What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

by Lesley Nneka Arimah

  Best not to venture there. Best instead to concentrate on the shaky footage captured by a security camera. The motion-activated device had caught the last fifty feet of the man’s fall, the windmill panic of flailing arms, the spread of his body on the ground. When the formula for flight had been revealed short months before, the ceremony had started unimpressively enough, with a man levitating like a monk for fifteen boring minutes before shooting into the air. The scientific community was agog. What did it mean that the human body could now defy things humanity had never thought to question, like gravity? It had seemed like the start of a new era.

  Now the newscast jumped to the Mathematicians who’d discovered the equation for flight. They were being ambushed by gleeful reporters at parties, while picking up their children in their sleek black cars, on their vacations, giving a glimpse of luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing public, who must have enjoyed the embarrassed faces and defensive outbursts from well-fed mouths.

  By blaming the Mathematicians instead of the Formula, Martina Furcal and the Center created a maelstrom around the supposedly infallible scientists while protecting her family’s legacy. And their money. Maybe not such a bad move after all.

  Nneoma flipped through the channels, listening closely. If the rumor that Furcal’s Formula was beginning to unravel around the edges gained any traction, it would eventually trickle down to the twenty-four hundred Mathematicians like her, who worked around the globe, making their living calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound.

  She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year. Alvin Claspell, the Australian, had committed suicide after, if the stories were to be believed, going mad and trying to eat himself. This work wasn’t for everyone. And of course Kioni Mutahi had simply disappeared, leaving New Kenya with only one grief worker.

  There were six grief workers in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, where Nneoma now lived, the largest concentration of grief workers in any province to serve the largest concentration of the grieving. Well, the largest concentration that could pay.

  It was the same footage over and over. Nneoma offed the unit. The brouhaha would last only as long as it took the flight guys to wise up and blame the fallen man for miscalculating. “Cover your ass,” as the North American saying went, though there wasn’t much of that continent left to speak it.

  A message dinged on the phone console and Nneoma hurried to press it, eager, then embarrassed at her eagerness, then further embarrassed when it wasn’t even Kioni, just her assistant reminding her of the lecture she was to give at the school. She deleted the message—of course she remembered—and became annoyed. She thought, again, of getting rid of the young woman. But sometimes you need an assistant, such as when your girlfriend ends your relationship with the same polite coolness that she initiated it, leaving you to pack and relocate three years’ worth of shit in one week. Assistants come in handy then. But that was eight weeks ago and Nneoma was over it. Really, she was.

  She gathered her papers and rang for the car, which pulled up to the glass doors almost immediately. Amadi was timely like that. Her mother used to say that she could call him on her way down the stairs and open the door to find him waiting. Mama was gone now, and Nneoma’s father, who’d become undone, never left the house. Amadi had run his errands for him until Nneoma moved back from New Kenya, when her father gifted him to her, like a basket of fine cheese. She’d accepted the driver as what she knew he was, a peace offering. And though it would never be the same between them, she called her father every other Sunday.

  She directed Amadi to go to the store first. They drove through the wide streets of Enugu and passed a playground full of sweaty egg-white children. It wasn’t that Nneoma had a problem with the Britons per se, but some of her father had rubbed off on her. At his harshest Papa would call them refugees rather than allies. He’d long been unwelcome in polite company.

  “They come here with no country of their own and try to take over everything and don’t contribute anything,” he often said.

  That wasn’t entirely true.

  When the floods started swallowing the British Isles, they’d reached out to Biafra, a plea for help that was answered. Terms were drawn, equitable exchanges of services contracted. But while one hand reached out for help, the other wielded a knife. Once here, the Britons had insisted on having their own lands and their own separate government. A compromise, aided by the British threat to deploy biological weapons, resulted in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance. Shared lands, shared government, shared grievances. Her father was only a boy when it happened but still held bitterly to the idea of Biafran independence, an independence his parents had died for in the late 2030s. He wasn’t alone, but most people knew to keep their opinions to themselves, especially if their daughter was a Mathematician, a profession that came with its own set of troubles. And better a mutually beneficial, if unwanted, alliance than what the French had done in Senegal, the Americans in Mexico.

  As Amadi drove, he kept the rearview mirror partially trained on her, looking for an opening to start a chat that would no doubt lead to his suggesting they swing by her father’s place later, just for a moment, just to say hello. Nneoma avoided eye contact. She couldn’t see her father, not for a quick hello, not today, not ever.

  They pulled up to ShopRite and Nneoma hopped out. Her stomach grumbling, she loaded more fruit in her basket than she could eat in a week and cut the bread queue, to the chagrin of the waiting customers. The man at the counter recognized her and handed over the usual selection of rolls and the crusty baguette she would eat with a twinge of guilt. The French didn’t get money directly, yet she couldn’t stop feeling like she was funding the idea of them. Ignoring the people staring at her, wondering who she might be (a diplomat? a minister’s girlfriend?), she walked the edges of the store, looping toward the checkout lane.

  Then she felt him.

  Nneoma slowed and picked up a small box of detergent, feigning interest in the instructions to track him from the corner of her eye. He was well dressed, but not overly so. He looked at her, confused, not sure why he was so drawn to her. Nneoma could feel the sadness rolling off him and she knew if she focused she’d be able to see his grief, clear as a splinter. She would see the source of it, its architecture, and the way it anchored to him. And she would be able to remove it.

  It started when she was fourteen, in math class. She’d always been good at math but had no designs on being a Mathematician. No one did. It wasn’t a profession you chose or aspired to; either you could do it or you couldn’t. That day, the teacher had shown them a long string of Furcal’s Formula, purchased from the Center like a strain of virus. To most of the other students, it was an impenetrable series of numbers and symbols, but to Nneoma it was as simple as the alphabet. Seeing the Formula unlocked something in her. From then on she could see a person’s sadness as plainly as the clothes he wore.

  The Center paid for the rest of her schooling, paid off the little debt her family owed, and bought them a new house. They trained her to hone her talents, to go beyond merely seeing a person’s grief to mastering how to remove it. She’d been doing it for so long she could exorcise the deepest of traumas for even the most resistant of patients. Then her mother died.

  The man in the store stood there looking at her and Nneoma took advantage of his confusion to walk away. The grieving were often drawn to her, an inadvertent magnetic thing. It made her sheltered life blessed and necessary. The Center was very understanding and helped contracted Mathematicians screen their clients. None of them were ever forced to work with a client or provide a service they didn’t want to. Nneoma worked almost exclusively with parents who’d lost a child, wealthy couples who’d thought death couldn’t touch them, till it did. When the Center partnered with governments to work with their distressed
populations, the job was voluntary and most Mathematicians donated a few hours a week. There were exceptions, like Kioni, who worked with such people full-time, and Nneoma, who didn’t work with them at all. Mother Kioni, Nneoma had called her, first with affection, then with increasing malice as things between them turned ugly. This man, in the tidy suit and good shoes, was more along the lines of her preferred clientele. He could very well become a client of hers in the future, but not today, not like this.

  At checkout, the boy who scanned and bagged her groceries was wearing a name tag that read “Martin,” which may or may not have been his name. The Britons preferred their service workers with names they could pronounce, and most companies obliged them. The tattoo on his wrist indicated his citizenship—an original Biafran—and his class, third. No doubt he lived outside of the city and was tracked from the minute he crossed the electronic threshold till the minute he finished his shift and left. He was luckier than most.

  At the car, she checked her personal phone, the number only her father, her assistant, and Kioni knew. Still no message. She hadn’t heard from Kioni since she’d moved out. She had to know Nneoma worried, in spite of how they’d left things. None of their mutual New Kenyan contacts knew where to find her, and Kioni’s phone went unanswered. Maybe this was what it took for Kioni to exorcise her.

  On the way to the school, Nneoma finished off two apples and a roll and flipped through her notes. She had done many such presentations, which were less about presenting and more about identifying potential Mathematicians, who had a way of feeling each other out. She ran a finger along the Formula, still mesmerized by it after all this time. She’d brought fifty-seven lines of it, though she would only need a few to test the students.

  When things began to fall apart, the world cracked open by earthquakes and long-dormant volcanoes stretched, yawned, and bellowed, the churches (mosques, temples) fell—not just the physical buildings shaken to dust by tremors, but the institutions as well. Into the vacuum stepped Francisco Furcal, a Chilean mathematician who discovered a formula that explained the universe. It, like the universe, was infinite, and the idea that the formula had no end and, perhaps, by extension, humanity had no end was exactly what the world needed.

  Over decades, people began to experiment with this infinite formula and, in the process, discovered equations that coincided with the anatomy of the human body, making work like hers possible. A computer at the Center ran the Formula 24/7, testing its infiniteness. There were thousands and thousands of lines. People used to be able to tour the South African branch and watch the endless symbols race ticker-style across a screen. Then the Center closed to the public, and the rumors started that Furcal’s Formula was wrong, that the logic of it faltered millions and millions of permutations down the line, past anything a human could calculate in her lifetime. That it was not infinite.

  They were just that, rumors, but then a man fell from the sky.

  As they neared the school, they could see a few protesters with gleaming electronic placards. The angry red of angry men. Amadi slowed.

  “Madam?”

  “Keep going, there are only ten.”

  But the number could triple by the time she was ready to leave. How did they always know where she’d be?

  The car was waved through the school’s outer gate, then the inner gate, where Amadi’s ID was checked, then double-checked. When the guard decided that Amadi wasn’t credentialed enough to wait within the inner gate, Nneoma stepped in. Her driver, her rules. The guard conceded as she’d known he would, and Amadi parked the car under a covered spot out of the sun. Nneoma was greeted by Nkem Ozechi, the headmaster, a small, neat woman whose hands reminded her of Kioni’s. She had a smug air about her and walked with a gait that was entirely too pleased with itself. She spoke to Nneoma as though they’d known each other for years. On a different day, Nneoma might have been charmed, interested, but today she just wanted the session to be over with so she could go home.

  The class was filled with bored faces, most around thirteen or fourteen (had she ever looked so young?), few caring or understanding what she did, too untouched by tragedy to understand her necessity. But schools like these, which gathered the best and brightest that several nations had to offer (according to Nkem Ozechi), paid the Center handsomely to have people like her speak, and it was the easiest money she earned.

  “How many of you can look at someone and know that they are sad?”

  The whole class raised their hands.

  “How many of you can tell if someone is sad even if they are not crying?”

  Most hands stayed up.

  “How many of you can look at a person who is sad, know why they are sad, and fix it?”

  All hands lowered. She had their attention now.

  The talk lasted fifteen minutes before she brought it to a close.

  “Some Mathematicians remove pain, some of us deal in negative emotions, but we all fix the equation of a person. The bravest”—she winked—“have tried their head at using the Formula to make the human body defy gravity, for physical endeavors like flight.”

  The class giggled, the fallen man fresh in their minds.

  “Furcal’s Formula means that one day the smartest people can access the very fabric of the universe.” For many the Formula was God, misunderstood for so long. They believed that it was only a matter of time before someone discovered the formula to create life, rather than to just manipulate it. But this was beyond the concerns of the teenagers, who applauded politely.

  The headmaster stepped from the corner to moderate questions. The first were predictable and stupid. “Can you make people fall in love?” No. “Can you make someone become invisible?” No. Nkem Ozechi might have been embarrassed to know that their questions were no different from those posed by students in the lower schools. Then (again predictably) someone posed a nonquestion.

  “What you are doing is wrong.” From a reed-thin boy with large teeth. Despite his thinness there was a softness to him, a pampered look.

  Nneoma put her hand up to stop Nkem Ozechi from interrupting. She could handle this. “Explain.”

  “Well, my dad says what you people do is wrong, that you shouldn’t be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.”

  Someone in the back started to clap until Nneoma again raised her hand for silence. She studied the boy. He was close enough for her to note his father’s occupation on his wrist (lawyer) and his class (first). She’d argued down many a person like his father, people who’d lived easy lives, who’d had moderate but manageable difficulties, then dared to compare their meager hardship with unfathomable woes.

  “Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real pain is. As far as I’m concerned, their feelings on this matter are invalid. I would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt.”

  The boy sat with his arms crossed, pouting. She hadn’t changed his mind, you never could with people like that, but she’d shut him up.

  In the quiet that followed, another hand raised. Not her, Nneoma thought, not her. She’d successfully ignored the girl since walking into the classroom. She didn’t need to look at her wrist to know that the girl was Senegalese and had been affected by the Elimination. It was etched all over her, this sorrow.

  “So you can make it go away?” They could have been the only two people in the room.

  “Yes, I can.” And to kill her dawning hope, “But it is a highly regulated and very expensive process. Most of my clients are heavily subsidized by their governments, but even then”—in case any hope remained—“you have to be a citizen.”

  The girl lowered her eyes to her lap, fighting tears. As though to mock her, she was flanked by a map on the wall, the entire globe splayed out as it had been seventy years ago and as it was now. Most of what had been North America was c
overed in water and a sea had replaced Europe. Russia was a soaked grave. The only continents unclaimed in whole or in part by the sea were Australia and the United Countries—what had once been Africa. The Elimination began after a moment of relative peace, after the French had won the trust of their hosts. The Senegalese newspapers that issued warnings were dismissed as conspiracy rags, rabble-rousers inventing trouble. But then came the camps, the raids, and the mysterious illness that wiped out millions. Then the cabinet members murdered in their beds. And the girl had survived it. To be here, at a school like this, on one of the rare scholarships offered to displaced children, the girl must have lived through the unthinkable. The weight of her mourning was too much. Nneoma left the room, followed by Nkem Ozechi, who clicked hurriedly behind her.

  “Maybe some of them will be Mathematicians, like you.”

  Nneoma needed to gather herself. She saw the sign for the ladies’ room and stepped inside, swinging the door in Nkem Ozechi’s face. None of those children would ever be Mathematicians; the room was as bare of genius as a pool of fish.

  She checked the stalls to make sure she was alone and bent forward to take deep breaths. She rarely worked with refugees, true refugees, for this reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her. The only time she’d felt anything as strongly was after her mother had passed and her father was in full lament, listing to the side of ruin. How could Nneoma tell him that she couldn’t even look at him without being broken by it? He would never understand. The day she’d tried to work on him, to eat her father’s grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your head long enough to calculate it. The attempt had ended with them both sobbing, holding each other in comfort and worry, till her father became so angry at the futility of it, the uselessness of her talents in this one crucial moment, that he’d said words he could not take back.