“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she manages through the beginning of sobs.
Then Ify sees it. The terror shaking Grace’s bones against each other. The resolve and clinical discipline washed away by fear. And she brings Grace into her arms. “It’s okay.”
Grace cries into Ify’s shoulder, and they stand there for several minutes, Ify smoothing Grace’s hair, an island of quiet in the sea of people rushing around them. “I thought I could conduct some research.”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
Grace looks up at Ify. “I didn’t do anything, Doctor. I swear.”
“It’s okay. I’m . . . I’m sorry for losing it. I just . . . it’s been a long time since . . . well, I’m not used to being back is all.”
“But, Doctor, all I was doing was collecting stories of the war.”
“We don’t have to do any more work tonight. Let’s just go home and rest.”
“But wait!” She breaks away from Ify, and that resolve is back.
Ify moves closer so that they can speak in whispers. “It’s normal for people not to want to talk about their trauma.”
“That’s the thing. I’d done all my research previously. When I asked them about the war, they had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Maybe some of them were far from the worst of it. There’s an explanation, Grace. Let’s go.”
“But, Doctor, no one knew about the war. I spoke with over a dozen people before the police came.”
Ify frowns. “Where were these people?”
Grace steps out of the mouth of the alley where they’ve stood and points up and down the street. Ify looks up into the sky, and as the maglev cars pass by, ambling up and down their flightlines, she sees them. The orbital surveillance drones. There are surely more embedded in the buildings and perhaps more strung throughout the air, too small to see with the naked eye. And they all would have seen Grace.
They all might have heard her too.
“Come on,” Ify says, grabbing Grace’s arm and pulling them back into the rush of crowds, zigzagging a path the long way back to the apartment. Ify knows it’s foolish to hope, but maybe they will have spent at least a moment or two outside the sightlines of the surveillance drones thickening the air above Abuja.
CHAPTER
22
Sometime when we are walking, I am seeing what is in front of me and sometime I am not.
Sometime, there is being forest with heavy leaf that is blocking us from the sun and there is being chirping and growling and rumbling of bird and animal and even there is being slow stomping of shorthorn, and baby wulfu is playing and we are climbing over root that is sticking up from ground or we are crawling under low branches or tree trunk that has fallen. And sometime, I am seeing boy and girl in front of me with dirty shirt that is being inside out and there is being gun over their shoulder. And I am seeing big man we are calling Commandant at front of the line and we are stopping in some place and creating hologram to trick people who are coming so that we are later killing them and stealing from them. Then I am seeing forest again with Oluwale and Uzodinma and the others who are walking with us.
In the beginning, there is no pattern to when we are stopping and sitting down and finding our peace.
But when we are sitting down, I am practicing looking for rememberings and sorting them. I am practicing organizing them, and it is becoming easier for me to be finding which I am having after Enyemaka are rescuing me from pile of corpses and which are coming from before then. I am knowing now that some of these rememberings are not mine. They are belonging to other people and being given to me. Some of these remembering is colored with red and others with yellow. But the ones with the girl I am calling Ify are blue-green. There is sometime being full color to them, but always there is blue-green at the edge. Like hologram but fuller. Maybe realer.
Sometime, it is early in the morning while grass is still wet with dew and insect buzzing is not yet as loud as it is going to be, and this is when we are sitting and finding peace. Sometime, the sun is already shot up into the sky fast fast before we are stopping to sit and look at our rememberings to find our peace. And sometime, it is when the sky is dark and the stars have come and maybe there is moon and maybe there is not that we are sitting down and looking through our memories and learning and finding our peace. Even when I am finding thing that is paining me or making me to be sadding, I am feeling like I am finding my peace. I am thinking this is what Xifeng is wanting. I am also knowing that I am having remembering I am downloading from her trailer inside my braincase, and I am knowing that it is living in me. If they are destroying trailer and burning everything inside, then I am only evidence that the people we are burying ever died. I am only evidence that people we are burying ever lived. We are observer or history writer. This is being data. These are being people, but this is being data.
Because of what Oluwale is teaching me about finding specific rememberings, I am learning how to be separating and organizing them in my brain. It is like making rows of graves and putting data into each and marking each grave to tell me what is inside it. And I am organizing by person, so this person is getting this row, and this person is getting the next row, and I am learning that I am even having inside me rememberings from people in same family, brother and sister, mother and son, father and father’s sister, so I am grouping them together as well.
“Like this,” Oluwale is telling me one day, and he is drawing spiral in the mud with his finger. It is spiraling outward and outward and outward, and he is then pressing his finger into points in the lines. “This is how people know each other in my memories. They are connected. Everyone is connected to each other. Sometime, it is not being evident how they are connected, so I put them over here.” He digs his finger into spot in the mud far from spiral. “But it is my project, seeing how everyone in my rememberings is connected. Sometime, it is because they are family. Sometime, it is because they are warring with each other. Sometime, it is because they are walking by in the street, and they see each other, and they are falling in love, but they are never seeing each other again. It is small small connection, but it is still connection, so they are going here.” And he draws a line from the faraway point to the spiral, then continues making the spiral until it touches the faraway point.
I am crouching and wrapping my arms around my knees when I am watching him do this.
“Uzodinma does it differently,” he is telling me.
“How?”
“He has made a spiderweb.” Oluwale takes his hand out of the mud and his fingers break apart at the joints into tinier connected pieces. These are scrambling fast fast in the mud so that where there was being spiral there is now complicated spiderweb. Pattern. “Each person is connected to a number of people. And each moment in that person’s life is connected to all these other moments.”