Remote Control

^{CHAPTER 5} THE ROAD

“Inshallah,” she said to herself, over and over as she walked along the main road.

The same road where she’d been hit. The bodies, including her brother’s, were still there. However, there was not a bit of traffic on the usually busy street. She ran alongside the road, not daring to look toward her brother’s corpse. Not daring to look at any of the faces. The swarms of flies were so thick that she wouldn’t have seen much if she’d looked, anyway.

Up the road, she passed three cars that had rolled into the bushes. Each was a nest of flies and rotting corpses. Other than these, there were no other vehicles. Eventually, after she’d walked for a half hour, she came to a roadblock in the distance. There were at least three soldiers in forest green fatigues standing at it. She hid in the grasses on the roadside and crept closer.

They stood in front of two thick slabs of yellow-striped concrete dragged into the road. Their military vehicles were parked on the side. And there was a white man with them who was wearing all black with a badge on the right side of his chest she couldn’t quite see, like a secret police officer in one of the Hollywood movies. The white man’s uniform was long-sleeved and it was hot and humid, but he seemed comfortable. She stepped into the shadow of the trees and grasses and snuck by. She was a small girl who’d spent all her life climbing the family shea tree. So she was fast, silent and comfortable amongst plant-life. Plus, they probably didn’t expect to see any survivors, especially a little girl.

Once past the roadblock, she made a turn onto another road and she walked for two hours. And by the evening, the world opened up to her. She was outside Wulugu, in the town of Nabori. People. Homes. Markets. Cars and trucks. She spent that first night, however, in a cluster of trees beside the busy road. Exhausted, she fell into a deep sleep almost the moment she rested her head against the tree. The loud gasp of someone feet away woke her. “Ghost! Spirit!” a man whispered. He turned and stumbled off.

She froze, listening with every part of her body because it was too dark to see him clearly. He was moving away. Nearly gone. She breathed a sigh of relief, her whole body shaking with the rush of adrenaline. She was many yards into the small forest beside the road. How did he see me? she wondered. Then she realized it. She was glowing, faintly green-yellow, but just enough to look like a forest spirit in the darkness. She couldn’t see very well around her, but she was sure she was surrounded by dead mosquitoes and other biting insects. Maybe this was why she was glowing, because her body was being assaulted by their bites and it was protecting itself. She quickly rubbed fresh shea butter on her arms, legs and torso and grabbed her things.

Just after sunrise, as she walked alongside the road, a man driving a truck stopped beside her. She kept walking, pretending she did not see him. She was holding the wooden body of her broken Sankofa bird and she squeezed it, praying the man would just go away.

“Do you need a ride?” he asked.

Sankofa pressed her chin to her chest and kept walking.

“Hello?” the man said from his truck. “I am safe. I have three daughters about your age. It’s not right for you to be walking here.”

She kept walking, but he didn’t go away. “I will call the police,” he said, holding up his mobile phone.

“No!” she said, looking up. “No police, sir.”

“Then where are you going?” he asked, grinning. He wore a long white kaftan and there were prayer beads hanging from his rearview mirror. “What’s your name?”

She looked at her feet and shook her head. She muttered the first name to come to mind. “My name’s… Sankofa. I’m going to the… next town.” Please don’t ask me the name of it, she frantically thought.

“Get in. I will drive you,” he said. “I know a woman there who can offer you a bed to sleep in for however long you need. I’ll even program my truck in front of you and have it drive itself, so you know exactly where I’m taking you.”

She hesitated. The name “Sankofa” was echoing in her mind, filling empty confused crevices. She liked it. She put her brother’s broken bird into her pocket and stepped toward his truck. She didn’t trust the man, but she didn’t want him to call the police, either. The thought of her dead parents, dead brother, dead town pulled at her. Maybe she did want him to call the police… so they could arrest and punish her for what she’d done. But she also wanted to flee, to escape, to keep going so she could right all the wrongs by finding the box. Yes, she thought, if she found the box maybe everyone would… wake up. “Ok,” she said. “Just into town, though.”

However, the moment Sankofa touched the truck’s door, something happened. She felt nothing. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. The truck just stopped working. One moment its idling engine was chugging away, the next, it was not. There was no sigh, as it stopped. No exhalation of exhaust or steam. No electric spark. The truck simply was no longer running. There were no vehicles passing on the road at that moment, so the silence was profound.

“What did you do?” the man asked.

She stepped back as he climbed in and tried to start his truck. Nothing happened. Not even a vehicular gasp. The truck was simply dead.

“What’d you do?” he shouted again, as he turned the key and nothing happened. “Are you some kind of witch?” He tried again. Nothing.

“I didn’t do anything,” she said, stepping away.

The rest happened fast. She sensed the change in the man, from kind and helpful to furious. Swift like the weather. She turned and ran. She was fast, but this man was faster and she didn’t get far before he’d grabbed her satchel. He yanked at it and she fell to the ground. “What did you do to my truck?” he shouted. “I was only trying to help you! My truck is my livelihood!” He slapped her hard across the face, his eyes wide and red.

The hot, raw sting registered in her brain and her body flooded with terror and panic. She stumbled backwards, holding her face. She remembered sneaking across the grass, as she stared at the roadblock. Leaving Wulugu. Seeing her mother’s fly-riddled body. Her dead brother who’d just been alive beside her on the road. Then she was thrust forward and she glimpsed death, destruction, heat, violence and more terror. Then she was back staring into the bewildered eyes of a man who was about to slap her again.

The green light that burst from her was wilder and denser than what had happened in Wulugu, but it didn’t travel beyond the man and his truck. She glanced at this for only a moment, then she pressed herself to the ground. The second blow from the man didn’t come. There was no sound and only moments passed. She heard a vehicle zoom by on the road. When the vehicle didn’t stop, she opened her eyes. She was in the shade of the dead truck, her satchel still on her shoulder. When she looked at where the man had been, all that was left was what might have been a jawbone. The top or bottom, she did not know. But it still carried all the teeth. She screeched and got to her feet. Sankofa ran.

She never made it to the nearest town, whatever it was called. Instead, before her feet took her there, she turned and walked into the bush. She stopped walking when it was nearly too dark to see. She cleared a spot in front of a tree and used some large old palm fronds to make a dry place. Then she curled up on them and fell right into a deep dreamless sleep.

When she woke the next morning, she remembered what happened and she started crying before she even opened her eyes. And when she finally did open them, they were gummy with dried tears and dirt. Eventually, she stopped crying and hunger pushed away her grief. After a search amongst the peaceful trees and bushes, she located a mango tree heavy with ripe fruit and a small secluded stream; her food and water concerns were solved.

As she bathed in the stream, she looked up and there was the fox who’d been skulking around her town. “You’re alive, too!” she’d whispered happily. It stood on the other side of the stream staring at her, water dripping from its narrow muzzle. Then it trotted from the shallows into the bushes, disappearing into the shadows with a swish of its luxuriant red-orange tail. Even after it was gone, the forest felt that much friendlier and welcoming. Sankofa stayed in that forest for a week.

She spent most of her days rereading and rereading her mythology book and watching for the fox, whom she’d spotted another two times. Once, at dusk while she’d prepared her spot for sleep, she saw it peeking at her from behind a nearby tree. The second time was on her last night in the forest. At the time, she was sure she’d live in that forest forever, despite the fact that eating a diet of mangos, bananas and water grass gave her horrible diarrhea that kept her near the stream washing and washing after each bout.

She’d been so happy in that forest, away from everyone, not having to speak, being unseen, living in the moment and turning her back on the past. However, all of that day, the protective wall of denial she’d managed to put up had been gradually crumbling. She’d heard an especially loud truck pass on the nearby road and she started thinking about the man she’d killed. The man who’d slapped her and had been preparing to slap her again. He’d been a kind Muslim on his way to work and her presence had somehow changed him into a raging beast.

Soon she was constantly thinking of her family, her town, her home, all dead. She started to glow that night. And in the brightness of her heated body, she saw the fox looking at her, feet away. She was resting on the tree against which she liked to sleep. Her head on the tree’s rough trunk, her mind unsettled.

“Hello,” she said to it. The fox didn’t move, though its pointy ears pricked and turned toward her. “You should have a name.” She thought for a moment and smiled as the name bubbled up from her anxious memory. “Movenpick,” she said. She’d seen a commercial for the Accra hotel on the news feeds and she’d always liked the sound of the word. “Movenpick,” she said again. “That’s your name.” The fox licked its chops and looked around with its large gold-red eyes. “Do you want the box back, too? If I find it, will you then steal it from me?” she laughed, tired, a drop of sweat tumbling into her eye. “Will you eat it? Swallow it whole? I’ll get the box back, if you come with me.”

The fox turned and trotted off and Sankofa’s smile dropped from her face. She crawled to her bedding, slathered fresh shea butter on her skin, and lay on it. It was another hour before she fell asleep and when she did, she dreamed about her mean old auntie Nana.

Her mean old auntie Nana had been educated in the West, made lots of money there and rarely visited Sankofa’s father, her younger brother. However, when she did, she liked to sit in the main room with a steaming cup of coffee in the morning and talk at Sankofa and her brother about mean things in a mean way. In Sankofa’s dream, it was one of those times, except her brother was not there, nor were her parents, and the main room was empty. Her old mean auntie Nana sipped from her large cup of boiling coffee and glared at Sankofa. “What kind of human being lives in the bush like an animal?” she asked in her nasally American English. “Stinking of shea butter over dirty skin.”

Sankofa’s voice was small. “Here I won’t hurt anyone like I hurt Mommy and Daddy and Fenuku,” she responded.

Then her old mean auntie Nana said what she’d said to Sankofa’s father many times. “If I thought like that, I’d have never gone on to earn my PhD and become a physicist. I’d have been one of the sad bush women here, shackled to a husband and children.” She slurped her coffee loudly. “If you hide forever, you’ll never find anything. And there is one thing you know you want to find. Go and find it, stupid nonsense child.”

When Sankofa awoke, her body was cool. And instead of fear of her mean old auntie Nana, she drew strength from the woman. She rubbed her eyes, got up and looked down at her dirty purple dress. Then she went to the stream and washed it as much as she could, laid it out to dry and then went back in to wash herself. She ran her hand over her bald head and told herself, I will steal a wig that fits. And some part of her was sure her old mean auntie Nana would approve and this made her feel stronger.

And so, while rubbing her bald head with shea butter, she tried. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath and reached out. The seed in the box had been long gone for two years, sold and then stolen and then who knew what, but it knew her and she knew it. She was sure. She gasped. It was like a point of green light in a dark familiar space. She couldn’t see where it was, but she knew. She could find it. It’s far, but it’s not that far, she thought to herself. A few towns away. Somewhere cool, dry, dark. Inside something?

Sankofa opened her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. Then she had another thought, though she wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it. I will stand up straight. And in that stream, all alone and naked, with no family or loved ones, Sankofa stood up straighter.

Over the weeks, Sankofa learned that she couldn’t drive in vehicles or touch digital windows or mobile phones, she couldn’t even touch jelli tellis because something about her killed technology. She was young and alone, yet she was dangerous. It was mere nights after leaving the forest that she had to kill another man who first tried to take her satchel of things and then tried to drag her into an alley. Some people may have seen it happen because the next day, strangers started giving her things. Some gave her money and asked her to pray for their loved ones. Some of the market women gave her food (boiled eggs, sacks of plantain chips, groundnuts) if she promised to “keep death away.” Most people simply avoided her. Word about Sankofa traveled fast, though it was never connected to Wulugu.

And she also learned that the seed kept moving, always one or two steps ahead of her. She arrived in the market where it had been kept in a refrigerated truck full of vegetables and meat for days before the truck left. “How did you know they parked and did their business right in this spot?” the old man who brought her here had asked.

“The seller’s auntie told me,” Sankofa lied, smiling to hold back her frustration. She’d have been here sooner if it weren’t for the torrential rains that had turned the roads into shallow rivers of mud. Then she’d been a day late finding whoever had it again two towns away. Then a week later, learning that whoever had it took it towns away. And so on. She tracked it and followed, tracked it and followed. It was almost as if the seed had a will of its own and was playing with her. But she refused to believe it could be so malicious. One day, she would catch it.

In media outlets, word about the town of Wulugu did spread quickly, though. The government speculated that some sort of disease had wiped out the entire population. There was talk of a new virus and fear of this resulting in a pandemic faster and more lethal than the one in 2020. However, those news stories and their curious journalists were quickly silenced. There were stranger speculations, but those did not leave conference rooms. Wulugu was discreetly quarantined, and systematically forgotten. To make things more mysterious, Wulugu disappeared from GPS systems. This made things easier for the already perplexed Ghanaian government, and officials looked the other way. No investigations into what happened were ever done. That’s all the peoples of Ghana could do.

Sankofa sometimes wished that people knew she was a Wulugu survivor, but she didn’t want the questions. Safer for people to focus their stories on just her. In this way, she was free to continue her search for the seed. And because people gave Sankofa power, she started to believe she was powerful. When she left home, she was seven years old. A baby. So this was even truer for her. She walked straight and made demands in the way she’d seen her mother do at the market. She raised her small voice, she flared her small nostrils, she scowled, she asked for the best of all things. And whenever people gave her trouble, she gave them her light. She couldn’t make it happen on purpose, not yet. But when she needed it, it was always there. And so she searched, following the seed as best she could. As the years passed, her feelings and suspicions about the seed darkened, too. If it was hers, why did it keep moving? Just far enough to be infuriating, never close enough to touch.

Sankofa always smelled of shea butter, a smell that reminded her of home. It was easy to find in markets and the women selling it gave it to her for free. She carried a jar of it at all times and rubbed it into her skin whenever she felt the need, which was often. Her light dried out her skin when she flared and the shea butter kept her skin supple and smooth. However, her mind was often clouded and those parts that were clear were populated with dark corners.