The Book of Phoenix

  • • •

  The Backbone is as tall as I remember. I look up at its spiked trunk and softly glowing leaves in the warming sky, all the way up until I can’t see any further. It has grown so much since I last saw it. I clench my jaw, pushing all this aside.

  It is the early morning before I disappear from the eyes of the Big Eye over the coast of Miami. Just before sunrise. The air is warm and humid, and I can hear the rush hour traffic; I can smell the exhaust. I am crying and the tears become steam before they can even roll down my cheeks. My black sheet burns up, the white make-up on my face turns to ash. My white heat resistant dress begins to crackle. I increase my heat, keeping my gaze on The Backbone. I am villain. I will break The Backbone’s back. I will burn the entire city starting from this arboreal heart.

  The tree shivers and some of its leaves fall. A groan comes from its roots; they are writhing deep below my feet. And the noise echoes across the city. I hear people exclaim from nearby, but I don’t turn to look. They’ll soon be dead, anyway. Good. These people are the same people who went about their lives, walking past Tower 7 every day, when it still stood. It made no difference to any of them what they were doing to us only a few floors above.

  And even if I care to see these indifferent people, I can’t see them. The mile wide area where Tower 7 used to stand is now gnarled wild jungle in the middle of the city. They have tried to contain the plants and trees by surrounding it with a high concrete fence. I smile with disgust. These people haven’t learned from their many mistakes. You cannot contain The Backbone. But I can burn it and the rest of this remorseless city to ash. They made me here. I will be exactly what they wanted. Since no one else seeks revenge for all that the Big Eye have done, I will. Let me be the villain for the sake of justice.

  “Is this what they’ve made you?”

  I pull my wings in. He is naked, but I know it must be terribly hot for him. Immediately I pull in my heat. I am so glad to see him.

  “Mmuo!” I whisper. I fall to my knees on the soil, suddenly very very tired. I look up at him. Now the tears fall down my cheeks, through the white ashes of make-up on my brown face. Wet. Water. They feel so cool. He reaches out a hand and helps me up. Mmuo, the Nigerian man who can walk through walls. Mmuo, who helped me escape Tower 7. Mmuo, one of the only two who survived its fall. Mmuo, who knew that I would rise from the ashes and had left me a dress to clothe my nakedness.

  “He said you’d be here at 6:55 am, a minute before dawn. And here you are.” Sweat pours down his face. He blinks as a drop falls into his eye.

  “Who?”

  From above, comes the loud flutter of wings and a burst of air that blows the trees, cooling the air further. The winged man lands on one of The Backbone’s lowest branches. Then he flies down and lands before me. He stands tall, peering down his nose at me. His eyes are still soft, still kind.

  “Will you kill everyone in this city, Phoenix?” he asks. He speaks with his mouth now. His voice is fatherly, and I feel like sitting back down and listening to him tell stories as the children did with elders on moonless nights in Wulugu.

  “Isn’t that what they want?” I whisper.

  Behind me, I hear Mmuo laugh.

  “You’re not a villain,” the winged man says.

  “I am a weapon,” I insist. “I’m a bomb. Isn’t that a villain? I’ll be doing what I was made for.”

  “Who made you?” The winged man asks, his beautiful face serious and intense.

  “That’s a tricky question,” Mmuo added. “Phoenix, it is not so simple.”

  But I still want to do it. Not only do I want to do it, I want to burn so hot that I would not come back. Saeed is dead. Kofi is dead. My only home has been blown up. The alien seed is safe. Mmuo is my friend, and he can sink into the ground to safety. The winged man is my guardian, and he can fly away. Let them leave me. I want to do evil. I want to do great great evil. More tears fall from my eyes as the thought squeezes my heart.

  “You both should leave,” I say flatly.

  “Should I leave, too?”

  The voice came from beside me. Slowly, I turn my head. Slowly. The sky is warming. My eyes focus on him. He is dressed in a simple white dashiki and pants. He wears leather sandals. Saeed. I press my hands to my heart, curling my wings around myself.

  He slowly comes to me. A stunned smile on his face. “Phoenix,” he says. “I thought you were dead!” He opens his mouth wide and inhales a deep breath.

  I cannot speak. I cannot think. I cannot process.

  He takes my hands. He sighs, his mouth quivering. “You are real,” he breathes.

  I can’t keep my tears from coming. My world is falling apart.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he says. “Phoenix, when I saw what they were doing, I couldn’t . . .”

  “You ate the apple,” I say. “You died.”

  “No, that’s not what happened,” Saeed says, shaking his head. “And they only thought I was dead. They flew my body to Tower 4 on the U.S. Virgin Islands.” He pauses, a dark look crosses his face as if he were remembering something ugly. “I woke in a morgue. I don’t know exactly what they planned to do with my body. But no one was watching me. So I escaped.”

  “You survived,” I say flatly. That’s what he always used to say.

  He nods. “Yes. But I had no money, I had no way of contacting you. It took me weeks to get back here, but I came for you. But by then . . .” He motions to the jungle and the majestic Backbone. “There was nothing in the news but talk of poor architecture and toxic waste.” He looks at the winged man. “I was in the Library of Congress searching fruitlessly for information about Tower 7. Over the months, I managed to take a reading class but still can’t; it’s hard. I was trying to read a general history book about the city when this man appeared and nearly got us both arrested.” He points at Mmuo.

  I can’t help the smile on my face as I imagine Mmuo appearing stark naked in the middle of a library; a tall glistening dark dark African man rising through the floor or stepping out of a wall.

  “He found us soon after,” Saeed says motioning to the winged man. He pauses, looking at my red gold wings. I have unconsciously uncurled them as I listened to him speak.

  He pulls me to him, and I rest my head on his shoulder.

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” I say.

  “Phoenix,” he says, kissing my ear.

  “I was the one who did it,” I say. “Tower 7 went down because of . . .”

  “I know,” he says.

  “I have a lot to tell you.”

  “I do, too.”

  We stand that way for several moments. Then he holds me back, his eyes on my wings.

  “May I touch them?” he asks.

  I laugh, glancing at Mmuo and the winged man. “Maybe later.”

  Mmuo steps up. “That was you, too, wasn’t it, Phoenix? You did that to Tower 1?”

  I press my lips together. Then I stand up straight. “Yes.”

  I catch the winged man’s eye and then look away. I know that he will come to me over the ocean as I am following the oil tanker tomorrow and teach me how to move through time.

  “See?” Mmuo tells Saeed.

  Saeed is looking at me with wide intense eyes. “We want to do that to all the towers,” he says. “We want to set every speciMen free.”

  Like an egg, a plan starts to hatch in my mind. There are several we can recruit who will want to help. If we can find them. I’d watched them escape Tower 1. My mind focuses especially on the one who’d set the building on fire. He will join us. That, I am sure of. But there is one problem. The tracking nanobots inside me. Even if I burn to ash, they will survive and immediately re-infect me as soon as I begin to reform.

  “The Big Eye will find me wherever I go,” I say, after explaining this to the three of them.

  “You have to die
,” the winged man says. “And you must burn hot. You have to destroy all the tracking nanobots in your body.” He looks into my eyes, leaving the worst of what he meant unsaid.

  I didn’t just have to burn hot. I had to burn 6000 degrees Celsius. The temperature of the center of the earth. Can I do this? Might this burn away that which is me? Phoenix or not, I am still a creature of this earth. But do I want to have to run from the Big Eye forever? Or even worse, get recaptured?

  “I won’t let them hurt you,” Saeed says.

  I wince. Kofi had said the same thing. I take Saeed’s hand, and I look at the winged man, “I will have to find a desert or go to the moon.”

  “I will contain you,” the winged man says. “Come.”

  Saeed is frowning. “Phoenix, you . . .”

  “Saeed,” I calmly say. “There is no other way. You know it.” I pause. “If I don’t come back, make sure you destroy them all. Every single goddamn tower. Every brick, piece of concrete, shard of glass. Make those buildings your greatest feast!”

  This makes him actually smile, and I know I am making the right decision.

  I look at Mmuo, who has taken my other hand.

  “There are others like us out there,” I say. “I helped them escape Tower 1. Find them. What they are doing in the towers will be the end of humanity if it is not stopped. We are living in darkness and, I swear to you, one day the Author of All Things will pull a star to this planet to burn all the evil away, taking all the good with it. I don’t believe in God, but I feel this so deeply. In my bones. But if we bring down the towers, maybe this will not happen.”

  Saeed hugs me. He whispers into my ear, “My special bird. Don’t fly away.”

  Mmuo squeezes my hand. “Don’t forget, we have work to do.”

  “Like what you did in Nigeria to your government?” I ask.

  But he only frowns. Still, even now, Mmuo refuses to tell me what happened in Nigeria that ended with his imprisonment in The United States, in Tower 7.

  “You will tell me someday,” I say.

  “No. It’s not a story with a happy ending,” he says.

  “No story ever really ends anyway,” I say. “Especially not the good ones.”

  The winged man curls his wings tightly around me, and I shut my eyes. I rest my head against his bare chest. It feels so cool. I hear no heart beat. I do hear the rush of the wind over the trees, the movement of the ocean, the shift of desert sands. Who are you? I wonder. I don’t believe in angels.

  I heat. With all my strength. I heat. I am so strong. I am so powerful. They made me a villain. But these people whom I love, they help me to make myself more. I have purpose. I go beyond that which I was made for. I heat. I burn. All around me are a thousand spinning suns. Oooh, I heat.

  Then I hear the wind in the leaves of The Backbone, and I understand the deeper meaning of my name.

  CHAPTER 10

  Wazobia

  I knew so little about the world and so much. As you listen to me, you should take that into consideration. I would, if I were you. I was two when I decided to escape Tower 7. How long was I in Ghana? A year? And once I crossed the Atlantic after leaving Africa, time stopped meaning anything to me. I had died three times, and I had learned to slip outside, between, through time into other times. And I had lost two men that I loved and gained one of them back.

  It was quiet where I was, but inside I was burning with fury. I carried it with me into the darkness of death, and when I brought it out into the light of life, it had evolved, matured, intensified, grown wings. I would free the others. I would crush those who had the nerve to make me. They had no respect.

  The winged man had kept me from killing myself. Thus, he’d kept me from doing the worst: killing my soul by killing a million other souls with my heat. As I became ash for the third time, I wondered yet again, Who is he? I didn’t wonder what he was.

  I never had any control of when I returned. This time, it took me a month. Mmuo and Saeed were happy to tell me how it all happened. “When you were nothing but ash, there was a final flash that nearly blinded us,” Mmuo told me the night after my full return. We sat in the living room of the apartment Mmuo rented in Soho. “He took most of your heat in his wings but we could feel it, too. It felt like a burst of hot wind.”

  Saeed had turned back first and fallen to his knees before the winged man. On the ground were grey ashes. In death, I looked like any of earth’s flesh when burned. The winged man stepped back as Saeed gathered my ashes into a pile, tears falling down his cheeks. He hadn’t been there when I burned the first or second time. Such a thing is always worse when you actually experience it.

  “She will be back,” Mmuo had told Saeed. But he wasn’t sure.

  The winged man flew off without a word. Mmuo and Saeed just sat there in the jungle of Tower 7. Mmuo said they spoke words over my ashes. They’d mourned me. Seeing me as ashes made it nearly impossible to not assume the worst. Nothing natural becomes ash and then returns to life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Neither Saeed nor Mmuo would tell me what words they spoke over my ashes.

  “A few minutes later there were lights in the sky,” Mmuo said. “And I swear to you, they made a weird whooshy almost musical sort of sound. Saeed denies hearing it, but I know he did. The whole city did, even above all the city noise.”

  He didn’t know what they were but I did. I’d read about them while imprisoned in Tower 7, and I used to wonder what they’d look like. They were called Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis. As I died, I’d flared like the sun and the atmosphere over the city was reacting to me. Later that evening, though there had been no previous recent activity spotted on the sun, the meteorologists and geoscientists speculated that the strange auroras and the blackout right after that killed service to computers, jelli tellis, skyscraper screens, and all portable devices for two days were caused by a solar flare. And the newsfeeds mentioned the noise, too. I guess they needed some sort of explanation after the resulting twelve hours of rioting and stockpiling.

  • • •

  Mmuo and Saeed guarded my ashes for the entire month. At all times, at least one of them was there. I do not remember a thing, not until that last three days when I started to . . . reappear. That’s how Saeed described it.

  “It was the dead of night and I was in my tent,” he said. “It was raining.”

  They had left my ashes. It had rained many times, the wind had blown, my ashes washed away, scattered far and wide. But Mmuo and Saeed stayed there, using a camouflaged tent, though the cover of the wildly growing and twisting trees was enough to hide them from the Big Eye when their surveillance cameras flew by. Saeed and Mmuo waited, in the very place I had burned while enfolded in the winged man’s wings. They patiently waited.

  Then one dark rainy night, Saeed heard a loud sigh. He heard it even over the noise of the rain. He crawled to the tent entrance and looked outside. Creeping over the spot where I had died was a soft mist. The wind kept blowing it away, but then it would return to the same spot. “The mist was warm and smelled like concrete cooking in the heat,” Saeed told me. “That’s how I knew it was you.”

  Soon, Mmuo returned to give him a chance to go to the apartment to bathe and eat a hot meal. But Saeed didn’t want to leave me. I was now more than mist. I was a softly glowing, slowly shifting shape. Like a nebula. Red orange yellow. Always warm.

  “Go and wash, at least,” Mmuo told Saeed. I remember him saying this because it was at this moment that I came back to myself. I could hear, see, and smell. Saeed did indeed need to bathe. “Is that how you want her to see you after all these weeks?” Mmuo added.

  I listened, reveling in their voices, the scent of the jungle around me, the after-scent of exhaust, the warm night air, the wetness from the rain, and the sight of the magnificent Backbone. I’m sorry, I thought as I looked at it. I’m sorry I ever sought to destroy you, magnificent creatu
re. It looked wider and taller than ever. I could see three hundred and sixty degrees around me, from the dirt below my non-body, to the stars in the sky, to the jungle around me, and the skyscrapers beyond.

  It was when Saeed had finally agreed to go bathe and sleep, when it stopped raining, that Mmuo started to tell me the story I had twice asked him to tell me: the story of what he did in Nigeria that landed him in Tower 7. The first time I’d asked was just before my escape from Tower 7. I’d asked again before I burned, cradled in the winged man’s wings. Both times Mmuo refused. Maybe now he hoped the story would bring me back faster. I could not move. I could not feel. I could only listen. I so wanted to hear his story. Finally. What did Mmuo know about going up against a government? I remember every word. Mmuo is an interesting man . . .

  • • •

  Phoenix, you must be very bored there, unable to move and cause trouble. You look like a sleeping bolt of lightning. Power at peace.

  I remember you well in Tower 7. Whenever I came to the 28th floor to meet with Saeed, you were the only other person that I always made sure I saw. Sometimes I let you know I was there, other times, I just quietly peeked in to make sure you were ok. I was often nearby during mealtimes. I used to steal whole roasted chickens, like a fox in a hen house. I saw you when they took you to the lab. Once I made their equipment cart fall over. Do you remember that? Phoenix. You are special. Come back to us. Wake up.

  I know you like stories, so I will tell you mine. There is not much time. Your Saeed will be returning soon, so I will try to keep my story moving. I may tell Saeed these things in due time, but for now, I will only tell you. Because you asked me twice. I am Mmuo, and the man I will tell you about is long gone, but I will tell you of him. I was my father’s fourth child and third son. He named me Ikenga Emezie Nnachukwu. My mother was a schoolteacher and she loved books.

  She met my father when she was about twenty. He too loved to read, but he liked books that were worlds away from the literary canon. He read things by legendary agitating African writers from long ago, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. And he listened to old old tunes from Fela Kuti, and he loved the American golden era rap music. He’d learned the meaning of colonialism and about the “colonized mind” from the deep Internet when he was twelve years old.