Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  I like cars. When the windows are up and the air conditioning is on I am cut off from the wider xenosphere and can have relative quiet without having to use antifungal creams. Aminat does not know, but I use her clotrimazole before we leave her house.

  There is a fight in the street where one car has scraped another. We are sealed in, but I can see straining neck muscles, open mouths, and silent caterwauling. A small crowd gathers, some people to encourage violence, others as peacemakers. There will be pickpockets, but I cannot identify them. Passing vehicles blow their horns. Lagosians love a good fight.

  We move on when the traffic speeds up again. We break free from Ojota, shoot up Ikorodu Road, and leave it behind as we head for Oworonsoki, close to the lagoon. This place is alien to me, but Aminat powers through with confidence. I get a good chance to study her profile. She has high cheekbones and a slight overbite. Her neck … I have been biting that neck. As we come to a loopy slip road an army green jeep cuts us off and comes to an abrupt halt, forcing Aminat to break.

  ‘Ekpe n’ja e!’ she yells at the jeep.

  Two young men step out and come to each of our windows. Their movements are synchronised and they wear suits and dark glasses. I notice the deformity of their jackets over concealed weapons.

  ‘Be still and quiet,’ I say. ‘Can you do that? Please?’

  ‘Do you know these people?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ I say.

  The man on my side taps on the window. I open it.

  ‘Kaaro,’ he says, ‘I have a message for you. Step outside please.’

  ‘No,’ says Aminat. Her breathing has changed and her eyes are wider.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘Just do what I said. You will be safe.’

  I read the man - no malice, no tension. He means me no harm, so I open the door. He takes off his glasses and hands them to me. We are causing an obstruction and tail back, but the usually aggressive Lagosians don’t even yell. When I don the glasses Femi is there on the screen.

  ‘What are you doing in Lagos, Kaaro?’

  The training kicks in automatically and I cover my mouth to stymie lip readers.

  ‘Hello, Femi.’

  ‘Answer the question, yam head. Why did you leave Rosewater?’

  ‘It’s a social matter.’

  ‘You only have the social matters that I choose for you, Kaaro.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was under house arrest or in exile. Am I not allowed to move around?’

  ‘You’re the man on the ground. You always have been. There’s an ongoing interrogation, remember? You can’t leave that half-done. And what are you doing with that Arigbede?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘She has a history. Her family —’

  ‘Stop. I don’t care. Also, I’m taking a day off. I haven’t had any leave. I need a break.’

  ‘I didn’t authorise —’

  ‘I wasn’t asking your permission, Femi.’ I take off the glasses and carefully collapse the temples. I make as if I will hand them back to the man, who reaches. Then I drop them and stamp down. ‘Oops.’

  He is furious, but I don’t give a shit.

  ‘Get your jeep out of the way before I make you swallow your tongue and gouge your own eyes out,’ I say. I don’t even know if I can, but I will try until I succeed or burst a blood vessel. The other man is standing on the driver’s side. I open the passenger door and say, ‘Get the fuck away from my girlfriend.’

  I settle in, aware that Aminat is staring.

  ‘You okay?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘So. I’m your girlfriend?’

  I shrug. ‘You got me acting all protective.’

  ‘Are you military? State Security?’

  ‘Not exactly. But I sometimes work for the government.’

  I have never had a girlfriend. Not a real one, at any rate. I do not know why I said that about Aminat. The truth is I would not know what it means. Most of the sex in my youth was meaningless and my felonious lifestyle precluded intimacy. Still, this liaison with Aminat has exposed a vein of possessiveness and aggression that I did not know was in me.

  The jeep revs too loud and spins tyres before speeding away. An arm reaches out of one window, middle finger extending from the hand.

  Children.

  Aminat’s family house is one of those three-storey buildings built in a moderately deprived area which was part-gentrified in the 1980s. The government at the time gave it various names like Gbagada and Phase Two, but it remained a residential area for working class and poor Lagosians with an incongruous scattering of overblown architecturally suspect Cocaine Millionaire mansions.

  Western sociologists and criminologists will tell you that crime, particularly violent crime, concentrates in this boundary of the rich and poor. Nigerians can be different in that regard. We celebrate and venerate the rich, especially the criminal class. The non-white collar criminals, the armed robbers, and sneak thieves (ahem) prey on the helpless. Rich folk have razor wire, illegal aliens, and bootleg turret bots which will vaporize your average AK-47-weilding home invader.

  I do not know what Aminat’s parents used to do, but the house stinks of depleted money. It has a massive compound with decorative palms interspersed with almond trees, and a gardener toiling away. There are two wings at right angles to each other and a portico marking the entrance. The columns have complicated capitals with angel heads and curves.

  Closer look: the gardener is old, gaunt, and wears no uniform. The paint on the house is faded and peeling. Green algae stain the wall where it meets the ground and weeds sprout like pubic hair here and there.

  ‘This is my father’s white elephant,’ says Aminat. ‘The house I grew up in was built on this site. It burned to the ground when I was a teenager. Daddy cleared the land and built this.’

  ‘Do you have a large family?’

  ‘No. It was a mid-life crisis. Some men buy big cars, my dad built a big house.’ She waves to the gardener who does not respond. I think, unkindly, that it will take him a week to realise he needs to wave back.

  Aminat has a key, and inside it is quiet. The air is not processed but not fresh either. The décor is baroque with golden filigree on the tips of the ceiling fan blades. It rotates at a lazy pace providing no air current whatsoever.

  ‘Hey! I’m home,’ Aminat yells. ‘Sit here. I’ll get you something. What do you want?’

  ‘Erm … water,’ I say.

  She leaves the room and I sit, sinking into an over-stuffed armchair. The air I displace is dusty. I feel for the xenosphere. The entire house is a black hole. I cannot even sense Aminat. I wonder how that can be. The xenosphere conduits are everywhere, although you can create sterile rooms if they are air tight.

  I hear dragging. Something solid sloughs and rattles along the floor. I am uncomfortable without access to the xenosphere and feel naked and defenceless. I wish I had my gun with me. I examine my phone. I have both charge and signal, so I dial Aminat’s phone. I ignore the many notifications for messages that no doubt come from my boss.

  ‘Hello,’ says a voice.

  I look up. A tall, muscular, fair-skinned boy stands in front of me. He is handsome in a way that brings pain to my heart, a being of perfect symmetry and regularity of feature. His muscles are straight out of an anatomy textbook. He has small, black eyes fixed right on me and shining with unblinking benevolence. He is shirtless and wears khaki shorts. Not a scar, not a single mark on him. Zero body hair. I want to touch him, to make sure he is not a hologram. On his left ankle there is a single manacle to which is attached a thick silver chain which trails off out of the room, into the corridor and on to parts unknown.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. Then, ‘I’m a guest.’

  He smiles. ‘Obviously.’

  I disconnect the phone. It’s difficult to concentrate with that beatific face shining down on me combined with the great silence from the xenosphere. His voice sounds rich, educated and welcoming. Next to him I s
ound like the braying of a donkey. I am thinking of what to say when Aminat returns with a tray holding a frosty glass of water containing a slice of lemon.

  ‘I see you two have met,’ she says.

  ‘Sister!’ says the boy.

  She places the tray on an occasional table next to me and squeezes her brother.

  ‘Kaaro, this is my brother, Layi. Layi, Kaaro’s my friend from Rosewater.’

  I stand up to shake hands but he initiates a warm hug so I reciprocate. He is as hard as a machine, his muscles cordy, taut, not just for show.

  Aminat kneels, examines Layi’s ankle which has a callus and looks chafed from the manacle. Not as scar free as I imagined. She tuts.

  ‘You haven’t been looking after this,’ she says. She leaves again before I can speak.

  ‘You’re from Rosewater?’ says Layi.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come with me. Let me show you something, Kaaro. Kaaro. Hmm.’ He looks up and seems to taste the word, turning the sound over in his mind. ‘Your name means “good morning”.’

  ‘And yours means “Wealth spins”. So what?’

  ‘Unusual name, that’s all.’

  ‘All names were unusual once.’

  ‘This is true.’ He seems satisfied with that and takes me to his room, dragging the chain. There are two fire extinguishers and a sand bucket on both sides of the door. The people who live here must be used to the sound. I find that the chain is moored to an iron ring that projects from the floor off to the side near the door of his room. Layi’s space appears massive and is surely composed of several rooms with the walls knocked out. The west wall is lined with bookshelves from end to end, about twenty metres. The windows are barred. There is a skylight which is also barred. The far end of the rectangular space has weights, a free-standing punch bag, and a cross trainer. There is a work station with a display sphere. I’ve never seen one of those outside magazines. It’s a plastic translucent sphere with an opening to allow computer users in. The entire concave inner surface is the display. Users claim it’s better than a holo-field. There are other iron rings sunk into the floor at different points in the room.

  Layi’s lodgings are neat to the point of neurosis. Not a speck of dust anywhere. Everything is in its place and we are the only sources of disorder as we move around. He opens a cabinet and rifles around until he finds an old, damaged pink mobile phone. The screen is broken, but all the pieces are in place like a solved jigsaw.

  He hands it to me. ‘I bought this off Nimbus.’

  ‘You got four-one-nined. It won’t work. This tech is from 2040 or so.’

  ‘I did not buy it to make telephone calls. I just wanted to show you where I got the video footage from.’

  ‘What footage?’

  He activates a remote and a plasma field forms in the air in front of us. It’s black and an image resolves. A moving image and the area it’s shot in is one I know.

  ‘There is no timestamp, but I am sure you have seen this before,’ he says.

  The camera shows an external scene, daytime but near dusk. The area is undeveloped land except for a single tarred road and a lonely row of poles bearing electric wires. There is a downed and smoking black military helicopter, but the crowd is strangely uninterested in this. The crowd is odd in of itself because of the stillness of the people who make it up. The people are watching something out of the shot. It’s shaky amateur footage, but I know what is missing. My heartbeat tells me I’m getting nervous.

  The camera jerks and pans rapidly towards the object of the crowd’s attention.

  The dome of what will come to be known as Utopicity is rising, growing into the sky like a blanket of flesh. There are gaps in the sheet, but they close at the same pace as the vertical ascent, rapidly like time-lapse wound healing. In the gaps one can glimpse ephemeral, indistinct movement of people shaped blurs.

  The dome seals itself and the fluid in the membrane swirls and diffracts the light. There is a ganglion poking into the sky, crackling with electric current and menace. Ninety-two people will die before we recognise it for what it is: a power source from a generous deity.

  The frame freezes.

  ‘This is the day, isn’t it? The first day of Rosewater. History made.’

  ‘It wasn’t incorporated as a town until —’

  ‘And I know why you seem familiar to me.’

  ‘I didn’t know that I seemed familiar.’

  He points to a young man in the crowd. The man is not looking at the dome or the helicopter. He is looking in the other direction and the expression on his face is not indicative of awe. I know this for a fact.

  ‘That’s you, Kaaro.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rosewater, Maiduguri: 2055

  ‘There is an explanation,’ I tell Femi. ‘I demand to be heard first.’

  ‘What explanation, you moronic amateur,’ says Femi. ‘You had one task. It did not involve violence or force of any kind because we all know how cowardly you are.’

  We are in a field office. Literally. It is a tent on a field with liberal scatterings of horse and cow dung. The soldiers around me and the S45 agents who have their guns trained on me are covered in dust. Most other people in the camp are walking wounded. The air is full of a low level electric hum which is coming from the dome and ganglia. Femi manages to be immaculate, as if the dust and grime refuse to stick to her. She looks and smells delicious.

  ‘I have had no training in talking to or negotiating with extraterrestrials, Femi.’

  ‘Mrs. Alaagomeji to you. And you said you could do it.’

  ‘I said I would try. Not the same thing. It’s not like you sent me in with a squad of soldiers or anything, not that it would have made a difference.’

  ‘The executive body of S45—all dead and gone or comatose.’

  ‘How is that part my fault? They went in hostile and the alien responded in kind. I went in after that, remember?’ I resist the temptation to point out to Femi that this means she is in charge, something she has wanted for a very long time. She stands in a tight red suit with high-heeled shoes. Who comes to a refugee camp wearing that? Or smelling of … whatever that divine fragrance is? ‘Look, I fucked up, okay? I am not too proud to admit my failings, but I’m not one of your agents. I am not trained. You framed me for a crime to get me here.’

  ‘It isn’t framing when you actually commit the crime, you yam head.’

  ‘Whatever. Entrapment, then. Just pay me my fee and I’ll be on my way.’

  Femi actually laughs. With mirth.

  ‘There’s a termite in your skull eating away at your brain, Kaaro. You should see a doctor or an exterminator or somebody.’

  ‘Fine. Don’t pay. Fuck you very, very much, Mrs. Alaagomeji.’ I move to leave but the soldiers block me. I look into the eyes of one of them and there is nothing there. No love, no hate, just bland, unfeeling obedience. He is a flesh robot, not human at all. This scares me and my eyes slide away from his face. I focus on a vein throbbing in his neck.

  ‘Your freelancing days are over, Kaaro,’ says Femi.

  I turn to her. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘You join the Department of Agriculture, Section Forty-five, and work with us to unfuck this fuck up as much as is possible.’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ve had enough of this freak show.’

  ‘You join us or you die in jail. I will send you to Kirikiri right now. Today. No trial, no saying goodbye to your parents.’

  An aide taps her at that moment. ‘The President.’

  She takes the phone, covers the microphone. ‘What’s it to be? Don’t worry, we’ll train you. You can have all the payment owed up to this moment, then you’ll be on the payroll. Which is generous. I’m doing you a favour, Kaaro.’

  At this moment I experience perfect hatred for this most beautiful woman. I do want to kill her even though I am not a violent man. My silence is assent. Femi nods and an agent grabs my arm just as Femi starts talking to the President.
Her gaze stays on me till I leave the tent. ‘Yes. We’ll say it’s an experiment in sustainable energy and clean living within a biodome. We’re all very excited with how Nigeria is leading the world …’

  I phone Klaus from the army base where I’m receiving basic training. I ache all over and my jaw hurts. Despite all this I’m fitter than I’ve ever been because of the running. My belly is flat, my arms are toned and my knuckles are raw from hitting a mu ren zhuang.

  ‘I hate the hand-to-hand shit,’ I say.

  ‘You never did like fighting. Remember that time in Idi-Oro when we got into that brouhaha over a hooker?’

  ‘She wasn’t a hooker, Klaus.’

  ‘I paid her.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you that the women here sometimes ask their boyfriends for money?’

  ‘But why? Are you paying them to love you, or something? Are they on retainer?’

  ‘Klaus …’

  ‘Okay. Anyway, I had to do the fighting. An old man like me.’

  ‘You’re not old, Klaus.’ I pause. ‘You do understand what I’m saying here, right?’

  ‘You’re saying our partnership is over because of those bastards.’

  ‘And bitches. Don’t forget the bitches. Or the bitch.’

  Klaus is my agent of sorts. He finds me assignments and I carry out the work. Flat fifteen per cent fee. He is much more, though. He has been my father since my parents finally kicked me out. He taught me a lot and changed me from an unfocused psychic teenager to a slightly focused bootleg psychic adult with money. Both of us, he and I, are liminal, on the edge of civilisation at all times.