Remote Control

^{CHAPTER 6} THE RED COUCH AND EYE PATCH

Sankofa lived this way for five years.

She pursued the seed around Northern rural Ghana, never telling anyone why she went where she went, moving about with earned and justified entitlement, listening for word of the seed in a box and allowing others to wrap her in the mythology of a spirit. People whispered things like, “She’s the adopted child of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.” There was truth in every single one of the stories.

Sankofa took shelter when she wanted shelter. She ate well because she demanded good food. And then, starting when she was about eleven years old, there were those who sought her out. There was the mother who came to Sankofa crying about her son who was in a vegetative state and had been on life support for eight years. There was the husband, daughter and mother of the woman suffering constant extreme pain from terminal stomach cancer. By this time, with effort, she could purposely call forth her light at very close proximity, enough to take a life. As long as everyone left the building. And in this way, Sankofa was able to give people what they needed and then moved on while they wept and pretended she wasn’t there.

Her story travelled like an ancestor, always ahead of, beside and behind her. She made no friends, except for Movenpick the fox who continued to follow her at a distance.… and Selah the white tailless fastidious stray cat who travelled with her for three of those five years.

One terrible night, three men attacked Sankofa and Selah the cat as they slept in an empty market. They’d killed Selah, a man crushing the cat’s head beneath a boot, kicked Movenpick when the normally evasive fox tried to intervene, and then Sankofa had killed them all. Afterwards, Sankofa stared at the bones of the dead men left behind, three jawbones and two long bones that could have been from arms or legs. Then she looked at Movenpick, who stood feet away, bruised but alive, despite the fact that Sankofa’s light had washed over the creature like toxic water. She buried her beloved cat and continued on.

Sankofa survived. A seven-year-old on the road alone, then an eight-year-old, then nine, ten, eleven. By the time she was twelve, most knew not to attack her and they gave her what she wanted and needed, instead. However, she spoke to no one about what drove her. What she was searching for. Who would understand? Who would care? She pursued the seed, which she eventually learned meant pursuing the man with the one eye across northwestern Ghana. The man who’d gone into her bedroom, taken the seed and then given it to the politician. The man who’d then stolen it from him, along with his money and golden shoes.

She was always ten steps behind the one-eyed man, as a girl on foot could only be when chasing someone moving around in a car or truck. She followed what it was that she saw behind her eyes when she closed them. The tiny green oblong moon that she could almost touch, so sure she was of its whereabouts. The problem was that it kept moving. The one-eyed man didn’t rest anywhere long enough for her to catch up and so neither did the seed.

Sankofa followed it this way and that. Arriving in the exact spot where the seed had been in a car, in a suitcase, in a pocket, in a backpack, days or even weeks prior. Then she would be off again. On foot. For five years, she persisted with this slow pursuit. Striking fear, awe and stories into hearts, getting those items she believed she was owed, and mercifully taking lives from those who requested it along the way. Until the day in Tepa.

Malaria. Some part of Sankofa that she’d locked tightly away remembered it well. She knew it slowed a person down enough for anything one was running from to catch up. As she walked, she smacked her lips, but the dry taste still remained in her mouth. She frowned and flared her nostrils. For so many years.

She held her light in as she walked through the town. Today she wore a blue and white wrapper and top, the colors of water. She wore the big gold hoop earrings that had been her mother’s and she now thought of as hers, despite the fact that she was still years too young to wear such earrings. She’d recently moisturized her skin with shea butter. Today would be a day of cleansing. She arrived at his home at sunset. It was a nice beige house with two Mercedes parked in front. Sankofa touched both of them as she made her way to the front door. She stepped up to the door and hadn’t stood there for even ten seconds before it opened.

He had a red patch over his eye, he had a large gold watch weighing down his wrist, a thick gold chain around his neck, he wore a bloodred dress shirt and those stylish jeans that spoke more of wealth than actual fashion sense in Sankofa’s opinion. “You, again. Come in,” he said, stepping back and taking a sip of the brown liquid in the glass he carried. In his other hand he carried a burning cigarette.

Sankofa stared at him for a moment. After all these years, finally. She’d caught him. But is he dying? she wondered. The armpits of his dress shirt were damp with sweat. His face was shiny with more sweat. He leaned on the door as if he would collapse if he let go. His teeth were yellow. She stepped inside. “What is wrong with you?” she asked, following him down the hallway.

“As if you don’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “The Adopted Daughter of Death comes and asks what is trying to kill me. Oh the irony.”

They entered a living room where there were a red couch and two red armchairs equally as red as the sweaty shirt he wore. He coughed and plopped onto the couch. The carpet probably used to be white, but it was now an uneven beige. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said. “One of my women lives here and takes care of it, but I come here when I am tired.” He shut his eyes and moaned. “I’m so tired.”

Sankofa glanced around the place and then sat in one of the armchairs and looked hard at him.

“No one is here,” he said, his eyes still closed, rubbing his hands down his face. “I sent my girl away two hours ago, told the houseboy not to come in today.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew The Adopted Daughter of Death was coming to collect her debt. Why not just let me die of bad bad malaria, eh? Why come here with your nonsense trouble? Following and following slow slow, just leave a man to rest.”

“You have something of mine,” she said.

“So you make me sick to slow me down?”

“I don’t make people sick.”

“No, you just kill them.”

“I only take life when people ask me to, when people are sick and in too much pain to live. The word is euthanasia… or when people threaten my life.”

“Death’s daughter, so merciful. Is that normal to you, though? Were you always like this? Poisoning people with some sort of body radiation that comes from your ovaries or whatever… it has to be a female thing, this type of witchcraft thing. Nothing else is believable.” He seemed to be growing more and more delirious as he spoke. “It’s evil, satanic, rain fire upon you in Jesus’ name!”

“Why did you have to steal it?!” she shouted.

“Why not?” he said with a laugh. “Parliament Member Kusi was a fraud. He had me stealing it from you to give to LifeGen, that fucking big American corporation that’s probably going to eventually destroy the world. Who knows what this seed thing is or does… the world should thank me.”

Sankofa had heard of LifeGen in passing. In some of the hospitals where she’d taken lives. In the cancer wards. LifeGen made a lot of the drugs patients took. The LifeGen symbol was a hand grasping lightning. But clearly, their drugs didn’t work very well. And clearly, pharmaceuticals weren’t their only focus. “Where is it?” she asked.

“Not here!” he screamed. The action seemed to drain the rest of his energy. Sankofa groaned and let her head fall into her hands. She felt it now. She knew. Why hadn’t she known before? It wasn’t here. It was close but it wasn’t here. “I’ve wanted to get rid of it since the day I stole it. What did I need with some artifact when I had bank cards full of millions in stolen money? You know I got half of that money out of those accounts before he was able to shut down the account within the hour. That’s why I was on the run.” He cocked his head and twisted onto his back. “But that damn seed thing… it had a pull. Couldn’t sell it, throw it away, couldn’t even leave it behind. Damned thing.”

“Then why’d you just get rid of it?”

“I didn’t! I lost it after I got sick and came here. It’s been days.” He suddenly sat up and pointed at her. “Now you show up here, instead of leaving me alone and following it. Evil evil goddamn thing.”

Sankofa stood up. He pointed a gun at her. It must have been in the couch. He’d truly been waiting for her. “I was just leaving,” she said.

“No. I’ll never rest until I know you are dead,” he said. “Five years of looking over my shoulder for a devil child. No more. I will get over this damn malaria, but I’m not going to go back to fearing you.” He blinked, his hand shaking.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. But the man with one eye was stupid. Tired, sick and stupid. He stood up, still pointing the gun at her as he swayed.

“FIVE YEARS!” he screamed. “Fear, nightmares, anxiety! My woman left me, I have no friends, I couldn’t come home! I wish I’d never set foot in your dirt patch of a village, never laid eyes on you and your family! Why couldn’t you just die, too!?”

Sankofa could have talked him into putting the gun down. He was practically delirious with malaria fever and she certainly knew how that was. Nevertheless, she was glowing and he was falling before he even pulled the trigger. She let the full range of her light fill the room. Anything that was alive would be dead, except Movenpick who stood outside, waiting.

She hadn’t realized the depth of her fury until he had answered the door. Her heartrate had not increased, she had not begun to sweat or even think violent thoughts. But the moment she stepped into the house, she knew one thing for sure: She was going to take this man’s life. This man had looked up at her in that tree, scoffed at her and gone inside and taken what was hers, leading to the death of everything for her and this life of wandering and wandering, her parents dead. Her brother dead. Her entire town dead. She unleashed it and he burned. Skin, fat, muscle, blood, bile, lymph, finally bone. Nothing but a rib was left when she pulled her light back in.

As the mysterious wind blew his ashes around the living room, the rib tumbled to her feet like an offering. She stared at it. Then she sat on his couch. The rib was clean of meat, a dull yellow, old already. Never had she killed a man out of rage. She got up. She sat down. She stared at the rib. She got up. She left.

Sankofa sniveled, walking past the man’s two dead vehicles, her chin pressed to her chest. Movenpick joined her, trotting at her heels, knowing to stay out of her line of vision but in her line of thought. An invisible comfort as always. She was glad. As she walked up the paved road, she shut her eyes and searched, feeling and seeing the green light beneath her eyelids. There. Her seed in the box wasn’t far. It was so close that it seemed to toy with her to come, come, COME. It might have been in one of this town’s local markets. Maybe being sold as some juju object or piece of junk. With the one-eyed man who’d kept it for years dead, who would know or care what it was but her?

However, Sankofa decided not to follow the internal radar that had been guiding her for years. She walked in the exact opposite direction. And that direction led her to a road and she walked down that road. She walked for days.

“Let it rot in hell,” she muttered to herself over those days like a mantra. “Evil thing will not take me with it.”