I am staring at the drawing Oluwale is making, and I am feeling wonder blow up like balloon in my chest. I am having picture of spiderweb in my head and thinking of point and how point is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more specific, so that when you are seeing it from far away it is like a star in the sky and every point where spiderweb is connected is like star in the sky. This is what I am thinking when it is nighting in the forest and I am looking at the sky. I am thinking I am looking at data. At rememberings.
It is being night and I am sitting next to Uzodinma and he is just finishing finding his peace and I am looking at his eyes change as he returns here from wherever he was being before. I am wanting to ask Where are you coming from? but I am knowing that we are the same in a very important way so I am asking Where are we coming from?
He knows that I am not using my voice, so he is knowing everything that I am meaning when I am asking this. There is being no expression on his face when he is saying, “I do not know.”
And then he is showing me holographic video of him being child of war and shooting and killing and being small small but pointing gun and killing, then there is explosion, and then he is showing me other holographic video of him being in what is looking like hospital. And I am knowing it is hospital because I am seeing place like it in other rememberings, and there is no blood but there is being nothing but air where his legs are being. And we are turning in the remembering to see the doctor’s face and the doctor is saying things, but I am thinking that there is so much pain in the remembering that the person is not being able to hear the doctor’s words. Then I am seeing other holographic video where Uzodinma is holding himself up on two metal bars and he is looking down and his legs are metal and there is no skin on them, they are just gears and pistons and rods, and they are moving slow slow and Uzo is gritting his teeth and moaning and sweating much, then nurse is coming to hold him up before he falls to floor. Uzodinma is fast-forwarding through other memories. He is receiving new arm and he is returning to one room over and over again and he is being put into chair, and we are both feeling cord plugging into outlet at the base of our neck and then there is darkness until he is waking up.
“I don’t know what happens to me when they put me in that chair,” Uzodinma is telling me. “There is only darkness. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if I am dying and coming back to life. But I am needing to know what is happening in that time, because that’s the secret to who I am.” He is looking at his hands and the different color skin all over them. “What I am.”
“Is that where we’re walking to?”
Uzodinma nods.
“What about the others? Do they want to go to different places?”
Uzo is looking up at the sky where it is showing between the tree leaves, and I am looking up with him and thinking that maybe he is seeing in the sky the same thing that is being inside his head. “Some of them might. But some of them want to know what they are, just like me. If I can find an answer, maybe they can as well.” Then he is looking at me. “We are the same,” he is telling me. “We are sharing mystery.”
It is taking me a long time to speak because I am feeling like he is seeing me. Not how Xifeng or Enyemaka are seeing me and not how drone is seeing me and not how people under Falomo Bridge are seeing me, even though I am calling all of these people friend. He is seeing inside me and outside me at the same time. He is seeing all of me. He is seeing the question I am asking and he is seeing the question underneath that and the question underneath that. He is seeing that I am worried and scared and that I am sadding and that I am learning new thing every day and it is filling me with fear, and I am thinking he is seeing all of these thing because he is once feeling them too. I am feeling like he is seeing me, and it is making me to want to be thanking him. “How are you knowing where to go to find this place or this person you are looking for?”
“I am retracing my steps,” he is telling me. “I am remembering that one time when I am being child of war I am walking this path, but I am going in other direction and I am leaving many dead body. So I am walking this path again and I am seeing what I am doing in my head when I am being younger and more foolish. And this is how I am knowing where to go. When the killing and the bleeding in my head is stopping, I will know that I have arrived. I will know that I’ve found what I am looking for.”
And I am thinking that maybe when he is finding what he is looking for, I will be finding it too.
When he is first saying we are sharing mystery, I am thinking he means we are both having something wrong with us or we are both having disease inside our body or our leg or arm is broken the same way, but now I am thinking that he is saying it more like we are sibling. We are brother and sister.
We share mystery. We are being family.
CHAPTER
23
The head of radiology at Nizamiye Hospital wears a shimmering white changshan with mauve magua jacket and traditional chieftain’s kufi. His pant legs whisper against each other as he leads Ify and Grace through the open ward where patients, who look the absolute picture of health, are being attended to by hovering drones and the occasional nurse. Small conversations and occasional laughter fill the room. Ify notices that every patient has bandages wrapped around their head and neck. A few have bandages swathing their arms, and through the gauze, the copper-red markings indicating a healing circular incision. An outlet.
“Many of our patients,” Dr. Ezirike says, “are farmers from the borderlands just outside the Redlands.” With a wave of his hand, he indicates the patients lining both walls. They don’t look like farmers, but then Ify wonders what she expected farmers to look like. “Proximity to radiation has adversely affected their internal organs, so they are prime candidates for the government’s mass cyberization initiative. Our target is to achieve full cyberization within the year.”
“There were quite a few empty beds in the room before this one,” Grace remarks.
Without looking back, Dr. Ezirike tells her, “A year or two ago, we were at full capacity. And before that, every hospital was strained almost to breaking. But the establishment of regional clinics throughout every state, as well as an extensive training program—thanks to the Chinese—has helped stem the flow quite a bit. Only those in most dire need of care are sent here. As you can see, our facility is more than equipped to meet their needs.”
They double back and reenter the hallway they had walked down earlier. Internists and doctors and nurse attendants hurry past, some of them making idle conversation, others with their eyes filmed over, no doubt reading reports or preparing to meet patients. A woman pushes a patient forward in a hoverchair that covers her legs, occasionally bending down to whisper something in the patient’s ear. Though the patient’s catatonic expression never changes, the woman smiles as though the patient were smiling too. As though the patient were laughing at a joke she’d just heard. There’s a levity here that Ify never noticed in Alabast. Everyone is about their work, and it is difficult work, but they don’t seem burdened by the seriousness of their tasks. There is joy in caring for the sick. Ify wonders if Grace sees the same thing, if she would see herself at home in a place like this, where it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to speak with a patient about food and family and where to find the good markets.