Remote Control

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “Hello,” she said to it. The fox didn’t move, though its pointy ears pricked and turned toward her. “You should have a name.” She thought for a moment and smiled as the name bubbled up from her anxious memory. “Movenpick,” she said. She’d seen a commercial for the Accra hotel on the news feeds and she’d always liked the sound of the word. “Movenpick,” she said again. “That’s your name.” The fox licked its chops and looked around with its large gold-red eyes. “Do you want the box back, too? If I find it, will you then steal it from me?” she laughed, tired, a drop of sweat tumbling into her eye. “Will you eat it? Swallow it whole? I’ll get the box back, if you come with me.”

  The fox turned and trotted off and Sankofa’s smile dropped from her face. She crawled to her bedding, slathered fresh shea butter on her skin, and lay on it. It was another hour before she fell asleep and when she did, she dreamed about her mean old auntie Nana.

  Her mean old auntie Nana had been educated in the West, made lots of money there and rarely visited Sankofa’s father, her younger brother. However, when she did, she liked to sit in the main room with a steaming cup of coffee in the morning and talk at Sankofa and her brother about mean things in a mean way. In Sankofa’s dream, it was one of those times, except her brother was not there, nor were her parents, and the main room was empty. Her old mean auntie Nana sipped from her large cup of boiling coffee and glared at Sankofa. “What kind of human being lives in the bush like an animal?” she asked in her nasally American English. “Stinking of shea butter over dirty skin.”

  Sankofa’s voice was small. “Here I won’t hurt anyone like I hurt Mommy and Daddy and Fenuku,” she responded.

  Then her old mean auntie Nana said what she’d said to Sankofa’s father many times. “If I thought like that, I’d have never gone on to earn my PhD and become a physicist. I’d have been one of the sad bush women here, shackled to a husband and children.” She slurped her coffee loudly. “If you hide forever, you’ll never find anything. And there is one thing you know you want to find. Go and find it, stupid nonsense child.”

  When Sankofa awoke, her body was cool. And instead of fear of her mean old auntie Nana, she drew strength from the woman. She rubbed her eyes, got up and looked down at her dirty purple dress. Then she went to the stream and washed it as much as she could, laid it out to dry and then went back in to wash herself. She ran her hand over her bald head and told herself, I will steal a wig that fits. And some part of her was sure her old mean auntie Nana would approve and this made her feel stronger.

  And so, while rubbing her bald head with shea butter, she tried. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath and reached out. The seed in the box had been long gone for two years, sold and then stolen and then who knew what, but it knew her and she knew it. She was sure. She gasped. It was like a point of green light in a dark familiar space. She couldn’t see where it was, but she knew. She could find it. It’s far, but it’s not that far, she thought to herself. A few towns away. Somewhere cool, dry, dark. Inside something?

  Sankofa opened her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. Then she had another thought, though she wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it. I will stand up straight. And in that stream, all alone and naked, with no family or loved ones, Sankofa stood up straighter.

  * * *

  Over the weeks, Sankofa learned that she couldn’t drive in vehicles or touch digital windows or mobile phones, she couldn’t even touch jelli tellis because something about her killed technology. She was young and alone, yet she was dangerous. It was mere nights after leaving the forest that she had to kill another man who first tried to take her satchel of things and then tried to drag her into an alley. Some people may have seen it happen because the next day, strangers started giving her things. Some gave her money and asked her to pray for their loved ones. Some of the market women gave her food (boiled eggs, sacks of plantain chips, groundnuts) if she promised to “keep death away.” Most people simply avoided her. Word about Sankofa traveled fast, though it was never connected to Wulugu.

  And she also learned that the seed kept moving, always one or two steps ahead of her. She arrived in the market where it had been kept in a refrigerated truck full of vegetables and meat for days before the truck left. “How did you know they parked and did their business right in this spot?” the old man who brought her here had asked.

  “The seller’s auntie told me,” Sankofa lied, smiling to hold back her frustration. She’d have been here sooner if it weren’t for the torrential rains that had turned the roads into shallow rivers of mud. Then she’d been a day late finding whoever had it again two towns away. Then a week later, learning that whoever had it took it towns away. And so on. She tracked it and followed, tracked it and followed. It was almost as if the seed had a will of its own and was playing with her. But she refused to believe it could be so malicious. One day, she would catch it.

  In media outlets, word about the town of Wulugu did spread quickly, though. The government speculated that some sort of disease had wiped out the entire population. There was talk of a new virus and fear of this resulting in a pandemic faster and more lethal than the one in 2020. However, those news stories and their curious journalists were quickly silenced. There were stranger speculations, but those did not leave conference rooms. Wulugu was discreetly quarantined, and systematically forgotten. To make things more mysterious, Wulugu disappeared from GPS systems. This made things easier for the already perplexed Ghanaian government, and officials looked the other way. No investigations into what happened were ever done. That’s all the peoples of Ghana could do.

  Sankofa sometimes wished that people knew she was a Wulugu survivor, but she didn’t want the questions. Safer for people to focus their stories on just her. In this way, she was free to continue her search for the seed. And because people gave Sankofa power, she started to believe she was powerful. When she left home, she was seven years old. A baby. So this was even truer for her. She walked straight and made demands in the way she’d seen her mother do at the market. She raised her small voice, she flared her small nostrils, she scowled, she asked for the best of all things. And whenever people gave her trouble, she gave them her light. She couldn’t make it happen on purpose, not yet. But when she needed it, it was always there. And so she searched, following the seed as best she could. As the years passed, her feelings and suspicions about the seed darkened, too. If it was hers, why did it keep moving? Just far enough to be infuriating, never close enough to touch.

  Sankofa always smelled of shea butter, a smell that reminded her of home. It was easy to find in markets and the women selling it gave it to her for free. She carried a jar of it at all times and rubbed it into her skin whenever she felt the need, which was often. Her light dried out her skin when she flared and the shea butter kept her skin supple and smooth. However, her mind was often clouded and those parts that were clear were populated with dark corners.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RED COUCH AND EYE PATCH

  Sankofa lived this way for five years.

  She pursued the seed around Northern rural Ghana, never telling anyone why she went where she went, moving about with earned and justified entitlement, listening for word of the seed in a box and allowing others to wrap her in the mythology of a spirit. People whispered things like, “She’s the adopted child of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.” There was truth in every single one of the stories.

  Sankofa took shelter when she wanted shelter. She ate well because she demanded good food. And then, starting when she was about eleven years old, there were those who sought her out. There was the mother who came to Sankofa crying about her son who was in a vegetative state and had been on life support for eight years. There was the husband, daughter and mother of the woman suffering constant extreme pain from terminal stomach cancer. By this time, with effort, she could purposely call forth her light at very close proximity, enough to take a life. As long as everyone left the build
ing. And in this way, Sankofa was able to give people what they needed and then moved on while they wept and pretended she wasn’t there.

  Her story travelled like an ancestor, always ahead of, beside and behind her. She made no friends, except for Movenpick the fox who continued to follow her at a distance.… and Selah the white tailless fastidious stray cat who travelled with her for three of those five years.

  One terrible night, three men attacked Sankofa and Selah the cat as they slept in an empty market. They’d killed Selah, a man crushing the cat’s head beneath a boot, kicked Movenpick when the normally evasive fox tried to intervene, and then Sankofa had killed them all. Afterwards, Sankofa stared at the bones of the dead men left behind, three jawbones and two long bones that could have been from arms or legs. Then she looked at Movenpick, who stood feet away, bruised but alive, despite the fact that Sankofa’s light had washed over the creature like toxic water. She buried her beloved cat and continued on.

  Sankofa survived. A seven-year-old on the road alone, then an eight-year-old, then nine, ten, eleven. By the time she was twelve, most knew not to attack her and they gave her what she wanted and needed, instead. However, she spoke to no one about what drove her. What she was searching for. Who would understand? Who would care? She pursued the seed, which she eventually learned meant pursuing the man with the one eye across northwestern Ghana. The man who’d gone into her bedroom, taken the seed and then given it to the politician. The man who’d then stolen it from him, along with his money and golden shoes.

  She was always ten steps behind the one-eyed man, as a girl on foot could only be when chasing someone moving around in a car or truck. She followed what it was that she saw behind her eyes when she closed them. The tiny green oblong moon that she could almost touch, so sure she was of its whereabouts. The problem was that it kept moving. The one-eyed man didn’t rest anywhere long enough for her to catch up and so neither did the seed.

  Sankofa followed it this way and that. Arriving in the exact spot where the seed had been in a car, in a suitcase, in a pocket, in a backpack, days or even weeks prior. Then she would be off again. On foot. For five years, she persisted with this slow pursuit. Striking fear, awe and stories into hearts, getting those items she believed she was owed, and mercifully taking lives from those who requested it along the way. Until the day in Tepa.

  Malaria. Some part of Sankofa that she’d locked tightly away remembered it well. She knew it slowed a person down enough for anything one was running from to catch up. As she walked, she smacked her lips, but the dry taste still remained in her mouth. She frowned and flared her nostrils. For so many years.

  She held her light in as she walked through the town. Today she wore a blue and white wrapper and top, the colors of water. She wore the big gold hoop earrings that had been her mother’s and she now thought of as hers, despite the fact that she was still years too young to wear such earrings. She’d recently moisturized her skin with shea butter. Today would be a day of cleansing. She arrived at his home at sunset. It was a nice beige house with two Mercedes parked in front. Sankofa touched both of them as she made her way to the front door. She stepped up to the door and hadn’t stood there for even ten seconds before it opened.

  He had a red patch over his eye, he had a large gold watch weighing down his wrist, a thick gold chain around his neck, he wore a bloodred dress shirt and those stylish jeans that spoke more of wealth than actual fashion sense in Sankofa’s opinion. “You, again. Come in,” he said, stepping back and taking a sip of the brown liquid in the glass he carried. In his other hand he carried a burning cigarette.

  Sankofa stared at him for a moment. After all these years, finally. She’d caught him. But is he dying? she wondered. The armpits of his dress shirt were damp with sweat. His face was shiny with more sweat. He leaned on the door as if he would collapse if he let go. His teeth were yellow. She stepped inside. “What is wrong with you?” she asked, following him down the hallway.

  “As if you don’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “The Adopted Daughter of Death comes and asks what is trying to kill me. Oh the irony.”

  They entered a living room where there were a red couch and two red armchairs equally as red as the sweaty shirt he wore. He coughed and plopped onto the couch. The carpet probably used to be white, but it was now an uneven beige. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said. “One of my women lives here and takes care of it, but I come here when I am tired.” He shut his eyes and moaned. “I’m so tired.”

  Sankofa glanced around the place and then sat in one of the armchairs and looked hard at him.

  “No one is here,” he said, his eyes still closed, rubbing his hands down his face. “I sent my girl away two hours ago, told the houseboy not to come in today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew The Adopted Daughter of Death was coming to collect her debt. Why not just let me die of bad bad malaria, eh? Why come here with your nonsense trouble? Following and following slow slow, just leave a man to rest.”

  “You have something of mine,” she said.

  “So you make me sick to slow me down?”

  “I don’t make people sick.”

  “No, you just kill them.”

  “I only take life when people ask me to, when people are sick and in too much pain to live. The word is euthanasia … or when people threaten my life.”

  “Death’s daughter, so merciful. Is that normal to you, though? Were you always like this? Poisoning people with some sort of body radiation that comes from your ovaries or whatever … it has to be a female thing, this type of witchcraft thing. Nothing else is believable.” He seemed to be growing more and more delirious as he spoke. “It’s evil, satanic, rain fire upon you in Jesus’ name!”

  “Why did you have to steal it?!” she shouted.

  “Why not?” he said with a laugh. “Parliament Member Kusi was a fraud. He had me stealing it from you to give to LifeGen, that fucking big American corporation that’s probably going to eventually destroy the world. Who knows what this seed thing is or does … the world should thank me.”

  Sankofa had heard of LifeGen in passing. In some of the hospitals where she’d taken lives. In the cancer wards. LifeGen made a lot of the drugs patients took. The LifeGen symbol was a hand grasping lightning. But clearly, their drugs didn’t work very well. And clearly, pharmaceuticals weren’t their only focus. “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Not here!” he screamed. The action seemed to drain the rest of his energy. Sankofa groaned and let her head fall into her hands. She felt it now. She knew. Why hadn’t she known before? It wasn’t here. It was close but it wasn’t here. “I’ve wanted to get rid of it since the day I stole it. What did I need with some artifact when I had bank cards full of millions in stolen money? You know I got half of that money out of those accounts before he was able to shut down the account within the hour. That’s why I was on the run.” He cocked his head and twisted onto his back. “But that damn seed thing … it had a pull. Couldn’t sell it, throw it away, couldn’t even leave it behind. Damned thing.”

  “Then why’d you just get rid of it?”

  “I didn’t! I lost it after I got sick and came here. It’s been days.” He suddenly sat up and pointed at her. “Now you show up here, instead of leaving me alone and following it. Evil evil goddamn thing.”

  Sankofa stood up. He pointed a gun at her. It must have been in the couch. He’d truly been waiting for her. “I was just leaving,” she said.

  “No. I’ll never rest until I know you are dead,” he said. “Five years of looking over my shoulder for a devil child. No more. I will get over this damn malaria, but I’m not going to go back to fearing you.” He blinked, his hand shaking.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. But the man with one eye was stupid. Tired, sick and stupid. He stood up, still pointing the gun at her as he swayed.

  “FIVE YEARS!” he screamed. “Fear, nightmares, anxiety! My woman left me, I have no friends, I couldn�
��t come home! I wish I’d never set foot in your dirt patch of a village, never laid eyes on you and your family! Why couldn’t you just die, too!?”

  Sankofa could have talked him into putting the gun down. He was practically delirious with malaria fever and she certainly knew how that was. Nevertheless, she was glowing and he was falling before he even pulled the trigger. She let the full range of her light fill the room. Anything that was alive would be dead, except Movenpick who stood outside, waiting.

  She hadn’t realized the depth of her fury until he had answered the door. Her heartrate had not increased, she had not begun to sweat or even think violent thoughts. But the moment she stepped into the house, she knew one thing for sure: She was going to take this man’s life. This man had looked up at her in that tree, scoffed at her and gone inside and taken what was hers, leading to the death of everything for her and this life of wandering and wandering, her parents dead. Her brother dead. Her entire town dead. She unleashed it and he burned. Skin, fat, muscle, blood, bile, lymph, finally bone. Nothing but a rib was left when she pulled her light back in.

  As the mysterious wind blew his ashes around the living room, the rib tumbled to her feet like an offering. She stared at it. Then she sat on his couch. The rib was clean of meat, a dull yellow, old already. Never had she killed a man out of rage. She got up. She sat down. She stared at the rib. She got up. She left.

  Sankofa sniveled, walking past the man’s two dead vehicles, her chin pressed to her chest. Movenpick joined her, trotting at her heels, knowing to stay out of her line of vision but in her line of thought. An invisible comfort as always. She was glad. As she walked up the paved road, she shut her eyes and searched, feeling and seeing the green light beneath her eyelids. There. Her seed in the box wasn’t far. It was so close that it seemed to toy with her to come, come, COME. It might have been in one of this town’s local markets. Maybe being sold as some juju object or piece of junk. With the one-eyed man who’d kept it for years dead, who would know or care what it was but her?