The Book of Phoenix (3 page)

Saeed was from Cairo, Egypt, where he had been an orphan who never went hungry because he could always find something to eat. He ate rotten rice, date pits, even the wooden skewer sticks of
kebabs
; he had a stomach like a goat. They brought him to the tower when he was thirteen, six years ago. He never told me exactly how or why they made him the way he was. It didn't matter. What mattered was that we were who we were, and we were there.

Saeed told me of places I had never seen with my own eyes. He used the words of a poet who used his tongue to see. Saeed was an artist with his hands, too. He had the skill of the great painters I read about in my books. He most loved to draw those foods he could no longer eat. Human food. Portraits of loaves of bread. Bowls of thick egusi soup and balls of fufu. Bouquets of smoked lamb and beef kebabs. Oniony fried eggs with white cheese. Plates of chickpeas. Pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Piles of roasted yellow corn. They allowed him to bring the paintings to mealtime for everyone to view. I guess even we deserved the pleasures of art.

Saeed could survive on glass, metal shavings, crumbles of rust, sand, dirt, those things that would be left behind if human beings finally blew themselves up. They tasted delicious to him. Nevertheless, eating a piece of bread would kill him as eating a giant bowl filled with sharp pieces of glass would kill the average human being.

The first time he kissed me, we were sitting together at dinnertime. I'd just finished my own meal of fried chicken curried rice. I was telling him the chemical makeup of the flakes of rust he was eating and speculating on how green rust would probably taste different to him. “I think you will find green rust tastier because it's more variable and complex.” We were sitting close, a habit we'd gotten into when we'd realized that my natural body temperature was usually warm and his was cool.

He took a deep gulp of water from his full glass, turned to me, cupped my chin and kissed me. All thought of iron oxide and corrosion fled my mind, replacing it with nothing but amazed shock and the soft coolness of his lips.

“No affected behavior,” we heard one of the nearby Big Eye bark and immediately we pulled away from each other. I couldn't help the smile on my face. I had read and watched many stories where people kissed, this was nothing like what I imagined. And I'd never thought it would happen to me. Saeed took my hand under the table and my smile grew bigger. I heard him snicker beside me. And I snickered, too.

Everyone in the dining hall stared at us. I remember specially the idiok baboons pointing at Saeed and me, and then signing energetically to each other. “They're just jealous,” Saeed whispered, squeezing my hand. I grinned, my stomach full of unusual flutters, and my lips felt hot. Even if it were from within, it was the first time that I had ever laughed at the Big Eye.

Now, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened.
He took my apple and he ate it
.
He took my apple and he ate it
.
He took my apple and he ate it
. The Big Eye explained that then his stomach and intestines hemorrhaged and Saeed was dead before morning. I couldn't stop stressing about the fact that I never got to tell him what was happening to me. I was sure that it would have given him hope; it would have reminded him that things would change. I wiped a tear. I loved Saeed.

 • • • 

As grief overwhelmed me for the first time in my life, I pressed a hand against the thick glass of my window and longingly looked down at the green roof of the much shorter building right beside Tower 7; one of the trees growing there was in full bloom with red flowers. I'd never been outside. I wanted to go outside. Saeed had escaped by dying. I wanted to escape, too. If he wasn't happy here, then neither was I.

I wiped hot sweat from my brow. My room's scanner began to beep as my body's temperature soared. The doctors would be here soon.

 • • • 

When it first started to happen two weeks ago, only I noticed it. My hair started to fall out. I am an African by genetics, I had the facial features, my skin was very dark and my hair was very coily. They kept my hair shaved low because neither they nor I knew what to do with it when it grew out. I could never find anything in my books to help. They didn't care for style in Tower 7, anyway, although the lion lady down the hall had very long, silky, white hair and Big Eye lab assistants came by every two days to help her brush and braid it. And they did this despite the fact that the woman had the teeth and claws of a lion.

I was sitting on my bed, looking out the window, when I suddenly grew very hot. For the last few days, my skin had been dry and chapped no matter how much super-hydrated water they gave me to drink. Doctor Bumi brought me a large jar of shea butter, and applying it soothed my skin to no end. However, this day, hot and feverish, my skin seemed to dry as if I were in a desert.

I felt beads of sweat on my head and when I rubbed my short short hair, it wiped right off, hair and sweat alike. I ran to my bathroom, quickly showered, washing my head thoroughly, toweled off and stood before the large mirror. I'd lost my eyebrows, too. But this wasn't the worst of it. I rubbed the shea butter into my skin to give myself something to do. If I stopped moving, I'd start crying with panic.

I don't know why they gave me such a large mirror in my bathroom. High and round, it stretched from wall to wall. Therefore, I saw myself in full glory. As I slathered the thick, yellow, nutty smelling cream onto my drying skin, it was as if I was harboring a sun deep within my body and that sun wanted to come out. Under the dark brown of my flesh, I was glowing. I was light.

I pulsed, feeling a wave of heat and slight vibration within me. “What is this?” I whispered, scurrying back to my bed where my e-reader lay. I wanted to look up the phenomena. In all my reading, I had never read a thing about a human being, accelerated or normal, heating up and glowing like a firefly's behind. The moment I picked up the e-reader, it made a soft pinging sound. Then the screen went black and began to smoke. I threw it on the floor and the screen cracked, as it gently burned. My room's smoke alarm went off.

Psss!
The hissing sound was soft and accompanied by a pain in my left thumbnail. It felt as if someone had just stuck a pin into it. “Ah!” I cried, instinctively pressing on my thumb. As I held my hand up to my eyes, I felt myself pulse again.

There was a splotch of black in the center of my thumbnail like old blood, but blacker. Burned flesh. Every speciMen, creature, creation in the building had a diagnostics chip implanted beneath his, her, or its fingernail, claw, talon, or horn. I'd just gone off the grid. I gasped.

Not twenty seconds passed before they came bursting into my room with guns and syringes, all aimed at me as if I were a rabid beast destroying all that they had built. Bumi looked insane with stress, but only she knew to not get too close.

“Get down! DOWN!” she shouted, her voice quivering. She held a portable in her hand and her other hand was in the pocket of her lab coat.

When I just stood there confused, one of the male Big Eye guards grabbed my arm, probably with the intent of throwing me on the bed so he could cuff me. He screamed, staring at his burned, still-smoking hand. The room suddenly smelled like cooked meat. “You're not going anywhere,” Bumi muttered, pulling a gun from her pocket. Without hesitation, she shot me right in the leg. It felt as if someone kicked me with a metal foot and I grunted. I sunk to the floor, pain washing over me like a second layer of more intense heat. I would have been done for if someone else had not shouted for the others to hold their fire.

Thankfully, I healed fast and the bullet had gone straight through my leg. Bumi said she'd shot me there knowing the bullet would do that; I believed her. If the bullet hadn't gone straight through and remained in my flesh, I don't know what would have happened with my extreme body temperature. Bumi knew this more than anyone.

One minute I was staring with shock at the blood oozing from my leg. Then the next, I blacked out. I woke in a bed, my body cool, my leg bandaged. When they returned me to my room, the scanner was in place to monitor me, since I could not hold an implant. They replaced my bed sheets with heavy heat-resistant ones similar in material to my new clothes. The carpet was gone, too. For the first time, I saw that the floor beneath the carpet was solid whitish marble.

Bumi took me to one of the labs soon after that. This would be my first but not last encounter with the cubed room with walls that looked like glass. Maybe they were thick clear plastic. Maybe they were made of crystal. Or maybe they were made of some alien substance that they were keeping top secret. I knew nothing. I didn't even know what the machine was called. They simply put me in it, and it heated up like a furnace. I felt as if I were on fire and when I started screaming, Bumi's voice filtered in, smooth like okra soup, sweet like mango juice, but distant like the outside world.

“Phoenix, hold still,” she said. “We are just getting information about you.”

I believed her. Even through the pain. I always believed everything they told me. The space was just large enough for me to sit with my long legs stretched before me, my back straight, my palms flat to the surface. The smooth transparent walls warmed to red and orange and yellow, so it was like being inside the evening sun I watched set every day.

“Does it have to hurt?” I cried. “I'm burning! My skin is burning!” It did not get so hot that my flesh caught fire, but the parts of me that touched the walls—especially my legs—received first-degree burns.

“Nothing great comes without pain,” she said. “Just relax.”

I closed my eyes and tried to retreat into myself. But the memory of the sound of Bumi's gun firing was still ricocheting in my head. I hadn't been fighting. I wasn't as dangerous as some of the other speciMen became when in some kind of distress. I wasn't doing anything but standing there in confusion thinking about the fact that I was off the grid. Yet, she'd shot me.

I couldn't help my legs flexing and twitching whenever the pain hit. My legs ran, like a separate part of my body.

“Relax,” Bumi said.

Relax. How could I relax? I frowned. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was as if my thoughts had become tangible and were bouncing off the walls, getting faster and faster, like a heated atom. Maybe thoughts were just atoms made of a different type of material for which even the Big Eye lacked tools to study.

“I am trying,” I said.

“Do you want to hear a story?”

For the first time, I was able to pull back from the sound of the gun firing and the kernel of whatever I was feeling deep in my chest. “Yes,” I said, looking up. All I saw was the machine's artificial burning sun.

“Ok,” Bumi said. She paused. I listened. “You read so much, so I know that you know my country, Nigeria.”

“Official name is the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Capital is Abuja. Most known city is Lagos, the second largest city in the world. West Africa. One of the world's top producers of streaming films, crude oil, and fine literature,” I whispered.

I heard her chuckle. “You know my country better than I do.” She paused. “But to really know it, you must go there. I was born and raised in the metropolis of Lagos. My parents lived on Victoria Island in one of the high-security gated communities. Big big houses with columns, porches, marble and huge winding staircases. Manicured palm trees and colorful sweet smelling flowers. Even the houseboys and house girls dressed like movie stars. Paved roads. Security cameras. Well-dressed Africans with perfect wigs, suits, jewelry and flashy cars. Can you see it?”

I nodded.

“Good. So, I was born in that house. I was the first of five children. My mother was alone when she went into labor. My father was on a brief business trip in Ghana. The two house girls had gone to the village to visit their families before coming to stay in the house until I was born. She only had a virtual doctor to guide her through it all. She'd never had to use one before then. They could afford to have an actual doctor come to check on her and they'd hired a midwife. But she went into labor with me ten days early and the midwife got stuck in go-slow, Lagos traffic. My mother said it was like being instructed by a ghost.”

“I was born healthy and plump in my mother's bedroom. She'd shut the windows and turned on the air purifier, so my first breath was not Lagos air. It was air delivered from the Himalayas.” She laughed. “My mother took me outside for the first time three weeks later. I took one breath of the Lagos air and vomited from coughing so hard. Then I was ok.”

I had my eyes closed. Though I could smell my skin slowly baking as the heat increased in the tiny room, I was strolling down the black paved road of Lagos beside Bumi's mother who was dark-skinned, pretty and short, like Bumi. She was pushing a light-weight stroller with baby Bumi in it, coughing and cooing.

“When I think of my youth in Nigeria, I know that I can never be fully American, even when I am a citizen.”

“So you are not American?” I asked. “But you live here. You work here. You—”

“I'm legal, but not a citizen. Not yet. I will be. My work with you will earn me the pull I need.” She paused. “Do you want to know about how you were when you were a baby?”

I frowned. I remembered life from when I was about a month old; I was like a three year old.

“Do you know when I was a baby?” I asked.

“I was there when they brought you,” she said. “You were so small. Like a preemie. But strong, very very strong. You never needed an incubator or antibiotics or special formula. You took easily to life.”

The lights in the machine went off and something beeped. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Time's up. Let's get you to your room,” Bumi said. She didn't say any more about first meeting me, as we walked back to my room, following the red lines. I was curious, but Bumi always had a set look on her face when she had switched back to her Big Eye self. I knew not to ask for more of my own story.