It is taking me a long time to speak because I am feeling like he is seeing me. Not how Xifeng or Enyemaka are seeing me and not how drone is seeing me and not how people under Falomo Bridge are seeing me, even though I am calling all of these people friend. He is seeing inside me and outside me at the same time. He is seeing all of me. He is seeing the question I am asking and he is seeing the question underneath that and the question underneath that. He is seeing that I am worried and scared and that I am sadding and that I am learning new thing every day and it is filling me with fear, and I am thinking he is seeing all of these thing because he is once feeling them too. I am feeling like he is seeing me, and it is making me to want to be thanking him. “How are you knowing where to go to find this place or this person you are looking for?”

“I am retracing my steps,” he is telling me. “I am remembering that one time when I am being child of war I am walking this path, but I am going in other direction and I am leaving many dead body. So I am walking this path again and I am seeing what I am doing in my head when I am being younger and more foolish. And this is how I am knowing where to go. When the killing and the bleeding in my head is stopping, I will know that I have arrived. I will know that I’ve found what I am looking for.”

And I am thinking that maybe when he is finding what he is looking for, I will be finding it too.

When he is first saying we are sharing mystery, I am thinking he means we are both having something wrong with us or we are both having disease inside our body or our leg or arm is broken the same way, but now I am thinking that he is saying it more like we are sibling. We are brother and sister.

We share mystery. We are being family.

CHAPTER

23

The head of radiology at Nizamiye Hospital wears a shimmering white changshan with mauve magua jacket and traditional chieftain’s kufi. His pant legs whisper against each other as he leads Ify and Grace through the open ward where patients, who look the absolute picture of health, are being attended to by hovering drones and the occasional nurse. Small conversations and occasional laughter fill the room. Ify notices that every patient has bandages wrapped around their head and neck. A few have bandages swathing their arms, and through the gauze, the copper-red markings indicating a healing circular incision. An outlet.