As we passed through the archway, my head began to ache so much that I couldn’t filter it out. Conversations, clicks, flashes of light in my peripheral vision, pinprick feelings in the parts of me that were organic flesh. I didn’t mention any of it to DNA. Why ruin the moment for him. Or for me.
First we passed a group of people standing on the sides of the dirt path we drove on. People wearing things from traditional loose garments of the north, to burkas, to jeans and t-shirts and miniskirts and tube tops. I saw dark brown faces, many ages, all watching with curiosity as we slowly passed. People held up cell phones and were taking photos, most were looking with their own eyes and laughing?
Messages started appearing on the screen in the truck.
“Welcome!”
“Righteous murderers!”
“We’re glad to have you!”
“Save the cows!”
Some sent links to our truck, email addresses, physical addresses, invitations to meetings, parties, and many sent “clean cash,” untrackable 48-hour credits that could be used anywhere without revealing one’s identity or even location.
“This is crazy!” I shouted.
DNA laughed, “We’re famous.”
“Infamous,” I said.
“No, the Hour Glass is the greatest refuge from . . .” He pointed behind us. “All that and beyond. These are the people who fall through or don’t fit. If they’ve seen the un-doctored footage, then they have full context.”
DNA opened his window as we passed. “Thank you all!” he shouted. An old woman in jeans and a colorful Ankara top and giant gold earrings, waved and came forward, “We all know when that time comes,” she said. DNA held out a hand and she took it. She looked in at me and pointed at me with her other hand. “You, don’t feel badly and don’t let insecurity blind you.”
“Okay,” I said, frowning.
Someone banged at the back of our truck.
“Hey!” DNA shouted turning around.
“Open the back door,” another woman said.
DNA got up and went to the back, joining GPS and Carpe Diem.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah, open the backdoor,” he said. “I think it’s okay.”
“You think?” I asked. He was looking outside the back windows, GPS and Carpe Diem crowding and nuzzling him.
“Just open it.”
A giant bale of hay was dumped into the truck a moment after I did and the steer set upon it immediately. “Thank you,” DNA said to two women who stood side by side grinning.
“We’ve been following the chase on the feeds. When we heard you were here, we knew they’d be hungry,” one of the women said.
The other raised a fist and said, “Let the cows live!”
I raised a fist in solidarity, laughing. DNA shut the door and came back to the front and we got moving again, more messages still popping up on the truck’s screen. We drove on the sand path leading into the city, and we were both quiet as we took it all in. On both sides were a series of stone domes, each with thick poles extending so high that one could barely see what was at the top. But you could hear it—large wind turbines, their wide blades slicing the air so fast that they were a blur. They must have extended through the anti-aejej’s field.
The stone domes had hundreds of antennae sticking out, making them look like pin cushions. Even as we passed, we saw a group of laughing teens open a stone door to go inside one of the domes. Each of these buildings made my new senses vibrate with their digital connectivity. Along with being enormous sources of electricity, they were each some kind of communication node.
Once we passed these buildings, there was more open space, farms that grew what looked like corn, onions, soybeans, and tomatoes. Huge sunshine lamps flooded the area with so much light, it was as if the sun had risen. “Wow,” I said. “It even feels a bit humid here.”
“Engineers, scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, doctors, even billionaires, there’s a lot of brain power in the Hour Glass,” DNA said. “Every kind of person has a reason to flee here, if they have the guts.”
“And if they don’t mind never seeing the real sun,” I added. “It’s like living on the Mars colony. Except it’s right here on Earth.”
We drove on the dirt road for what seemed like miles. There were markets, the occasional stone building, but it was mostly farmland. People walked along the road. It was peaceful. We arrived at one of the open spaces and a message told us to “get out of the truck, leave the steer, they will be cared for, start walking,” so we did. Water was drawn from a network of deep wells in the area and people lived around these wells. What fascinated me most was that, because the anti-aejej prevented rain and wind, people lived right out in the open, not a house in sight. And there was so much open space, privacy wasn’t an issue. The sky that people were used to was the maelstrom churning above. There were wide oriental rugs spread over the soft sand in the home areas. People walked about without shoes.
White stone hearths were set up in designated places, and there were wooden tables beside them. Women and sometimes men, crowded around many of these, plates of food, cooked and uncooked on the tables. One man was grilling what looked and smelled like chicken kabobs and ears of corn. A woman stirred something in a giant metal pot. The air in the cooking area we passed smelled of curry, red stew, thyme, wood smoke, stockfish, boiling rice, and incense. The place we walked through reminded me of DNA’s nomad village, though it wasn’t nomadic at all. These were places and people who did not move.
“Anwuli! What the FUCK!”
Hearing my birth name made me jump. I turned to see a tall, very lean, dark-skinned man wearing a long white kaftan with an intricately embroidered blue collar. For several moments, my mouth hung open. “Oh my God! Force Ogunleye?” I strode over to him. “Are you . . . how . . . what?!!”
Along with the headache and other sensations I was enduring all over my body, the additional shock made me dizzy. It was just too much. Force Ogunleye and I had dated for two years while I was in my teens. We met in auto shop class and bonded immediately over our love of the class materials that most were only there to memorize and then use to make money. Force was the one who’d put in my hands the very first anti-aejej I’d ever held. At the time, he was obsessed with them and I was wondering what the point of them could be. Who needed something that created a protective electromagnetic dome around you during a sand storm?
I was pretty self-centered back then. Completely paralyzed from my upper thighs and down, I was still trying to figure myself out. And I was months away from deciding to have my useless legs removed to allow for cybernetic ones. Most of the time I wasn’t dealing with my situation well. I was angry and frustrated and yet to understand that screaming, “It’s not fair!” at every problem, machine, and person around made absolutely no difference. Force was always able to distract my rage with ideas and by giving me things to work on with my new cybernetic hand. He was the one who taught me how to use them and that a mechanic with an arm and legs like mine was a superior mechanic.
Force wasn’t my first kiss, but he was my first love. Then when he was eighteen, he was called back to his land in the west to be king. He was next in line in one of the lesser Yoruba monarchies. I remember the pressure he was always under. He was constantly told that nothing he loved doing mattered, and if he were ever called to take his position as king, he had to do it. It was the only time I’d ever heard him say, “It’s not fair.” He’d whispered it, but he said it.
“I left,” he said now as he hugged me tightly. He let go and looked me over. “But I didn’t return to my homeland in Ondo State.”
“You came here?”
“Eventually.”
We stood staring at each other. I could almost feel DNA’s struggle between waiting and demanding he be introduced.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. I gazed at his face, feeling tears sting the corners of my eyes. For over a decade, I’d wanted to ask this question to his face.
“I don’t like . . .”
“Doesn’t matter if you don’t like goodbyes,” I snapped. “You ghosted.” My heart was throbbing hard now, but I resisted the powerful urge to rub my temples. I didn’t want him to see weakness in me right now. He’d ask me if I was okay and shift the focus to my health, my strange body. He used to do this often when we were teens.
“There was a lot,” he said. “But I ran from my family, and I didn’t want them to track me. So, yes, I ghosted . . . I ghosted everyone.” He pressed his lips together and looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“Your parents told me you committed suicide!” I shouted. This time I did rub my temples.
“Hello,” DNA said, stepping up. “My full name is deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA for short.” Force turned to DNA and just stared at him, all the emotion on his face turned toward DNA. I thought he was going to punch DNA in the face.
“Hi,” Force said.
I slept for twelve hours. I knew the exact time because I checked with my mind. The ability was still there. I’d slept, though, without being aware that I was being watched and without being aware enough to watch back. I awoke with blood crusting my nose and my left ear. I stared up at the “sky” of chaos for nearly ten minutes. “The Red Eye never closes,” I whispered. Swirls and gusts of dust and debris dimly lit by glimpses of sunshine that somehow managed to penetrate the storm. What a “sunrise” it was to look at. I squinted.
What was that? I could have sworn I’d seen a speck of something that wasn’t dull sandy brown. It was a glint of something lighter than the shadowy beige of the dust, but I’d only glimpsed it for a second. The ceiling of the anti-aejej’s field was about a hundred and fifty feet. High enough for me to not see it clearly, but low enough for me to know I’d seen it.
I shuddered and sat up, looking away from the “sky.” I brought my metal legs to my chest and pressed my face to them. The cloth of the long green kaftan spanning my legs was soft and smelled like Force. I inhaled the scent trying to let my angry memories of him overpower the thing I knew I’d seen fly by above. I was still angry with Force but this didn’t work. “You know you saw it, you know you saw it,” I muttered, pressing my face harder against my legs. “Shit.”
I’d just glimpsed one of the most disturbing facts everyone knew about the Red Eye. I’d always assumed it was urban legend designed to keep people away. But I know what I saw. Even if it was for a split second, I know that I saw a cluster of bones. Human bones. When one got caught in the winds of the Red Eye, the winds took you. First the storm thrashed you about until you were dead, then it stripped you of flesh and sinew. And then you flew forever.
The Red Eye’s winds were full of the dried tired bones of unlucky people who’d never find rest. Around and around they flew, the winds keeping the bones in their own clusters. I pressed my face to my legs and shut my eyes. Then I opened them because the pomegranate of eyes was looking back at me, and in looking at them, I felt the connection to everything else and this threatened to swallow me. I felt blood oozing into my nose as I took deep breaths to calm myself.
Something lightly kicked one of my metal feet. When I looked up, a young woman was grinning down at me. She was wearing a bright orange sari, no shoes, and her long braids were piled atop her head. “DNA is up already and went for a walk. We all thought you should sleep, but the sun’s been out for hours now. The day is going. You want some breakfast?”
I sniffed the blood back into my nose. “I . . . I . . . ugh.” I rubbed my head and hair and sighed, getting up. Dolapo was Force’s long-time girlfriend. I liked her. Her happy demeanor was its own sunshine, and I needed all the sunshine I could get. She was a coder who’d come to the Hour Glass out of pure curiosity and loved what she discovered so much she decided to stay. She also seemed to be my biggest fan, which was weird.
“I made some egusi soup, dodo, suya, or if you only want a snack, I have dates and groundnuts.”
“Thanks, Dolapo, but I’m not hungry.”
“Well, just tell me when you’re ready. I think you should eat, though. You need your strength.” She paused, staring at me with a grin on her face. “Anything you need. I’m over at the hearth for now.” Then she bustled off. I dragged myself up and, as I did, I saw Force emerge from between the field of high corn directly behind our sleeping area.
“Dolapo texted me you’re finally up,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Eat and get dressed, I want to show you something before your DNA returns.”