Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  ‘Go west,’ I say.

  The ride is quiet, though punctuated by my directions. After forty minutes the driver speaks.

  ‘We’re going round in circles, boss.’

  The woman cocks her head in response.

  ‘You are wrong,’ I say. ‘But I forgive you. The path we are describing is called a spiral. We are winding our way inwards in curves of regular reducing radii. We are working towards the centre.’

  ‘Why can’t we just go to the centre?’ asks the woman.

  ‘You’re paying me for a job. Let me do it.’ I shift away from her slightly. ‘I do not know the destination, but I know the way.’

  The woman crosses and uncrosses her legs. The movement causes a puff of perfume to tickle my nose. I have a sudden powerful erection and I trap it between my thighs so that it isn’t visible.

  The roads become narrower. The dark windows give the world a richness that it lacks in reality. The bleached sand looks amber rather than the usual stark beiges.

  They are closer. Soon, now.

  The road is bumpier. Fewer houses. Clumps of hardy weeds, industrial waste, dumped pallets. The last vestiges of civilisation are the speed limit signs, tortured and broken up for scrap metal, then there is just dry red earth. I see in the rear window that the SUV kicks up a ten-foot dust cloud.

  Hawks swirl in the sky.

  Here.

  ‘Stop the vehicle,’ I say.

  My heart thumps. I am close. I see a meaningful look pass between the driver and the woman, but I do not or cannot care. I am caught in an ecstasy of a hunger that I cannot not define, but that I have felt many times. The poets like to call it the finder’s passion.

  I try to open the door, but I can’t work the handle. Haste.

  ‘Open the fucking door. Now. Now! Kia, kia!’

  I feel sweat forming on my skin. Too slow the driver gets out, then he opens the other door.

  On the ground, in the dust, a piece of wood with one flap of a strap hinge attached, marker of a phantom door that leads nowhere. I fix on this briefly, then I take exactly four steps forward. I turn on the spot in this desolate place. I kick the powdery dirt with my shoe and something is different. I hunker down and swipe what I find with my left hand, rub between index finger and thumb. This is not dry earth, it is sawdust.

  I look back at the car and notice the woman disembark, her dress flapping in the wind, a ghost snatching at her hemline. My tumescence shifts as I see her thighs.

  I say, ‘I need a —’

  ‘Shovel,’ says the driver. He is already walking to the boot. It is suspicious that he knows, that he already has a shovel handy, but I file this away for later. My urge to locate, to find, is overpowering and I will sink into the ground if it means I will know peace.

  I dig in silence apart from grunts and heavy breathing. I keep a rhythm, knowing from my experience of manual labour when younger that this is the only way to get it done. I am shirtless now, having stripped when sweat drenched my clothes. The woman and driver do not offer to help, but watch me without comment or apparent guilt, the guileless manner of the rich towards a serf fulfilling a role.

  Four hawks land with thumps in the dirt all around me. They are cyborgs, COBS, recording information, spooling it to servers in the sky.

  The shovel hits something more solid, a boot.

  ‘There’s somebody here,’ I say. ‘Someone’s been buried.’

  I dig around and use my hands to gouge out chunks. My efforts slowly reveal that the corpse is —

  ‘Not alone. There … that’s a hand from … this isn’t …’ I look up and see that the woman and her driver are not surprised at all. They stand like telephone poles in the wind, conveying secret information while seeming inert. ‘This isn’t the kind of job I’m used to. Take me back, right now. I’m … I’m not involved. Klaus was mistaken about the work I do. I don’t work. I’m unemployed. The police will —’

  ‘Calm down,’ says the driver.

  ‘Have you found it?’ asks the woman.

  ‘The trance ends here. This is the person you were looking for, one hundred per cent. Or to be specific, one of these. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You knew he was dead, and that he’d been … God, I can’t stop talking.’

  ‘Calm down.’ The driver looks around, then at his watch.

  ‘Please, I beg you, don’t kill me,’ I say.

  ‘Why would we kill you?’ asks the woman. To the driver she says, ‘They’re late.’

  ‘If you let me go you can forget my fee. I need to live because I have a family to look after,’ I say.

  ‘No, you don’t have a family. Now, shut up, please. You’re starting to irritate me,’ the woman says. Both she and the driver keep looking around and up.

  If I get out of this alive I will kill Klaus. He is probably not even Belgian to start with. Fucking German Nazi bastard scumsucker! I stand in the shallow grave not even knowing if I should continue digging, or try to escape. There is no place to escape to. Desolation for miles around, which makes it perfect for getting rid of bodies in the first place. I can probably outrun the driver, and the rich woman isn’t even in contention there, but there are other factors. The driver’s uniform bulges in the right places to suggest a concealed firearm. I may be a low-impact variety of telepath, amazing in my own way, but I can not run faster than bullets or deflect them with my skin.

  ‘I usually find runaways and jewellery. This is … dead bodies make me nervous. Please!’ If only I can make tears. Usually I am a good actor — the best scammers are — and when nothing is at stake I can make myself cry easily. This time the fear dries up my mouth and eyes.

  I hear it: the whipping of rotor blades as they cut through air. Helicopter. I scan the sky and see it approaching from the west.

  ‘About time,’ says the woman. She walks closer to the verge of the grave. From my angle I can see up her skirt, but both the finder’s passion and my sexual interest are gone. ‘Did you know that we humans are probably the first primates to kill our own natural predators? We learnt to use tools and bam! Up the hierarchy because of opposable thumbs and big brains.’

  The helicopter is so close she has to squint from the dust it kicks up and raise her voice above the din.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I say, uninterested. ‘I did not know that at all.’

  ‘Just listen. You were born with certain advantages that other people do not have.’

  So were you, I think, but do not say.

  ‘Your mental abilities are like metaphorical thumbs. What do you think the lions and the panthers would have done if they knew the significance of emerging opposable thumbs? They would have wiped humankind out, uppity apes that we were.’ She has to hold her skirt in place now. ‘You are supposed to register yourself as a finder.’

  ‘Yes, I know and —’

  ‘Just listen. You are the best we have encountered. Amazing, really. I had one woman from Ojota who wandered all over Lagos before settling here, but she could not pin-point the exact grave.’

  ‘It’s not an exact —’

  ‘The men in there, one of them was my husband. The others were dissidents like him. I knew he had been liquidated, but my superiors did not tell me where he was buried.’

  ‘Why? What … I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m from Section Forty-five. We’ve been trying to find you, or someone like you for a long time now. We’re not going to kill you, although we could, and nobody would know. We’re not going to put you in prison, although we could because you’re breaking the law. We have a job for you. Complete that task and not only will you walk free, but we’ll pay you a handsome fee. It’s up to you. Will you do it?’

  She holds up an ID badge to confirm that she works for the secret police. The helicopter lands and disgorges uniformed, armed men who spread like a plague to surround me. My options dwindle fast.

  ‘Say “yes,”’ says the driver.

  Fuck it.

  ‘Yes,’ I sa
y.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rosewater: 2066

  I do not spend a long time in the hospital. A week is enough, although I am still stiff and my urine looks reddish. On my last day I ask where Shesan Williams is held and because of my S45 status they let me see him. He is hooked up to life support with his family around him. His second wife is monumentally fat. She literally looks like a monument to greed. Beautiful face, though.

  In the xenosphere Shesan is surrounded by a featureless grey fog. He looks perplexed. I whisper his name and he looks about, stricken. I have hidden the gryphon form from him. I hesitate. What I am about to do isn’t nice, but I remember my helplessness when the floater held me, bullets flying past, and I remember the bones in the cell. I remember blood from the creature splashing into my mouth.

  ‘Shesan Williams, you should not act with impunity,’ I say. ‘It is never a good idea to cause pain to angels.’

  I generate images of floaters, six of them, and I set them on him.

  The floaters swoop down on him and begin to take bites. I know this is only in his mind, but he will feel real fear and he will feel the real pain of each tooth. When they finish with him the whole cycle will start again, a fresh hell each time. In reality, Shesan’s face is smooth and he seems restful, serene. His family is not alarmed.

  When I get back to my bedside Aminat is waiting, having packed my stuff.

  I have an optional cane, but I use it all the same. I have a fantasy of hitting any attackers with it. I need one of those disguised sword sticks. I’d draw it and slash my initials into the air. I’d swashbuckle.

  ‘Bola wants to talk to you,’ Aminat says in the car.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. I have that feeling of unreality that you know of if you’ve ever been in hospital. The outside world is odd to you, takes getting used to.

  ‘She’s really sick,’ says Aminat.

  ‘She must be about to drop that child.’

  ‘She … ahh … she lost the child.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what? How? When?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you because you had your own problems going on. She’s really sick.’

  I have a sinking feeling. ‘Take me to her.’

  ‘Sure. We’ll drop your things at home —’

  ‘No. Now, please. I have to see her now.’

  It is odd seeing Bola with a flat belly.

  She is at home, lying on the sofa, covered, skin hanging loose on her frame. She seems older and her bonhomie is all gone. Beside her is a plastic tumbler with water and a straw which from time to time she sucks. It is a child’s straw with happy floral patterns that seem out of place.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say.

  ‘Sit down,’ she says. Her voice is low and words come with difficulty.

  I sit on the centre table, which is uncouth but the other chairs are too far away.

  I’ve had a cough since the parade. It got worse, then one day there was blood. The baby … I had to go into labour. Devastating.

  As she shares it with me in the xenosphere I get a wash of her despair but also some shame. Bola is not a trained sensitive, at least not in the formal way that S45 trained me. She is more of a traditional adept who found her way by trial and error and plied a trade in peripheral towns and villages before the bank’s headhunters found her. Powerful. I wonder what she would be like if she were trained. This, I think, is the only edge I have on her. In her sickness, that edge is gone. Unbidden I am awash in her images and sounds. She is or has been somewhere else in the xenosphere, with her dead husband, Dominic.

  Bola …?

  You may.

  Even though she is as accessible as any lay person on the street I still have to ask permission. She wants me to, maybe even needs me to. Out of respect I use my real self-image, not the gryphon.

  Her mind is a decaying temple. The ground is putrefying meat and the columns are wet with spit, mucus, and pus. The windows let in a jaundiced light which is bile-filtered sunlight. The glass is made of crushed kidney-stones. There are no seats or pews, but a few tumour-like growths approximate the look of chairs. They are lumpy, but have depressions that a person might sit in. There is no altar, but two figures sit on the floor. One of them is Bola, her self-image as she was when in her early twenties. Behind her, sitting on his haunches, is a tall, skinny man I recognise to be Dominic. I can only see the upper half of his head, but his eyes follow me, shining with malevolence. His hands grip both shoulders. Bola’s mouth is slightly open, as if she can’t get air in fast enough, but I see the rise and fall of her chest and it is slow.

  Dominic’s grip is the opposite of a lover’s embrace.

  ‘Dominic, right?’ I say.

  He does not respond, but keeps tracking my approach. The give of the meaty floor is unsettling, but I push any sign of weakness far away. I stop in front of them, then I walk around and see why he does not answer. His mouth is attached to the middle of her back, teeth embedded in the muscles. A slow stream of blood drips down. I do not know what this means, but it cannot be good for Bola.

  ‘Let her go,’ I say.

  He does not respond. He does not move, although his eyes are on me.

  I punch him hard, on the temple. His jaw loosens and Bola falls to the ground. He snarls and leaps up, facing me. His mouth, nose, and chin are smeared with blood and snot. He looks feral, but is essentially human.

  ‘Bola, memory, imagination, or fantasy, this has gone too far, I think. I will have to —’

  Do what you must, she responds.

  Dominic loses interest in me and goes back to Bola. There is a wound on her back that corresponds to his teeth, but it is not anatomical. There is a pulsing blood vessel that I do not recognise, but it spurts away Bola’s life force or its equivalent in this place.

  I transform into the gryphon and dig my beak into Dominic’s neck. I grab onto his sides with my forepaws and flap my wings. We both soar, with Dominic struggling and leaking not blood but ichor. I use my hind limbs and kick against his flesh, ripping him apart with the claws. I am at the roof of the temple and I drop him, but follow, maintaining a distance of a foot. After he hits the floor I lift him again, but making sure he faces me. This time I claw away his belly and chest. His organs fall out with a splat. He stops thrashing and is still. His eyes go out.

  I hover for a bit, then I open my eyes, and I’m back in Bola’s living room. She is asleep it seems.

  Thank you … so tired …

  Rest. I’ll let myself out.

  Aminat is waiting for me.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asks.

  ‘A kind of exorcism,’ I say.

  ‘She was possessed?’

  ‘No, she got caught up in her own memories. A kind of thought loop that she could not get away from. I broke the loop.’

  ‘Will this make her well?’

  ‘It shouldn’t have made her physically unwell in the first place. The two are not related.’ I thought of the decaying temple of meat. ‘Should not be related.’

  Something about the whole episode perturbs me, but I cannot put my finger on it. I am tired and just out of hospital. I ask Aminat to drop me at home. I call Femi Alaagomeji, but there is no response.

  ‘I’ll check on you after work,’ Aminat says.

  ‘I don’t know what you do for a living,’ I say.

  ‘I deal with drugs,’ she says and raises both palms, splays and shakes them, meant to convey spookiness. She kisses me and is gone.

  My flat seems desolate. ‘Intrusions?’

  There’s a five-second delay before the flat responds. ‘None.’

  ‘Messages?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Music. Otis Redding.’

  I strip, lie on the floor for what I mean to be only a minute, but fall asleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Unknown: 2055

  When I am frightened my gift becomes erratic.

  They fly me away from Lagos in a helicopter and take me to a military installat
ion, but I have no idea where it is. This is not a problem because I am a finder. I can always make my way back home, but that depends on distance and the need for a vehicle and whether I will have to steal, which seems likely given how long the flight takes.

  They keep me in a white windowless room under armed guard. I have not been fed and by my estimate I’ve been here for seven hours. The psychotic woman and her muscle-bound driver do not travel with me and the robotic military-types assigned to me will not talk, no matter how obsequious I try to be.

  ‘So this is Section Forty-five?’ I say. ‘Wow. It’s full of lights.’

  The guard maybe shifts a bit. His eyes may have narrowed, or I perhaps imagine it. Either way, it is a reaction of sorts.

  ‘I’m really hungry, though. Really. Ravenous. I would really, really like some food. How about it, soldier?’

  The guard keeps still.

  ‘Do you know that your stomach empties between ninety and one-eighty minutes after your last meal? It’s true. It’s a fact.’ I push back and rock my chair until it stands on two legs. I balance this by putting my foot on the table. ‘I must have one of the ninety-minute varieties because … whew! My belly just keeps grumbling. Maybe because I had beer for lunch. What do you think?’

  The guard keeps still.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  This time there is a definite wrinkle of the brow. Small sign of irritation, but a fine result all the same. I startle as the door opens. My chair falls with a clack.

  The rich woman comes in, this time in a tight beige trouser suit. She holds a few sheets of paper, a flat rectangular tin container, and a lighter. My lust returns and it brings friends.

  ‘Please tell me that’s a menu,’ I say.

  ‘Confidentiality agreement,’ says the woman. ‘You sign and you give a thumbprint.’

  ‘You really like thumbs, don’t you?’