Remote Control

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “Come on,” her brother shouted. He ran. But Fatima was looking at an approaching tanker. These vehicles always made her pause. She liked to imagine them as bombs on wheels. At her cousins’ house, they had a jelli telli that could stretch across the room’s entire wall. The whole village would come by to watch Hollywood movies about faraway places where terrible and wonderful things happened. And in many of those films, tanker trucks would blow up like giant heated palm kernels.

  As her brother crossed the road, Fatima’s gaze stayed on that tanker and she daydreamed about plumes of smoke, boiling orange, red and yellow flames, burning the very air it consumed. Before she knew it, her brother was halfway across. She gasped.

  “Fenuku,” she called.

  He turned around. When he saw his sister still standing there, he threw his hands up with annoyance. Then he motioned for her to come. His actions were so dramatic looking that Fatima giggled.

  “You can make it!” he called.

  “Ok!” she called back, her heart pounding in her chest. A wave of heat rolled over her flesh and she wondered what those around her might have seen had they been looking at her. Nevertheless, few people noticed short dark-skinned little girls in dusty old purple and white printed dresses.

  The tanker zoomed past, slapping her with gravel and a fresh plume of dust. She coughed as a woman beside her ran across. There was a gap in the traffic as a large group of cars approached. Fatima made a run for it. She laughed as she ran. Then she stepped into a pothole, stumbled and fell, skinning her knee. She felt herself pulse with heat from the pain and for this reason, she paused. The olive-green car was upon her before she even looked up. Her brother loved cars and Fatima had looked through the tattered car magazines his uncle brought him from Accra. In this way, she knew that the green vehicle barreling toward her was a BMW.

  Fatima was flying.

  She could see all the way to the city of Accra, though she’d never been there. Her mother said Wulugu was over three hundred miles away. But Fatima was that high in the sky now. She was finally seeing beyond her village. She wished she could tell her father about all she was seeing. Maybe when she landed.

  Fatima heard the sound of blaring horns and smelled the smoke of screeching tires. She hit the ground, scraping the side of her face. People running to her. Her brother screaming her name, tears in his eyes. He’d never cried when the wasps stung her. “FATIMA!” he wailed, as he ran to her. “Sister!” He had never called her “sister.” She chuckled and doing so hurt.

  Her face was pressed to the concrete of the street. She felt the sunshine on her skin. Warming her skin. Warmth on warmth. The market was emptying as people poured out to see what had happened. Her brother was screaming. He was almost to her.

  Then the pain came. This was the moment when Fatima forgot her name. It was a pain that tumbled to her soul. Later she would understand that it wasn’t just a pain. It was a beginning. And this beginning annihilated all that came before it.

  The red sharp aching radiated from her hip where the car had rammed her. She moaned deep in her throat. Something was coming. Then it burst forth. She was on fire and it was green.

  She heard her brother sobbing.

  A woman yelled, “What is…”

  Fatima squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the blood strain in her ears. Then all went silent. Except the sound of idling vehicles.

  When she opened her eyes, she gasped. Everyone was asleep. Her brother lay on the street. The woman who must have spoken, lay beside him. Everyone in the market, those who’d come out to see. A man in a car rolling to a soft stop. All asleep. Fatima’s body flared again with pain. And this time she saw it. A corona of green sickly light burst from her, growing huge as it traveled from her small body. A bird dropped from the sky. A drone fell beside her and she vaguely wondered if it was the same one that had just delivered a package to those girls. A mobile phone on the ground burst into flames. No more cars or trucks came up or down the road.

  Slowly, gently Fatima stood up. She touched her head. Her cap of short hair was gone. Her left eye twitched and her body began to shake so severely that she sat down hard on the concrete. Sweat poured down her now bald head and she could feel every drop. It gathered at her chin, dripping to the hot road. She stared at her brother who lay beside her. One of his shoes was half off and his white kaftan was smudged with dirt. His face was turned away from her.

  It left her as a butterfly leaves a flower. She felt it go. It wasn’t instant, just a gradual disappearance. Her name. She couldn’t remember her name. She whimpered, fighting to recall it. Nothing. “Home, home, mommy, the tree,” she whispered. “Fenuku’s dirty room. Papa’s cigarettes. Papa wanted his favorite cigarettes.” Still nothing. No name.

  She shut her eyes tightly and her mind fell on an image of Shango in her mythology book. He was standing in the clouds looking down at a big city in Nigeria, his hands on his hips as lightning crashed around him. She’d always liked this picture because he looked like a superhero, but was not. She didn’t like this photo so much anymore. However, she opened her eyes. She rubbed them with steady hands. She slowly got to her feet. She pressed at her hip. The pain was big, but it was not sharp. Her hip still worked. She was ok. She looked around. No one stirred. She limped home.

  * * *

  She passed the mosque. Inside, everyone was asleep. Including her father. They lay in various positions, some as if they were still praying, including her father, others simply lay this way and that. At home, her mother was asleep. This made her run down the hall and she somehow ended up in her brother’s room. On his table were the birds he liked to carve—an owl, a hawk and a Sankofa bird. She picked up the Sankofa bird and ran her finger over the long neck that looked backwards as it took an egg from behind it. She felt a prick of pain as a splinter from the wood entered her flesh and her body flashed with light. She dropped the bird and its neck snapped. Tears fell from her eyes to the floor as she knelt down and picked up the pieces. She’d broken the bird, just as she’d broken her family and her entire hometown.

  She threw the bird down and left the room. In the kitchen, she made herself a plate of fufu and soup from the dinner her mother had prepared. She ate until she was fuller than she’d ever been in her life. Then she slept like everyone else in town. Come morning, everyone else was still … asleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  GODDESS OF TRAVEL

  After three days at home, she had to walk. As she walked, she wept. Her mother, father and brother were dead and she now understood this deeply. The dust on her face made her eyes sting and itch.

  She’d left her mother’s body in the house. After a few days, it had started bloating. And then there was the smell. And the flies. They were all over Wulugu, sprouting from people’s bodies like fidgeting black flowers. The house was suddenly full of them. Maggots wriggled everywhere. The newly hatched flies crawled on the walls, slow and bewildered, their wings fresh and moist. The adults beat themselves against the windows, copulated and laid more eggs in her mother and under the carpet. She hated the sight and sound of them. She would hate flies forever.

  She found that when the flies really angered her, her body would glow, not heat, glow, and every fly in the room would drop dead. Her body did this many times when she crept into the main room to see her mother’s corpse. But the flies always returned hours later. They emerged from her mother’s body, from other rooms, from outside when she opened the door.

  And so the seven-year-old girl in her pink knee-length skirt and yellow T-shirt gathered what food she could find, soap, her brother’s Sankofa bird that she’d broken, her mythology book, her mother’s favorite gold hoop earrings, a wooden owl her brother had carved for her, and a jar of her father’s shea butter, put it all in the satchel she used for school and she walked up the road.

  She stopped, turned back and went a last time into her parents’ bedroom and took one of her mother’s black curly-haired wigs to cover her bald scalp. It didn’t fit her small
head, but she wore it anyway, imagining it to be more like a hat she hid beneath.

  “I am like Hermes,” she said aloud as she stepped onto the quiet road, just to hear her voice. Hermes was a god of travel. Maybe she could find the box that her father sold away. The box that was taken from her and if it had not been taken, none of this would have happened. It was mine, she thought. And it was all she had left of home.

  She nodded to herself as she walked, back straight, stride true. “I will find you. Wherever you are.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ROAD

  “Inshallah,” she said to herself, over and over as she walked along the main road.

  The same road where she’d been hit. The bodies, including her brother’s, were still there. However, there was not a bit of traffic on the usually busy street. She ran alongside the road, not daring to look toward her brother’s corpse. Not daring to look at any of the faces. The swarms of flies were so thick that she wouldn’t have seen much if she’d looked, anyway.

  Up the road, she passed three cars that had rolled into the bushes. Each was a nest of flies and rotting corpses. Other than these, there were no other vehicles. Eventually, after she’d walked for a half hour, she came to a roadblock in the distance. There were at least three soldiers in forest green fatigues standing at it. She hid in the grasses on the roadside and crept closer.

  They stood in front of two thick slabs of yellow-striped concrete dragged into the road. Their military vehicles were parked on the side. And there was a white man with them who was wearing all black with a badge on the right side of his chest she couldn’t quite see, like a secret police officer in one of the Hollywood movies. The white man’s uniform was long-sleeved and it was hot and humid, but he seemed comfortable. She stepped into the shadow of the trees and grasses and snuck by. She was a small girl who’d spent all her life climbing the family shea tree. So she was fast, silent and comfortable amongst plant-life. Plus, they probably didn’t expect to see any survivors, especially a little girl.

  Once past the roadblock, she made a turn onto another road and she walked for two hours. And by the evening, the world opened up to her. She was outside Wulugu, in the town of Nabori. People. Homes. Markets. Cars and trucks. She spent that first night, however, in a cluster of trees beside the busy road. Exhausted, she fell into a deep sleep almost the moment she rested her head against the tree. The loud gasp of someone feet away woke her. “Ghost! Spirit!” a man whispered. He turned and stumbled off.

  She froze, listening with every part of her body because it was too dark to see him clearly. He was moving away. Nearly gone. She breathed a sigh of relief, her whole body shaking with the rush of adrenaline. She was many yards into the small forest beside the road. How did he see me? she wondered. Then she realized it. She was glowing, faintly green-yellow, but just enough to look like a forest spirit in the darkness. She couldn’t see very well around her, but she was sure she was surrounded by dead mosquitoes and other biting insects. Maybe this was why she was glowing, because her body was being assaulted by their bites and it was protecting itself. She quickly rubbed fresh shea butter on her arms, legs and torso and grabbed her things.

  Just after sunrise, as she walked alongside the road, a man driving a truck stopped beside her. She kept walking, pretending she did not see him. She was holding the wooden body of her broken Sankofa bird and she squeezed it, praying the man would just go away.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked.

  Sankofa pressed her chin to her chest and kept walking.

  “Hello?” the man said from his truck. “I am safe. I have three daughters about your age. It’s not right for you to be walking here.”

  She kept walking, but he didn’t go away. “I will call the police,” he said, holding up his mobile phone.

  “No!” she said, looking up. “No police, sir.”

  “Then where are you going?” he asked, grinning. He wore a long white kaftan and there were prayer beads hanging from his rearview mirror. “What’s your name?”

  She looked at her feet and shook her head. She muttered the first name to come to mind. “My name’s … Sankofa. I’m going to the … next town.” Please don’t ask me the name of it, she frantically thought.

  “Get in. I will drive you,” he said. “I know a woman there who can offer you a bed to sleep in for however long you need. I’ll even program my truck in front of you and have it drive itself, so you know exactly where I’m taking you.”

  She hesitated. The name “Sankofa” was echoing in her mind, filling empty confused crevices. She liked it. She put her brother’s broken bird into her pocket and stepped toward his truck. She didn’t trust the man, but she didn’t want him to call the police, either. The thought of her dead parents, dead brother, dead town pulled at her. Maybe she did want him to call the police … so they could arrest and punish her for what she’d done. But she also wanted to flee, to escape, to keep going so she could right all the wrongs by finding the box. Yes, she thought, if she found the box maybe everyone would … wake up. “Ok,” she said. “Just into town, though.”

  However, the moment Sankofa touched the truck’s door, something happened. She felt nothing. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. The truck just stopped working. One moment its idling engine was chugging away, the next, it was not. There was no sigh, as it stopped. No exhalation of exhaust or steam. No electric spark. The truck simply was no longer running. There were no vehicles passing on the road at that moment, so the silence was profound.

  “What did you do?” the man asked.

  She stepped back as he climbed in and tried to start his truck. Nothing happened. Not even a vehicular gasp. The truck was simply dead.

  “What’d you do?” he shouted again, as he turned the key and nothing happened. “Are you some kind of witch?” He tried again. Nothing.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said, stepping away.

  The rest happened fast. She sensed the change in the man, from kind and helpful to furious. Swift like the weather. She turned and ran. She was fast, but this man was faster and she didn’t get far before he’d grabbed her satchel. He yanked at it and she fell to the ground. “What did you do to my truck?” he shouted. “I was only trying to help you! My truck is my livelihood!” He slapped her hard across the face, his eyes wide and red.

  The hot, raw sting registered in her brain and her body flooded with terror and panic. She stumbled backwards, holding her face. She remembered sneaking across the grass, as she stared at the roadblock. Leaving Wulugu. Seeing her mother’s fly-riddled body. Her dead brother who’d just been alive beside her on the road. Then she was thrust forward and she glimpsed death, destruction, heat, violence and more terror. Then she was back staring into the bewildered eyes of a man who was about to slap her again.

  The green light that burst from her was wilder and denser than what had happened in Wulugu, but it didn’t travel beyond the man and his truck. She glanced at this for only a moment, then she pressed herself to the ground. The second blow from the man didn’t come. There was no sound and only moments passed. She heard a vehicle zoom by on the road. When the vehicle didn’t stop, she opened her eyes. She was in the shade of the dead truck, her satchel still on her shoulder. When she looked at where the man had been, all that was left was what might have been a jawbone. The top or bottom, she did not know. But it still carried all the teeth. She screeched and got to her feet. Sankofa ran.

  She never made it to the nearest town, whatever it was called. Instead, before her feet took her there, she turned and walked into the bush. She stopped walking when it was nearly too dark to see. She cleared a spot in front of a tree and used some large old palm fronds to make a dry place. Then she curled up on them and fell right into a deep dreamless sleep.

  When she woke the next morning, she remembered what happened and she started crying before she even opened her eyes. And when she finally did open them, they were gummy with dried tears and dirt. Eventually, she stopped crying and h
unger pushed away her grief. After a search amongst the peaceful trees and bushes, she located a mango tree heavy with ripe fruit and a small secluded stream; her food and water concerns were solved.

  As she bathed in the stream, she looked up and there was the fox who’d been skulking around her town. “You’re alive, too!” she’d whispered happily. It stood on the other side of the stream staring at her, water dripping from its narrow muzzle. Then it trotted from the shallows into the bushes, disappearing into the shadows with a swish of its luxuriant red-orange tail. Even after it was gone, the forest felt that much friendlier and welcoming. Sankofa stayed in that forest for a week.

  She spent most of her days rereading and rereading her mythology book and watching for the fox, whom she’d spotted another two times. Once, at dusk while she’d prepared her spot for sleep, she saw it peeking at her from behind a nearby tree. The second time was on her last night in the forest. At the time, she was sure she’d live in that forest forever, despite the fact that eating a diet of mangos, bananas and water grass gave her horrible diarrhea that kept her near the stream washing and washing after each bout.

  She’d been so happy in that forest, away from everyone, not having to speak, being unseen, living in the moment and turning her back on the past. However, all of that day, the protective wall of denial she’d managed to put up had been gradually crumbling. She’d heard an especially loud truck pass on the nearby road and she started thinking about the man she’d killed. The man who’d slapped her and had been preparing to slap her again. He’d been a kind Muslim on his way to work and her presence had somehow changed him into a raging beast.

  Soon she was constantly thinking of her family, her town, her home, all dead. She started to glow that night. And in the brightness of her heated body, she saw the fox looking at her, feet away. She was resting on the tree against which she liked to sleep. Her head on the tree’s rough trunk, her mind unsettled.