The Book of Phoenix

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “Does it have to hurt?” I cried. “I’m burning! My skin is burning!” It did not get so hot that my flesh caught fire, but the parts of me that touched the walls—especially my legs—received first-degree burns.

  “Nothing great comes without pain,” she said. “Just relax.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to retreat into myself. But the memory of the sound of Bumi’s gun firing was still ricocheting in my head. I hadn’t been fighting. I wasn’t as dangerous as some of the other speciMen became when in some kind of distress. I wasn’t doing anything but standing there in confusion thinking about the fact that I was off the grid. Yet, she’d shot me.

  I couldn’t help my legs flexing and twitching whenever the pain hit. My legs ran, like a separate part of my body.

  “Relax,” Bumi said.

  Relax. How could I relax? I frowned. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was as if my thoughts had become tangible and were bouncing off the walls, getting faster and faster, like a heated atom. Maybe thoughts were just atoms made of a different type of material for which even the Big Eye lacked tools to study.

  “I am trying,” I said.

  “Do you want to hear a story?”

  For the first time, I was able to pull back from the sound of the gun firing and the kernel of whatever I was feeling deep in my chest. “Yes,” I said, looking up. All I saw was the machine’s artificial burning sun.

  “Ok,” Bumi said. She paused. I listened. “You read so much, so I know that you know my country, Nigeria.”

  “Official name is the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Capital is Abuja. Most known city is Lagos, the second largest city in the world. West Africa. One of the world’s top producers of streaming films, crude oil, and fine literature,” I whispered.

  I heard her chuckle. “You know my country better than I do.” She paused. “But to really know it, you must go there. I was born and raised in the metropolis of Lagos. My parents lived on Victoria Island in one of the high-security gated communities. Big big houses with columns, porches, marble and huge winding staircases. Manicured palm trees and colorful sweet smelling flowers. Even the houseboys and house girls dressed like movie stars. Paved roads. Security cameras. Well-dressed Africans with perfect wigs, suits, jewelry and flashy cars. Can you see it?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. So, I was born in that house. I was the first of five children. My mother was alone when she went into labor. My father was on a brief business trip in Ghana. The two house girls had gone to the village to visit their families before coming to stay in the house until I was born. She only had a virtual doctor to guide her through it all. She’d never had to use one before then. They could afford to have an actual doctor come to check on her and they’d hired a midwife. But she went into labor with me ten days early and the midwife got stuck in go-slow, Lagos traffic. My mother said it was like being instructed by a ghost.”

  “I was born healthy and plump in my mother’s bedroom. She’d shut the windows and turned on the air purifier, so my first breath was not Lagos air. It was air delivered from the Himalayas.” She laughed. “My mother took me outside for the first time three weeks later. I took one breath of the Lagos air and vomited from coughing so hard. Then I was ok.”

  I had my eyes closed. Though I could smell my skin slowly baking as the heat increased in the tiny room, I was strolling down the black paved road of Lagos beside Bumi’s mother who was dark-skinned, pretty and short, like Bumi. She was pushing a light-weight stroller with baby Bumi in it, coughing and cooing.

  “When I think of my youth in Nigeria, I know that I can never be fully American, even when I am a citizen.”

  “So you are not American?” I asked. “But you live here. You work here. You—”

  “I’m legal, but not a citizen. Not yet. I will be. My work with you will earn me the pull I need.” She paused. “Do you want to know about how you were when you were a baby?”

  I frowned. I remembered life from when I was about a month old; I was like a three year old.

  “Do you know when I was a baby?” I asked.

  “I was there when they brought you,” she said. “You were so small. Like a preemie. But strong, very very strong. You never needed an incubator or antibiotics or special formula. You took easily to life.”

  The lights in the machine went off and something beeped. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Time’s up. Let’s get you to your room,” Bumi said. She didn’t say any more about first meeting me, as we walked back to my room, following the red lines. I was curious, but Bumi always had a set look on her face when she had switched back to her Big Eye self. I knew not to ask for more of my own story.

  When we arrived at my room, it was evening.

  “May the day break,” Bumi said. This was how she liked to say goodnight to me every night. She said she’d once heard it in a Nigerian movie she’d watched. She only said it to me and usually when she said it, I laughed and smiled.

  Tonight, I was in too much pain to smile, but I responded as always, “May it break.”

  My body ached from the burns, but by the time I entered my room, removed my clothes and inspected myself, there wasn’t a mark left on my body. But I remembered the pain. You never forget the smell or the pain. I took a long cool shower.

  As the days progressed, I learned that when I grew hot and luminous like this, electronics died or exploded in my hands, except that cubed room. This was why they started giving me paper books, despite the risk of me setting them afire. These paper books were limited, old and difficult to read, as I couldn’t turn the pages as quickly as I could with the e-reader. And they could now easily monitor what I was reading. Although now I realize that, with the e-reader, they were probably monitoring my choices, too.

  I didn’t tell Saeed about the heating and glowing because at the time I didn’t want to worry him. I enjoyed our talks so much. I wish I had told him.

  • • •

  The door slid open and my doctors came in, Debbie and Bumi. I took a deep breath to calm myself. Though the heat did not go away, it decreased, as did the glow.

  “How do you feel?” Bumi asked, as she took my wrist to check my pulse. She hissed, dropping it.

  “Hot,” I flatly said.

  She glared at me and I glared back thinking something I had not thought until Saeed was dead—You should have asked first.

  “Open,” Debbie said. She placed the heavy-duty thermometer into my mouth.

  “She’s not glowing that brightly,” Bumi said, typing something onto her portable. I resisted the urge to grab it and hold it in my hands until it exploded. Saeed was dead because of these people. I steadied myself, thinking of the cool places sometimes described in the novels I read. I once read a brief story about a man who froze to death in a forest. How nice it would have been to be in that cold place at that moment.

  “It might just be menopause approaching,” Bumi said. “I believe the two factors are correlated.”

  I tuned out their talk and focused on my own thoughts. Escape. How? What would they do to me? What did Saeed see? My internal temperature was 130 degrees, but the temperature of my skin was 220. They couldn’t take my blood pressure because the equipment would melt.

  “We need to get her to the lab,” Debbie said.

  Bumi nodded. “As soon as the scanner says she’s reached 300 degrees. We don’t want her any higher or things around her will start to ignite. Maybe by morning.” She looked at me and smiled. “May the day break.”

  “May it break,” I responded.

  They left. I paced the room. Restless. Angry. Distraught. They would be back soon.

  How am I going to get out of here? I wondered. As if to answer my question, Mmuo walked into my room. He came through the wall across from my bed. My heart nearly jumped from my chest. “Mmuo, good evening,” I said. He’d scared me, but I was glad to see him
. Without Saeed, Mmuo was my only other friend now.

  “Did you hear?” he asked, sitting on my bed. He spoke quietly, his low voice like distant thunder.

  I blinked, feeling the rush of sadness all over again. He was Saeed’s friend, too. “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Phoenix.”

  My face was wet and drying with sweat. “I’m getting out of here,” I declared.

  Mmuo softly laughed. “You?”

  “Will you help me?” I asked. “You once did things against the Big Eye in Nigeria. Can’t you . . . ?”

  “You get it wrong. I went up against Nigeria’s government, but the Big Eye . . . I know better than anyone what the Big Eye will do when you cross them.”

  “What? What will they do?”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “I’m not telling you that,” he snapped.

  “Then help me get out of here,” I begged. “Please.”

  He frowned. “What is wrong with you? I can feel you from here.”

  I sighed. “I think it has something to do with how they made me. It’s been happening for two weeks and it’s getting worse.”

  We looked at each other, silent. I knew we were thinking the same thing, but neither he nor I wanted to speak it. If we spoke of my name, I didn’t think I’d be able to move, let alone run.

  “Yes, that would make sense,” he said.

  He called himself Mmuo, which meant spirit in a Nigerian language. He was a hero to all those who were created or altered in Tower 7. Like Saeed, Mmuo had been taken from Africa. He said he was from “the jungles of Nigeria,” the same country as my doctor Bumi. I didn’t believe he was from any jungle. He spoke like a man who had known skyscrapers, office buildings, and streaming movies. He knew how to disable the security on several of the floors and was known for causing trouble throughout the building. Not that he really needed to do so to get around the tower; Mmuo could walk through walls. The only walls he could not pass through were the walls that would get him out of Tower 7. Mmuo could not escape; obviously, his abilities were created by Tower 7 scientists.

  He was a tall, thin man with skin the color of, and as shiny as, crude oil. He never wore clothes, for clothes could not pass through the walls with him. He was so proud and frank in his nakedness that I didn’t even notice it any more. Mmuo stole what food he needed from the kitchens. He was the only person/creature who’d successfully escaped the Big Eye’s clutches.

  Why Tower 7’s Big Eye tolerated him, I do not know. My theory is that they simply could not catch him. And since he was contained, they accepted the trouble he occasionally stirred up. Most of those in the tower were too isolated and damaged to be much trouble if freed, anyway.

  “It looks like your skin is nothing but a veil over something greater,” he mused, after an appraising look. It was something Saeed would have said, and the thought made my heart ache again.

  “Can you open the door?” I finally asked. I paused and then pushed my request out of my mouth. “I want to see what is down the hall, near Saeed’s room.”

  Mmuo met my gaze and held it.

  “What did Saeed see, Mmuo?”

  He shook his head and looked away.

  “Show me, then,” I said, suddenly wanting to sob. “And help me. Help me escape.”

  “Saeed and I, we had plans,” he said. “He always said that it was right beneath your skin,” he said with a slight smile.

  “That what was?”

  “Your taste for freedom.”

  He moved close to me, and I was sure he was going to hug me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said. “You’ll . . .”

  He raised a hand up and made to slap me across the face. “Don’t move,” he said. His hand passed right through my head. I felt only the slightest moment of pressure and there was a sucking sound.

  “Wha . . . ?”

  “Can you hear me?” I heard him loudly say through what sounded like a microphone. I looked around.

  “Shhh! They’ll hear you!” I hissed. I frowned. His lips hadn’t moved.

  “No,” he said. He held his finger to his lips for me to quiet down and grinned, his yellow-white teeth and black skin shining in my glow. “They won’t. You are hearing this in your head.”

  “Not even the Big Eye know I can do this,” he said aloud, but lowering his voice as before. “Whatever they did to enhance my abilities, I can pass it into people, and they can hear me until the tiny nanomites are sweated from their skin.

  “I did this to a little Tanzanian boy on the fifth floor. He had a contagious cancer, so they kept him in isolation for tests. Hearing me talk to him from wherever I was, kept him sane. At least, until he died.”

  His disease could have killed you, though, I thought.

  He started to descend through the floor. “Fifteen minutes,” he said in my head, then he was gone.

  I whipped off my pants and t-shirt and threw on a white dress they’d recently given me made of heat resistant thin plastic. The dress was long but light, and it allowed me to move freely. I didn’t bother with shoes. Too heavy.

  For a moment, I had a brief flash in my mind of actually stepping outside. Into the naked sunlight, under the open sky, no ceiling above me. I could do it. Mmuo would help me. He and I would both escape. I felt a rush of hope, then a rush of heat. The scanner on my wall beeped. I had reached over 300 degrees.

  Just before the door slid open, I had the sense to spread some shea butter on my skin. Then I ran out of my room.

  • • •

  “If you want to see, turn right and then go straight. Do it quickly, they will soon know you are missing. I can’t delay it long.”

  I was working hard not to look at the floor. I’d never left my room without instruction from the floor. Usually a yellow line appeared that told me where to go. There was none now. With nothing to guide me, I felt like I was free-falling into the heavens; like if I didn’t fly, I’d die; I just had to figure out how to do it.

  I jogged, my feet slapping the cool marble floor. The hallway was quiet and empty, and soon I was in a section of my floor that I had never graced. This was where they kept Saeed. His prison, I thought.

  I crossed a doorway and the floor here was carpeted, plush and red. I paused, looking down. I had never seen red carpet. How could a “guiding line” show through a carpeted floor? Before they took it out, the carpet in my quarters had been black, thin and flat. I wanted to kneel down and run my hands over the redness. I knew it would feel so soft and fluffy. I also knew that I wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “See what you must but you have to make it to the elevator in two minutes,” Mmuo’s voice suddenly said into my head. “Go down the hall and turn left. You will see it. Hurry. Do not press any buttons when you get in.”

  “Ok,” I said aloud. But he could not hear me. One-way communication. I ran down the red hallway. Through glass windows and doors, I could see lab assistants and scientists in labs. Each large room was partitioned by a thick wall. There was bulky equipment in most of them. If I were careful, no one would notice me. After sneaking past three labs, I saw the one that Saeed saw. It had to be. I stopped, staring and moaning deep in my throat. This lab was much bigger than the others and ten black cameras hung from its high white ceiling.

  There were two wall-sized sleek grey machines on both sides of the room. I could hear them humming powerfully. Between them, the world fell away to another world where it was daytime, and all that was happening was perfectly bluntly brutally visible. There were old vehicles, trucks from long, long ago, boxy, ineffective and weak. But strong enough to carry huge loads of cargo to dump into a deep pit. And that cargo consisted of human bodies. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Dead. Not Africans. These dead people had pinkish pale skin and thin straight-ish hair like most of the Big Eye and the lion woman. When was this? Where was this? Why were the Big E
ye scientists just standing there watching with their clipboards and ever-observing eyes?

  It was not like watching a 3D movie. Even the best ones could never look this . . . true. Bodies. And I could smell them. The whole hallway reeked with their rot and blood and feces and bile and the smoke of the trucks. My brain went to my books and recalled where I had seen this before. “Holocaust,” I whispered, fighting the urge to turn to the side and vomit. I shut my watering eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I nearly gagged on the stench. I opened my eyes.

  This genocide happened during one of the early world wars. The Germans killed many of these people because they were sure that they were inferior or a threat or both. The book I read spoke as if wiping them out was the right thing to do. It certainly looked wrong to me. Were these Big Eye looking through time? Is this all they could do? Look? I whimpered. Why this time period? Why this nasty moment? Couldn’t they stop it? For a moment, the portal disappeared and there was lots of scrambling, adjusting machines, pushing buttons, cursing. And then the portal reappeared showing the same activities, in the same time period in the same place. Happening.

  The surge of heat in my body was like a deep heartbeat of crimson flames. I shuddered and felt it ripple over every surface of my skin. I couldn’t move. Saeed had probably stood here just like this, too. Acrid smoke stung my eyes. My feet were burning the red carpet. A fire alarm sounded.

  Finally, I ran.

  The elevator was open. It was empty. I got in and it quickly closed behind me. I wished Mmuo would say something. If it went up, I was caught. If it went nowhere, I was caught. If it went down, I might be caught, but I might escape, too. I shut my eyes and whispered, “Go down, go down, please, go down. Have to get out!” Sweat beaded and evaporated all over my confused body and the elevator quickly grew humid.

  If I hadn’t rubbed all that shea butter on my skin at the last minute, I’d have been in horrible pain, my skin drying and probably cracking. I was hot like the sun, there was a ringing in my ears, as if my own body had an alarm and it was going off, too. I looked at my hands. They were glowing a soft yellow. My entire body was glowing through my dress.