Buchi walked around the house, toward the veranda, thinking of irreparable damage, thinking of women bled dry, thinking of Damaris, thinking of Louisa, dear, brave Louisa, who deserved something she could not give. And Buchi knew she would pick up the phone, call Ijeoma, and do something a mother just couldn’t do.
— Dinner was quiet. Damaris speared her bit of beef and chewed all the juice out of it before spitting the fibrous ligaments onto her plate. She didn’t seem to notice the tension around the kitchen table or how extra nice Buchi was to Louisa, or how Louisa took sullen little bites of rice and all but ignored her mother. In the dining room, Dickson and Precious talked, though Precious, who usually acknowledged Buchi with a thank-you or complimented the meal, ignored her, too. Buchi dreaded the lecture she knew was coming, about how a wife must stand with her husband and how she, Buchi, should not let the devil use her to bring strife into Precious’s marriage. Dickson raised a brow and gave Precious a look but made no comment about the lack of chicken on his plate. Buchi would be hearing about that, too.
Lawrence, who usually handed her the freshly slaughtered chickens, had put Kano in a bucket on the back steps and covered it, in case Damaris walked by. And she did, looking for the bird, but was placated with the news that Kano had gone “outside,” meaning outside the gate, something the bird did often despite Precious’s complaints that it made them look like bush people. The bird hadn’t been drained properly. Blood pooled into her feathers, and the ragged seam at her neck signaled Lawrence’s distaste for the task. Devoid of life, Kano’s body shrank. Picked clean off the bone, her flesh wouldn’t amount to a man’s fist. Buchi bagged the bird and threw her onto the trash heap outside that, when Lawrence lit it, would become her funeral pyre.
After dinner, Louisa took Damaris to bathe while Buchi washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. When she’d completed her tasks, she went out onto the back steps and waited for Lawrence, who usually sat with her for a few minutes, both of them exhausted from a day filled with work that needed four bodies, not two. He soon approached the steps and, fearing that he wouldn’t stop, Buchi called out to him.
“Good night, ma,” he said, but he kept walking toward his quarters, a small cement structure built into the walls that surrounded the house. Buchi sighed and shook her head. Enough tears today.
Louisa had already put Damaris to bed on her pallet and the little girl was gone from this world. Buchi sat on her own bed and patted the spot next to her. Louisa hesitated, but got up and sat next to her mother. Buchi tried to rub circles into her daughter’s back, but Louisa shrugged her off.
“Are you all right?”
Louisa didn’t respond, which meant a no she was too polite to voice.
Buchi pressed on.
“Do you know why I had to listen to Uncle Dickson?”
Because we are destitute.
Because your father was a fool and, yes, money is everything.
Because the consequences of disrespecting a man like Dickson are always disproportionate to the sin. A grenade in retaliation for a slap. A world undone for a girl’s mistake.
Louisa shrugged.
“Do you remember Auntie Ijeoma?” Buchi asked.
Louisa nodded.
“Do you want to visit her?”
Another nonresponse.
“Please, Louisa, I can’t have you not talking as well. Please.”
Louisa finally looked at her.
“Soma,” she said.
The two girls had only met a few times, as distance and time constraints meant that Buchi and Ijeoma didn’t get together as much as they wanted, but Louisa had been at the funeral, knew that the girl was gone. Soma, indeed. So quiet in that way a girl in a family of boys could be. Buchi had often told Nnamdi she wished they lived closer so that Soma could be a tempering influence on Louisa, to which Nnamdi had responded that Louisa was too like her mother. You might as well bite into a diamond.
A light knock preceded Precious’s opening the door—the door that Buchi was never to lock. She nodded in her sister’s direction before walking off. Buchi was being summoned. She looked at Damaris, splayed and boneless in sleep, and knew that the little girl’s problems were ones she could resolve: tears she could wipe, mattresses she could scrub, a distressed body she could clutch close to her as it kicked and screamed. Locks with keys she held.
“You like Auntie Ijeoma, don’t you?”
But the question was just a formality at this point.
WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY
It means twenty-four-hour news coverage. It means politicians doing damage control, activists egging on protests. It means Francisco Furcal’s granddaughter at a press conference defending her family’s legacy.
“My grandfather’s formula is sound. Math is constant and absolute. Any problems that arise are the fault of those who miscalculate it.”
Bad move, lady. This could only put everyone on the defensive, compelling them to trot out their transcripts and test results and every other thing that proved their genius. Nneoma tried to think of where she’d put her own documents after the move, but that led to thinking of where she’d moved from, which led to thinking of whom she’d left behind.
Best not to venture there. Best instead to concentrate on the shaky footage captured by a security camera. The motion-activated device had caught the last fifty feet of the man’s fall, the windmill panic of flailing arms, the spread of his body on the ground. When the formula for flight had been revealed short months before, the ceremony had started unimpressively enough, with a man levitating like a monk for fifteen boring minutes before shooting into the air. The scientific community was agog. What did it mean that the human body could now defy things humanity had never thought to question, like gravity? It had seemed like the start of a new era.
Now the newscast jumped to the Mathematicians who’d discovered the equation for flight. They were being ambushed by gleeful reporters at parties, while picking up their children in their sleek black cars, on their vacations, giving a glimpse of luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing public, who must have enjoyed the embarrassed faces and defensive outbursts from well-fed mouths.
By blaming the Mathematicians instead of the Formula, Martina Furcal and the Center created a maelstrom around the supposedly infallible scientists while protecting her family’s legacy. And their money. Maybe not such a bad move after all.
Nneoma flipped through the channels, listening closely. If the rumor that Furcal’s Formula was beginning to unravel around the edges gained any traction, it would eventually trickle down to the twenty-four hundred Mathematicians like her, who worked around the globe, making their living calculating and subtracting emotions, drawing them from living bodies like poison from a wound.
She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year. Alvin Claspell, the Australian, had committed suicide after, if the stories were to be believed, going mad and trying to eat himself. This work wasn’t for everyone. And of course Kioni Mutahi had simply disappeared, leaving New Kenya with only one grief worker.
There were six grief workers in the Biafra-Britannia Alliance, where Nneoma now lived, the largest concentration of grief workers in any province to serve the largest concentration of the grieving. Well, the largest concentration that could pay.