This was my tenth session with Professor Okpala since I’d arrived at Oomza Uni. Thus far, all we’d really done were deep treeing exercises where I’d call up the exact current that I now understood activated the edan’s strange translation technology. It didn’t translate every language, but some of the ones that it did translate surprised me. I’d communicated with a bee-like insect hovering around a flower Okpala had brought in. The insect had been obsessed with the deep orange hue of the flower and the work it planned to do with others of its kind. And it hadn’t been interested in talking to me, so it didn’t respond to anything I said to it except to tell me, “Go away, I’m busy”.
Okpala had later introduced me to one of her graduate students, an Okwu-like Person. It had been angry when it realized I could understand the insults it spoke about me to Professor Okpala. It had been jealous of my closeness to the Meduse and didn’t think I deserved the honor, no matter what I’d done to earn it.
“Sit down,” Okpala said when I stepped out of the elevator. “You’ll need all your strength today… if you do this right.” The astrolabe she wore clipped to her hip vibrated. “Relax yourself for a few minutes while I talk to this student,” she said stepping away.
I slipped my sandals off and stepped onto the densely woven vines that made the floor of her office. I went to the place she called “the classroom”, the area in the middle of the open space that was her office. There was a small grey solid stone table here and nothing else. I dumped my satchel beside it and sat down.
Straightening my long red orange skirt, I stretched my legs in front of me and reached into my satchel. I brought out the tiny capture station that I’d brought from home. I carried it with me everywhere because I liked the taste of the water it pulled and formed in its cup-sized bag and because it was a piece of home.
The cool air the capture station blew at me as it pulled condensation from the clear sky felt refreshing in the hot sun. After a few minutes, the bag was full enough to fill a cup. I held the orange bag of fresh cool water to my forehead and then drank deeply from it. When I finished, I rolled up the bag and put everything back in my satchel. In the heat, the otjize kept my skin comfortable. I smiled turning my face to the sun. All my nightmares, flashbacks, and loneliness retreated. I put my edan on my lap, my astrolabe beside me and waited for Professor Okpala.
She came back to me five minutes later. “Okay, let’s see if it’s willing to open up to you, share what it knows,” she said, clipping her astrolabe back to the cloth hanging from the side of her skintight red and green suit. She sat across from me with a tablet.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s not alive. Is it?” I frowned, remembering a lizard egg I’d once found back home. “Is it?”
I’d found what I thought was a dried dead lizard egg in the desert and kept it in my room because I liked its soft blue color. After I’d had it for over four years, it hatched. I’d come into my bedroom that day just in time to see the tiny blue lizard glance at me and then leap from my open bedroom window. I ran over and looked down. There it was, scampering toward the desert.
“Focus, Binti,” Professor Okpala said. “All edan are different. Settle down. Climb a bit into the tree.” She touched her tablet and it glowed a deep transparent purple. I could see what she was writing through the clear tablet: ‘Binti: First attempt’.
I allowed myself to drop into the tree by grasping the Pythagorean theorem. I sighed, the world around me fragmenting and then both dimming the slightest bit and clarifying. I focused my attention on my edan. Somewhere in the distance my mind still quipped, But maybe it is alive. I pushed the distraction away.
“Good,” Professor Okpala said. “Now, I’m going to ask something of you.”
“Okay,” I said. She could ask me anything; I would know the answer.
“Home,” she said. The word hit me hard in the chest like a stone, but I didn’t feel it. “What do you miss about it?”
“The sand,” I said.
Professor Okpala typed something on her tablet as she looked at me with piercing eyes. “We have sand here.”
“It’s not the same. Different memory.”
“Hold your edan, call up a current… and tell me exactly what you mean by you ‘miss the sand’. Do that as you guide the current into the edan.”
I climbed a little higher into the tree as I thought about it. “In the evening, I would sit outside behind the Root, that’s my family’s home. I’d be wearing my long skirt over my legs, and I would plunge my hands into the sand. It was cool on the surface, but underneath was warm, like the body of a living thing. Inside, my mother would be in the kitchen cooking pumpkin soup and my father would be walking home from his shop because it was a windy evening and he loved the wind. My brother would be on the roof of the Root making sure the storm analyzer he’d built was secure and my little sister wouldn’t be home because she was out with her friends near the lake collecting matured clusterwink snails.”
The current I ran over my edan entered the grooves and crevices and I gasped. It was doing this without me guiding it. “My friends who were more obsessed with marriage than all other things,” I said. “My best friend Dele who always knew the town rules, my classmates laughing about how they didn’t understand any of the math problems. But I understood it all and I just… sometimes I felt lonely.” I don’t know when I did it, but I made the current thicker. Stronger. I stared at the blue current, my eyes unfocusing. I could feel the possibility and I went higher and deeper. I stopped talking at Professor Okpala. I went with it. It was like sliding down a sand dune.
“It… it wasn’t the day I left that I knew I was different. Not really. It was long before that. When I was seven years old. During school. Five, five, five, five. It was only me and I started going into the desert.”
I felt a sting in my chest as I caught my breath. That was the moment I jumped the rails. It didn’t matter that I was treeing. It didn’t matter that I was with my professor, who was watching me closely, typing all that she saw into her tablet. I was far from home. The only Himba on an entire planet. My hair was braided into the tessellating design of my family, and not one person on this planet would be able to decode, read and understand the great weight of its importance. What did I think I was doing?
I was alone. Lost in space. I was in a strange place. So I arrived right back at that moment. Heru’s chest. It was exploding. I was there. I grabbed my edan and held it to my chest, the blue purple current leaving the edan and rotating around my clenching hands now. It held my hand there, the muscles stiffening. I shut my eyes and I prayed to it, I am in your protection. Please protect me. I am in your protection. Please protect me.
The memory opened up and multiplied, a living fractal.
I opened my eyes to my professor. My nostrils flared and I smelled every scent around me—grass, flowers, and I smelled blood. The sky was red, my hands were red. Looking into the eyes of my professor, I opened my mouth wide and screamed so loudly that my throat stung. Professor Okpala jumped, but even this didn’t make her drop her tablet. With all my strength, I bashed the edan against the stone table. I bashed it again.
“Binti!” my professor shouted, horrified. “Stop it!”
Bash! I was still screaming. “Evil thing! I hate you! Die! Let me die!”