The Book of Phoenix

  Looking relieved, everyone nodded or said “Yes,” or “Please.” The old man was all frowns. There were no children in the group. I’d have loved to see children. I’d never seen them in real life.

  • • •

  I was alone now and I was glad. Every part of my body was shrieking. With life. Fresh fresh life. I was alive. I was awake. I was intact. I could move. My temples throbbed a different kind of pain. It felt like pieces of glass grinding in my head, and my vision went blurry for a moment.

  I curled my body and some of the rubble that had buried me fell away. Chunks of white marble, chips of concrete, broken beams of steel, shattered glass. It was all heavy, but it did not crush me. I pushed it off. I tore off vines that had grown over me. There was no one around to hear the tinkle, crunch, and scrape of debris tumbling, sliding off my body. I got up. My vision blurred again and I stumbled. My balance felt off. Like the world around me was tilted to one side. I took a step and crushed more glass and some tiny white flowers with my tough feet. I took another and my heel ground into a piece of piping making me stumble again. Then it seemed everything settled—my vision, the way I related to the world around me. Ok, I thought.

  I stood tall, stretching my arms, back, and legs. I felt a little odd. Like I was me, but who was me? I looked at myself. I was naked and covered in dust; I must have looked like a ghost. But I was alive. After I’d died. I vividly remembered dying. My name is Phoenix, I thought. I don’t know who named me, but I am named well. I stood up straighter.

  I licked my wrist. Then I smiled. My skin was still brown as the ripe shell of coconut. I was me. Tall. Lean. Full breasts. Strong legs. Long feet. Did I still have the dark brown spot on my left eyeball? The birthmark on my thigh? Did I still have the scar on my belly from when they’d taken a hipbone sample? The burn mark under the nail of my left thumb?

  I frantically started swiping the dust from my skin. I swiped and swiped. My arms. Legs. Belly. Backside. Chest. There was so much dust that a cloud rose up around me. Then I stood still. The warm breeze caressing my body and blowing away the dust.

  The birthmark on my thigh was there. The burn mark under my thumb was gone. I laughed as I looked up. The night sky was indigo with a hint of red; the way the night sky had always looked to me. Except now I was seeing it with my naked eye, through no window. I had never been outdoors until now. I had never seen the stars, either. I would. I would get out of the city. Away from its light pollution.

  “Ok,” I whispered. My voice was the same, too. I was working up to answering a most troubling question. If I was still me, was I still me? I stilled myself, shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Immediately, I could see it. Right through my eyelids. The soft yellow green glow that emanated from my skin. Beacon, I thought. I am a beacon.

  When I attempted to escape from Tower 7, they had surrounded and riddled me with bullets as I burned to ash. My powerful light woke the plants, especially The Backbone. Then The Backbone had brought it all down, killing almost everyone and every freakish thing inside. Now I’d woken up in the ruins. I was reborn. I still glowed. I was still a phoenix. I let out a breath, a tear rolling down my cheek. It wasn’t over. Silly of me to think it was.

  When I opened my eyes, they fell on something white and blowing in the strong breeze a few yards away. A dress hanging on a piece of piping sticking out of a jumble of thick green shoots. Only two people would have cared enough to leave it for me. Only two people really understood what I was. There was Saeed. How I loved Saeed. But Saeed was dead. And Mmuo, who’d also been a prisoner in Tower 7 and managed to escape when it all came down. Mmuo who could walk through walls. Mmuo who had opened the door for me. He’d most likely left the dress.

  I walked over to it. With each step, I felt more like myself. It was cotton, stained a little from the dust, but long. It would fit perfectly. I liked long dresses, but I hoped the cotton wouldn’t burn. As I put the dress on, it felt odd on my back. I frowned. My back felt odd, now that I thought of it. Achy, as if I’d been injured there. But yet, when I touched my shoulder blade, I didn’t feel the touch as much as I should have. I smoothed out the dress on my body and then touched my back again. There was a swelling there or a sort of hump.

  I bent forward without a problem. Only the aching. A flare of heat flew through my body. Then I was cool again. “Wish I had a mirror,” I whispered.

  There was a deep groaning, and I froze. Then it came again. From behind me. I turned around. The sight took my breath away. You could not see the end of it. Surrounded by smaller trees and bushes, its great trunk was the diameter of two cars. Its rough rich brown bark was now covered with large sharp thorns. No human in his or her right mind would attempt to climb it even if the tree were at rest. Which it was not. You could sense it even from yards away. If it wanted to, it could call its roots together, pull them out of the ground and walk away. Maybe it eventually would. Stranger things certainly had happened in the last seven days.

  Its leaves were broad and oval shaped and you could see them happily waving with the wind, high high high into the sky. Until you could see no more. The leaves of The Backbone were slightly luminescent, just like me. And it had bloomed large fiery red flowers that grew high up. What happened at its very top? One would need a helicopter to find out.

  The groaning came again and all the sounds of the city—vehicles driving on roads, the breeze moving around the skyscrapers, the creak of crickets, the sound of people talking—it all stopped. There was only dead silence. The building across the street was dark and deserted but on the second floor, if I squinted hard, I could see a pigeon was frozen in midflight.

  “Wha- ?” I startled myself. My voice felt as if it were coming from within and outside of me at the same time. “What is this?”

  The grassy ground beneath my feet vibrated and then domed the slightest bit. I stumbled forward and the ground here also domed, and I was forced forward again. The Backbone wanted me close. And it must have had a hell of a secret to tell me because it had stopped time so that it could do so. At least this was my theory. Amongst the thousands of books I had read in Tower 7, one included an African myth, or was it Arab, that spoke of a tree so old that it had learned to stop time. Hadn’t that tree been covered with spikes, too? My memory said it had. When I was mere feet from its lethal looking trunk, the bare ground before me began to churn.

  If it weren’t for the forceful sagacious presence of the tree, I’d have run. I touched the hump on my back and rubbed at it. It felt so achy. The ground before the tree was rich red soil, different from the rest, which was brown. Had the Big Eye done exactly that? Brought in special soil for it from somewhere after they’d soaked it in the special growth formula? The history of its official planting in the base of Tower 7, the exact nature of the experimental solution poured over it and subsequent care were all kept top secret. It was even omitted from the classified books and files they let me read about the history of Tower 7.

  “What is that?” I whispered as something began to push up beneath the churning soil. A tan powerful thin root whipped through. Then another, then another. Then a larger root must have pushed it from below, for the wooden box rose from the soil like a gift presented by a God, held up by a kneeling slave. It rose slowly, carefully, dare I say dramatically.

  It was for me. I’ve never questioned that.

  I picked it up and the tree groaned softly. Then I tensed, all my new flesh, muscles and sinews, tightening for the first time. My body flashed a brilliant green. I was blinded for a moment, though I kept my eyes open. It wasn’t hot, however, for my dress remained intact. I felt more gather in my chest. Then it burst from me, violently rustling The Backbone’s leaves and the twigs, leaf stems, vines, and flowers of all those plants that grew around the great tree. The Backbone shivered.

  The flap of pigeon wings behind me. I turned around and watched the pigeon finish flying to the next building. The sound of vehi
cles moving, vomiting plumes of exhaust. The sound of far off voices. The movement of the breeze around the concrete jungle.

  Then a different kind of rumbling began. There was enough light from the street and the buildings around the area to show me exactly what was happening. It was the building across the deserted street. Where the pigeon had landed. The building was called the Axis Building because according to satellite maps, it sat in the exact center of the city. The rumbling became a great roar and the concrete building started to collapse on itself. Crush, crash, beams buckled, buttresses splintered. The destruction plumed out dust, papers, and rubble. I stared in awe. I had been looking down at this building all my life. It stood right outside my window. It was one of the buildings the city designated to house a lush roof garden full of potted trees, bushes and flowers.

  I’d looked down on the false jungle and dreamed and hoped and never touched, smelled, stood within. I loved the sight of it from afar, but now I realized an unconscious part of me loathed its existence. It had been unattainable. It was not part of my world. Over eight days ago, this never would have been so clear to me, but now I was outside. Now it was. As the building collapsed, I felt joy. Most likely, there was not a soul inside it. The building would have been evacuated days ago. They had to have known it was unstable. But I loved the fact that it was I who gave it the push that finally brought it down.

  Good.

  The box, I held. There was no lock or latch. The wood was not heavy but it was solid. And a rich brown like the tree’s trunk. Its edges were worn smooth. Do I open it? There was definitely something heavy inside. When I moved it this way and that, whatever was in it slid heavily this way and that. It was one thing.

  I had been created in Tower 7 two years ago from the DNA of an African woman possibly born in Phoenix, Arizona. Or maybe what I was was the origin of my name. Standing out there watching the building fall, I took the idea further. Maybe my DNA was brought directly from Africa and had nothing to do with Arizona. I frowned as what I had been seeing all my life clicked into clearer focus. So many of those created, manipulated, enhanced, deformed, crippled people with me in Tower 7 were from parts of Africa. I’d known this by looking at people but now I wondered, Why?

  I sighed, looking at my feet. “Fully unraveling my origins is a lost cause,” I muttered.

  But one thing I had learned was that, despite my origins and the sinister reasons for creating me, my light brought life. Though I burned, I was a positive force. It had been my light that had brought this jungle that grew in the debris. It was my light that had given The Backbone the strength to shake Tower 7 from its great body.

  And now The Backbone was offering me a strange gift. I opened the box.

  • • •

  My hands went numb. My eyes watered. The scent of leaves packed my nose. The taste of mud flooded my mouth and my entire body began to glow. The grass pushed up beneath my feet, and tiny flowers blossomed from the blade tips. The Backbone softly twisted, shedding bits of bark as it stretched further toward the stars. I heard it snapping and creaking, but I was looking at the object in the box.

  “It’s a nut,” I whispered.

  Round and about the shape and size of a garden egg, it looked made of a tougher heavier wood than that of the box and the tree. Etched deep into it were mazes of lines that made circles, squiggles and geometric shapes. The black lines ran and repeated close to each other but they never touched. The designs moved in a slow dance, undulated like bizarre insects.

  Heat. It coursed through me like water, rushing up from my feet, up my entire body to my head. The heat again. Seven days ago, I had heated until I burned to ash. Now here I was again. However, my clothes still did not burn. I shined brighter through my brown skin and reached into the box and picked up the strange nut.

  • • •

  Blackness.

  Pure. Quiet. Then pricks of tiny white, blue, and yellow lights. I was seeing stars for the first time. Billions and billions of stars. As I flew through space smooth and gentle. In a vastness that made me want to weep. But I had no eyes with which to shed tears. No body with which to shudder. No nose with which to leak.

  I was traveling. I would know where to land when I saw it. My direction was clear. The pull was strong. The small blue planet. Earth. I was hope sent from afar. A beacon. Deep in the red soil. Until the right time.

  • • •

  “They dug you up?” I said aloud, as I stared down at the nut. “They dug you up with the red soil and brought you here.” That is why The Backbone knows itself, I thought. Alien seed. Alien seed in the soil of Tower 7 where scientists, lab assistants, lab technicians, doctors, administrative workers, guards and police and the mutations, monsters and mistakes they made dwelled. I laughed hard.

  The world went white. I nearly dropped the box as I shielded my face. The light was harsh to my unaccustomed eyes. My heart sank as I understood I had been so focused on the nut that I hadn’t noticed the chopping sound.

  “Do not run,” a voice blared. “Stay where you are!”

  The helicopter’s searchlight nearly blinded me. I had seen them many times while I was growing up in Tower 7, where the windows were thick glass. Their chopping noise was always muted. I’d never imagined they were so loud, their blades chopping the air like a cleaver on a chopping block. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that on the side of the helicopter was the logo I’d been seeing in Tower 7 all my short life: A hand grasping spears of lightning. Those of us in Tower 7 had always called the organization represented by that logo the Big Eye (the lightning represented speciMen). We never used the Big Eye’s official name.

  They probably thought that I had purposely brought down the Axis building. In a way I had. But shouldn’t they also have been expecting me? They made me. I was their weapon. To be used for nuclear warfare or biological warfare, I did not know. But I hadn’t matured in the way they had wanted or expected. I was a failed project, a rogue prisoner. Still, they had to know that I would show up again. Maybe that is why they had not begun to clear the incredible amount of debris. Maybe. Maybe not.

  I shut the box, tucked it under my arm and took off. If they knew nothing else, they’d know not to shoot.

  • • •

  My lean legs were strong. My back flexed. Every muscle in my body was working in perfect harmony. I was made to run. I was like the finest horse. First and foremost, they’d been trying to create a human weapon. A human bomb that self-regenerated to blow up another day. One who could run fast was a plus. I’d only gotten to run on a treadmill, during my time in Tower 7. Now I got to sprint out in the open. It was absolute joy, even with the Big Eye pursuing me.

  One foot, then the next. Digging into the ground and launching me forth. I felt like I could fly. Like nothing could touch me. My healthy fresh lungs expanded and drew in hearty breaths. I ran faster. Faster. FASTER. There were cars on the street, and I kept up with them as I dodged the few pedestrians on the sidewalk.

  It was night and I’d always thought people retreated indoors at this time. I’d read a lot about the crime rate here. The shootings, gang violence, muggings, car crashes. But people walked the streets, men and women. In groups and a few alone. They all carried thin glowing screens and coin-like portables. Some spoke to them; others watched probably the very same shows they could watch on the sides of buildings.

  I passed a group of people standing outside a restaurant. They looked confused and bewildered and were pointing toward the ruins. They’d probably heard the building fall. Did these people even see me? They did, but not for long. Above, the Big Eye followed, shining their searchlight, confusing the people on the sidewalks and streets even more.

  So this was New York. Palm trees grew beside roads. Mango trees. Iroko. Rosewood. Mahogany. The tall buildings were adorned with lights that showed large screens with dancing people, prime time TV shows, and flashy commercials. All t
he buildings were draped in those sweet smelling vines the mayor said would help keep the city’s air clean. Those vines had been engineered in Tower 4, which was on the US Virgin Islands, but few people knew that. Even fewer cared.

  Some of the roads were smooth, and I ran on them, keeping to the side. But I got to a few that were full of potholes. The news reports I had read all year were not exaggerating. The city had a water drainage problem, and the year’s heavy rainy season had exacerbated it. The vehicles on the road were fast and dented. I’d never seen one up close and I’d always wanted to drive one. The acrid smell of their exhaust was greater here.

  Suddenly, I saw huge versions of myself on the buildings. In some of them I was running. Others were old photos of me not smiling, peering into the camera. These photos were from before I had been what I was now. People looked up from their portable screens, to the big ones on the buildings and then back at their screens. Fantasy meeting fantasy. How confused some must have felt when they then saw me run by.

  As I ran, the hump on my back ached worse than ever. I grunted from the pain, but I kept running. They would not get their hands on the box. It was mine. The Backbone gave it to me. And it had told me where to take it. And they certainly would not have me. Never again.

  I ran beneath a railway and watched the searchlight pass overhead. Then I ran along the sidewalk beneath the railway. I could see the helicopter trying to change direction, but it was too late. How would they know which way I’d gone? Or if I ran anywhere at all? I could have just stopped right there and waited. They chose to go in the opposite direction. For the moment, I’d lost them. But my face was everywhere. Someone would recognize me any moment and report my whereabouts. I slowed to a walk as I tried to figure out my next move. I passed a jewelry shop and a currency exchange. Both were closed.

  As I walked, I sniffed. There was a spicy smell in the air. Tomato, onion, garlic, lemon. A perfumy aroma. A familiar one. When I came to the open door, I looked up. Ethiopian Sunrise. I walked into the restaurant.