Rosewater Read online

  I sit down and avoid talking by eating. I avoid eye-contact by using the binoculars.

  The crowd is contained in Sanni Square, usually a wide-open space framed by exploitative shops and travel agents, behind which Oshodi Street lurks. A firework goes off, premature, a mistake. Most leave the celebrations till afterwards. Oshodi Street is a good spot. It’s bright from the dome and we are all covered in that creamy blue electric light. Utopicity’s shield is not dazzling, and up close you can see a fluid that ebbs and flows just beneath the surface of the barrier.

  The glasses are high-end with infra red sensitivity and a kind of optional implant hack that brings up individual detail about whoever I focus on, tag information travelling by laser dot and information downloading from satellite. It is a bit like being in the xenosphere; I turn it off because it reminds me of work.

  Music wafts up, carried in the night, but unpleasant and cacophonic because it comes from competing religious factions, bombastic individuals and the dome tourists. It is mostly percussion-accompanied chanting.

  There are, by my estimate, thousands of people. They are of all colours and creeds: black Nigerians, Arabs, Japanese, Pakistani, Persians, white Europeans, and a mix-mash of others. All hope to be healed or changed in some specific way. They sing and pray to facilitate the opening. The dome is, as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege.

  Some hold a rapt, religious awe on their faces and cannot bring themselves to talk, while others shout in a continuous, sustained manner. An Imam has suspended himself from a roof in a harness that looks homemade, and is preaching through a bullhorn. His words are lost in the din which swallows meaning and nuance and shits out a homogenous roar. Fights break out but are quashed in seconds because nobody knows if you have to be “good” to deserve the blessings from Utopicity.

  A barricade blocks access to the dome and armed constables form up in front of it. The first civilians are one hundred metres away from Utopicity’s dome, held back by an invisible stanchion. The officers look like they will shoot to kill. This is something they have done in the past, the latest incident being three years back when the crowd showed unprecedented rowdiness. Seventeen dead, although the victims rose during that year’s Opening. They were … destroyed two weeks later as they clearly were not themselves anymore. This happens. Utopicity can restore the body, but not the soul. The god told me that back in ‘55.

  I cough from the peppery heat of the akara. The fit drives my vision to the sky briefly and I see a waning gibbous, battling bravely against the light pollution.

  I see the press, filming, correspondents talking into microphones. Here and there are lay-scientists with big scanners pointed finger-like towards Utopicity. Skeptics, true believers, in-between, all represented.

  I feel a gentle tap on my left shoulder and emerge from the vision. Aminat is looking at me. Bola and her husband have shifted out of earshot.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asks. She is smiling as if she is in on some joke but unsure if it’s at my expense.

  ‘People desperate for healing,’ I say. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Poverty,’ says Aminat. ‘Spiritual poverty.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.’

  ‘Are you politically inclined against Utopicity?’

  ‘No, hardly. I don’t have politics. I just like to examine all angles of an issue. Do you care?’

  I shake my head. I don’t want to be here, and if not for Bola’s invitation I would be home contemplating my cholesterol levels. I am intrigued by Aminat, but not enough to want to access her thoughts. She is trying to make conversation, but I don’t like talking about Utopicity. Why then do I live in Rosewater? I should move to Lagos, Abuja, Accra, anywhere but here.

  ‘I don’t want to be here either,’ says Aminat.

  I wonder for a moment if she has read my thoughts, if Bola matched us because she is also a sensitive. That would be irritating.

  ‘Let’s just go through the motions to keep Bola happy. We can exchange numbers at the end of the evening and never call each other again. I will tell her tomorrow, when she asks, that you were interesting and attentive, but there was no chemistry. And you will say …?’

  ‘That I enjoyed my evening, and I like you, but we didn’t quite click.’

  ‘You will also say that I had wonderful shoes and magnificent breasts.’

  ‘Er … okay.’

  ‘Good. We have a deal. Shake on it?’

  Except, we cannot shake hands because there is oil on mine from the akara, but we touch the back of our hands together, co-conspirators. I find myself smiling at her.

  A horn blows and we see a dim spot on the dome, the first sign. The dark spot grows into a patch. I have not seen this as often as I should. I saw it the first few times but stopped bothering after five years.

  The patch is roughly circular, with a diameter of six or seven feet. Black as night, as charcoal, as pitch. It looks like those dark bits on the surface of the sun. This is the boring part. It will take half an hour for the first healing to manifest. Right now all is invisible. Microbes flying into the air. The scientists are frenzied now. They take air samples and will try to grow cultures on blood agar. Futile. The xenoforms do not grow on artificial media.

  In the balcony everyone except me takes a deep breath, trying to get as much inside their lungs as possible. Aminat breaks her gaze from the dome, twists in her seat and kisses me on the lips. It lasts seconds and nobody else sees it, intent as they are upon the patch. After a while I am not sure it happened at all. I don’t even know what to make of it. I can read minds but I still don’t understand women.

  Down below it begins, the first cries of rapture. It is impossible to confirm or know what ailments are taken care of at first. If there is no obvious deformity or stigmata like jaundice, pallor, or a broken bone, there is no visible change except the emotional state of the healed. Already, down at front, younger pilgrims are doing cartwheels and crying with gratitude.

  A man brought in on a stretcher gets up. He is wobbly at first, but then walks confidently. Even from this distance I can see the wideness and wildness of his eyes and the rapid flapping of his lips. Newcomers experience disbelief.

  This continues in spurts and sometimes ripples that flow through the gathered people. The trivial and the titanic are equally healed.

  The patch is shrinking now. At first the scientists and I are the only ones to notice. Their activities become more agitated. One of them shouts at the others, though I cannot tell why.

  I hear a tinkle of laughter from beside me. Aminat is laughing with delight, her hands held half an inch from her face and both cheeks moist. She is sniffing. That’s when it occurs to me that she is here to be healed as well.

  I get a text at that moment. I look at my palm to read the message off the flexible subcutaneous polymer. My boss again.

  Call right now, Kaaro. I am not kidding.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rosewater: 2066

  It’s the middle of the night when I arrive at Ubar. I come off the last train and there’s a car waiting for me. Ubar is an area between the North Ganglion and the widest part of the River Yemoja. We drive along the banks before turning away into empty roads and dark buildings. The driver stops in front of imposing iron gates and waits for me to get out, then drives off.

  I walk into a facility that belongs to the Ministry of Agriculture. From the outside it is a simple, two-storey building with ordinary signage showing the Nigeria Coat-of-Arms covered in dust. Inside there’s a reception and an open plan office. There are framed photographs of the president on one wall and Rosewater’s mayor Jack Jacques on the other. Mundane. I’m buzzed through all of this without delay and my RFID is logged sure as cancer.

  I go straight to the elevator down to the sub-levels. These are used and controlled by Section Forty-five, or S45. Most have n
ever heard of this obscure branch of government. I have only heard of them because I work for them. Before that I was a finder and a thief.

  Part of my job with S45 is interrogation. I hate interrogations.

  It is 0300 hours and we are in a dim meeting room. There are two agents in black suits standing on either side of a prisoner who is naked and tied to a chair. The prisoner is blindfolded. The agents don’t speak and I do not know what information they need. I don’t bother trying to read them because the organisation would not have sent them if they knew anything. This is part of some bureaucrat’s idea of keeping the subject’s mind uncontaminated with expectations. What they want is for me to copy all the information from the subject’s mind, like making a backup of a hard drive. This is ridiculous and not possible, but no matter how many times I’ve written memos to the powers that be, this continues to be the manner in which they request interrogation.

  Data does not spool into or out of the brain like a recording.

  The man in front of me is black, unbruised, breathing in ragged hitches, and muscular. From time to time he says ‘please’ in Kanuri or Hausa. He tries Igbo and Yoruba sometimes, but I am not convinced he speaks any of the languages fluently. I am uncomfortable and stay two feet away from him. I connect to the xenosphere. I first establish that he is not a sensitive. His self-image is the same as the man in the chair. That’s good — it means I will not be here all night.

  There is violence in this man’s head. I see two men beating a third in what looks like a backyard. The two men alternate kicks and punches between them while their victim tries to stay upright, using his forearms to shield himself as best as can be managed. The victim is bruised, dirty, and bleeding from the mouth and nose. He does not seem afraid. If anything, he appears to be mocking his tormentors. His attackers are uniformed, dark-skinned, with berets and sunglasses designed to make them seem identical. They do not look like the Nigerian police or Army, at least not by the uniform. Looking closer, the uniforms seem homemade, like from one of the militia. They have no weapons holsters, but one has a pistol stuck in a belt at the small of his back.

  Something else that is odd: I cannot smell the yard or taste the dust that the three men kick up. I have neither the taste of blood in my mouth as the victim should, nor the pain of impact on my knuckles as the perpetuators should. Instead, this image is associated with the taste of food and drink, specifically kuli-kuli and beer. I also keep getting snatches of music from a cheap keyboard.

  I briefly emerge from the xenosphere and inspect the prisoner. I walk around behind him and check his bound hands. His knuckles are dark, callused. You get this from knuckle push-ups and punching a hard surface like a wall or Wooden Man in order to remove sensation from the area, to make you a better fighter. I know this because I have done it. I check this because none of the participants in the prisoner’s memory seemed trained in hand-to-hand. He is not one of them.

  Did he order the beating? Where did he witness it from?

  Then it hits me.

  ‘Oh, you clever bastard,’ I say.

  I re-enter the xenosphere. The ‘memory’ is staged. The prisoner watched it in a movie on repeat and was probably eating and drinking at the same time. He probably found a lesser known Nollywood film, which accounts for the cheesy music and the poor production values. He is not a sensitive, but he knows we exist and that he might be exposed to one on arrest. What it means to me is that he does have something to hide. I probe at the edges of the memory, which is like trying to peel off the adhesive label on a packet. I need to find purchase. I fix not on the image or sound, but on the other senses. Touch, smell, taste.

  ‘Hello, Gryphon.’

  It’s the same woman as earlier in the night while I was at the bank, playful, curious, ephemeral. The interruption breaks my concentration and I see the beating looping around and around. I search for a linked self-image but all I can find is the noise of the general xenosphere. Random mentations. Useless. I am irritated, but my training kicks in and I focus my will on the matter at hand.

  The sensation associated with the beating is gentle pressure on the buttocks and food, which tells me he was seated in some living room watching the scene on a wide-screen TV or a hologram. I discover the smell of cigarette smoke. The scene shifts, wobbles, dissipates and I’m in a smoke-filled room with five other men, all of whom are intent on the screen. Nobody speaks, but they drink beer, they smoke, and they chew the snacks laid out on a tray.

  I don’t like interrogations, but I’m good at them. I feel proud of myself when I solve a puzzle, and then I feel disgust. I try to think of myself as a lawyer, operating within certain parameters that do not include morality. Focus on the task.

  I pull out and say to the agents, ‘I need a forensic sketch artist. Now.’

  I am debriefed by my boss, Femi Alaagomeji. Videoconference, of course. Nobody in the security services would ever knowingly be in the same room with a sensitive. I know for a fact that they are not even allowed to form relationships with sensitives and are required to report the occurrence of sensitives in their families. The last time I breathed the same air as Femi was six years ago, but before that was eleven years ago, when she shoved me into S45, just before my training, when Utopicity was new and Rosewater was nascent.

  Femi is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is physically perfect in so many ways it hurts. In a sterile room, with a secure link, I videoconference with her. Today she wears burgundy lipstick. I happen to know she has a burgundy convertible Mercedes Benz. She must have driven it to work today.

  ‘Kaaro,’ she says.

  ‘Femi,’ I say.

  ‘Call me Mrs Alaagomeji.’

  ‘Femi.’

  This is an old dance that we dance. She is not really irritated and I am not really impudent. We play the roles all the same.

  ‘Who is the prisoner, Femi?’

  ‘Classified, need-to-know, all that good shit. What do you have for me?’

  ‘Faces. Five of them. The artist did well and is running them through the system right now. She’s also looking at the location, the brand of the electronics, everything. That’s all for today. I’m tired and it’s almost time for my day job.’

  ‘It’s not a job. You contract. This is your job.’

  ‘Fine. My other job.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘I do not know. If you told me his name —’

  ‘No.’

  ‘— or what he’s done —’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we do it the hard way, inch by inch. I discover information, I stop, I let the artist know, we start again.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘In a minute. How are you, Kaaro?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re lonely.’

  ‘I am alone, not lonely. It’s solitude, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I’m keeping up with my reading. I’m going to learn to play the oboe.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Chomsky.’

  ‘All right. Are you really learning the oboe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know why I bother asking. Go home.’

  ‘Goodnight, Femi.’

  I’m barely able to keep my eyes open by the time the S45 car drops me at home. The night has lost the battle with the day and soon Rosewater will rise and go to work. The city wakes up in layers. Food comes first. Long haul drivers bring in crops from Oyo, Ogbomosho, Ilorin, and Abeokuta. Cassava, corn, yam flour, millet, rice from Thailand. Not a lot sourced locally anymore. These are delivered to the many categories of Bukka, the Mama Put, the Food-is-ready. Cheap, local, and essential for the unskilled workers who need a hearty carbohydrate bomb before tackling their less-than-minimum wage jobs where they go to use their biceps, triceps, and spinal columns to lift, hew, saw, join, shave, slaughter, and clean. They cook. The aroma draws out the first tier of office worker, clerks, secretaries, j
uniors. Over a two-hour period the middle-class professionals of Rosewater will arrive at their offices, surgeries, law chambers, accounting firms, and of course banks.

  I will be joining them, but I need a shower and breakfast, perhaps strong coffee. I live in the middle floor of a three-storey in Atewo. An eight-digit code opens my flat, but there is an override key.

  A series of phone messages come through as if the signal just became strong enough. I seriously consider skipping the bank, pretending to be sick and sleeping all day. I want to find out who is trying to reach me across the xenosphere. I strip and walk naked into the shower. I try that trick of using warm, then cold, then scalding hot water, but it does not refresh me. In the mirror my eyes look bloodshot and baggy like they’re from a pervert’s mug shot.

  ‘You look like an idiot,’ I say to my reflection. ‘You are an idiot. Your life is meaningless.’

  I put on boxers and pad into the living room without getting fully dry.

  ‘Miles Davis, “So What,”’ I say to the sensors and the base plucks out on the speakers.