I rolled my eyes. Irrelevant things were even more irrelevant in a wizard’s tent.
Baba Sola held it out, and I had to lean onto my knees to get it. I enjoyed marijuana once in a while, especially when I was in pain. And something told me that this was not the kind grown on corporate farms with corporate pesticides and corporate genetic modifications. This would be organic and very kind. DNA gave me a hard look as he watched me bring it to my lips. A joint from a sorcerer in a tent in the middle of a dust storm the day after I’d killed five men with my bare hands. I took a deep deep pull.
The smoke filled my lungs and within seconds, the world bloomed around me. Opulent, vibrant, and churning wilder than the winds outside. Yes, this was wizard’s brew. I exhaled, and it was like I was exhaling the world, new and refreshed. It shifted and turned before me on its own axis. I frowned, unable to look away. I held the joint out to DNA and his frown deepened. “I am a Muslim,” he said, disapprovingly.
“And you’re a murderer in the tent of a wizard,” I told him, my words leaving my lips with the smoke, smooth and cool like water.
“No,” he simply said, and I shrugged. The world was breathing all around me. I inhaled and exhaled and it was like I was breathing with it.
“The world isn’t all about you, AO,” Baba Sola said.
“Yet the world’s after me,” I muttered. I took another puff and handed it back to Baba Sola.
Baba Sola paused, looking at DNA. “You sure?”
DNA shook his head.
“Ah-ah, he dey try, but what will be is what is, eventually,” Baba Sola said, taking two more puffs before putting it out in the sand beside him. “Mister DNA, you’ve waited so long for a wife who adheres to tradition that you have surpassed the age when it is traditional to find a wife. You’ve fallen from the tradition you fight so hard to stay in.”
The irony of his words was like someone lightly running a finger over my armpit; I couldn’t hold back my laughter. I guffawed loudly and the sound of it made me guffaw even harder. DNA frowned at me. “You’re high,” he said.
“I am!” I shouted, pressing my hands to my mouth, giggles still escaping. In a wizard’s tent, I thought and this nearly sent me to the moon with fresh laughter. I pinched my nose. Both Baba Sola and DNA watched me. For how long, I will never be able to tell you. But by the time Baba Sola spoke again, I had calmed down and was staring at the shuddering tent walls thinking they looked like the fists of people outside punching it. I wondered if those people outside would soon come in. And what they’d do to all of us.
“And you,” Baba Sola said.
“Me?” I asked, looking at him. A white man in black robes who glowed like he had studied his craft with talent and skill for decades. I didn’t believe in sorcerers, jujuwomen, witches and wizards until this moment. I believe now, I thought. What will happen to me? To both of us? Maybe it’s bigger than that. I paused at this last thought, my eyebrows going up.
“Yes, you,” Baba Sola said, his smile broadened as if he knew what had just cracked open in my mind.
“You fled into the desert and are now following a man. As is tradition.”
Now it was DNA’s turn to snicker. I wanted to slap him, but a part of me also wanted to snicker, too. The world was no longer the world.
“You’re both here because this is a meeting,” he said. “You’ve arrived at the same place from different places. I’ve been here before, I’ll be here again. But neither of you will. What I can give you I’ve already given.”
We both looked at each other, afraid to say what I was sure we were both thinking—that juju from this man would be real and true. The type our grandfathers referred to using one word, “abomination.” Both of us leaned forward, listening.
“I had a friend who was a yam farmer in the east. Ndi Igbo,” Baba Sola said.
I blinked at the phrase and just let it go. This white man in the desert was the real thing, nothing like those who’d come before wanting to colonize, appropriate, seize, and destroy. He was a white man who traveled and shared and learned and laughed and observed. Maybe he did live backwards. He probably knew a thousand languages. He probably spoke Igbo better than I could.
“He told me that long ago, two farmers went into the jungle hoping to escape the hard lives they were living on their farms. They met each other on the third day. It was as if the jungle was playing with them, leading them this way and that, deeper and deeper. It would show one a leopard, and he would flee. It would show the other a python, and he would flee even farther into the jungle. Neither was terrified enough to recapture his senses and return home to his good, not so bad life.
“Until that day when they met. By this time, they were each covered in red mud, because it had rained every day they’d been in the jungle. Their bellies were full of roots, wild yam leaves, and roasted bush meat they’d each found and consumed. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness of living below the jungle’s canopy.
“Now, when two farmers meet, normally, one will conquer the other. Farmers are territorial by nature. They cannot coexist on the same land. But this day, there was no fight to the death or battle of well-chosen words. The men could see with the clarity of the jungle and the purity of their purged minds. They hadn’t heard the voices of their wives in days. And so they sat. They built a small fire. They talked of many things. These two men were never seen again after that night. Though some say, they both returned home to their wives and families and lived such rich lives that no one recognized them as the same men.”
Baba Sola leaned back on his hands and crossed his feet at his ankles as he looked at us, clearly satisfied with himself.
“What’s that story got to do with us,” I asked. DNA nodded vigorously beside me, equally irritated.
“Your generation has lost the art of the proverb, the gift of wordplay, the science of fiction, the jujuism of the African,” he said, picking up the joint he’d placed on the sand beside him. He brought out a match and flicked its tip aflame with his nail. He threw it in the fire, relit the joint from the fire and took a deep pull. He exhaled smoke, and I stifled the urge to cough. Despite the fact that we were in the middle of a whipping whirlwind, it smelled like we were suddenly in a tiny poorly ventilated room, and that room was filled with smoke; not marijuana smoke but the kind that rises from burning wood. Beside me, DNA started coughing. “Heh, amateur,” Baba Sola said. “Can’t even take the second-hand.”
“I take what I want to take,” DNA said, his cough subsiding.