No mad land, p.24
No/Mad/Land, page 24
“I shouldn’t have let the twins see the dead skin. Misunderstanding Alphonse’s intentions was stupid. The biggest mistake was stopping. We should have left the nanites and gone on our way.”
Rafabel notices the scaling of his skin, the same skin that many years ago peeled from Nicolas the first time and made him a free man, is now becoming necrotic with him trapped inside. However paradoxical it may seem, swallowing a sip of water would not now help him; on the contrary, as Farisa explained, it would cause an edema of the larynx and therefore death by suffocation; his throat would swell up until it was blocked, preventing him from breathing. With a strong blow, Rafabel cuts through the belt and grabs Nicolas’s arm before it flops.
“I wanted to believe…but I was fooling myself right from the beginning. I built an amazing sandcastle on unstable foundations. I imagined a solution, it’s just a pity it is irrelevant for anyone who sees things differently….”
“Be quiet, Nico.”
But Nicolas continues to mutter. She starts cutting the leather of the second tie.
“Hakim told me an African proverb, ‘A stranger can look at a thousand things but will only see what he already knows.’ Rafabel, I lived in a city until I was thirty-seven. The only nature I ever saw were plant pots, flowerbeds, or at the most, a park.”
As soon as the belt gives, Rafabel supports Nicolas’s arm and gently lowers it to his side. Then she swaps hands and speeds the rhythm with which she’s cutting the third belt blocking his right leg.
“I was happy when I didn’t know the route or our destination, crossing the unknown with no idea of what we were going to find. Now I know….”
The morning wind seems to want to help destroy Sangha. At this rate, if no firefighter drones come to intervene, the village will be razed to the ground. Rafabel wonders if Hakim will be more sad or happy about this outcome.
“I know the world has its laws and that frequently – more often than we think – these are not human laws.” A thread of dark saliva is hanging from his lips.
“Do you have a metallic taste in your mouth, Nico?”
“I haven’t had such a bad taste in my mouth for years.”
“I’m nearly done.”
Rafabel looks around. The shouting has moved into the distance, the fire is beginning to crackle around them. A red wall is advancing on them relentlessly. When she looks up, she can see a solitary drone watching them. She nods, knowing that on the other side of the camera Farisa is waiting for a signal. Rafabel lifts three fingers, the minutes she needs.
With his head resting on his shoulder Nicolas sees the battery’s charge display: 1kW.
“It’s ironic, on average a man burns sixty-five calories an hour while sleeping and seventy-five while awake. Walking burns two hundred, and you need one thousand six hundred and fifty to stay alive…every day. This body has allowed me to escape death more than once, to live thousands of experiences and to enjoy lots of relationships with friends and strangers, but above all it freed me from my sedentary existence and the uncertainty of western society.”
One more cut and Rafabel moves on to the last belt.
Nicolas’s dirty feet remind her how much he has become a fundamental element of her nervous system and how losing him would eradicate all the connections activated by his presence, by his odors, words, and actions.
She puts all her strength into it. Rafabel pushes and the boards shake. So does Nicolas.
“Done, you’re free.” She gives the drone a thumbs-up. “The village has been evacuated. Everyone has gone, and now it’s our turn.”
In the corner of the piazza, three hooded figures appear: Hakim, Shimbo, and Askalu. The first two are carrying a hospital stretcher taken from Sangha’s clinic; the boy keeps looking around, checking nobody is going to stop them saving Nico.
Nicolas is picked up and placed gently on the stretcher like a relic.
Seeing his heliotrons are dull and almost lifeless, Rafabel makes a decision: Nicolas’s message – that revolutionary one of ‘nanites for everyone’ he first declaimed years before – must continue to circulate, like poems handed down over the generations until they become myths, like secret formulas passed from hand to hand transform into cults, and experiences shared by many people, become custom and then culture. This is the only way Nicolas Tomei can survive, by encouraging his contribution to the human race to propagate through other people’s nervous systems.
Rafabel pulls the bandolier from his waist and takes the damaged but functioning bracelets from his wrists. In a moment of lucidity, he manages to grab her hand.
“You read my mind. The fabtotum and the bracelet: take them to Nika, please.”
“Should I tell her something?”
“The last phial, give that to her. It’s a perfume I made for her. Then tell her, beautiful follies help us live better.”
She’s on the point of crying because this is the kind of legacy that makes people human. Nicolas twists on the stretcher; his movement unbalances the carriers.
“Does it hurt, my love?”
“Physical pain, the real pain is the absence of the people you love.”
“Are you thinking of Nika again?”
“Yes, apologize for me, I haven’t been a great father. But tell her what we have done. Tell her our home is the whole Earth, that the hills are its walls and the plains are its floor. Tell her every time we breathe, we inhale energy. Tell her we have wandered without a destination, we have muscles and the weather-beaten skin of people who use their legs and the sun to move from one place to the next. Tell her we have seen things we would never have been able to imagine from the Gianicolo Hill or a skyscraper in the EUR district.”
“I will.”
His nostrils open to breathe in every molecule of this moment.
“For seven years, you and I have woken up and gone to sleep together. For seven years, you and I have walked alongside each other, every day. I will miss your smell….”
Then Nicolas’s eyes close.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The Value of Future Things
Rafabel puts in her earbuds and starts listening to ‘Roads’ by Portishead, a song from her childhood, when the world was enclosed by the rocky cliffs of the Val Venosta.
It was her grandfather who taught her the best things. It was he who had pushed her to sell the house in Naturno and leave after the death of her parents. He had crossed Italy to pull her alive out of the rubble after the earthquake in L’Aquila; now the least she can do to honor his acts and Nicolas’s life is to cross the world again to take Veronika her inheritance.
Rafabel has a young boy with her, so she’s even more wary than usual. She has avoided villages and busy roads, she has stopped to sleep in safe places and eaten what the land had to offer them: herbs, flowers, tubers, and a little fruit.
Askalu is finding it hard to keep up: the nanites have been circulating in his young body for a short time and they don’t yet allow him to maintain a faster pace. His body temperature, after the first few days of sweating and convulsions, went down to thirty-eight degrees, but he’s still not used to living with that sensation of constant fever. He’s strong though, and so is his will. He has not allowed himself to cry, only uttering the occasional moan when the nanites’ replication hurt the most.
They took the bus from Mopti to Bamako and then called Moussa Korò who sent a pickup driven by Ismail and Abdhallai to take them to Nouakchott.
“Can you make it? The ship is down there, we’ll have to get a motorboat to board.”
Rafabel points to a moored boat. Askalu can’t see it properly, but he knows it is one of those belonging to the Green Ark she has told him about, an extraordinary thing for someone like him who is about to sail for the first time in his life. Askalu nods and follows Rafabel towards a motorboat which a couple of men are pushing into the water.
They both turn, as if to say goodbye to the land that has been hosting them. Their farewell – perhaps a see-you-again – is also extended to the Pulldogs staying in Sangha, each one for different reasons.
Hakim wants to rebuild the village. Within a few weeks, a battery of self-replicating 3D printers will have recreated everything as it was. There is a risk that maybe Alphonse will come back to reclaim his place amongst the elders, but by then other elders, younger than the previous ones, will have taken their places. The new Sangha will grow on different foundations to the old one.
It was Farisa who convinced Hakim to raze the village to the ground. It was she who convinced him to rebuild it again. She will need rest in the coming months, her gestating belly already visible.
Shimbo, on the other hand, couldn’t resist Aissa’s charms. He had admired her from the first moment he saw her. Afterwards, he did everything he could to get to know her. After the death of Nyala during the fire, he stayed, for her, and to help Hakim rebuild Sangha.
Rafabel feels a tugging at her sleeve.
“I’m scared. I’ve never been on a ship like this. The ones on the Niger are little boats by comparison.”
“You’ll get used to it. It rocks a bit to begin with, but it passes.”
“Like on the bus?”
“Something like that.”
“When I’m on the bus, I always play the I-spy game. For example, from the window of the pickup with Ismail and Abdhallai I spied a pile of lamb heads, I spied how they print bicycle tires, and I spied two car fires. Then I stopped doing I-spy. If everyone driving a car or a motorbike took the bus, there would be less traffic, less pollution, and fewer crashes. When I’m big I want to create a community of people who drive buses, like Ismail and Abdallahi. Their trailer has everything, bathroom, kitchen, printers, and music.”
“It will be difficult to play I-spy on the sea, but wait till you see Rome’s rickshaws.”
Askalu’s face lights up. “Are we going to Rome?”
“Yes, one day, but first we have to go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Here,” she says as she opens iMaps on her phone and points at a blue circle.
“Lake Baikal, in…how do you say that? Irzusk?”
“Irkutsk, it’s where our friends are going to be in a few months. Someone saw the video of Nicolas online and sent it to a friend of mine on the Global Walker app. She called me last night.”
“What is your friend’s name?”
“Silvia.”
“Was she sad?”
“Very sad. She and Nicolas were good friends. They grew up together.”
He doesn’t ask any more, but goes back to the main point.
“How are we going to get to Lake Baikal?”
“Walking. There is a special road, you’ll see it when we get to Russia, it’s called a walkersway. In the meantime, we have to get to the Baltic Sea first. You’re not scared of the sea, are you?”
“No, there is a Dogon proverb that says, ‘If you want to arrive first, run alone. If you want to go a long way, walk together.’”
* * *
Their appointment with the Green Ark is like finally meeting a virtual friend in real life. Rafabel can see Askalu’s excitement by the speed with which his eyes are darting from one part of the vessel to another. What she has told him about it has not been enough to dampen his curiosity: it’s immense, luxurious with vegetation, damp, but cleaner than the lanes of Sangha. With its stylized tree flag fluttering high on the flagpole, the Green Ark is not how Askalu imagined it.
From the railings on the main deck, he waves Africa a last farewell.
“Will you miss it?”
“I don’t know, but I wish I could have spent more time with Hakim.”
“What about Alphonse?” Rafabel asks, wondering if one day this boy will thank her or hold it against her for having taken him away with his brother’s, but not his father’s, permission. He doesn’t answer but rests his chin on the railings.
“He said I would be going to Bamako as soon as I was twelve. I would become someone there.”
“Good, we are only a few months early,” Rafabel says, trying to lighten the tension. “And you already are somebody.”
“Even though we lived in the same house, we never spent much time together.”
“Then the thing is to concentrate on the good moments.”
Rafabel’s voice breaks slightly, making Askalu turn to look at her.
“Why? Is that what you do?”
She touches her wrist and starts to rub it. Nicolas’s death was worse than an amputation, the brutal, definitive, and irreversible suppression of the nerve, emotional, and affective input she received from him.
“Yes, memories remain and the past has to be enough for our future.”
Rafabel can’t help herself and sheds a tear for that part of herself that left her with Nicolas. There is no anesthetic for such pain.
They had buried him by a baobab, his epitaph carved into its bark:
Nicolas Tomei
Rome, 1989 – Sangha, 2039
walker
The tree will gradually consume him, he will be pulled up through its roots and absorbed into the lymph feeding the budding flowers and filling out the fruit. Every year, Hakim will go and re-cut the letters, and every new season Farisa or Shimbo or someone from the village will collect the seeds and scatter them throughout Sangha. With time, the augmented seeds will give rise to other fruit and pollinate other trees and other minds, giving rise, perhaps to other solar plexuses.
Rafabel can’t stop looking at her wrist. The bracelet feels like a terrible weight now. By touching a series of symbols, she composes the unlock sequence, takes the object off and hands it to Askalu.
“You do it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Askalu smiles from ear to ear. He takes the bracelet and with a powerful throw bowls it into the sea. Rafabel takes another bracelet out of her bag, it is Nicolas’s. She puts it on.
“Can I use the fabtotum?”
“All right, but remember it isn’t yours. I have to take it to a young girl as special as you.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Rafabel takes Askalu by the hand and they head off towards their cabin.
PHASE SIX
ECOLUTION
‘It is not the nature of tracks being tracks that should interest the walker, but the amount of grace, strength and perseverance with which we follow them.’
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
‘Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground and it explodes into a giant oak! Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay.’
George Bernard Shaw, The Vegetarian Diet According to Shaw
Veronika Ruiz-Cormani
Chapter Fifty-Five
Footprints and Seeds
Nika’s breathing is light, a cadenced sound spreading through the Tunka forest. When touched, the laziest larches drop a fine rain of gilded needles to the ground. Beauty is everywhere, at every height, lying low down on the soft layer of white dotted with moss, mushrooms and lichens, scattered amidst thousands of tree trunks enjoying creating a natural maze, beyond the twigs and branches, above, in the blue sky with cotton wool clouds.
There are what look like lots of little faces pressed into the fresh snow, faces that are actually the prints of hares: their back paws make two elongated eyes, the front paws leave two almost parallel marks making the nose and an oval mouth. Those aren’t the prints she is looking for.
Nika climbs over a fallen tree, slows down, and stops to study a sun-drenched slope. The warmth of the sun has melted the thin layer of snow and the wind has taken away what was left. Behind her, the sound of crunching snow warns her someone is coming. If she doesn’t want to be caught up she’ll have to move faster.
Where the snow has been compressed the prints are different. What is pressed in the snow becomes relief and the concave becomes convex, Nika says to herself, remembering lessons of Kenshij, her Path Master.
The trapezium shape comes from the structure of the hooves, the deep print and the lateral spurs. A wild boar’s prints sparkling like silver coins minted by the sun.
Knowing she has found the right tracks, Nika starts walking again; in fact she speeds up to put some distance between herself and whoever is trying to follow her. Along the way, she stops occasionally to gather red and indigo bilberries hanging from the bushes.
The consistency of the ground is an illusion. Solid-looking mounds turn out to be spongy carpets or treacherous bogs where it would be easy to sink, whereas lichens that look damp and slippery crackle underfoot like dried wood shavings.
“Veronika, stop! Wait! Have you found anything?”
She turns, and in the middle of the larch trunks she recognizes a face with a sulky mouth. She doesn’t bother to answer and carries on along her path. The person following her doesn’t give up; he’s fast and trots across the snow with long strides like a young reindeer.
“I asked you a question. Why won’t you answer?”
“You know why, Vasja.”
His tight, fluorescent yellow sports clothing highlights his muscles, particularly well developed for a twelve-year-old. He is, after all, considered the village favorite for the next ultra-marathon. Then he starts walking very fast, making wide circles ahead of Nika’s trajectory.
“Oh c’mon…give me a clue, a solitary tree, a humpbacked hill, any kind of sign.”
“If you spent less time composing sport suits and gadgets and spent more time in the forest, you’d know how to manage without having to copy someone else.”
