed. DNA held my eyes for a moment and then turned to Baba Sola and leaned forward, his hand held out.
Baba Sola took another puff of his joint, held it between his lips and took DNA’s hand as he gazed into DNA’s eyes. “Some Yoruba like to put charms beneath the skin, but somehow I’ve always felt that was kind of primitive. It’s like putting a computer chip under the skin instead of using nanotechnology to grow it right into the ribonucleic acid or just strong psychic energy from a travelling man like me.” He leaned forward and roughly pulled DNA closer.
“What?” DNA asked, his voice shaky. I wouldn’t have wanted to look into the sorcerer’s eyes like that either.
“I don’t think there’s much I have to say to you. But I will say this: You’re no king. You’re no leader. You’re just a herdsman. That’s good. But you listen. Listen. And when they come,” he leaned in. “Know. Your. Worth.” With each of those last three words, he shook DNA as if he were trying to wake him up.
“What are you talking about,” DNA whispered.
“You are not a herdsman, then?” Baba Sola said, letting go of his hand.
“I am, yes, but . . .”
“Then shut up,” he said. He took another puff from his joint and, as he blew the smoke out, he added, “Just remember my words. I don’t need your response to them.” Baba Sola raised his chin, his attention on me now. His eyes were blue. A cold, frozen, blue, like those of a mysterious cat. He took another pull at his joint and held it.
With each and every word he spoke, came a puff of the heady smoke. It was as if he were speaking a spell. “You, my dear, you’ve been fucked with enough. Time for you to see beyond yourself and fuck the world. Make it see a new day.” He sat back and dismissively waved a pale hand at us. “I’m blessed to have witnessed the both of you in person, but it’s time for you to be on your way. They’re coming.”
“Who?” DNA asked.
“Everybody,” he said. He was fading and the fire was fading and soon the tent began to fade, too. We both jumped up.
“Hey!” I shouted at the disappearing Baba Sola. “What do we do now?”
He laughed. “Not my story to tell.” He was gone.
And we were outside.
“Quick! Put your mask on!” DNA said. I was still carrying mine in my left hand, and quickly I pressed the gel to my face and ears. When I looked up, I saw the eeriest thing. The sun saw me and decided to hide, even as the dust covered it up. The sun moved. Swiftly. And then it was hidden behind the dwindling edge of the swirling storm. And it took the light before the dust could roll and swirl in. The light faded as Baba Sola had faded, quickly, suddenly, for no reason.
I grabbed DNA’s hand as both sand and storm fell back on us.
“Your steer?” I shouted over the noise of the storm.
He looked around, shielding his eyes with his other hand. “GPS,” he called. “Carpe Diem, to me!” I wanted to hold up my left hand and shine the small light in my fingernail around us because it was so dark, but instinct told me to wait and keep holding on to DNA.
“Urooooo!” The sound came from right behind me and I jumped, whirling around. I felt the cow push past me to nuzzle against DNA’s arm. And GPS stood right behind her. I could see this because it suddenly wasn’t so dark anymore. A piercing floodlight cut right through the dust. The drone shining the light blasted through the dust so strongly that it created a momentary funnel that reached the clear star-filled sky. It’s nighttime? I franticly wondered. How long had we been in that sand storm with the sorcerer? Maybe it was the marijuana and its time jumps.
The dust and wind swooped back in and closed the opening to the sky and I held on to DNA and one of GPS’s horns for dear life. The powerful lights from the drones flooded all around us, helicopters zipping just above us like alien ships. But somehow, they didn’t see us. Was it some of Baba Sola’s lingering juju? DNA’s weird ability to be unseen as he had been in that town? A loophole in my country’s elaborate surveillance system? Maybe they didn’t see us for all these reasons. Technology always fails eventually, and juju is made to succeed.
We snuck right past an entire line of soldiers—a herdsman wanted for murder, a woman mechanic wanted for murder, and two steer who’d survived attempted murder. The soldiers had somehow surrounded us, yet been unable to find us. To speak might have changed this, so when GPS blundered to the right and then forward, as if he knew where to go, we did, too. The sandy wind bit at and buffeted us about and for several minutes, it felt like being lost in a furious stinging sea. The wind was behind us, then in front of us, then beside us, but mostly beside us. I could feel it trying to tear at my clothes, grating at my flesh, pushing for my organs, trying to take my breath away, threatening to whisk me away. We moved slowly but steadily, shoulders hunched, heads down.
The veil of the Red Eye began to lift, and now it was mainly just wind we were contending with. “GPS really knew where he was going,” I shouted over the wind, finally feeling able to let go of both him and GPS’s horn.
“It’s not my first time trusting him,” he said. “Now you understand how he got his name. If you let him lead the way, he’ll always lead you out of the Red Eye. He hates it.”
“Handy and good friend to have,” I said, patting the animal on his side.
“Yes,” DNA said.
We emerged into a field of dried grass, near the warehouse. We’d made it through the fields and were just about to cross the remaining hard pan to the parking lot when we heard it behind us. A loud roaring. My heart sank. We didn’t stop or look back until we were running across the parking lot, right into the glass doors of the abandoned warehouse we’d passed earlier.
“This is why we stay away,” I heard DNA say as I put a hand to the dirty glass door. It opened smoothly, almost as if the hinges were oiled or removed. Why would they leave a warehouse door unlocked, even if there was nothing inside? And though the sun had set long ago, the door was warm to the touch. The noise continued behind us and finally, I looked back. What I saw made me want to abandon all hope.
Soldiers were setting the field of grass we’d just run through on fire. It didn’t take much and the wind provided even more fuel. There were about ten drones flying over it and spraying flames on the grass like water, aiming their fiery spray from south to north to avoid setting themselves aflame. What they spewed was thick, nearly solid flame that looked and heavily fell like lava.
“Why are they doing that?” I shouted.
Within minutes, desert grassland that had been untouched and unbothered for probably years, looked like a war zone. DNA was muttering in Pulaar again. I shook my head, trying to clear it. I was still high from Baba Sola’s wizard marijuana and the field looked as if it were blooming and swirling, not being razed by swirling biting fires. The propellers from the many drones which, clearly, were fireproof, created miniature whirlwinds in the flames.
Then I noticed them. “DNA! Look! Look at them.”
They came running about the edges of the flames, unbothered by the heat. Some even ran into and out of the fire. The soldiers were automated. Upon closer inspection, I could see that they didn’t move like human beings at all. Their motions were fluid, perfect and measured to cover distance using the least amount of energy and time. They would soon find we were not there. Then they’d come here.
DNA flung the door open and it fell off the hinges, clattering to the ground. An old charred smell wafted out, but the terrified steer trotted right in, shoving past both of us through the double doors. DNA and I paused for a moment, looking at the flames and smoke rising in the fields. The fire’s blazing light reached far enough to light the beginning of the Red Eye’s churning winds of dust, some of the flames actually whipping into fiery whirlwinds.
“My family has never been a part of this,” DNA said. “We stay out of the way of this kind of ‘civilization.’ Look at them coming here and just doing this. Burning everything. For what? You? Me? Who are we?”
I was barely listening. Whirls of flame, automated soldiers, drones, all the way out here. Since when could drones vomit flames? My God, I was in trouble. It felt ominous turning our backs on fields of fire to enter a burned out building.