The beer bottle dropped to the ground with a clunk and rolled away as his skin covered with goosebumps and the hair on his arms rose with the change of static in the air.
You’re coming, he thought, pushing the door of the sheebeen open onto the barren waste left behind for ChinaCorp.
He looked up. The cloudy sky should have been grey with rain clouds. Instead, deep in the cycling mass, a red glow laced the sky, mingling with the charcoal clouds, layers upon layers high in the altitude, slowly making way for the one thing that he could rely on, the one feeling that connected his waning soul with his body and the world around him.
The beam.
The wind began to rise around him, the tiny maelstroms of dust spinning and merging into each other. The air went damp. Then dry. Then damp again, until his skin raged to crawl off his bones, rippling with the wind and the electric charges, the clouds growing bloodier, the smell of the air thickening, his tongue growing pasty and numb.
Somewhere deep in the clouds there was a thump, as if a thousand elephants pounded the ground with one foot all at once. And then silence.
It was but a second of silence; yet in the shifting elements it seemed to last a lifetime. It lasted long enough for him to want to run, and stay, and change his mind again a dozen times until the silence cracked with the deep rumble of bass. The clouds burst open, and the beam crashed down with the anger of an avalanche of rocks and glass, his ear drums exploding with the pressure in the air, the influx of pain searing through his brain as he screamed but couldn’t hear himself, and never would again.
The earth shook beneath his feet, rising and settling in waves, trying desperately to resist the onslaught of energy pouring down from space to rape it over and again.
He was a shell drifting at sea, a shredded bird blown senseless by the gales. And yet, through the blood leaking from his ears, through the air searing his lungs with grit, he felt whole. Whole and waiting to die.
Would his wife and son care? Would they even know what he had passed? There wouldn’t be anything left of him, not even a shadow imprinted on a rock. Nothing. They would never know and never find out.
Somehow the thought comforted him. They would never have to grieve. They would go on with their lives thinking he had given up on them. They would never have to question leaving him, or feel any remorse for pushing him over the edge. It was easier to work through hatred than through pain, he knew that now.
He thought back to that morning. The house, empty. His heart, empty.
He had gone back to bed. Numb yet cold. So cold. He had curled up in the sheets that smelled of Nabu’s sweat and churai, and fallen asleep, waking up shaking, a fever running through his blood, cold sweat dampening the sheets and his forehead burning.
He screamed for them. He dreamt of them in the midst of the furnace that was his skull, each succeeding dream worse than the previous. He saw Nabu crying while he was away on one of his trysts. He saw Demba consoling his mother, too young though he was to understand and not knowing which words to use to comfort her.
He should have seen it all. He should have seen the relief in Demba’s eyes when he walked through the door, covered in cologne to conceal his current mistress’s perfume. He should have seen Nabu’s eyes avoiding his for only the slightest instant before putting on a mask of strength that she wore for so long he didn’t know the mask from his wife anymore. He had convinced himself that she didn’t know of his trysts, that their marriage was healthy, that his family was alright.
The sky over him glowed red from horizon to horizon, and also the air around him; the swirling sand burned red, grating relentlessly against his exposed flesh, his threadbare clothes caked with vomit and sweat slowly torn off his body.
The beam was out there, closing in on him, finally coming to claim him and take him out of his misery, his own, Ibrahima -made misery. Mame Fatou would have laughed, not mockingly but in her delicate and light-hearted way.
And he heard her now, like a whisper in the wind. He shouldn’t be able to hear her. He couldn’t hear the wind or the storm, yet riding ahead of the beam, surfing waves of immense heat battering his now naked body, were voices. A carillon of millions of voices, trillions of them, drawing back to the edge of time when the first voice rang alone in the void and cried at its own loneliness, when love and longing were born, when fear and emptiness were so real there was no room for hate, only room for desire, only room for life.
Ibrahima felt at one with the voices, at one with their finite eternity and for a moment, he felt peace. For the tiniest fraction of a moment, all his pains were alleviated, and he was the voices too, the laughter of his ancestors.
We are the bedrock.
We are the buried.
We are the bones.
His dreams finally made sense. The void that had reflected itself upon his soul was an all-embracing light, welcoming him, calling him with the softness of his grandmother’s loving tones.
Sirius exploded at your birth, Mame Fatou’s voice whispered softly in his mind.
The Bandiagara cliffs collapsed into powder that day. An earthquake buried the pyramids. Space itself will be YOURS. The voices joined Mame Fatou’s whisper.
The beam was on him, drowning him in radiation, cracking open his cells and remolding them, his inner organs boiling to stew, pulling at his mind, trying to make Ibou one with it, or to become one with him.
But it couldn’t.
Somehow, where the ground had burned, where thousands had died, he still stood. Blind and deaf, his eyeballs melted down his cheeks, but he stood.
There were other voices in the beam, voices he understood but couldn’t recognize. The cry of animals were caught up in the beam and strongest among them, a mandrill more self-aware than man. It was an old mandrill, probably the leader of his clan, powerful enough to retain his consciousness, his knowledge of self where millions could not.
There was a will in the voices: a will to dominate the beam, to own it, to bite and tear it limb to limb in revenge.
And in the midst of the soothing ancestors was rage, single and purely focused. And the rage fed into his rage, read his pain and knew his heart. The Mandrill’s eyes opened onto the universe, folded it into the shape of Ibou’s heart and took a bite. In that bite the Madrill tasted love and tasted anger; and the anger matched his anger, its longing matched his longing —two faces that awoke the pain inside him.
Nabu his wife.
Demba his son.
In the onslaught of the beam the Mandrill’s face appeared, a powerful jaw and all too human eyes, looking at him in suffering, wanting to help him the only way it knew how…
The spell lost its hold on Ibou as the beam moved away from him, leaving him a shivering burnt and purulent mass of brown and red-welted flesh. The beam turned south, moving with the slowness of a distant tidal wave towards IKapa.
✦✦✦
Light.
The universe is light.
It seems dark as night, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is light.
It seems empty as a pit, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is a web.
The universe is light.
✦✦✦
The hunt continues for the conspirators who commandeered the gruesome attack on IKapa three years ago.
The city remains empty, a broken ossuary, where millions were buried and burnt in a flash of light.
The billions of yuan poured and still pouring out of Beijing make no difference, and how can they? You can always rebuild buildings; stone and steel are always plentiful. But what about soul? What do you do when that is gone?
What soul wants to live in this city, built on embers and blood, staring into the split carcass of Table Mountain cracked open to the clamor of millions?
ChinaCorp and Han Industries are not without their detractors, not with the shadow of Ouagadougou still stretching over their every move, but the data is unanim
ous. Someone somehow managed to divert the beam.
Suspicion first pointed at Han Industries, but this is not the misguided act of a competitor but the murderous game of the coward, the callousness of wanton politicized violence. This is an act of terror.
As three years close on the destruction of IKapa, the search continues, and will not stop until the cowards are brought to justice.
On the anniversary of the tragedy that struck IKapa, we remember the buried.
Masha Villiers for the eThekwini Gazette.
✦✦✦
Soul.
The universe is soul.
It seems cold as a shallow grave, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is soul.
It seems dead as a rotting corpse, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is life.
The universe is soul.
✦✦✦
IKapa is far from empty. There is always someone to hear the fall of the tree in the forest. There is always someone to pick the pockets of the dead.
“This place stinks, girl.”
“You mean you can smell something beyond that breath of yours?”
“Remember that time I banged your mom? Close enough.”
“We have the same mother…Of course it stinks, Greekson. It’s a fucking graveyard. They don’t call it Pompeii Black for no reason.”
It was wrong to say that IKapa had been destroyed. Abandoned yes, but the beam had not destroyed the city. It had only sliced through the Hottentot mountain chain like an industrial saw through unlucky fingers. The mountains split open, bursting tons of rock and ash into the atmosphere, some of it swallowed by the beam while the rest settled around it, covering neighborhoods in thick dust and debris, trapping hundreds of thousands in homes running out of air, trapping others on the top floors of buildings as they watched their neighbors die while waiting their turn.
Instead, the abandonment of IKapa created an opportunity for all kinds of scavengers. Some were people left behind at the expansion of the Confederacy. Some were farmers from the old homelands who had never seen a city. Some were rebel groups from the old nations of the Republic and the Empire, hoping to weaponize debris against the corporations. Some were religious fanatics of different bigotry. There was a fortune in valuables, materials and anything that could be salvaged.
And radiation.
Most scavengers had left after a year. The city was baked in decomposing bodies. The money wasn’t worth the price of scavenging in IKapa: the hair and nails of the scavengers would fall out in clumps, and anything out of IKapa was a tough sale, for very few would touch it. Except Greekson and Charity who, through some luck in the gene pool, were less affected than the others. At least early on.
“You can’t smell anymore,” Greek snapped back at Charity. “You think I can’t tell, but I’ve been letting them rip for months and you never complained. You always complained, ever since we were kids.”
Charity shrugged. “Doing what we do, I call that a blessing.”
“Yeah, but we can’t do this forever,” he said, coughing a few speckles of blood into his fist. “And no more tasting food for you either.”
Charity was getting used to that. She had never been a big eater anyway. She said, “I can handle that. A few more months and we should be able to pay off Big Caffer and get gandma her meds and our asses to the Republic.”
“You said that a few months ago,” he said.
“Can’t help it if water prices keep going up.” She handed Greek a dusty handkerchief with brown traces of dried blood. “Here, wipe that off your hand.”
Clean water was easy enough to come by if you had the yuan. The shantytowns surrounding IKapa had developed an economy of their own, reliant on water Wallas, and a host of bottom feeders with more courage than scruples.
It was a beautiful day. It happens in disaster zones too. Already, flowers and vines made their way through the dust and the cracked concrete, up the sides of the houses and buildings, wrapping old buses in cocoons of giant green thorns. Beautiful, fairy tale things, all of them deadly.
“We’re heading into the crater.”
Greekson spit out the little water in his mouth. “What!?” he yelled. “Are you out of your mind?”
“There hasn’t been a flare up in months,” she said, looking towards the vaporized bay and the giant hole known as the crater, full of broken buildings and who knew what. “Plus, I have a feeling about that place. I think that’s where the guys who stuck it to ChinaCorp are hiding.”
Greek shook his head. He loved his sister. She was the only reason he was still alive and prospering beyond all beliefs, but sometimes…
“Are. You. Out. Of. Your. MIND?!” he yelled again. “That’s where the radiation is the strongest. That’s why there are the flare-ups. We’ve been lucky so far, but…damn it you’ve lost your sense of smell already sis! There’s nothing there but radioactive slag!”
Charity shook her head.
“Think about it,” she said, spinning around and grabbing him by the shoulders. “There has to be something there. What is with the flare -ups? It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Something is controlling the satellite and it’s always stopping there. Right there Greek. We don’t even have to catch them, just confirm that they’re hiding there.”
“Who’re they?”
“The hell if I know. But what do we have to lose?”
“Our lives!”
“Come on. In and out. A quick recon mission. If we find something we’ll be rich. I mean Republic rich. We won’t have to work another day. Ever. And if we don’t find anybody…well, we’re back to the daily grind.”
Greek wanted to argue but knew it was pointless. Once Charity had made up her mind, that was it. It had always been so. She’d been getting him in trouble since they were toddlers, including their current predicament with Big Cafer.
“Ok,” he said. “Ok. But no more than an hour. In and out like you said.”
✦✦✦
Love.
The universe is love.
It seems heartless as a snake, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is love.
It seems lonely as an owl’s song, but it’s an illusion.
The universe is everyone.
The universe is love.
✦✦✦
What was left of Ibrahima’s shell sat on the floor of an old building, buried deep inside what people called the crater.
On the stone were stuck bits of his skin which peeled off him when he moved, leaving pus filled holes in his flesh. Most of the skin on his eyeless face and skull were gone, exposing the nerves and bones beneath. His right arm had fallen off years ago, the bones lying discarded in a corner of the den. The wound had never healed and occasionally leaked fluids onto the floor. The legs folded under him looked closer to chicken wings than a man’s legs; but then he didn’t need them, for he never crawled further from his seat of meditation than the small crack in the ceiling that dripped rainwater when the skies were clement. Every inch of his body was covered in bubbling sores, bursting open and closing whimsically.
No one would have recognized him. Not even himself.
Inside his mind, Ibrahima could see the universe unfold, travelling far into space where wormholes bloomed and faded out of existence in a blink. He could see the explosion of distant stars showering the galaxy with gamma rays, destroying life on one planet and creating life on another.
Sometimes his thoughts would surf on a comet until it crashed into a moon and shattered it into orbital rings.
All of it. All of life. In its nigh infinity. They were right within his grasp, yet utterly out of his reach.
And somewhere in that void Demba and Nabu danced with the stars, their shapes elusive, oft times whole, and oft times just a string of elements scattered on the immortal canvas.
When the beam had released him, a blind and quivering wreck seared to perfec
tion, he had screamed after it. In his mind. His vocal cords had been shredded by the air and radiation. He didn’t know that he was mute. He didn’t know that he was blind. He didn’t know that he was deaf. Despite being erased from his body, his senses were somehow heightened. He could see clearer, hear louder, smell stronger, and suffer more intensely—infinitely more so.
Every fiber of his being yearned for his family. He had pushed himself up and desperately tried to follow the beam which, guided by the primal rage that he had shared with the force, had zeroed in on his loved ones. He screamed after it, pleaded with it, begged for it to stop, told it that the fault wasn’t theirs but his. It was his own selfishness. His self-pity. Not them. But the beam ignored him and marauded further, relentlessly.
He picked up himself and repeat his appeals for days. Days after the destruction was wrought on IKapa, the city was covered in ash and the last living residents fled in a slow river of molasses, passing him by and pushing away the bleeding lumpy creature crazy enough to march into IKapa.
He heard his family scream when they died. He shared their panic at the incoming slaughter, the brief moment of disbelief when pain fades and death strikes, just a nanosecond between life and oblivion.
There had been something else there that had taken him the last two years to accomplish. Acceptance. At the very last moment they had accepted and embraced their fate: his strong and beautiful childhood friend who had become his wife, his son young yet tough enough to stare death in the face with a smile. He felt so proud of him.
Would he have had that courage? He who had taken the coward’s route, tried to end it and failed? He couldn’t even kill himself. All he could do was hurt others. He had wanted the beam, yearned for it since he was a child, but he had killed it, and enjoyed killing it.
And for two years he sat in this den, his body decaying as he breathed, racked by guilt and by a lifetime of emotions held at bay, never more than a heartbeat away, hammering him over and again until his soul cracked open and he couldn’t take it anymore and had to let go.
Dominion Page 27
