Rosewater

by Tade Thompson

  We walk to the soldier who tags us as soon as we round the corner and unsubtly swings his rifle to cover us. This is the second time I’ve been threatened with a gun today. His thoughts radiate to me. He does not consider us threats. He thinks we are visitors to the Department of Agriculture who got lost. He thinks Oyin Da’s hair is daft and he is puzzled by the asexuality of her dressing. His tastes run to that of the commercial sex worker, in any case.

  ‘Halt!’ he says.

  ‘We’re here to see Mrs. Alaagomeji,’ I say. ‘She’s expecting us.’

  ‘I received no notification of that. Remain still,’ he says. He speaks into a mouthpiece and listens.

  The double doors of the conference room swing open and Femi emerges.

  ‘Where’s my gun, you fucking klepto?’ she says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Rosewater: 2066

  Clement lives in a crowded high-rise in Kinshasa. The best thing to be said about Kinshasa is that it’s close to the South Ganglion. The uninterrupted power supply does not make up for the density of population, the crime, the social deprivation, and general nastiness of the area. There are illegal aliens there, extraterrestrials, owned by locals, used for whatever advantage can be extracted. Fight clubs, illegal betting, intimidation, getting rid of an inconvenient body, all rumoured to happen here. It’s cheap to live in the rise, though, and Clement is a young man just starting out without the benefit of rich parents. There’s a high rate of Eru use too, and the authorities can’t keep up. Eru is a shadow currency, loosely based on barter, and used when the Naira seems to benefit the rich more than the common man. Eru is a glorified IOU slip. There’s a Goodhead store on the ground floor. The walls are covered with graffiti like cheap makeup.

  My xenosphere awareness is coming back, enough for me to want to suppress it. The sense of desperation and despair from this block is overpowering. The elevator is out so I take the stairs up twenty floors. There is a kid on the seventh floor sitting on the stairs, head lolling, stoned, unaware of me. His shorts are wet with liquid shit and his mouth hangs open. I move on. I am not fit so I am breathing hard by the time I get to the floor I want. The corridor is full of buckets attached to rain water collecting devices. I have to pick my way between them.

  I knock on the door of his apartment. There is no response so I phone Clement and I can hear a cheesy ringtone from inside. I knock harder.

  ‘Clement, I know you’re in there,’ I say.

  The door sweeps open and a woman as tall as me and wide as the doorway stands there. She’s not black, but appears dark enough to be mixed race. Before I can say anything she punches me in the face. It lands right on my nose and I see stars. My knees buckle. I fall back, but she grabs the front of my shirt and drags me into the flat.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ I hear Clement shout from inside somewhere.

  ‘Baby, get the police,’ she yells. ‘He’s here.’

  While she’s distracted I clap both hands over her ears, though not hard enough to rupture her ear drums. She lets me go and clutches her head. I am about to follow through when Clement pops out of a door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks, but it is unclear if he means me or his … friend?

  I’m dripping blood from my nose to my shirt. I like the shirt. She lurches away towards whatever front room they have, wailing. Clement pats her shoulder and steers her towards a bedroom, but looks back at me.

  ‘Go to the lounge. I’ll meet you there. You want a tissue?’

  The sitting room is a shrine to Jesus and professional wrestling. There is the usual reproduction of the Last Supper and some Raphaelite Gethsemane scene. Here and there garish bumper stickers persist on the wall like barnacles of poor taste. It looks like Clement’s partner used to wrestle. There are several framed photos of her in tights hurling some other poor woman about. There is one with her balanced on the turn buckle, one with her lifting a belt. In these she looks younger, lean, muscular, and sexual. Her hair is cut short. There are no pictures of her in her current stature.

  Clement comes in.

  ‘You’ve met Lorna, then.’

  ‘I’ve met Lorna’s fist,’ I say.

  ‘I’d like to say I’m sorry, but I’m not. She’s just protective.’

  ‘Bully for you.’

  ‘You are not welcome here, Kaaro. Why are you trying to kill me?’

  ‘I’m not trying to kill you, you fucking idiot.’

  ‘You can’t anyway,’ he says. He unbuttons the ankara shirt he has on and thrusts his bare chest at me. ‘I have protection.’

  ‘What are you doing? Put your shirt back on.’

  ‘I figured out how to block you!’ His torso glistens and is almost white with a thick layer of ketoconazole. I can smell it from where I sit. It’s a chemical, sulphurous smell so strong that I taste it in my mouth immediately.

  ‘Clement, why would I need to kill you? Cui bono, motherfucker. Who benefits?’ I cough slightly, and the blood spurts from my nostrils. I feel it trickle down the back of my throat.

  ‘I ... I ... why have you been attacking me?’

  ‘You attacked me. In Bola’s flesh temple thing. You laid in wait and tried to ambush me with your stupid iron golem.’

  ‘Only because you’ve attacked me almost every day since I came to Rosewater. I saw how you stared at me. You’re trying to get rid of a rival.’

  ‘Clement, I do not give a shit about you. I don’t give a shit about your job. I’m not in competition with you for anything. Get this shitty idea out of your head. I never even thought about you until the day you tried that cack-handed attempt to kill me.’ I cough. ‘And if you think a layer of cheap antifungal cream will stop me if I wanted to kill you ...’ I cough, and the tickle won’t stop. I cough, and I feel something viscous coming up, although it seems to need convincing. I hack, I change posture, stand up. My eyes start to water. I look at Clement and mime a glass of water, but he is staring at me in horror.

  Lorna bursts out of the room wearing a t-shirt and what look like a man’s boxer shorts. She stares too.

  Have they never seen a coughing man?

  I sense a tearing in my chest and I can feel the edge of something coming up my throat. I cough, but then it’s like vomit and it flows on its own. My vision becomes misty and I am mindful of the lack of tears on my cheeks. Whatever is coming out of my eyes falls upwards.

  Oh, fuck, it hurts.

  The effluent from my mouth rises and joins the vapour from my eyes in a continuous flow.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ says Clement.

  ‘It’s our house. I can throw him out,’ says Lorna.

  I raise a hand as if to say, wait. I can feel the lower edge of it now, the end of it, flowing like a mollusc leaving a trail of pain and disgust. When it’s out I fall to the ground. I look up at it. It swirls close to the ceiling as cheerful as a shroud, opaque, yellowish here, there off-white, thick. What the fuck is it?

  It is not just a cloud. It roils, but with purpose. It moves towards Clement and he’s too frozen in place to move away. I try to tell him to run, but I cough instead. The xenosphere is there, but is full of electric noise, interference or deliberate blocking, I cannot tell. When I see the miasma entering Clement, with Lorna screaming like a horror flick soundtrack, I recognise it.

  Ectoplasm.

  The real kind, with neurotransmitters and xenoforms.

  Strands of it enter his eyes and his nostrils and his open mouth. He starts to choke. Lorna hugs him and I want to tell her to do the opposite.

  Lay him down and pump his chest!

  Help him breathe!

  I am too weak to help. I can barely breathe between coughs.

  Clement moves intensely, jerkily, and then he goes still.

  I back towards the door. Lorna has not been the most stable of hosts and I don’t want to negotiate peace with a professional wrestler. I have to escape while she is disoriented by grief. The ectoplasm drains out with vermiform fingers from Cl
ement’s orifices. Lorna sees them and lumbers out, charging past me into the corridor, and out of the flat. Her screams die away.

  I should not be here.

  The ectoplasm speeds up and is back in me before I can think. I am in the xenosphere and Molara is there, aroused, nipples sharpened to pin-points, poised above me, hovering with her wings. She licks her lips and descends and begins to fuck me. Her tongue is long enough to flick against her own chin. We are in a place of multicoloured mist which swirls in different directions as we buck against each other.

  ‘You are ... the last … one, Gryphon,’ she says, panting. ‘Soon, now. Soon, you …’

  She climaxes violently, and disappears, leaving me lying in a room with a dead body, blood on my shirt, a broken nose, and sexual arousal. Not a vista that speaks to my innocence.

  What does she mean, soon?

  I get up. Clement’s eyes are open and seem to accuse me, and not without reason. I did bring death to his home. I feel shame and guilt. I try to close his eyes like I’ve seen done in movies, but for some reason his lids seem too small and they keep retracting back to the open position. I cover his face with a tea towel. I have to escape, not because of the police. Thanks to my bleeding nose and maybe the ectoplasm, my DNA is already all over the flat and my implant will tell them I’ve been here. What I’m worried about is Lorna whipping up the neighbours into a murderous frenzy. I’ve already done the mob scene and I’d rather not repeat it. Better to call the police myself than get necklaced.

  The door is ajar. I hear no unusual noise that might indicate ructions beyond. I feel for the xenosphere. It is full of a mixture of Lorna and Clement’s thoughts. They are not what I expect. I anticipated disorganisation bordering on psychosis, but what I get is rationality. Clement’s safe thought space is a school and a police station. It constantly shifts between the two. I find out that his mother was a police officer and his father was a teacher. I am walking in the hall of the school and now in a classroom. I sit at a desk and read the exercise book in front of me. Now it is a folder, an old style police record.

  Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil. Machiavelli.

  Why did this man hate me? Or at least fear me?

  There is nothing written in the folder, and when I look up I see a new door. When I open it I am looking at Clement on the day he joins the bank. I see myself. It is a strange feeling. I don’t look like that. When did I get so old?

  Clement feels intimidated. In the background someone drones on, telling him the names of the others who make up the psychic firewall. He does not listen. It is I, glowing radioactive, who distracts him. He has heard that I have been here since the old days, since the first days. Later, when he recounts it to his lover in the midst of sex-funk, all he can talk about is meeting me. In their copulation she is the aggressor, penetrating him with fingers, which he loves. He practices his drills in the xenosphere, trying to keep his skills honed for the firewall. There are tubes of ketoconazole all around him, a mountain of discarded, twisted, empty containers. Lorna helps him. She feeds him random bits of information to use as white noise against personal attack.

  ‘Did you know that Ernest Hemmingway patrolled the East Coast of the US on his personal yacht looking for U-boats during World War II?’

  That night, even after making love, he is too excited to really sleep, but too exhausted to stay awake. He dozes and finds himself in the xenosphere. And there, in the swirling mists, he sees me, Kaaro, dressed in all black, grinning. I don’t ever grin in real life. Without talking we begin to fight, him and this mental image of me. In his xenosphere we trade blows and blow trade winds, and I beat his iron golem to a bloody mess. I produce a dagger and he flees. He wakes beside his lover, breathing heavy, comforted by her snores.

  I shift and move swifter through his memories, remembering that I am in a room with a dead body and either a mob or the police or a physically powerful and trained lover will come for me.

  There are multiple encounters with my doppelganger. Clement never wins. In the daytime he tries to appease me by using the usual primate signs of surrender. He smiles, he defers to me, he flatters me, and he never disagrees with me. Since I am unaware of the violence he experiences, I behave indifferent. At night, every night, he fights what he believes to be me, and it is exhausting.

  He tells his lover. With Lorna’s help he begins to increase the size and skill of his avatar, but it makes no difference. The fake Kaaro is too powerful. Finally, Clement stops going into the xenosphere outside work. When Bola dies he hides in her safe place, operates from there. Which is fine, until I turn up, a terrifying gryphon attended by a succubus. After his giant avatar is destroyed he spends all his hours under a thick layer of antifungal cream. Which works until I turn up at his doorstep and belch ectoplasm into his face. I exit the xenosphere.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to his corpse.

  I listen and hear nothing, then I leave the flat. I close the door. It will lock automatically. I wonder where Lorna has run to, but I don’t dwell on it until I hear her say the three words I have been dreading.

  ‘There he is.’

  INTERLUDE: HEALTH CHECK

  Ubar, Rosewater, 2061

  Annual mental health check.

  Assholes throwing questions at me from behind airtight screens or teleconferenced in. What they don’t know is that they have an imperfect seal and the xenosphere link is spotty, but present.

  ‘Are you religious?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you had a religion when you were young?’

  ‘My parents were nominal Christians, my mother took it more serious than my father.’

  ‘Do you go to church?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you attend mosque?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you practice African Traditional Religion?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you a Satanist?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you a demon?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been possessed or been diagnosed as being in a possession state?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever participated in an exorcism?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell us about this.’

  ‘You know the answer because I told you last year. Every year we have to go through this. Every single year.’

  ‘Answer the question please.’

  ‘An S45 agent went on a mission with a sensitive called Oloja. The mission was a success. On their way back to debrief they became close and had sex. It happens sometimes in high stress situations. Unfortunately, Oloja wasn’t a very experienced sensitive. While coupling he left a version of his mental image in the agent’s mind. By accident. The agent first lost his own personality and then became catatonic. The psychiatrists said it was a possession state and recommended an exorcism based on the agent’s religion. My supervisor, Femi Alaagomeji, invited me to observe. Ordered more like. During the … ceremony I saw the problem: Oloja’s multiplying avatar. I intervened. The agent got better.’

  ‘What do you mean by “intervened?”’

  ‘I entered the xenosphere and killed the avatars’.

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘I stopped counting at six hundred and twenty-four.’

  ‘How did you kill them?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Slashing, decapitation, blunt force, suffocation, burning, eating.’

  ‘“Eating?”’

  ‘Symbolically. Look, my avatar’s a gryphon. It isn’t cuddly. Both the eagle and the lion part are pretty predatory. They like to kill and eat things. I absorb the avatar into myself and “digest” it.’

  ‘Have you ever killed a human being?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever eaten human flesh?’

  ‘Is that because of the eating comment?�
��

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you feel any remorse for killing Oloja?’

  ‘Have you been listening? The guy is still alive.’

  ‘Was this accident really an accident?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did Oloja duplicate himself inside the agent?’

  ‘He was trying to wipe the agent’s memory of the sex.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because some assholes in government have not been able to overturn homosexuality laws for decades, that’s why.’

  ‘Are you a homosexual?’

  ‘No. But if I were, I wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Are you human?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you a human being?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is any part of you controlled by an external agency?’

  ‘Yes. S45 controls me.’

  ‘I mean other than employers. Is your volition your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you controlling anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you feel life is worth living?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Are you …’

  ‘Do you …’

  ‘What is …’

  ‘When will …’

  ‘Why …’

  ‘Why not?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Unknown, Rosewater: 2055

  ‘Has everyone calmed down?’ asks Femi. ‘Good. Pay attention.’

  In the conference room we all have screens on the table as well as a giant one on the south wall. Other than Femi and Oyin Da who is seated beside me, there is a white man called Bellamy in the room. I do not know if this is his first or last name and nobody clarifies. He is British and acts as a kind of consultant.

  ‘You are all aware of Wormwood, the extraterrestrial that landed in London back in 2012. You know that it has been travelling in the Earth’s crust. It contaminated the biosphere with alien microorganisms which we call xenoforms. We have not been able to track its movements, but we’ve always speculated that where there is an unusual concentration of xenoforms, Wormwood can’t be far away. This is all public knowledge. About a month ago S45 scientists detected rising levels of xenoforms. The elevation was too sharp to be a statistical fluctuation. Wormwood was here. It burst through here.’