Oware Mosaic Page 4

  “You’re young. Why do you meditate?” Auntie Yajna asked and picked up my tin garbage can from beside my reading desk.

  She stopped to look at some of my books: Clone Forensics by Kwesi Nzingha, Transferring Consciousness onto Retcons by Ama Selasi and Soul Sleep by Mahama Kwasi, among other books on pathology and science.

  She nodded her head in a slow thoughtful motion. “You’re too young to be so wise.”

  “I want to do big things, Auntie! I want to make a difference in this world.”

  “Child, you are doing big things!” she said, and tossed the broken pieces in my tin garbage can.

  “You don’t understand. That’s not what I mean.”

  “Don’t be silly. Helping me with the twins, keeping the place clean, it’s a big help to me. A tremendous help. I don’t know what I’d do without you. There’s nothing more important than family and you help me keep this one together. Good families are what make a difference in the world. Many folks grow up in dysfunctional ones. Now, go on and get ready. It’s almost time to go get food rations. You know I like to be one of the first in the line.”

  “Okay. I’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

  “Hurry up, child,” she said, and left my room.

  That made me feel good, hearing her say that I was a big help to her. None of my foster parents ever expressed love for me, but it also made me sad because Auntie Yajna truly didn’t understand the black hole that was eating up my very soul. There had to be more to life. There had to be. I glanced in the mirror, and instead of my face, all I saw was that dead girl under my car. If I didn’t kill her, who did?

  5

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  The market square was packed. People were trading rugs, handmade blankets, clothes and a variety of other objects. Not depending on the government to supply our food, our neighborhood elders formed a secret hunting council and had gone hunting for tufted deer and Patagonian maras, leaving the village mothers and their offspring standing in the long line to receive our morning food rations. My brothers and sisters, Linga and Yoni were fraternal twins. They were running around, playing with other children without a care in the world. God, if they were ever abducted and trafficked, there wouldn’t be a stone I wouldn’t overturn to find them. The thought gave me a chill. How could the GAF let it happen for so long? Many villagers said that they were more corrupt than the criminals they pursued.

  Since there was a group of musicians singing and playing drums beside us, the twins were chastened by Auntie Yajna to be in her ear’s reach. They did as told, but roused the hackles of everyone within ten meters of us, running between the people in line. There were at least twenty others in line ahead of us, but behind us, there had to be a hundred or more people. God, it was brutal. I just wanted to get back home and get back into the game.

  About every fifty meters, the Kumasi Garrison from the Fourth Battalion of Infantry (4BN) were positioned to keep order and make sure no one skipped. They all wore camouflage fatigues and carried rifles. Ever since a riot broke out when they ran out of food, two years ago, the Inspector General enforced a stricter security detail to enforce crowd control and safety.

  My mind bee-lined back to the House of Oware. The game was not only something to bide the time with, but it had also taught me forensics through intense tutorial drills, and tests through practicum. The repetition from doing the same things over-and-over again until I learned enough to move the plot along to advance to higher levels drilled into me investigative science.

  I’d played the game near all of my life and I had a real knowledge of pathology. There was no doubt that I could be a real coroner in Ghana. But I was only seventeen, and even though I’d been down to the infirmary almost every month for the past year, they laughed at my offer to help in the coroner’s department. No matter how I impressed them with my knowledge, I always got the same advice: Come back when you’re older, and we’ll see what we can do to get you a job in the records department.

  Assholes. I’ll show them.

  I had much to offer the world and knew that I could make a difference if given a chance. Hopelessness seeped in deep and made my stomach turn.

  A young albino girl stood by a dashiki seller, yelling, “Your judgment is coming! We have been treated like lepers long enough. You are nothing but lambs to stand by and allow someone to call a woman a slut because she is showing cleavage, or on the contrary, you say just because my whole body is covered that I’m oppressed, and I’ve been forced to dress this way. I am in a religion, dummies. It is my choice! My choice! And now, you have made a choice…to do nothing! To not vote; to be lambs! And you will be judged, accordingly because your religion is inactivity!”

  There were many albinos in our village. Auntie Yajna said that the radiation caused them to be born that way. I didn’t have the heart to correct her, that albinism was a debilitating disorder that existed long before the Final Event. I let it go. The albino girl reminded me of that person who hacked the radio broadcast and was spewing angst and disgust with the system.

  Is there a resistance growing?

  I shook my head, saddened by seeing the cruel state of our country robbing yet another young person of their mind. An old man with long dreads rode by on his bicycle, playing the news on the radio. The reporter caught my ear when he said: “The parents are asking for information if anyone has seen their daughter, Jinni, that they call the station or send them a neural message to the police hotline. Their thirteen-year-old daughter has been missing for three days, now, and as you can assume, their family are praying that she comes home soon.”

  Omigod! Lamp has a sister named, Jinni. What a terrible coincidence. The number of missing teenagers was growing. It was those damned slave traffickers.

  The old bicyclist rode down the street, and with the musicians playing their drums with such bravado, was out of earshot halfway down the block. My attention shifted to a couple of men bickering. Alongside an old emerald green building, a couple of local elder men, one bald, and one with a white long beard.

  That’s the guard, Kweku!

  The two men sat under a lean-to, smoking cigarettes, or jots, as I called them. The bald one, named Nana, wore a white tee shirt with the image of the superhero, Little Zeng, on it. The caption under the illustration said FIRST BLACK SUPERHERO 1963. They both sported over-sized earthtone shorts and were barefooted.

  It was like they were putting on a two-man play for the people standing in line. The old men were loud and animated, and sought everyone in the line for reactions. Besides the musicians slapping their palms to the rhythms of Africa, those two men were our entertainment, and made it less painful, waiting in the long lines for food rations.

  Kweku wiped the sweat off of his head, and said, “It’s not superstition, I tell you. Those pack of devil dogs, those dholes are killing our children, Nana. Something has to be done about them!”

  “Man, you’ve been watching those tabloid news programs again on corneal stream TV. First of all, they’re nothing but hungry Asiatic wolves. They’re hungry, and the radiation has been in their blood for so long they’re a little cuckoo in the brain.”

  “And that means what? They can come into the villages of Kumasi and eat up our children? If they look at you, you fall in a trance and walk right into their den of death—”

  Nana interrupted him. “A bunch of old wives and superstitious scary husbands made that tale up! It’s fiction! All fairy tale. Kick one of them dogs in their ass and they’ll go whelping off back into the mountains with their tails in between their legs.”

  “You talk a big game,” Kweku said. “But I don’t see you going up into them hills.”

  “What is real, though was the Final Event. Now that squeezed the life out of our country and Ghana hasn’t been the same since that idiotic nuclear war, ten years ago. It’s 2025, and we’re living like we’re in one of them apocalyptic novels.”

  Kweku said, “Ghana isn’t the same? You blind, man
? The world, itself, hasn’t been the same. Kumasi ain’t no different from all the other cities that are struggling to supply food for its citizens.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Nana said. “Back in the day, I used to get a six pack of Pee Cola every Friday after a long back-breaking week working at the cocoa bean factory. Those days are gone. It’s two cartons of lousy processed blood every day. Three, if one of my grandkids didn’t drink theirs, and I give them a bit-credit for it.”

  “Hoo—wee! I sure miss gulping down a bottle of ice-cold bottle Pee Cola, and then burping out all that carbonation until the sun came up!”

  Nana slapped his knee and laughed. “You ain’t said nothing, man! My wife, may she rest in peace, used to hate me burping like a gassy babirusa! Used to make her twist up her pretty little face every time. But now, there are no more supermarkets, retail stores, no merchandise shops, nothing that survived bombing and looting in Ghana, this market is all we’ve got for miles around.”

  “If I want to get batteries for my beard shaver, I have to wait two months before my order comes into the Accra Warehouse. Two months! Don’t matter if I’m able to pay extra bit-credits to expedite delivery. And when I say delivery, I mean walking these two size twelves to the warehouse to pick it up! What happened to mailmen?”

  Nana sucked his teeth. “Now you’ve got this girl hacking onto to all the streaming programs threatening to make the people of Ghana pay because we didn’t exercise our right to stand up to the politicians.”

  Kweku blew out a puff of smoke. “What good does that do? Ain’t nothing going to change anyway. The rich run the world and piss on the poor like a dhole marking his territory.”

  “Tell me something, Kweku,” Nana said.

  “Go on, man!”

  “Did you vote?”

  “You asking a trick question, Nana? You know I haven’t voted since a Kenyan’s son was President in America, almost two decades ago. What does one vote mean, anyway? Nothing. It won’t change a thing!”

  “The dumb get dumber,” Nana said.

  “Have you voted in the last decade?” Kweku asked.

  “No, but-but-but that’s not the point!”

  Everyone started laughing at that.

  Major Grunt walked toward us, and when he walked right by me, asked, “You okay, yeah?”

  I nodded.

  He whispered. “You owe me one.”

  “You do know the dead girl was found, this morning?”

  “Already taken care of,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You guys didn’t come up with a smarter plan, like dumping her in Lake Volta, or something?”

  “You guys don’t have nothing to do with trafficking children to Lake Volta, do you Major Grunt?” Kweku asked, breaking up our conversation.

  “How are you going to ask me an asinine question like that?” Grunt asked.

  He shook his head in disgust and walked toward the back of the line.

  Trying my best to act normal, I called out to him, “Hey, Grunt.”

  He stopped and turned toward me. His eyebrows buried in anger, but he knew what I was going to ask because I always asked him the same thing almost every time I saw him.

  He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t even ask, Feeni.”

  “What?” I said. “You know I’m a good shot, Grunt, by all the times you’ve taken me to target practice. When can I really go hunting with you guys? Kofi goes out with your battalion, sometimes, and I’m a helluva better shot than him.”

  “Like I told you three times, this past week,” he said. “You’re not ready, yet. For one, it’s too dangerous. The dholes are very smart, and we have to make sure we keep them out of our village. We don’t have time to babysit. It might get one of us killed.”

  “Dholes are nothing but wild dogs,” I said. “Kill the alpha male and all the rest will go running.”

  He chuckled. “You may know a lot about pathology and that kind of stuff, but you know nothing about the nature of a wild animal. You have to almost be a wild animal to hunt and kill those radiation-mutated beasts.”

  “Hunting dholes?” Auntie Yajna said. “Girl, please! You better let the trained GAF do their jobs and worry about the house and children. That’s where you belong.”

  I turned to her and sucked my teeth. “Home, doing meaningless house chores while Kofi gets to be a hero for our village?”

  “Suck your teeth at me again and see if I don’t knock some sense into them,” Auntie Yajna said.

  “When you’re ready, Feeni,” Grunt said. “Join the GAF academy.”

  I sighed. “That’s really funny, coming from you! Where is my brother, anyway?”

  Grunt clenched his teeth and I knew he was thinking of what we’d done the night before.

  “He’s doing paperwork on a case, and afterward he has to follow up on something,” he said.

  What did Kofi have on him to keep him from turning me into the police? Was it good enough to keep him silent? Was it that he forged Kofi’s paperwork? Yeah, that’s it.

  Nana waited until Grunt was out of earshot and said, “Forget about hunting, Feeni. You look like such a sweet girl. Have you ever killed anything besides a mosquito?”

  “She may act tough,” Auntie Yajna said. “She’s too much of a loving spirit to kill anything that breathes God’s beautiful air. Besides, ain’t nothing but rabid beasts out there in them damn jungles. Too many areas are still radioactive, and the poor animals won’t ever be the same. Many of them run around in packs and will kill anything with a heartbeat.”

  “I know, Auntie,” I said. “That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

  Kweku said. “Your Auntie’s right, Feeni. You don’t want to be in any environment as volatile as that. Them witch dogs will have their way.”

  “There’s no such things as dogs that can wield magic!” I said.

  I didn’t know how much more of that kind of talk I could take.

  Nana continued. “But like I was getting ready to say, the government tattooed our wrists with numbers like we’re prisoners. We’re prisoners of technology, that’s what we are! I quite remember when I was a boy we went to schools. Schools! When you took a technology class, you figured how to take apart a transistor radio. Nowadays, a person can read an entire book just by corneal streaming. Corneal streaming. What a joke. I remember how I used to get excited when the bookmobile visited my school!”

  Kweku said, “Kids, today don’t even have a clue what a school is, with their neural tutors telling them how to do everything, even wipe their balls, since neural implants became mandatory.”

  “Now you’ve lit the fire that’s got my feet hopping!” Nana said. “It’s been twenty years, now! Two whole decades since everyone had to get those damned neural implants.”

  Kweku said, “I remember telling my baba that would be the end of schools, libraries, universities, all of that, when neural tutors became the rave.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Hell naw, he didn’t believe me. My father is probably in his grave right now, shaking his head at how places like Ghana and Botswana were the first to endorse children learning from neural tutors.”

  “Put millions of teachers out of jobs, is what it did,” Nana said. “And now, the children think they’re smarter than their parents because they can learn calculus and name galaxies before they can properly get an erection or wear a bra. Well, I tell you what children. Ain’t nothing like experience, and no virtual construct in the world is going to teach you the way a real live person can.”

  Kweku spread his arms wide and said, “Tell me all of you who are mothers. Was that fair? Putting schools out of business? Now, you have to watch your children round-the-clock. No more educational institutions to babysit your little monsters for six-to-eight hours a day.”

  A lot of the women in the line agreed and started clapping.

  “All right, settle down,” Grunt said. “You two are making my job harder,” he said, looking at Nana
and Kweku.

  “It ain’t a crime to speak our mind is it, Major Grunt?” Nana asked.

  Grunt grinned. “I don’t know, some of the jokes you make are so terrible they should be crimes.”

  They all laughed at that, even Kweku. I was too uptight to even think of a chuckle. Grunt turned and took a slow walk back down the line. Our eyes met. He nodded his head and I looked away.

  Kweku continued. “All neuroschools do is make our children cynical and lazy. That’s a bad place for anyone to thrive in.”

  “Thrive? Thrive? The only industries that thrive are the fishing industry and those that have tied themselves into IGP Sibaya’s consciousness storing enterprise. They haven’t even figured out how to transfer minds successfully, yet. But still, Sibaya holds all the power because he holds the keys to all the Consciousness Vaults, the world over.”

  “How in the hell does a man get that much power?” Kweku said and looked at us in the line. “The man used to be president of the NGS, the dag-blamed National Gun Society, way over in America.”

  Nana added, “Now, I understand that his parents were Ghanaian, but he was born an American. How does he come to Ghana, and not only become the Inspector General of Police but bamboozle the world to elect him to handle all affairs of the C-Vault?”

  “He’s a great salesman,” Kweku said.

  Nana spat on the ground next to him. “What he is, is a great con man.”

  “To hear you tell it. But see here? He didn’t have much opposition after the war, that’s how. After many nations fell from getting nuked, people were starving for a leader, and he stepped up to the plate. Yep, stepped up to the plate like he was Sir Don Bradman.”

  “It’s like Sibaya Jedi Mind-tricked us all. We rolled over and barked whenever he told us to,” Nana said, and started barking like a dog. “That’s what that hacker on the radio keeps talking about. We’re like lambs! Why don’t we stand up to them? Show them a thing or two?”