I am closing my eyes when I am suddenly smelling sulfur like rotten egg, and then my head is paining me and I am falling to the ground like the woman I am giving dead body to and I am seeing nothing, then all I am seeing is white, then I am seeing little girl with pigtail on both side of her head and barrettes in pigtails and I am crouched over girl, then I am seeing girl covered in blood but still alive and looking at me with blank face like face carved from stone, then I am back in trailer and I am shivering but not from cool air.
When this is happening before, Enyemaka are telling me that I am having what is called temporal lobe epilepsy and that it is wounding in my brain from when I was child of war. Most times but not always, I am waking in trailer and I am receiving medicine in my arm, then I am better. But they still come and my body is shaking shaking.
And I am trying to remember the mission. I am trying to be remembering why we are downloading all these rememberings, and I am seeing the hard drives that the Enyemakas are transferring the information to, and it is these hard drives that we will give to people when we return to the city, and I am trying to think of my duty, but then Xifeng is holding me and not letting me move.
I am wanting to tell Xifeng thank you, but my tongue is not moving in my mouth, so I am just letting her hold me until my head is no longer paining me.
CHAPTER
7
“In the beginning,” Peter says around a mouthful of spaghetti, slurping a noodle so that it smacks his nose with sauce, “we were on the side of the government, and we were against the rebels. I was a child, so I didn’t know sides, but we had government stations broadcast on our BoTas and iFlexes.”
Amy sits to Ify’s left and twirls pasta around her fork. She leans toward Ify as though to whisper some conspiracy and says, quite loudly, “Peter’s father worked in the mining industry and was apparently very high up in the food chain.” She looks at Peter, and Ify worries she will wink at the poor boy. “On a first-name basis with the president, right?” When Peter nods, Amy nods too, satisfied with herself. “Tell Ify about the bakery.”
Peter turns his eyes to Ify. “When you’re a child, you don’t know what revolution is or what a regime is. You only know who puts suya in your wrapper on the street or who turns off the light to your room when you go to sleep.” He talks of these things to Ify as though she were oyinbo just like Amy and Paige. Like she hadn’t spent so much of her life in exactly the same place he is describing. But she grits her teeth because something is strange about this boy. “I had everything I could ask for. I wanted for nothing.” Where did this boy learn his English? His accent is gone. “Electronics, trips into town by rail or bus. We were wealthy. So wealthy that I would be brought to the front of the line when I went to the bakery to collect bread for my family. But then fighting came closer and closer to our village and we couldn’t go out and play as far as we would before.”
Both Paige and Amy have furrowed brows focused on Peter, like he is both an equation to solve and a fascination, some strange and exotic animal from another planet that they’ve come across. Ify has seen that look before, and every time, she’s struggled to find the words for what boils in her chest, what she wants to say to get them to stop. He is not a shiny foreign object. He is a boy and quite possibly a liar. But she just remains silent, twirling sauce-drenched spaghetti around her fork and trying to look as though she’s enjoying the meal while listening to Peter’s story.
“There was one rebel group, they were called Angels of Heaven, and they were inching closer into the countryside. And getting closer and closer to where we lived. The morning they came, I was asleep in the guest room at a cousin’s house. It is tradition for us to—how do I put it—swap relatives from time to time. Our houses have many stories, and cousins come to live with you or you go to live with them. For a while, my grandmother stayed with us, and I had to give her English lessons because she was too old to be cyberized, and she only spoke the kind of Igbo that I couldn’t use my software to translate. But the heart knows.” He smiles, and charm sparkles in his eyes. It repulses Ify. The manipulation is so blatant. She can tell immediately that he is doing everything he can to take advantage of them. But why? What is his agenda? “Anyway, I was in my cousin’s house’s guest room when we hear this huge BOOM!” He leaps from his chair and Amy and Paige shriek in unison, so that when he sits down again, he’s fighting back a grin. “Glass everywhere. Pshhhhhhh! Imagine how the ground would be shaking beneath you. It would be terrifying, right? I wasn’t terrified. Maybe I was numb. Maybe I knew I was protected. The sound of the explosion told me that it had been a vehicle bomb. Maybe a car. More likely a truck. There’s a very particular sound to a truck bomb. Once you hear it, you never forget.”
Ify’s frown deepens.
“So, I went outside. And everywhere, pieces of building were falling down. It was like weather, the way stones and shrapnel and pieces of metal fell from the sky. That is what the violence became in my country during the war. It was like the weather.” He doesn’t look to Ify for confirmation. Indeed, this whole time, it seems as though he’s been making a conscious effort to ignore her, to pretend she doesn’t even exist at this table. “I walked past a building that had been cut in half by the bomb. There was shooting. Katakata. Katakata. Everywhere, bullets flying. Even pinging the walls around me.
“Then I hear this poor man moaning. I look around, and that’s when I see him. Lying on the ground in a government uniform. He’d been shot in the stomach. Soft moans. That’s what he’s letting out. Very soft moans, but I can hear very well, and I hear him. As soon as he sees that I am not the enemy, he begs for my help. Not in sewing up his wound, but in escaping. And I tell him it is absolute foolishness to try crossing this main street wearing a government uniform when there are rebels shooting katakata everywhere.” Peter leans in toward Paige and Amy and lowers his voice. “So I tell him I have an idea. And I go back into what’s left of my cousin’s home, and I open the dresser in my aam and aamee’s room, and it is just as I have hoped. The clothes are untouched. Not even a speck of dust on them. So I take one of her dresses and return to the soldier, and I say, ‘Hey, put this on, it will be very helpful.’” He bursts into laughter.
After a nervous beat, Paige and Amy join in. Ify can’t even bring herself to pretend. But when the table calms down, Paige asks, “Well, did he?”
“He refused at first, but eventually, he realized he wanted to live, so he wore the dress.” Peter takes generous sips of his water, then loudly smacks his lips.
“Where was your village again?” Ify asks.
All heads turn to her.
After a moment’s pause, Peter’s expression changes from one of surprise to one of smirking understanding. “Kaduna State.”
“An Igbo-speaking family that far north? Among the Muslims?”