After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “I didn’t order it. You made me go through the approved vendor list. I never know what I’m going to get from them, if they deliver at all. I needed a hundred millimeters and they brought me sixty. It’s what showed up. Five hundred meters of it.”

  It had been five hundred yards, actually, which the vendor couldn’t explain because Nigerians used the metric system.

  “Okay, fine. On Thursday, you fill the pool. You’ll be ready?”

  “If I find the right cable.”

  “If you find the cable—do you know how unprofessional this is, Kwesi? This never would have happened in Paris. We always stayed on schedule. We can’t launch a rescue mission without the astronauts running simulations. The pool is the only way to do this. Every day that you keep it dry we lose a day of practice. Do you know how many people I have breathing up my neck right now?”

  Down your neck, he thought. Breathing down your neck, not up it.

  “Kwesi, you need to stop running on Nigerian time. I thought you were from America. You’re not acting like an American. Nigerians spend a fortune on fancy watches to tell time that they will never keep. You’re acting like a Nigerian, like this is a sinecure. It’s not a sinecure, Kwesi. There are actual lives in danger.”

  Bracket didn’t know what sinecure meant, though he caught the gist of it. She was saying he was lazy.

  “You’re being unfair,” he said. And he listed off a dozen obstacles he’d overcome that week alone.

  “Look,” Josephine admitted, softening for once. “Nurudeen Bello is coming back tonight.”

  “For the dedication ceremony? I thought that was a staff event.”

  “Not anymore. I tried to convince him we’re not ready for him, but he didn’t want to listen. He’s going to be here in an hour with all his people. Don’t you dare say a word of this to him.”

  Now Bracket understood why she was so irritable. Nurudeen Bello was the politician who had founded the entire spaceport, but he mostly spent his time raising funds for the project in the halls of power in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, or regaling the glinting boardrooms of Lagos, the economic engine of the country. When he worked from the spaceport he tended to bring a coterie of hangers-on who interrupted everyone.

  “I’ll make sure my crew knows he’s coming,” Bracket said. “One more thing, Josephine. You ever heard of Bendix?”

  “Bendix? It’s a kind of chocolate mint. Haven’t had one in years. Quite delicious.” Then, as if he held some in his pocket: “Do you have some? The chocolate in this country is shit.”

  “You’re saying Bendix is a chocolate company?”

  “One of the best.”

  One more mystery of Kano, he thought.

  “I didn’t see any chocolates. All that I saw was an old machine in a building by the array.”

  He could register her disappointment as she turned back to the console before her. “What does this have to do with anything, Kwesi? Rien! I told them when we hired you that you didn’t have enough experience. I was hoping you could prove you weren’t just a handsome face. This is your last chance. Fill up the pool, or I’ll have to put one of the Indians in charge.”

  She switched the lever in the command chair, and the alloy petals retracted, with thirty staff members now watching them curiously, trying to guess what they had been talking about. He wondered if she had made the same threat to them too, that she would outsource their jobs, if given the chance, and replace them with an Indian who was smarter and who could do the work at a lower cost. She never threatened to replace Bracket with a Nigerian.

  He shouldn’t have mentioned the chocolates.

  Over the past few months, he’d seen Josephine dismiss people for minor mistakes, and she held it against him that NASA had fired him after the Flare, as if this were a stain he could never erase, a birthmark of indolence, even if ten thousand other workers had been fired at the same time.

  Josephine had advanced her career at the European Space Agency in what Bracket called the slipstream: pulled along, like a crafty cyclist in the peloton, by mentors who recognized her intelligence and determination. And when her bosses left for another job, typically to the private space agencies, she slung forward in the draft to the top echelons of management. Like most people who glided along the slipstream, she had no patience for people who rode outside it, and she downplayed her own luck—that she happened to be at the agency when they were promoting women, or that she was hired because she had a business degree from INSEAD instead of the usual astrophysics degree. In Josephine’s view, she had found the slipstream by herself and she didn’t care whether she had made her own luck. People like Bracket weren’t clever enough to join the peloton in the first place.

  Now Josephine was always spinning around the next bend, threatening to leave him behind. She kept a calendar of the number of days since Masha Kornokova had been stranded in the International Space Station, which she would log with a red grease pen as thick as lipstick: 370.

  CHAPTER 5

  Later that night, spiritual leaders from all over the country began to appear, flown to Nigeria Spaceport at great expense for the consecration of the bronze replica of the Masquerade. Bracket marveled at the jingling dresses of Ijaw priestesses and the intricately carved masks of the Ogoni inside the spaceport’s central auditorium.

  Oh, Mom, if you could only see me now, Bracket thought. The homecoming that you dreamed of for me.

  The Emir of Kano himself arrived on horseback from the city, with his cavalry and horses festooned with pomegranate-colored cloth, imparting an air of importance and dignity to the affair. He served as the spiritual leader of Kano and much of the Muslim north, but right now he also was the one who could close down Naijapool if he knew what Bracket had discovered there.

  After cleaning himself up at his quarters that night, Bracket had thrown the bloody cloth in the wastebin, thinking if it was still there when he returned after the dedication ceremony, and the sanitation crew hadn’t tossed it away, then he would do something more about Abdul Haruna. He walked only a couple of steps from his door before turning on his heel to stuff the cloth into a drawer. It felt cowardly to pretend it hadn’t happened. He understood why Josephine wanted him to keep it quiet, but he had questions of his own. A man did not just disappear into thin air like that.

  Mulling over these thoughts, Bracket filed into line with the rest of the spaceport staff to shake the hand of Nurudeen Bello, who insisted on receiving each of them as if they were at a wedding. Bello was a compact man whose head barely reached Bracket’s chest, and yet he was rarely described as short. The politician possessed a natural charisma that made it seem like you were always looking up to him, and lucky to be shaking his hand. His reputation made him seem even larger: a whistleblower who had escaped imprisonment to reveal an entire secret counterterrorism organization that had once controlled Nigeria like a shadow government; a former bandleader who had once toured the country with his music; now, the head of Nigeria Spaceport. The list went on. He was wearing an airy indigo agbada covered with prints of rockets and sporting a fila cap on his head crooked to the left side.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Bracket.” He scrutinized Bracket with an intense gaze that caused him to lean back. “Any water in Naijapool yet?”

  “It will be ready soon, sir. We’re set to begin filling it before the end of the week.”

  “I look forward to seeing it. We can’t afford any more delays.”

  “Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.”

  The next woman in line pressed forward, interrupting them, with Bracket thinking, When was the last time I called someone “sir”?

  Bello soon took the podium and a hush descended over the audience. “There are seeds I’ve seen on the Jos Plateau,” he began, “that can only propagate by means of fire. It takes a broiling, enraged inferno to crack the thick shell and release the seed, which will be carried by the wind over the charred, brittle earth. Only then does the seed enlodge itself in the soil and sp
read its tendrils to grow into a hearty plant. We too have been forged in the fire. We too required the cauldron of the sun to melt down our ambitions, our dreams, and our enmities to seek out a bold new direction. The Flare—the great cosmic intervention—has given us an opportunity to prove our ingenuity and to right the wrongs of the past. Before it, our program had a modest goal to send an astronaut to the moon, but now our aspirations are much higher, tied indeed to the very fate of space travel. Other countries shook their heads when we announced our intention to rescue Masha Kornokova. But we weren’t dismayed.

  “Nigeria has looked beyond our imaginary borders so that we could find you. You are the paragons of African ingenuity who are destined for the stars—the bones of our women are nearly twenty-five percent more dense than other people, making us perfect for long-term space exploration. We all must take our opportunities when they arise, and our moment is now.”

  A cheer rang out from the hall as he riled up the crowd, and Bracket too felt the excitement of his infectious vision. The politician led the notables outside with the help of his aides into a warm evening pillowed with clouds. Before them, the replica of the Masquerade shone under the spaceport’s klieg lights. The actual spacecraft was sealed in a sterile hangar a kilometer away.

  The replica was an impressive blend of artistry and engineering, designed by a sculptor from Ife who specialized in bronze who had pulled off a terrific feat: all the curvilinear surfaces—from the nose cone to the swell of the ram’s-horn thrusters—incorporated the geometry of traditional masks from the country’s numerous ethnic groups. The viewing windows opened like slits, and the hatches jutted out prominently. The slow curve of the hull resembled the canoes of the floating villages of Makoko. Instead of tiles, the underbelly of the real ship would be covered with heat-absorbent, lab-grown scales that the sculptor had interpreted as crocodile skin.

  Each soothsayer took turns blessing the Masquerade, throwing rice, burning smudges, pounding drums, or clapping their hands in drawn-out ceremonies, which were cacophonous and chaotic and beautiful and long-winded, yet Nurudeen Bello insisted that no one could eat dinner until they were completed. The final ritual closed when an ancient, leather-skinned Tiv elder tooted on a mahogany horn until he collapsed, and Bracket was nearly trampled by the rush to the banquet table.

  He tried to make conversation with the director of India’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, who politely asked what he did on the project.

  “I’m the director of Naijapool,” Bracket said.

  “Ah, yes, the swimming pool. I’ve heard it has no water.”

  Before Bracket could retort, the man clutched at his chest as his Geckofone burst from his pocket.

  “Catch it!” he shouted. But Bracket missed it as it scurried under the table.

  And he wasn’t alone. All around the room Geckofones were leaping out of purses and coats and pockets, as the banquet hall erupted in pandemonium. The escaped G-fones clustered together in the middle of the room to form the shape of a large arrow. Then the arrow illuminated in bright neon blue, and slid rapidly out of the room, their owners sheepishly running after it. Gradually, the banquet hall calmed down, and people sat back down to eat. Bracket clutched at his pocket but his Geckofone hadn’t moved. The emergency signal wasn’t meant for him.

  Sitting by himself at a table, spooning ewa agoyin stew into his mouth and thinking, alternately, about what the emergency might be and what had happened to Abdul Haruna, he didn’t notice at first when a woman sat beside him.

  “You didn’t get called into the Nest either?” she asked.

  She had large brown eyes flecked with green and thick, luxurious black hair that fell to the small of her back. She was a full head shorter than him.

  “No, I work on ground operations. You know what that was about?”

  “Something about the Kibo module being damaged. Space debris.”

  “Kornokova?”

  “She’s alright.”

  “Good,” Bracket said, relieved. “I’m sure Josephine will send out an alert soon.”

  “I feel bloody useless,” the woman admitted. She pointed at his plate. “Especially since we’re enjoying this feast while Kornokova’s up there.”

  “We should eat while we can.” This day had drained any desire to ingratiate himself. Besides, he had plenty to focus on. He’d have to drive into town bright and early to get cable for the pool.

  “You sound like a good ol’-fashioned Waller, stuffin’ your face fulla barbecue as the rest of the world starves.”

  “The Wallers ration like everyone else,” he corrected, “and they kill anyone who tries to take theirs. They spare the children, mostly. I’ve seen them gun people down right in front of my eyes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Shouldn’t have said that. I know it’s bad in America.”

  “Bad everywhere.” He shoveled another bite of rice into his mouth as she extended her hand.

  “I’m Seeta.”

  “Kwesi.”

  Just then, the loudspeakers erupted with highlife music, and everyone set down their plates to dance. The most sullen Nigerian astrophysicist was now sticking his rump into the air and twisting to the trumpets. Seeta pulled Bracket to the dance floor, twirling her hands about her face. She turned around, grinding her butt into his groin, then spun around to press her thighs against his hip. Her moves helped the other dancers. Freed from any awkwardness, they all slipped forward in the groove.

  Much later, Bracket pulled two bottles of Guinness from an ice bucket and joined Seeta on a bench outside in the cool night air. They spotted a satellite falling from the sky, flaming across the darkness and disintegrating. She explained that she was a vibroacoustic engineer whose job was to ensure the integrity of the structures exposed to the tremendous pressures of rocket launch, when acoustic shock waves could exceed 180 decibels. The sounds were extremely random, meaning that both the amplitude and frequency of the energy changed continuously. A strong shock wave could dislodge parts of the structure or send a fissure through the rocket that could blow apart the entire spacecraft. He’d long since learned that a space program had many ultra-specific jobs that he’d never imagined before.

  He watched her lips as she spoke, seeing the upper lip pucker with the vowels in a charming, fascinating way.

  “You should have heard the sounds I measured on the Mangalyaan missions,” she reminisced. “The wind pushing through the rubble-strewn valleys of Mars. It was haunting.”

  “Must have been a big change for you to come out here.”

  Anything to keep her lips moving.

  “I signed up for the exchange program,” she continued, “thinking I could do my part in the mission. But I was bored to tears when I got to Kano. The rocket platforms had not even been built yet, so I spent my time recording local musicians. I record all my own music, you see, but not like ethnomusicologists. It’s important to me to record the ambient environment as well—the insects, the birds, street sellers, even the car horns. I went out to Lake Chad to record some musicians playing outside, and the biophony—that’s the full range of sounds in an environment—is extraordinary. Around the lake, the insects time their vocalizations so that they don’t sing at the same moment. This way they have a better chance of finding a mate. And if an insect has to vocalize at the same time as a bird, or a mouse, or a bat, it does it at a different frequency, so that the signal can still get through. You can find this all over the world in any rich habitat. But what I found out by Chad—listen to me, I’m making it sound like the lake is a person—the soundscape is so rich, and the musicians are part of it. I met this lute player who wasn’t especially skillful, not in the way you find with kora players, but her music felt so right. She had good rhythm, I knew that much, but only when I listened to the recording later did I understand it wasn’t the rhythm. She had tuned her lute a half step down so that it fit perfectly with the cicadas and other insects in the background. Her music fit the biophony. On its own,
no one would have called the sound beautiful.”

  “That’s all new to me,” Bracket admitted. “When I listen to music, I like to hear the beat, the vocals.” He wasn’t sure what to think of this woman. He didn’t have a high opinion of anthropologists as a rule, especially amateur ones. They seemed like pornographers of the authentic, leaching off other people’s lives.

  “I’ve tried to share the recordings with my girlfriend back in Delhi,” Seeta added, “but I can’t reach her. It’s not a high enough fucking priority to leave the Loom.”

  Bracket unlocked his eyes from her alluring face, embarrassed. Was she teasing me the whole time? What was the sexy dancing all about?

  “When was the last time you talked to her?”

  She looked at him and laughed, as if surprised. She had meant to shock him.

  “The bloody Loom won’t let anything through. It rejects my messages.”

  “Rejects mine too. Sometimes a convoclip will slip through.”

  She threw her Guinness into a recycling bin and began walking away, but glanced over her shoulder as if to invite him along. He found himself falling into stride with her as the sounds of the dance party began to fade away. He didn’t ask where they were walking, afraid it would break their flirtation. She had just talked about her girlfriend, but he still felt a thrill that there might be something more.

  “Who are you trying to talk to?” she asked.

  “My daughter, Sybil, mostly. Sometimes my ex to talk about my daughter. She’s going into her second year at med school, and doing well too. But the Flare set her back awhile. At least I know the cowries get through to her. How about you—how’d you meet her?”

  He wanted some finality around the situation, so that if she was closed to him tonight he could act accordingly.

  “Before I went to graduate school, I worked as a Pyper. We’d communicate through the music, you know, make a game of it. I’d ask her at the end of the day, when we were lying in bed, which song I had chosen for her,” Seeta said, peering up at the stars. “I feel cut off from her now. Really cut off. Sure, I was spinning for a lot of people, but every set had something for her in it.”