Woman who is standing over boy who is sleeping-not-sleeping is seeing me and staring at me and not moving. Then she is moving away from boy and walking to me.
Even though I am feeling like I am being back inside my own body, I am wanting to smash the glass and I am wanting to tear through the floor and I am wanting to knock over every bed between me and that boy that she is standing over before she is walking to me and I am wanting to take that boy and raise him in the air and smash him into the ground until his head is breaking like coconut. And then I am wanting to be taking machete to every part of his body and making him to be screaming and shouting and crying, because even though I am knowing that I am in this hospital room, my body is still feeling all of the thing he is doing to it.
But woman is walking to me and tears still build like wall in her eyes and then, when she is coming to window, she is holding her hand together in front of her and her bottom lip is trembling and she is saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” in soft soft voice.
She is not moving her mouth and that is when I am realizing that she is speaking to me in my brain. She is having braincase too.
Why are you thanking me?
Then she is sending me image and recording of the boy and he is being called Peter and he is sometime smiling and twirling spaghetti around his fork and sometime he is angry and shouting at woman who is being called Amy and sometime he is in hoverchair watching other children play on top of water pond. Then she is sending me feeling of love for him and how she is taking him in and accepting him and teaching him how to live and what is being peace, and then I am stopping her.
Do not be sending me these things.
Why not?
I don’t care about him. You are telling me he is being good person and so he is deserving good thing to be happening to him.
She is pausing because of shock. What is wrong with that?
Peter is not good person. I am taking several moments to calm myself. He is fighter during the war and he is finding me one day and he is putting me in room and he is hurting me very badly. He is hurting me all over, even when he is not having to be hurting me. He is hurting me and enjoying it. I am not letting her see or feel the rememberings because I am not wanting to be giving her that access to me. I am not wanting her to be knowing me in this way, but I am telling her so that she is knowing that the boy she is loving is bad person and he is deserving to die.
When I am finished giving life back to the children I am finding Peter and I am killing him for what he is doing to me.
For a long time, she is not saying anything, then she is blinking at me like she is not understanding what I am saying. I am thinking I should be repeating it again, but then she is getting look in her eyes like she is asking me, Please don’t, but without saying the words. But the look in her face is also saying other thing at the same time. It is saying, No, you are lying, and it is saying, No, it cannot be like this, and it is saying, My son deserves to live, but it is also saying, Is he my son? and all of this is happening in Amy’s face at the same time.
I know her heart is paining her but I am not caring.
He is my son, she is saying to me with tears falling from her eye.
That is not changing what he is doing to me.
She is looking at me for long time, and I am thinking she is looking for something from me. Maybe she is looking for me to be changing my voice or how I am standing, for my body to not be tensing like this. Maybe she is looking for me to be saying, I forgive him, and also be saying, I forgive you for loving him.
But I am not saying any of these thing. I am never saying any of these thing.
And she is seeing this and she is turning and she is walking away.
CHAPTER
53
Grace is at Ify’s side as nurse’s assistants transport the first child into a separate operating room. She has all her note-taking materials out in front of her, stylus forever poised over her tablet screen, but Ify can see that the girl is too riveted by what she’s witnessing to document it.
It had come to Ify in a dream. Céline used to joke, while they were in school, that this was Ify’s superpower. She could conjure the right answer out of thin air, and all she needed was enough sleep.
The epiphany: words whispering a melody, indistinct and blurring together, while a circle formed out of thin air, inky and writhing. Ify remembers the circle, then another. All the while, words surround her and come together to make images of people and places and reveal snapshots of human beings caught in the throes of their living. And the circle means something, but in the dream, Ify couldn’t tell what. She remembers she had been leaning forward when caught up in the vision, but in the dream, she begins to lean back and passively accept the circle and the images and words swimming around her, then another circle appears on top of it, so that their edges are just barely touching, then another and another until six circles sit in formation before her, and they remain like this, like rings of black fire, until more circles join them, forming a honeycomb pattern. It was as she was leaning back, letting the sight fill her vision, that she saw the greater image. More and more rings of black fire joined the assemblage, and when it looked like they were going to turn into an entire wall of black, Ify saw it. Or, rather, felt it.
It was a series of moments, a cascade. Someone taking her face in their hands and lowering it and blowing softly on her forehead, and Ify realizes that she is hearing words or more than words. She is experiencing synth speech. Because she feels hands gripping her face, but they are not just Uzo’s hands, bringing to life that moment on top of the site of that abandoned detention center in Kaduna State, and not Onyii’s either, during a moment when Ify felt the humid air of their camp was suffocating her. It is both pairs of hands and neither. It is past and deeper past, reaching into her present.
Ify feels the warmth of a fire on her arm, and when she looks at it, she sees her arm turn to Onyii’s metal one absorbing the blow from a shockstick, and at the same time, she’s seeing her own arm as a child as a mutated mosquito drifts off with too much of her blood. So many moments, braided together so that it feels as though she’s experiencing everything for the first time but always has, in the back of her mind, a memory of the same.
Then she looks back up at the multiplying rings of fire, and that’s when she realizes she’s not looking at a wall. She’s looking at a floor. Floor tiles.
DNA tiles. The sentences are units of DNA. The building blocks of being. Uzo’s words-thoughts-feelings are what made her. Ify’s words-thoughts-feelings make her. Onyii’s made her. This is why Uzo always speaks in the present tense. Everything she experienced is still happening to her, ossified into the present tense in her memories. Happened becomes happens and remains is happening.
In the dream, Ify grows suddenly like a giant, and the three-dimensional column of memory-units, interlocking rings of black fire, sits in the cup of her two hands, and for some reason, Ify thinks of a gosling, small and furry and poking its head out from the fold of skin by her thumb to gaze into her face, the very first thing it sees after being born. A feeling of wonder and love and gratitude thrills through her as she looks at this structure growing in her hands. This is Uzo’s memory of the gosling. The gosling was a thing that happened to her, Ify realizes, a burst of understanding twinned with an explosion of love in her heart.