The Book of Phoenix (11 page)

As soon as they stuck that needle into my flesh and pressed down on the syringe, I felt naked. But at least I could fly.

All stories must be told.

I've been telling you this one as I cross the Atlantic again. Below me, its waters ripple and roil. There is great wind here. An angry type of wind. But it's moving in the right direction, which means that all I have to do is keep my wings open. The wind is taking me to my false home in America. To pass the time, I tell you
The Book of Phoenix
. My turbulent accurate memory. My oral unfinished tale. Unfinished because it will finish when I finish.

If I stray too far from the ship below, I have no doubt that they will come after me in their helicopters, with their weapons and their fearful self-entitled intent. However, they have nothing to worry about. For now, I comply.

How long have I been telling you this tale? How long have I been flying? For days. I've shut down my system again. No straining muscles, this time. Flying is natural, and I am stronger than I was when I left the United States. My titanium alloy bones are not light, but my body is made to fly. The Big Eye built me well. I'd have been a good weapon if I were not human, if I did not have a brain that could remember after death after death after death.

And there is more. Last night, he came to me. I was flying low, listening to the calm of the water and fantasizing about dropping into it. If my wings got wet, I wouldn't be able to fly. The water would pull me into its great belly, as it had so many other Africans on unwanted journeys.
Will the Big Eye be able to come after me?
I was wondering. I almost wanted to find out.
Do they have deep diving gear ready? Will they be able to reach me? I can fly, but I am not light. I will sink fast.

The smell of the ocean out here, away from everything, a mile from the ship whose lights I follow, is of fine salt and the flesh of bodies large and small, plant and animal. I felt good. I inhaled the fresh air, feeling my brain and spirit vibrate because I clearly understood that I was so much more than I was before. Tower 7 would never have held me for long. I wished Saeed could see me now. “Saeed,” I whispered. “So much has been lost, but all is never lost.”

It was too dark for me to see anything but the sliver of moon above, the lights of the ship, and the soft glow of my red gold wings. The wind was gusting, so I couldn't hear him. The ocean's musk was in my nose, so I could not smell him, either. But I sensed him with the tips of my longest feathers.

There he was, flying below me, slightly to my right. His enormous wings spanned past my left. He rode the air inches above the water. Something told me that he didn't risk a watery death if his wings got wet. It was hard to believe that
I
had freed
him
from Tower 7. Already I was putting next to no effort into flying; his presence made flying even MORE effortless. He was carrying me, for the moment. I stared down at him. His skin was so dark that I only clearly saw his brown wings. I heard his voice as if there was no roar of ocean wind, and he was right beside me. He spoke to me in Twi.

“Phoenix the Okore returns to the United States of America, her birth place, the prodigal daughter.” His voice was rich, and it sounded like he was smiling.

I frowned and spoke aloud, despite the noise of the wind. “I've had one other ‘birthplace' so far. And there will probably be more.”

“Yes, but Tower 7 was the place of your
creation
,” he said. “There is nothing to love or hate about it. It is fact.”

“Tower 7 no longer exists.”

“Phoenix of the Okore,” he said again, this time laughing, deep and throaty. “Reckless impulsive child.”

“How did you get here?” I asked. “Who are you?”

His voice grew deeper. “
I
am your father.”

I paused. Then I burst out laughing, glad that he was carrying me. I'd had the time, equipment, and access in Tower 7 to stream and watch thousands of movies, old and new. But how had he managed to see the fifth movie in the Star Wars series while trapped in his glass dome?

“Not all questions have answers,” he said, chuckling.

“I know.”

“I know what you are planning,” he said. “You've no intention of letting them take you to Tower 6. You want to go to New York. But, Phoenix, you can't just go to The Backbone.”

I paused. How did he know? “I'll do my best,” I finally said, pressing my lips together and frowning. I didn't want to think about
the how
yet.

“Your ‘best' will get you captured quickly,” he said. “Your blood is tainted.”

I laughed. “My blood has never been pure.”

“They can track you wherever you go.”

He was right. But they might let me at least flee as far as the city. I just had to reach The Backbone.

“I'm here to show you how I got here,” he said. “Because you can do it, too. And you might like to have some fun with it.”

“Do what?”

“You are not what I am,” he said. “I'm immortal. I cannot die. You are super-mortal. You can live and die to live and die again. You are speciMen, beacon, and reaper, life and death, hope and redemption.”

Villain
,
too,
I thought.
And I have plans.
But I hoped he couldn't read my mind. No one needed to know that. Not even him.

He chuckled, again. “That is to be decided by your actions, Phoenix. Not by your thoughts. I want you to remember the ends and the beginnings, of birth and death. Remember.”

“I can't remember when I was first born.”

“No. But what of the other times?”

The first time I inhaled my first breath in the ruins of Tower 7, it warmed my warming body. I remember noticing the breeze first, how it smelled of flowers and then exhaust. The second time was in the pit that used to be Kofi's home. A hot shiver from my toes to the top of my head. I'd thought of Saeed, but then Kofi. I remembered both times that I died, when there was also heat. I frowned, remembering something else.

“There was something.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, pushing the memory forward, and then I opened them. “When I died in Kofi's house.”

“Good.” He said. “You've found it.”

But I hadn't. Not yet. It was right on the tip of my mind but I couldn't grasp it.
There was something when I died. With Kofi burning up in my arms. As I burned
. For a whole minute we flew, not speaking. I still couldn't remember it.

“I live outside of life and death,” he said. “So I can slip through time and space. You live
inside
life and death. So you can do the same.”

I looked up at the moon. It was a tiny sliver. Like an opening, a cut into another place. That was when I remembered. A sliver. The moon. Like the slice of otherness I'd seen when I was burning up, when I was trying not to look at Kofi's disintegrating body. My heart ached for a moment, as I remembered Kofi's face blowing away, becoming ash, showing bone, then bone becoming ash.

With effort, I focused on the opening into nothingness I'd seen. “There was something into something else,” I whispered. It was black. A black slit. No not black, it was nothing. I'd stared at the “bones” of my hand, realizing that my bones were some kind of metal. Then I'd slipped my hand into the slit and my hand disappeared. I brought it out just before I died. My bones were still intact, made red hot by the flames.

“Will it hurt?” I asked. I'd only slipped the skeleton of my hand into it.

“No.”

“I can control what it does?”

“Oh yes.”

I felt my heart begin to pound as I realized what this meant, what I could do. I smiled in the dark, above the ocean. I looked at the oil tanker that carried the Big Eye, and the tanker's crew, and wished that sea monster I'd seen last time would emerge and swallow them all up.

The Big Eye had no idea what was coming to their coveted country, their beloved city. I am reminded of the chant that the African market women over a hundred years ago shouted when they battled against the white colonialist foreigners. One woman would cry, “What's that smell?!” and the other women would shout in response, “Death is that smell!”

Something scarier than that sea monster is coming.

 • • • 

That was yesterday. It is today. It is afternoon. Up ahead is the American coast and the Big Eye are signaling me to come and land on the ship. I'd told them I would never set foot on that damn ship,
any
damn ship. That should have been their first clue. I would never arrive in this country on a boat. Never.

I take one last look at the coast of Miami. Then I do as the winged man taught me last night over the ocean. I look deep within myself, as I hear the Big Eye's helicopters approaching me. I count to five as I focus inward. I am heating up. My wings are probably glowing. Then I fly forward, and I am gone. “Slipping,” that's what I will call it. And it isn't hard to do because I am “slippery.” And it doesn't hurt. I am made for this, too.

And I know exactly where and when I am going.

 • • • 

Tower 1 is a large building in the middle of a Chicago northern suburb called Naperville. It is surrounded by bushy unkempt palm trees, but it is easy to find. I can practically smell what they are doing in there. Once you've smelled captivity, greed, and abomination, you know the grey nose-stinging scent anywhere. I don't need to go in through the entrance. They have high security to make sure only cleared personnel enter and none of their creations get out. This place is no Tower 7 where guards and security relied too much on technology. Here they have true Big Eyes. Especially after what I had done to Tower 7. Also, security is tighter here because Tower 1 is where it all began. Tower 1 is the nexus.

I read about Tower 1 in my days at Tower 7. It is where the Big Eye created their first abomination. They “adopted” a ten-year-old girl from Ethiopia. They believed that she was a traceable direct descendant of “Mitochondrial Eve” and thus carried the complete genetic blueprint of the entire human race. On top of this, the girl was afflicted with hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition that made her able to remember every moment of her entire life. They gave her the code name, “Lucy.” The portion of the records that gave her real name was deleted.

To the Big Eye, this girl was the complete Great Book of Humanity. They did two things with her. 1. They made a perfect clone of her (when you have one Great Book, you make a back-up copy). 2. They tried to make Lucy immortal by reprogramming her DNA to not age. For eleven years, Lucy remained in the body of a ten year old. When she was twenty-one, she escaped and threw herself from the roof of Tower 1. She left no suicide letter. Nevertheless, her case was still deemed a great success. And they still had Lucy #2.

From that point on, the programs in Tower 1 were heavily funded. They built Tower 2 in Boston, where they focused primarily on creating methods of dealing with climate change and buoy technology for floating towns and cities. Soon after that, they built Tower 3 in New Orleans, where Leroy Jackson became famous for curing AIDS and several of his students began studying the New Malaria. And so on. Behind the good intentions and amazing science, however, was abomination. Weapons, the quest for immortality, how far could we go . . . The foundation of all the towers was always always always corrupt, driven by a lusty greed.

 • • • 

To kill a snake, cut off the head.

No one has any idea what is about to happen right here in the dead of night. It doesn't matter who is patrolling the hallways or the streets and parking lots outside. It doesn't matter who is perched in the trees, guns ready. None of it matters.

Somewhere a tracking device receiver is beeping. At first, it claims that the nanobot's host is in a department store. Then it claims that it's outside of Tower 1. Then inside. But that does not matter either. They will dismiss this information as a malfunction because no one has injected me with the tracking nanobots yet. Not to their knowledge. That won't be done for another two days. I've stepped into a different space and time. Naperville, Illinois, United States, Tower 1, Floor 4 out of 9. The most extreme research is usually done on the middle floors.

The walls are white and low. The floors are grey, shiny, and cool beneath my bare feet. There is steel railing running along the walls of both sides of the hallway. We didn't have that in Tower 7. The hallway is narrow, so I fold my wings tightly against my back. It's painful but I have no choice. I've wrapped a black sheet over myself so that only my face shows. I pinned it below my head, so that it doesn't fall off. I have used make-up to shade my dark brown face a light peach color. I grabbed all these things from the department store. If I am seen by their cameras, they cannot know it is me.

I walk down the hall, the soft slap of my feet the only sound I hear.

“Like a hospital,” I whisper. But I know it is not. This is not a place of healing. Pathologies are created here. It smells strongly of rubbing alcohol. I turn a corner and step into a hallway with walls full of glass doors. I tug my black sheet over my forehead to hide the upper part of my face and peek into the first door. I want to scream, but I hold it in. It's not his fault. And as I look at him, my eyes understand what I am seeing. He is no different from me.

He is a man with rich brown skin and a wide puffy crown of black hair. He could be Kofi's brother, for all I know. A jelli telli is stretched to cover the wall in front of him. He is watching an ancient Western that I recognize immediately because the theme song had scared me so deeply when I watched it over two years ago:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. As if something is mocking me, the awful theme song plays, and I shudder. It still sounds like a chorus of starving coyotes.

Both of the man's arms and the lower parts of his legs are complicated masses of red, black, and green wires meshed over jointed metal rods. His hands remind me of the metal bones of my own hands. Computer parts are strewn about his room, and he is standing at a table heavy with more parts. His thin metal fingers are highly dexterous as he weaves wires into what looks like a green circuit board. There's a spark. He laughs to himself and nods his head. I can't tell what he is building.