The Book of Phoenix (24 page)

They had this technology
for a long time. It is smaller than a shoebox and just as light as an empty one. The instructions are simple, too, the touch screen guides you in voice commands and with pictures. It is not made for scientists. It is truly a recorder. It is made to pull and store information, not to offer its services only to the elite educated. I cannot read very well, so this was good.

The memory extractor was in the remains of Tower 2. It was not a tower that we ever researched, so I do not know what they specialized in. Phoenix would have known. It was in the place that used to be Miami. I travelled there on foot, a year later, after I had decided to leave the dead lands of the United States and find my way back to Africa. I found it in the ruins by chance. If you believe in chance.

Do you wonder how I got there when there were no more airplanes and the only people alive were dying or living in seclusion, stunned that they had somehow survived what looked like the sun exploding. How did I get to Africa? I walked. The oceans had dried up.

I was fine. I was made to survive this, remember? I ate the sweetest sand I'd ever tasted as I crossed the grave that used to be the sea. I reached what used to be Senegal four months later. In that time, I didn't see a soul. Not one person, not one bird, not one insect, and certainly not one fish. Phoenix was serious. It was about halfway through that I sat down and brought the memory extractor from my backpack.

I let it pull Phoenix's memory from the one thing of hers that I still had. Her golden red feather. It still glowed softly in the dark. All I had to do was press the device to it. The red light on the screen went on, along with a word that I could not read. Then it grew warm and in a soft woman's voice said, “Extracting The Phoenix Okore, SpeciMen, Beacon, Slave, Rogue, Fugitive, Rebel, Saeed's Love, Mmuo's Sister, Villain.”

These were how she saw herself. Her various incarnations. All right there. How did this device know? Mmuo was always talking about this stuff in his skin called DNA. He said this stuff was what carried all that we would be. Did DNA carry memory, too? Was it reading her DNA? I don't know. I will never know.

The device beeped and then said, “Extract sent to database 80255.” It beeped. “Protocol 7 is now in place. Extract bypassed from 80255 to protocol 7,
The Great Book
. May God help your soul.”

I laughed. I could not listen to the extract because it had been sent somewhere else. I laughed again as I thought,
Maybe it was sent somewhere in Ghana.
They had contact there, who's to say they did not have some computers placed somewhere underground or even on a satellite? Just in case the world went to shit as it had, thanks to the woman I will love forever. And ever. Maybe they placed it there knowing that the shit would start elsewhere. Yes, this feels right. Regardless, Phoenix's words were out there somewhere. Alive.

I put the memory extractor to my flesh. The red light goes on. Words that I cannot read flash on the screen. It grows warm. Then the woman's voice said, “Extracting . . .”

Sunuteel was squinting.
Saeed's brief extract had been a footnote at the end of
The Book of Phoenix
. It was in Arabic, a language that was like a stripped down version of Sunuteel's native tongue, Nuru. Listening to it gave him a headache, but that wasn't what was making him squint. The sun was rising in the distance, chasing away the cool air. He'd been listening to Phoenix tell her story all night, finishing with the part where Saeed spoke. But listening all night wasn't what was making him squint either.

His head pounded, his jaw ached and there was a tinny sound deep in his head. He squinted more deeply, staring ahead. Beyond his stretched achy legs. Past his sand encrusted feet. Past where the red virtual words had flashed before his eyes, as Phoenix spoke the memories she'd have never spoken to anyone. Through the opening of the cave. And out into the desert. About thirty feet away.

“Ani protect me,” he whispered. “She is here.”

Not only could he feel her heat, he could smell smoke, though nothing burned. Not now. Not anymore. The burning was all done. Now she danced before him, a bird woman or orange red yellow light. Just like his wife's vision. Phoenix had appeared to his wife first, but Phoenix decided to give
him
her story. He was the chosen one. She had danced there throughout the reading of the last portion of her story—when she'd spoken of how she scorched the earth.

Sunuteel had wanted to look away. He'd wanted to clap his hands over his ears. Phoenix was tearing his world apart with her words. Everything he'd thought he knew was wrong. Ani had not pulled a star to the earth when the Okeke people, his people, had crossed the lines of morality. That story had been made up. Made up by this Phoenix.

Sunuteel whimpered. How could this be? So who were his people? The Okeke? According to Phoenix, the Okeke weren't only the people of the land, the dark-skinned wooly haired people on the sun. The Okeke were everyone, Nuru, Okeke, and even these whiter skinned limper haired people he'd never heard of. His people
weren't
born to suffer for the sins of those Okeke who came before him. Stories, all stories.

Saeed.

He bent his legs. Slowly. The joints popped, but he was quickly able to bring them to his chest. She was gone. She'd stayed to hear her story then she'd flown off to wherever spirits flew when they were no longer interested. He got up and walked outside, into a world that was no different to him. He was not cursed. He'd been raised to believe he
was
, that all his people were. He felt lightheaded. He felt light.

“Saeed,” he said aloud. “The Seed.”

He'd been taught by the very man who had loved the woman who ended the world as it was known. Women brought life but the most important origin stories spoke the real truth, which was that women more often brought death.
The Book of Phoenix
was full of this truth. If she had been a male, she'd have controlled her anger, channeled it into righting the world's wrongs, and probably not sprouted troublesome wings.
Woman
, Sunuteel thought, recalling a poem or a bit of literature he'd once heard and always thought described the other sex so well.
“This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility”.

This woman's story was real. It was close to Sunuteel in ways that astonished him. The existence of his teacher of English, The Seed, once known as Saeed, brought Phoenix's tale directly into his life. He frowned, unable to resolve this fact. Unable to reject it or find a way to smooth things over so that he was comfortable with the information and his world didn't feel so backward. A refreshing idea popped into his head.

He'd read it in reading class and even had a copy of the essay still on his portable. Yes. An essay from over a hundred years ago, translator and author unknown. He pulled it up on his portable and the passage in the second paragraph instantly caught his eye.

“As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

He chuckled to himself. The essay had originally been in a language that was now lost, and this was probably the cause of the convoluted nature of the writing. However, if he read it slowly, it made perfect sense. He'd been fascinated by the notion stated in the essay, all the students had. Considering the fact that almost all the authors of the few books and essays and other pieces of literature they had
were
dead, the concept allowed for a lot of understanding.

His teacher had proudly referred to the “Author is Dead” essay whenever anyone asked, “What was the author thinking when he wrote this?” Once the author wrote the story, the author became irrelevant. The author was dead. In
The Book of Phoenix
, this was certainly the case. Phoenix was dead. The story was alive, having separated from Phoenix as a child separated from her or his dying mother at birth. It was up to the reader to
interpret
what the story really was about. And in this case, the only reader was Sunuteel.

“Wife,” Sunuteel wrote in a message. “I'm coming home.”

He sent the message and then went back to his blanket near the cave entrance. He plopped down, with a bone weary sigh. He felt as if he'd travelled a thousand miles. In a way he had. His portable buzzed viciously and he froze. His portable always buzzed and announced the arrival of a message from his wife in a soft female voice that reminded him of his third daughter. However, this was just a buzz, and it was a sharp buzz that he'd never felt before. He nearly threw the portable. He looked at it, and then he did throw it. It landed noisily in the sand.

For the first time in his entire adult life, he was afraid of being alone in the desert. His hand screamed from the sudden heat his portable let out, and he felt the weight of his age and his lack of age simultaneously. He was old, and he was too young. He was vulnerable. He was alone. He rubbed his painful hands; even their toughness was no protection from the burn.

His portable had been hot to the touch and on the screen, flames of orange, yellow, black, and red churned and broiled. It was impossible for his portable to feel that hot and still work.

“Sunuteel!”

The harsh voice shot from his portable, vicious and sharp. But it sounded like the speaker was smiling. No one but his wife's voice had ever spoken through his portable. Not his children's, not his friend's. His portable was connected to only one network, his wife's. Yet, the voice of a dead woman was speaking to him through the device.

“Impossible,” he muttered. Tears ran down his cheeks and urine ran down his inner thighs.

“I know what you think,” she said. “You can rewrite a story, but once it is written, it lives. Think before you do; your story is written too and so is the map of the consequences. Ani will remember the path, even if it is full of loops and swirls. Think, old man.”

“You're just a memory,” he said. “You've been extracted. You're nothing now. Leave my portable. It is not yours.”

“Who is writing you?” she asked. But her voice was fading, just as Sunuteel imagined Mmuo's voice must have faded in Phoenix's head when her heat burned away his nanomites. Sunuteel blinked, frowning and knowing that all Phoenix spoke had happened. Every last word. And that scared him even more than the thought of her or her ghost or her memory speaking through his portable.

When his portable remained quiet for several minutes, only then did he move. He got up and went to his portable and looked down at it for a very long time. He'd need to use his capture station to pull down condensation from the sky so he could soak his hands. Capture station water was always cool, thankfully.

He nudged the portable with his sandal. He knelt down and poked it with his finger. It was cool, again. He left it there and went to soak his painful hands, wash his fouled legs and change his clothes. He returned an hour later, picked it up, and placed it back into his pocket. Portables were easy enough to find, but he and his wife couldn't afford another. Plus, he wanted this one. No matter how fearful he was about what it all was and meant, he wanted to be a part of this. To him, it was written.

 • • • 

Sunuteel returned to his wife a day and half later. When they could let go of each other, and his wife had stopped laughing and crying, and Sunuteel had finished the roasted goat meat and cactus candy his wife fed him, Sunuteel told her much. He spoke of the cave of computers, and her eyes grew wide as they always did when he told her something amazing. He spoke of the transmission, and she gasped and asked for every detail, even the
ping
sound it made on arrival. And he spoke of the grand audio file he found on his portable, and she grew very quiet, her eyes keen. But he did not tell her
The Book of Phoenix
.

“Give me thirty days then I will tell you the story.”

His wife looked him in the eye for several moments. Then she said, “Ok.” She had lived for decades as Sunuteel's wife. She trusted him. And so, at the next market they encountered, Sunuteel spent much of what they had on several reams of rough paper and ten black pens. Then they found a nice place in the desert where five palm trees grew and had survived several ungwa storms, and for thirty days, they did not go anywhere. And Sunuteel listened to the English and Arabic parts of
The Great Book
and transcribed it to paper. He took in the words and rewrote them. At first the going was slow, but as he fell into the rhythm of the story and the depth of the subject matter, he transcribed faster.

Phoenix had said that the goddess Ani had pulled a star to the earth after she saw what the Okeke were doing. All he had to think about was how the Okeke, his own people, had been so destructive centuries ago. This was not just false history, it was real. He knew this. He didn't care what Phoenix said. The Okeke
were
a cursed people.

And this was how the Great Book was rewritten as the story of The Okeke and Why They are Cursed. Sunuteel was old. Of all people, he knew that Phoenix's story was no longer relevant to the descendants of the survivors of her rage. The past was the past. Not once did he speak aloud the fact that Phoenix, dead or alive or neither, scared him to his very soul. He could not admit that he understood her to be like a god; that to evoke her image in story, over and over, to him, was to tempt fate. Now it was a time for stories that were truer than the truth, stories that spoke to the soul.

Sunuteel did not specifically set out to solidify the Okeke as slave and the Nuru as superior through powerful literature, but what is in one's heart comes out in one's stories. Even when he or she's retelling someone else's story. Sunuteel was old. He'd lived for a long time understanding his ancestors as slaves.

At the end of the thirty days, Sunuteel told his wife the story of
The Book of Phoenix
and then she read the version her husband had written. And his wife was pleased. “We should convert it to an audio file that we can copy onto people's portables. That way those who cannot read can listen and understand it well.”

And this was how
The Great Book
that went on to be the most read book in the last hundred years was born. Sunuteel's wife's deep rich voice lived far beyond the old woman's physical self. In this way, both Sunuteel and his wife became immortal. The Big Eye would have been mildly impressed.