Nneoma needed to gather herself. She saw the sign for the ladies’ room and stepped inside, swinging the door in Nkem Ozechi’s face. None of those children would ever be Mathematicians; the room was as bare of genius as a pool of fish.
She checked the stalls to make sure she was alone and bent forward to take deep breaths. She rarely worked with refugees, true refugees, for this reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her. The only time she’d felt anything as strongly was after her mother had passed and her father was in full lament, listing to the side of ruin. How could Nneoma tell him that she couldn’t even look at him without being broken by it? He would never understand. The day she’d tried to work on him, to eat her father’s grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your head long enough to calculate it. The attempt had ended with them both sobbing, holding each other in comfort and worry, till her father became so angry at the futility of it, the uselessness of her talents in this one crucial moment, that he’d said words he could not take back.
The bathroom door creaked open. Nneoma knew who it was. The girl couldn’t help but seek her out. They stared at each other awhile, the girl uncertain, till Nneoma held out her arms and the girl walked into them. Nneoma saw the sadness in her eyes and began to plot the results of it on an axis. At one point the girl’s mother shredded by gunfire. Her brother taken in the night by a gang of thugs. Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore. And other, smaller hurts: Hunger so deep she’d swallowed fistfuls of mud. Hiding from the men who’d turned on her after her father died. Sneaking into her old neighborhood to see new houses filled with the more fortunate of the French evacuees, those who hadn’t been left behind to drown, their children chasing her away with rocks like she was a dog. Nneoma looked at every last suffering, traced the edges, weighed the mass. And then she took it.
No one had ever really been able to explain what happened then, why one person could take another person’s grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives and negatives, a type of cellular math. An equation all their own. A theologian might have called it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God’s own mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patients who gave up their sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden and then she did not.
—
The ride home was silent. Amadi, sensing her disquiet, resisted the casual detour he usually made past the junction that led to her father’s house, whenever they ventured to this side of town. At home, Nneoma went straight to bed, taking two of the pills that would let her sleep for twelve hours. After that she would be as close to normal as she could be. The rawness of the girl’s memories would diminish, becoming more like a story in a book she’d once read. The girl would feel the same way. Sleep came, deep and black, a dreamless thing with no light.
The next morning, she turned on the unit to see much the same coverage as the day before, except now the fallen man’s widow had jumped into the fray, calling for a full audit of the Center’s records and of Furcal’s Formula. Nneoma snorted. It was the sort of demand that would win public support, but the truth was the only experts who knew enough to audit anything all worked for the Center, and it would take them decades to pore over every line of the formula. More likely this was a ploy for a payoff, which the woman would get. The Furcals could afford it.
Nneoma told herself she wouldn’t check her messages again for at least another hour and prepared for her daily run. A quick peek revealed that no messages were waiting anyway. She keyed the code into the gate to lock it behind her, stretched, and launched.
The run cleared the last vestiges of yesterday’s ghosts. She would call Claudine today to see how serious this whole falling thing was. There’d be only so much the PR rep could legally say, but dinner and a few drinks might loosen her tongue. Nneoma lengthened her stride the last mile home, taking care to ease into it. The last time she’d burst into a sprint she pulled a muscle, and the pain eater assigned to her was a grim man with a nonexistent bedside manner. She’d felt his disapproval as he worked on her. No doubt he thought his talents wasted in her cozy sector and was tolerating this rotation till he could get back to the camps. Nneoma disliked Mathematicians like him and they disliked ones like her. It was a miracle she and Kioni had lasted as long as they did.
As she cleared the corner around her compound, she saw a small crowd gathered at her gate. Protesters? she wondered in shock before she registered the familiar faces of her neighbors. When she neared, a man she recognized but could not name caught her by the shoulders.
“We called medical right away. She was banging on your gate and screaming. She is your friend, no? I’ve seen her with you before.” He looked very concerned, and suddenly Nneoma didn’t want to know who was there to see her and why.
It was just a beggar. The woman wore no shoes and her toes were wounds. How on earth had she been able to bypass city security? Nneoma scrambled back when the woman reached out for her, but froze when she saw her fingers, delicate and spindly, like insect legs.
Those hands had once stroked her body. She had once kissed those palms and drawn those fingers into her mouth. She would have recognized them anywhere.
“Kioni?”
“Nneoma, we have to go, we have to go now.” Kioni was frantic and kept looking behind her. Every bare inch of her skin was scratched or bitten or cut in some way. Her usually neat coif of dreadlocks was half missing, her scalp raw and puckered as if someone had yanked them out. The smell that rolled from her was all sewage.
“Oh my God, Kioni, oh my God.”
Kioni grabbed her wrists and wouldn’t surrender them. “We have to go!”
Nneoma tried to talk around the horrified pit in her stomach. “Who did this to you? Where do we have to go?”
Kioni shook her head and sank to her knees. Nneoma tried to free one of her hands and when she couldn’t, pressed and held the metal insert under her palm that would alert security at the Center. They would know what to do.
From her current angle, Nneoma could see more of the damage on the other woman, the scratches and bites concentrated below the elbow. Something nagged and nagged at her. And then she remembered the Australian, and the stories of him trying to eat himself.
“Kioni, who did this?” Nneoma repeated, though her suspicion was beginning to clot into certainty and she feared the answer.
Kioni continued shaking her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing to confess a lie.
Their falling-out had started when Nneoma did the unthinkable. In violation of every boundary of their relationship (and a handful of Center rules), she’d asked Kioni to work on her father. Kioni, who volunteered herself to the displaced Senegalese and Algerians and Burkinababes and even the evacuees, anyone in dire need of a grief worker, was the last person she should have asked for such a thing, and told her so. Nneoma had called her sanctimonious, and Kioni had called her a spoiled rich girl who thought her pain was more important than it actually was. And then Kioni had asked her to leave.
Now she needed to get Kioni to the Center. Whatever was happening had to be fixed.
“They just come and they come and they come.”
Nneoma crouched down to hear Kioni better. Most of her neighbors had moved beyond hearing distance, chased away by the smell. “Who comes?” she asked, trying to keep Kioni with her.
“All of them, can’t you see?”