If the girl sitting across from me had my powers, she’d do what I do every day: be invisible. But she doesn’t, and she compensates for it by sinking lower into her seat. Her wings stretch around her to form a dome that shields her face from view. She’s trying to avoid the attention from the kids at the table behind her.
Their leader, Grace – detained here because she kept teleporting people she didn’t like to the Sahara Desert – had commanded one of the assistabots to play the “Egnevaing Angle” video. The bot had complied, hovering above their heads so those at the table and whoever was curious enough to look over could see.
I turn away from the hologram being projected by the bot and begin to cut my akara into precise shapes. I’ve seen the video before, and although I do feel bad, it is impossible to watch with a straight face.
It starts with the winged girl in a bus-stop, waiting for a hanfo. She’s wingless and scratching furiously at her back. Working herself into a frenzy, oblivious to the crowd she’s beginning to draw. Her hand slips into her uniform. She pulls out a feather. The camera captures her expression of dismay as she looks at the feather, mouthing one word repeatedly, “No.”
There’s a snapping sound and she doubles over, body juddering. She mewls loudly. Two humps start to grow out of her back.
“Someone help her!” a voice says.
The person recording abruptly turns to a woman as she pulls out from the crowd. There are wrinkles between her brows and at the sides of her mouth, which tighten as she approaches the girl. When they’re close enough to touch, the woman pauses in her advance, wheezing. It’s hard not to notice the white in her afro or the way she appears drawn into herself, shoulders close to her body.
Under the attention of the RERD chip/contacts – you never know with these things – her wrinkles seem like something carved into her face.
The woman looks to be in her mid-twenties – young enough to be part of the Second Generation consisting of preteens and young adults like me. The Geanomic-2: progenies of the children who survived the effects of the Green Harmattan forty-three years ago, mutations that reengineered the genes of foetuses three-months old and below. The alterations for the rest of the country – adults, mostly – hadn’t been as kind.
Despite how young she looks, the woman carries herself as if she were older, like the years were a burden, one for the stoop in her shoulders, a few more for the wrinkles on her face, the rest trailing behind her like a tail humans haven’t had the need for in a few thousand years.
“No touch am o!” someone in the crowd shouts. “I hear of one woman wey when her pikin dey change, she do mistake touch the boy, na so serious electric just shock am. Na laik dat she take die.”
The air ripples with murmurs from the crowd. Someone spits out the word “demonic.” The woman’s spine straightens and she takes a step forward, reaching out a hand to an exposed skin on the girl’s leg. She takes a deep breath. Her eyes turn a bright yellow. The girl’s shuddering stops, the tension in her body dissipating. The woman whimpers, and as if run through by a hand covered in ash, her hair turns gray and then back to brown, the white in it more plenty than before.
It’s baffling why anyone would find this funny, I know, but as soon as the girl stops shaking, great wings burst from her back in a bloom of black feathers, rending her shirt. They’re not bloody, but there’s a slimy sheen to them.
The girl slinks away from the lady, who has ducked to avoid the onslaught of feathers. Her wings flutter, perhaps trying to shake off the greasy coating or responding to her unease, it’s hard to tell. They spread out from her back, and people stoop or move away to avoid them. She looks over her shoulder and gasps, her lips moving with the familiar refrain, “No!”
Her hands reach behind her as if to pull the wings from their stumps. The wings give one great beat and as quick as a shot, the girl is up in the air, screaming her head off.
Her refrain changes to something else: “Jesus! Jesus!”
Her wings stretch beyond her arms, taking her higher. She knocks askew a surveillance drone whose beacon has begun to flash red for the unfolding disturbance. She loops over a train overpass, and in a breathtaking moment, with the sun as a backdrop, she looks like the representation of an avenging angel – even if this one was awkward and screaming like her head was on fire.
When she flies past a com tower, her hands clamp onto the bars for dear life as her wings beat, pulling her in the other direction. However, she hangs onto it like a long-lost friend.
“Mummie o,” she screams. “Mummie o.”
It takes four flight-aptitude authorities – one of them a geanom with dragonfly wings – to get her to come down. And even then, she refuses to fly herself down. They give her a numbing shot and one of them carries her down instead. I would have thought the story would end well for all the parties involved but she’s here, at geanomic rehab, which means there’s either something wrong with her powers or something goes wrong when she uses her powers.
I study her openly – one of the good things about being invisible. Her wings are no longer shielding her face but she has created a pile of feathers on the table from pulling them out. Maybe that’s why she’s here, because she has geanomic trichotillomania.
She pauses in her feather-pulling and cocks her head in my direction, her gaze narrowing. I don’t look away. Some geanoms can sense me, but I’ve never met one who can see me.
She’s tall, lanky even. It appears that her body is covered in scales – reticula – making it a glossy brown. They’re only obvious when the light hits her skin a certain way, but I’m not surprised. Her geanomaly appears to be of the animalia kind.
Laughter comes from the other table. Someone has replayed the video, and it has gotten the attention of a handful of people in the lunchroom. The girl winces. A few of her feathers flail. She resumes plucking them out, one at a time, faster than before. I wonder if they hurt like it does when you pull a hair strand from your body. Her face gives no indication to support my theory.
I dip my akara in my custard and take a bite. The people on our table don’t bat a lid at the spectacle I create. My not being present but still affecting things around me is nothing compared to Adeyemi, who refuses to sleep because he always wakes up in someone else’s body, or Ibrahim, whose susceptibility to misfortune is higher than average and can be transferred to anyone he touches. He wears a hazmat suit with an automatic call button in case he starts to asphyxiate in it like he did yesterday.
There’s Cee, who affects reality any time they say the words “I wish,” and who was remanded here because they tried to make a potato the Nigerian president. They had been caught because there are people who watch for these things, especially when someone with a similar ability had tried to remake the world in her own image.
We work with parapsychologists to “achieve a balance between our abilities and our places as human beings.” For some people like Ibrahim, parapsychologists clear them for power dampening chips or even a cure. Adeyemi signed the consent forms for his chip a week ago, and Ibrahim is awaiting feedback for a customised cure, engineered with his geanomaly in mind.
I’m actually fine with being invisible. But my psychologist told my parents I’m using my powers to deal with past trauma. With only a few minutes needed each day to recharge and reacclimatise my atoms with this reality, I’ve been invisible for eighteen months.
The girl’s screaming of “Jesus” gets a bigger reaction from her audience the second time around. There’s raucous laughter and she grabs a handful of her feathers and pulls. This time, pain flashes on her face and before I know what I’m doing, I’m reaching for her hand.
“Stop,” I say. She looks at where my hand should be and rips out another feather. “Stop it!” I hiss. I let the hand atop hers appear – gloved. It gets cold the longer I stay invisible.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” I ask.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” she echoes.
“What?”
“Doesn’t it hurt, being invisible?”
I contemplate my answer. “As long as I don’t stay invisible for more than thirteen hours at a time, I’m usually fine.”
“What are you hiding from?” she asks.
“Why are you plucking your feathers?” I shoot back.
She smiles. “I hate them. I hate the attention,” she pauses. “You hate the attention too. Maybe not the kind of attention I get, but it’s definitely why you’re hiding.”
“Small-small sha. If you add trauma in there somewhere, you just might sound like my therapist.”
She laughs. “I’m Isoken, by the way,” I say.
“Chinwe,” she replies, and stops pulling out her feathers long enough to give me a smile.
Because she can’t see the smile I offer her in return, I give the hand still atop hers a squeeze before withdrawing it. I’m about to have it disappear again, when I notice her watching it, hand trailing over her wings, but not doing any ripping. I let the hand remain visible. I give her a thumbs up.
Her smile widens, and until an orderly takes her away, her wings don’t lose any more feathers.
*
The therapy room is my least favourite place in geanomic rehab. It’s an average-sized room that the facilitating therapist makes even smaller by having us sit in a close circle. There are no windows, and the bio-flo lights are turned on low.
They used to play “soothing” music until a technopath took out the speakers and the facility’s power grid because he heard wraiths speaking to him through the song.
“Isoken, would you like to be present with us today?” the facilitator asks me.
I shrug and give her my usual response. “I’m present enough.”
Someone snorts, but I refuse to pay her any attention. The therapist continues staring at me. An empty chair in a circle of six people makes me very conspicuous. She’s trying to pinpoint my face, my eyes probably, with her pensive stare, but she’s going to have to go a little lower than that. She looks at the tablet in her hands and I know she’s cognitively writing notes about me.
Someone stumbles in and we turn.
“Chinwe,” the therapist says. “Nice of you to join us. How about you grab a chair and join the circle?”
“Or she could sit here?” Grace points to the chair a seat away from her. The chair I’m on. “There’s no one there,” she says innocently.
The therapist gives her a disapproving look. “Grace, you know Isoken is in that seat.”
“She’s not o. She just left. I sensed her leaving.”
Uncertainty smoothens away the disapproving line of the therapist’s mouth, and before she can ask, I say in a jaded tone, “I’m still here.”
Grace does this every time. She pretends I’m not there because I’m invisible and then tries to trick others into doing the same. It’s a tiring joke. Even if I don’t want to be seen, I refuse to be ignored – a conundrum, I know. I may not look like the Isoken from eighteen months ago, but I still sound like her – something I hope never changes.
Chinwe looks from Grace to the therapist and then to the chair I’m in. I want to wave, but what good is that? She walks over to the side of the room, takes out a chair from a stack and carries it to the circle. The action takes longer than it should because her wings keep trying to lift her off the floor while she insists on doing the opposite.
The six of us watch the scene. Adeyemi has pity turned up to the highest. Cee’s expression best matches what I’m feeling – a little pity, a little confusion and a lot of curiosity. The girl sitting between Grace and I is cringing and clutching her hijab, feet bouncing. A few weeks ago, she had been a blur, stuck in a loop from constant alterations of her time stream, trying to redo conversations, events and anything at all that fell short of what she held as ideal.
She looks like she’d really like to give Chinwe a do-over or even a bump in time in order to avoid the scene playing out in front of her. Chinwe’s wings get the upper hand, dragging her a few steps backward. Grace snickers and I swallow the urge to lean over and just wrap my hands around her neck for a few minutes.
“Chinwe,” the therapist calls, her expression kind, “how about you try not to fight it?”
Although Chinwe looks like she’d rather do the opposite, she gives it a go, letting her wings take the lead. They stretch, but not to their full length and give a small flutter, lifting her an inch or two off the floor. Chinwe’s visage is grim, her approach unsteady, but she covers the short distance with no problem and shoves her chair between Cee and me.
Cee gives her a smile and I adjust my seat to make room for her.
“See?” the therapist says, eyes glowing with triumph. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Good job, Chinwe.”
Adjusting to get into a comfortable position with her wings tucked behind her chair, Chinwe gives the therapist a dubious look, but she’s writing more notes into her tablet. I use the distraction to whisper, “Give her a big smile. She might give you a gold star.”
“Really?”
“You get a gold star, you get a gold star. Gold stars for everybody.”
Chinwe laughs. Her eyes travel lower. “Where is your hand? You showed it the last time.”
“Ah.” I fidget. “I don’t usually let other people see me. I’m invisible most of the time.”
“Why?”
This is the second time she’s asking this question, but the directness of this attempt throws me off so that I’m stunned for a few seconds. My personal therapist tries to prod the answer out of me by asking subtle questions that get me to talk and perhaps put things into perspective. He doesn’t push, but Chinwe’s question jolts, requiring me to think about the reason I keep hiding and I don’t like it.
“Maybe if you share why you’re so afraid of using your powers, I just might tell you why I choose to remain unseen,” I bite out. When I turn away from her, I find the therapist watching me with that pensive expression. This time, she manages to catch my eye, and my anger flares, prickling my skin through the coldness that comes with being invisible.
I force myself to relax. She can’t see me. I’m safe here. My voice is still Isoken’s. The therapist finally looks away.
“Chinwe,” she begins. “I heard about your episode in the dining area. Would you like to talk about it?”
Chinwe shifts in her seat. Her eyes leap to me and then back to the therapist. “I hate these things,” she says gesturing to her wings. “I don’t want them.”
The therapist sports a thoughtful expression. She writes in her tablet. “And why is that?”
“Do you know who my mother is?”
“I know of her. But no one would know her better than you, so why don’t you tell us?”
“I’m different.”
The therapist nods. “Yes, I know. These abilities—”
“Not that kind of different.” Chinwe shakes her head. “I’m erm… I’m different, sexuality-wise.”
Grace snorts. The therapist gives her a quelling look while I debate how to get away with strangling her in the presence of six witnesses.
Chinwe doesn’t let that stop her. “They say the Green Harmattan killed one-fourth of Nigerians, right? One-fourth of four hundred million people gone, just like that. My mother’s family, most of them died. Only her twin sister – they’re fraternal twins – got powers, but it didn’t end up well for her either. So my mother bought into the idea of the apocalypse, the end-time mania. My uncle says it’s her way of getting closure. But her way of getting closure is erm… very…”
“Fundamentalist,” I offer.
She nods. “Yes, that word. She was very dedicated to the cause. It didn’t take long for her to be made a reverend and then she married the founder of the church. After his death, she became the new GO. They had me some time before he died.”
A chair scrapes, Halima, the hijabi girl changing positions. Adeyemi rubs at his neck. Grace lets out a loud yawn and Cee shoots her a glare that suggests they’re seriously considering altering her reality.
“My mom knows I…” She flails her hands. “That I am—”
“A homosexual,” Grace deadpans.
“Grace.” The therapist’s voice carries a warning.
“What? She didn’t want to say it. I was just helping her out.”
“Dem send you message?” Cee says. “Stop helping.”
“Now, everybody, calm down,” the therapist says. “This is a safe place, a support group. Let’s allow Chinwe her chance to be open with us. Please continue, Chinwe.”
“We agreed, my mom and I, we agreed that we’d keep it a secret. Her acceptance of what I am was enough.”
“That’s not acceptance,” Adeyemi interrupts. The therapist stays silent.
Chinwe lifts her chin. “It was enough for me. It’s better than being thrown out or subjected to prayers.”
“What about now? Is it still enough?” the therapist asks.
A beat passes. Chinwe’s feathers fidget. “I can hide being a homosexual,” she finally says. “But not this.” She gestures to her back.
*
Chinwe doesn’t say anymore after that. The session ends with Halima sharing her progress with not using her powers when things don’t go her way. The therapist gives Chinwe a pat and congratulates her for sharing before leaving. Soon, it’s just me, Chinwe, and Grace in the room.
Grace is playing teleporter tag, appearing at random places, shoving and hitting the assistabot as it cleans up the space. I’m still in my chair, disbelief keeps me rooted. Chinwe hasn’t left her seat either. She really took me up on my challenge. Does that mean she’s expecting me to share my reasons for constant invisibility? I study her. Her head is lowered. She is picking at her nails.
“You’re still here, right?” she asks.
I almost don’t answer. I throw Grace a cautious glance. “Yes. Still here.”
“So…”
“You never said why you’re afraid of using your powers. Not explicitly.”
She shoots me an exasperated look. “Using it feels like an acknowledgement. Maybe if I don’t use them—”
“They will not go away,” I cut in. “And unless you choose to be cured of them, they’ll still be there. Always. Is that what you want?” She squirms in her seat. “Have you even tried flying?”
“The facility provided a teacher. She has butterfly wings.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
She squirms again. “No.” I scoff. “The thing is… I’m afraid of heights. The teacher tried to make me feel better by telling me ‘the ground is not your enemy.’ And I thought, hantie, as long as there’s gravity, the ground will always be my enemy.”
A laugh bursts out of me, more anything else, I am amused at her portrayal of a Yoruba accent. Soon we’re both laughing.
“Oya, your turn,” she says when we’re done. “Why are you always invisible?”
I open my mouth, about to speak but not sure of what I want to say or how I’m going to say it, when Grace suddenly appears in front of us.
“You’re wasting your time with this one,” she tells Chinwe. “She wants to disappear so much that she refuses to use her real name. Ask her na. Ask her if Isoken is her real name? Our madam is pining over her dead sister.”
I bristle. “You looked in my file?”
“Before nko? Why won’t I? When you are forming brooding, invisible teenager. Your sister is dead, Itohan, you don’t look like her anymore, deal with it.”
I grit my teeth and let her see the hand coming before I punch her. We grapple with each other. She teleports me to the desert, and then the roof of a building in god knows where. In one of the rooms, we startle a kid trying to hack into his mother’s botpot. But I have a firm grip on Grace’s blouse and I’m punching her, my hand visible the whole time.
When we return to the therapy room, the attendants are there and ready for us. They give Grace an anti-geanomic shot. She starts to convulse. I pull away from her and let my hand disappear just in time, but the assistabots are prepared. They spray a gaseous form of the serum in my general direction and the last thing I see as my body goes into a fit is Chinwe shoving one of the attendants in a bid to get to me.
*
They can’t give us dampening chips or a cure without our consent, so they make us think through the consequences of our actions by giving us chores we have to do manually. Grace gets cleaning the girls’ toilets, and Chinwe and I get weeding the facility’s field. The arrangement doesn’t please me.
I’d been visible when I got sprayed with anti-geanom. She saw me. Anti-geanom takes away your powers by attacking the genes that carry the geanomic trait. It’s not fatal, but one of the side effects is seizures. Where the cure reengineers the cells by coaxing the anomaly out of the gene’s encoding, absorbing it to be discarded as waste, the serum treats the gene like a thing to be annihilated.
It’s been two days since then, and I’ve been avoiding Chinwe, but I can’t put off my chores any longer. She keeps glancing at me as I uproot weeds with a fervour that matches my agitation.
She shuffles over. “Hey.”
“What?”
She fidgets. “What do you want? Is it my sob story? Is that why you won’t leave me alone? What Grace told you, is it not enough for you?”
Hurt crosses her expression. “Sorry. I just wanted to—” She shakes her head and turns away.
I don’t want to feel bad, but I do. I pull out another weed with so much force that its momentum sends me tumbling. Chinwe hears me yelp and rushes over, the plant in my hand telling her where I am.
“Are you okay?”
My chest heaves and I start to sob. “Grace had no right. Nobody was supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to see. It’s how I keep her alive.”
“Who?”
“Isoken. It’s how I keep Isoken alive.” I wipe my eyes. “She’s my twin.” She doesn’t push. Just stands over me and waits. “There was a fire. A geanomic child suddenly got his abilities on the train. He couldn’t keep it under control. We tried to help. I couldn’t get my force-field to work. Isoken though, Isoken was good at everything. But things got out of hand – an explosion. And then—” I cough, but the clog in my throat stays in place. My heart twists painfully. “When I woke up. I looked like somebody else and I didn’t have a sister anymore.
“We were identical. Even our parents couldn’t tell us apart, and now, I look at my face and I can’t see her. I don’t feel like my parents’ daughter. The only thing I have that’s still mine and hers is our voice.”
There’s silence for a while. Chinwe settles down on the grass. “Your sister won’t be forgotten. You’ll always be your parents’ daughter.”
I laugh. “You’re not related to my therapist are you?”
She shrugs. “My uncle. I read his books. He’s a psychologist. I think some of his psychologist-ness rubbed off on me.”
I chuckle. My breath catches with my next question. “He’s not my therapist, is he?”
“I don’t think so.” She cocks her head so I can see the earnestness on her face.
Her answer quietens my flurry of anxiety. “How do you know my sister won’t be forgotten?”
“You told me about her, didn’t you? So I know her now and since I know her, I’ll remember her. Her friends? They’ll remember her. Your parents? They’ll also remember her. Just as you told me about her, you’ll tell other people about her, and some of them will remember her.”
I start to protest. She shakes her head at me.
“There’s more to you, Itohan, more to your sister than your faces. But if you’re busy trying to keep her alive, hiding away from the world, who’ll remember you then? I know you want to disappear, but do you want to be forgotten?”
We spend the rest of our time in silence. Her question keeps echoing in my mind. Do I want to be forgotten?
*
I tell my therapist about the conversation I had with Chinwe, and he thinks she’s on to something. He convinces me to meet with my parents for the first time in four months. I don’t have to be visible, the only thing I’m required to do is watch.
That’s what I’m doing right now as friends and family mill about the common room. The inpatients are distinguishable in their grey slacks, hugging, talking, some of them crying. The facility only allows one open day each month, and a lot of people are making the most of it.
My parents stand in the middle of the room, my mother’s eyes combing the crowd. She’s looking for me; I realise with a jolt. My dad stands beside her. He doesn’t search for me, but his eyes are fixed to the door. I begin a slow walk towards them.
“Mummie, Daddie.”
I catch my dad’s disappointment before it vanishes. My mother’s eyes stay fixed on the empty space I’m standing in. When I’m around most people, their eyes move over to something else with substance to latch on to. My mother’s eyes, however, never budge.
A beat passes. She asks. “Itohan, you’re still here, abi?”
“I’m still here.”
“I’m so glad you called us.” Her eyes are shining with tears. “We thought you didn’t want to see us anymore.”
“I—” A familiar laugh catches my attention. Chinwe is standing ways away with a man and two children. She’s holding one of the kids and her wings are beating. She’s two feet above the ground.
“So you can fly now.” The man is grinning.
She laughs again. “It’s not really flying, but I’m trying.”
She’s trying. I turn back to my parents. My mum’s expression is expectant. Her eyes are now locked in the wrong direction. My dad doesn’t even try. His gaze is lowered to the floor.
I look down at my hands. There’s more to me than my face. I don’t want to be forgotten. My courage has never been anything impressive, not since I chose to go invisible. But for this, I take a tiny bit from my reserves. I don’t think. I step away from the coldness of being unseen, into the heat of sight.
Gasps follow my reveal. My mother is caught between joy and shock. She starts to sob my name. “Itohan, Itohan.”
When my dad finally looks at me, he doesn’t tear his eyes away, almost as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear again, and I try not to. I can’t stay still, uneasiness churns in my stomach, but I stay visible till the end of their visit.
As soon as they leave – my dad squeezing my hand and my mum almost smothering me with a hug – I fade away again, turning to find Chinwe standing in front of me.
“I saw you,” she says.
I roll my eyes. “Yes, you and everybody else.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Iz naw laik dat.” She smiles. “I mean, I saw you. I saw what laughter does to your face. How you look when you’re embarrassed. When you’re trying to suppress a smile, the mirth jumps to your eyes. You do a weird thing with your mouth when you’re nervous. I saw all of that.”
“And?”
“You’re a world, all on your own.”
I scoff, but pleasure sits in my stomach like the burn from a spicy food, slowly spreading to the rest of me. “For a girl afraid of heights, how do you manage to sound so deep all the time? Do you lay awake thinking about different ways to be profound?” I tease, but I can’t stop grinning. “That day at the field, what did you want to tell me?”
“I tried flying.”
“How was it?”
“I still hate it. But I don’t think I hate myself for it, not anymore. I was scared, you know? But it took—”
“Tiny bravery.”
“Yes, that. Tiny bravery. One day at a time, nothing grand, nothing impressive. Just living.”
I take another wisp of courage from my reserve and kiss her on the cheek. Her surprise is so comical that I burst into laughter. She grins, doesn’t say anything, and I appear for a bit, just to show her that we’re both grinning like idiots.
