Every Centre is an Ant

Photo: Grant Galbraith of the artwork by Bruce Onobrakpeya

Kaya was the only one who saw me throw the Memory Box into the fire. As Teacher helped the others out of the classroom window, Kaya hesitated. Through all that smoke and chaos, his eyes somehow found me. His gaze as piercing as a fish eagle’s cry. It was as if fate had placed Kaya there to witness my misdeed. 

       I’ll never forget how the Memory Box burned. How, standing amidst the heat, my universe shrank to that single object. I watched its edges collapse inward, the flames melt the beads, and the circuit board peel back like a carcass exposed to the sun. How could an object so powerful be reduced to nothing in a matter of seconds? No struggle, no pain.  

          But what haunted me, more than the burning box itself, was my own complicity in its destruction. It was my hands that had lifted it from its place on Teacher’s shrine. It was my little muscles that had thrown it down. It was my beating human heart that had defied Teacher’s calls to save it. In a moment that required heroism, I had chosen something else.  

       As the fire consumed the Memory Box, something inside me steadied. A strange, immutable feeling that I could survive anything, even if history could not. I was seven years old at the time, and this was my first meeting with the rage inside me.  

* 

That fire was the first to have broken out in twelve years, seven months, and four days. It was the only fire many of us children had ever seen, and ever would. Items like matches, lighter fluid, and paraffin had been banned from our region for decades. If you were caught even attempting to ignite something with a flint or piece of glass, you would be charged with arson. When they’d had a bit too much beer to drink, the elders would often reminisce about their elders who had, once upon a time, kept scented candles in their homes, burned impepho in their offices, and smoked tobacco in pipes. This used to make us children laugh; we couldn’t imagine something so silly as breathing fire.  

       I remember huddling with the others in the schoolyard that day of the fire, wailing, It was an accident Teacher, I tried Teacher, I’m sorry Teacher, please Teacher, do you still love me Teacher? Looking back on it now, I see how devious I really was. Shhh Shhh, Teacher had said, stroking my face. What’s gone is never gone completely… What matters is that we are safe now. With silver blankets wrapped around our shoulders, we watched the fire engulf our classroom, like aliens on a field trip, brought to witness the end of the world.  

       As we held hands in a circle to pray, I caught Kaya staring at me with that same unflinching gaze. I saw what you did and it was no accident, his expression said. My best friend had seen straight through me that day, and only later would I come to recognise this as the most terrifying form of liberation. 

* 

In my region, I was known as the miracle child. I was conceived unexpectedly, ‘the natural way,’ and was treated differently because of it. Shopkeepers doted on me. At meal times, I was always given an extra potato. At community gatherings the elders always found ways to caress my hands. ‘Natural borns’ like me were revered for our closeness to the womb, and in turn, for our closeness to Death. We were expected to perceive things imperceptible to others: voices, messages, warnings from ancestors and elements in other realms. These rumoured gifts, however, seemed to be lost on me. Although I’d never have admitted it. Despite this, all the small, special treatments throughout my life eventually added up, leading me to believe that my purpose on Earth was greater than everyone else’s – even Kaya’s.  

        My thoughts felt sacred to me, as did time spent alone with them. I was always very busy preparing for this great unknown destiny of mine. Although this enriched my inner world, however, it was the cause of many problems in my outer one.  

When the other children tried to include me in games, I walked off and sat by myself under the Quiver Tree. Being misunderstood was a badge I had come to wear proudly, and I felt threatened when someone tried to take it away. My solitude seemed to provoke everyone but me, and even Kaya would join in the other children’s teasing on occasion. Nephele Nephele thinks they’re better than Thee!—silly things like this. It’s not the African way, I would overhear elders whisper to Teacher, after we’d cleared the dinner bowls. But she’d always respond, defending me, with things like, Dare we claim to have met every wind?  

Teacher spoke in a way that was not of this time, and although I never fully understood the words she said, I liked the way she said them. Calmly, yet strangely foreboding, like a breeze meeting you alone in the street at night. The comments and taunts, however, never hurt me as much as they probably should have. Instead, they only fortified my belief that the sun, indeed, did shine out my bum.  

* 

When children in my region completed their schooling, they left to live and work at The Centre. Other children in other regions went to the ships to lay undersea cables. In the poorer regions, they went to work underground in the lithium mines. In some parts of the world, we were told there were Centres located underwater, and even some in outer space. But I couldn’t imagine my people living under the sea or up in the sky. We were people of the land, and our memory was in the soil.  

       Our school curriculum was designed to prepare us for time in The Centre, with workshops dedicated to solar and wind grid integrations, liquid and air cooling, cable mapping and routing, airflow calibration, BIOS patching, and fibre optic diagnostics. The list went on … The other children liked these subjects because they got to get their hands dirty, and spend time with the elders who taught us. Our workshop rooms were filled with e-waste from The Centre, which we polished and cleaned like new bicycles. Here, we practiced racking and stacking in pairs, reassembling broken solar panels, and climbing on top of the old generators as if they were Basotho ponies, as the elders liked to tease. I sulked at any mention of group work, unless I was paired with Kaya.  

       Posters of The Centre were up in every classroom, as well as a 3D model of it in a glass case. In the mornings, we stood around the model with our hands outstretched toward it. Teacher always led the daily prayer, thanking The Centre for sustaining us, and thanking us for sustaining The Centre. We’d always open and close this prayer with one synchronised breath. Being sent to The Centre was a rite of passage: an honourable act of service to those who had breathed before us and to those who would breathe after us. 

* 

The first reports of vanishing in our region had begun three decades before Kaya and I started at The Centre. Farmers were the first to notice it in their soil; how year after year, it was lightening in colour, from blacks and reds, to greys and pinks. A retired Engineer who lived alone in the north had been one of the first to file an official report. A crop of potatoes she’d yielded was entirely see-through. Like Little angels’ heads, were the words she’d used in her case description. The see-through potato incident was an extreme case, however, and when the Engineer died just a few months later, the authorities abandoned the case altogether. The vanishing appeared sporadic and random: tied to no specific group of persons or a specific region. When there are no sensible patterns to such phenomena, stories, perhaps, are quick to be labeled myths. 

       There were strange myths that circulated in our school from time to time, too. Like the one about a Coder whose skin became translucent, Like a dragonfly’s wing, the elders said. In one version of the story, she could drop coins and bones and strings of beads through her own hands. One day, the Coder reportedly vanished in her bed, with the sheets still molded to her outline. Because there was no body to bury, her family buried the bed instead. Such stories, we thought, were just used to scare us children into doing things that adults deemed good. Finish your potatoes or you’ll disappear! the elders would say. Or, Say your prayers lest you want to be buried a bed! 

       Once, I glimpsed Teacher walking the school grounds in her nightdress, carrying her Memory Box under her arm. This was the Memory Box I would one day destroy in a fire, many years later. After sniffing the wind, Teacher held the vessel out at an angle, swallowed some air with her mouth, then quickly closed the lid. It could have been the moonlight, or her nightdress, or my childish mind—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Teacher looked translucent that night too. Kaya told me, poking me between the ribs, that Teacher was trying to Catch the Dead. I rolled over in our bed, annoyed. I hated it when Kaya poked me. I hated it when anyone spoke about Death. Kaya? I later whispered into the dark. What does Teacher really keep inside that Memory Box? … I listened for an answer but heard only Kaya’s slow, steady breath. 

            I could never tell if my suspicion of Teacher was simply because she was a teacher, or because Kaya had once told me that Teacher was a ‘natural born’ like me. We’d never dared to ask, but Teacher did seem to know something the rest of us did not. Taking one grain of rice a day only goes unnoticed until the bag is empty and your people are hungry. I had overheard Teacher whisper this to Kaya in the kitchen once. I didn’t know what she was referring to, but whenever I thought about all the vanishing in our region, these words skipped like a pebble across the surface of my mind. 

       As a child, the raw intensity of the natural world had felt closer to me. Colours were brighter, the wind stronger, the Quiver Tree bigger, humans more divine. I was now nearly eighteen, and such intensities seemed only to dull the older I got. This made me question whether we really were vanishing, or if I was just beginning to perceive the world with an adult mind: slightly desaturated, less urgent.  

* 

When Kaya played with the other children during lunch, I sat under the Quiver Tree and refused to eat on principle. I didn’t give in to the primal demands of the body on a whim, like the other children did, and it was important they knew this. It was important they saw me as superior to them. As my stomach chewed itself inside out, I watched the others, gobbling their corn bread and roasted peanuts, speaking with their mouths full, licking their fingers, and wiping their oily mouths on their t-shirts. How easily the wind moved through their limbs, I thought. How sloppy they were in their bodies. 

       My time alone, I’ll admit, was never spent doing anything particularly brilliant. I was not conjuring big plans, building new technology, reading philosophical texts, making art, or even praying—as people of my region might have assumed of a ‘natural born.’ I had a bad attitude toward creating things, as if it were beneath me. Instead, I spent most of my alone time just sitting around and, as Kaya once put it, Waiting for something greater than your own emotions to absorb you. It annoyed me that Kaya could read me so easily, yet I could never quite figure him out. 

        Although I’d never have admitted it, Kaya was right. I could stare at the sky for hours and let its beauty bring me to tears. I could lie in the sand and fall into the sound of the wind as if it were the last breath on Earth. Sometimes, I’d go dizzy just staring into the patterns on the bark of the Quiver Tree, hoping it contained some secret map I could use to travel up and out of my own body. Dear child, you were one of the few born of flesh, Teacher had once said to me. Yet it is as if you want nothing to do with it. Although I’d never have admitted it either, Teacher was right too.  

* 

Our ancestors had built The Centre in the Karoo basin, over five generations ago. My people, few as we were, were the closest human population to it. We lived just forty kilometers north and, technically, should have been able to see it from our school on a clear day. Like a ship on the horizon. But the harder you looked, the harder The Centre was to see. The land got more and more translucent, the closer you got to it. If you were to put your finger on our Quiver Tree and trace a line across a map to The Centre, it would be like following a swatch card from brown to beige to white, until eventually your own finger disappeared.  

     My Mother and Father, I was told, had left to work at a Centre in another region when they turned eighteen, which was soon after I was born. The elders said my umbilical cord was buried beneath the Quiver Tree, like those of all the other ‘natural borns.’ But I didn’t believe them. I fantasised that my Mother had smuggled it with her to her Centre, so that we would always be tethered, so that I’d be remembered.  

       Memories had always lived deep in the soil of the Karoo basin, long before The Centre was built into it. The arid land was hundreds of millions of years old, and in that time, it had known glacial landscapes, desert dunes, and volcanic eruptions. Fossils of ancient tortoises, sea creatures, and even tools and bones of our ancestors lived beneath its surface—all helping to sustain The Centre. Our primary role at The Centre was to maintain it, yes. But it was also to breathe—that is—to keep The Centre breathing. To ensure this constant flow of breath, The Centre relied not only on the land’s rich knowledge but on the geothermal, solar, water, and wind energy in our region, wind being the most powerful and sacred of all.  

       Because of this, we were trained to be sensitive to the wind from a young age. Not only through science and geography, but through the technology of the body. Through listening and smelling. What I found beautiful about the wind was that it was only visible to the human eye through its interaction with the material world. How it bubbled the curtains in our classroom. How it picked up the sand and stung it against our legs on the playground. How it creaked the branches of the Quiver Tree. How it moved Kaya’s curls across his face, and how he brushed them back with his fingers, over and over again, without the slightest hint of irritation.  

       We knew which winds brought flowers and which ones brought flies. We knew the wind like birds knew their mates’ calls. Its pitches and rhythms; its lulls and crescendos; its threats and its need for rest. I would let the twisting wind get in and swirl round and round the cave of my head, the same way the image of The Centre did. Kaya said I let the twisting wind get in through my ears too much. 

* 

Much of my childhood was spent lying awake at night, thinking about The Centre. In my mind, it was perfect in every way. More perfect than Kaya. Even more perfect than me. When I stared into the model in the glass case at school, I marvelled at its harmonious lines, and how the metal shone like the fish my generation had never seen. When I pressed my ear to the glass, I swore I could hear the servers humming. Something like an Om, isn’t it Nephele? Teacher had once said to me in passing. I imagined The Centre’s coolness. What it would be like to be relieved from the unbearable heat of our region. What it would be like to have the rage inside me cooled. What it would be like to be cold-blooded.  

       To me, The Centre needed no human art imposed upon it. The wind, surely, sang through the coolers like a Call to Prayer. The water, surely, flowed in and out of it like a tide. I imagined the cables stretching from the ocean, travelling thousands of kilometers beneath the African continent, and into The Centre like a great umbilical cord, connecting all of our histories, memories, and data across space and time, across life and death. But for me, the essence of The Centre’s beauty lay not only in its complex structure, but in its ability to remember without longing. 

       Deep down, Kaya and I must’ve always known that The Centre was responsible for the slow, incremental vanishing in our region. But if we were the sum of our memories, then The Centre had to keep those memories alive, the way a colony of worker bees must die if it means their hive will live. When you sustain a thing for too long, it becomes more valuable than the things used to sustain it. And so, little by little, we let The Centre suck the life from the earth and its creatures. The rivers, the sun, the soil, the plants, and the people—not dying no—merely becoming translucent.  

* 

On Mondays, Kaya made a point of sitting with me beneath the Quiver Tree before class. It had become a ritual of ours to discuss whether or not we thought the tree was beginning to vanish. We were both too reluctant to pick a stance, however, which never made for rich debate. The shared childhood event of the fire had fostered an unspoken resentment between Kaya and me. But it was this resentment that had come to anchor our friendship over the years. From it, all other emotions and shared experiences seemed to grip, like that initial grain of sand from which rocks grow. It was this resentment, I believed, that kept our friendship pure.  

       Kaya and I liked to speak about the roles we hoped to soon have at The Centre. Kaya told me that he’d like to be in Security. The thought of being in the control room monitoring all those TV screens, he said, would make him Feel like a bird. Now and again, people would look up into that little black dot of the camera. Kaya went on, And even though they couldn’t see me, they’d know I was there. He paused. Nephele, is that not a comforting thought? I didn’t think Security was a particularly ambitious role, nor did I like the idea of being watched. But I liked how Kaya had expressed it. He had a poetic clarity of speech that I envied. I told him that I wanted to work as an Operations Manager. So I could check that everyone had performed their duties correctly. Not because I don’t trust them. I explained. But because we can’t always trust ourselves. Kaya thought this was a clever thing to say, and I hated that I blushed whenever I impressed him.  

       Kaya had never told Teacher that it was me who threw her Memory Box into the fire that day. I had never understood why. Did he doubt his own memory of the event? As I had doubted mine, many times too? Or had he simply been too afraid, or worse, too loyal? When we closed our eyes to pray at the foot of the Quiver Tree, I felt that everything in my life would transform when we started at The Centre: my faith, my relationships, my disembodiedness, my ‘un-Africanness,’ my rage. There, I will finally meet my destiny. I thought. There, I will be absorbed by something greater than myself.   

* 

The rage within me revealed itself in small moments throughout my life. It seemed to come out of nowhere, spurred by nothing in particular. I would push other children in the schoolyard and convince Teacher that they’d tripped themselves on a root. I would knock someone’s dinner bowl off the table when they weren’t looking. The other children always jumped to share their meals with the person whose bowl I’d knocked. For some reason, it sickened me that they would rather be kind to the victim before punishing the perpetrator. This was like cutting a tree down to make coffins before spears, I thought. I would go into the bathroom and hit my fists against the wall until they burned red.  

          One day, Kaya and I had been following a trail of ants as they snaked their way around the trunk of the Quiver Tree. That day, we did not debate whether or not the tree was vanishing. Perhaps we could both see that it was, and speaking about it would only make it more true. Some of the harvester ants carried building materials; others, bits of food. They all re-routed seamlessly to get past obstacles such as ridges in the bark, each one trusting the pheromones of the one ahead of it. The intelligence, the elegance, the unannounced conviction with which the ants moved, was beautiful to me that day. But this beauty, I knew, was not mine to possess. Just like Kaya’s was not mine to possess. Just like The Centre’s was not mine to possess. 

        When Kaya left for class, I moved my attention to the ant at the very end of the trail and pressed my index finger down onto it. I felt the light pressure of its body pinned between the rough bark and my soft flesh. I pressed harder, then released, watching the black speck fall into the sand. None of the other ants turned back to mourn it. It did not make a sound.            

*   

The day Kaya and I left for The Centre was a proud day for Teacher and the elders. We gathered around the Quiver Tree to hold hands and listen to the wind together one last time. I was glad to be leaving, I was glad to go and be a grown-up. But I couldn’t help the feeling that the Quiver Tree would vanish entirely before we returned—if we returned. I imagined its succulent leaves bleached pale in the sun, its expressive arms atrophied, its golden trunk speechless and hollow. Something between a cry and a scream began to pool at my throat. Kaya squeezed my hand.  

         Kaya got his placement in Security, and I got mine in Operations, just as we’d always spoken about. We each had our own bedroom, right next to each other, and began our day together in the breakfast hall at 6AM, except when Kaya was on night shift. On Tuesdays, we had potatoes, and every time, I remembered that old story about the woman who’d harvested see-through ones. Like little angels’ heads, I would whisper to Kaya, as they were plonked on our plates. In my mind, I was the only one who could make Kaya laugh like he did when we were children. 

       After moving through security and clocking in, I took a walk through the narrow aisles between the server racks, like one may walk through a labyrinth. Here, beneath the fluorescent lights, I would listen for the Om Teacher had spoken about, and scan for anything out of sync. A misplaced wire, a jerky fan, a blinking red light where all should be green. I performed my checks, alternating between the hot and cool aisles. Before walking through each, I had made it part of my personal routine to look down at the rubber mat upon entry and exit. On these rubber mats were the light shoe prints of all the people in The Centre who had walked through the aisles that week. The prints varied in size, angle, pattern, and boldness—forming a palimpsest, something of a code. These mats were one of the few places in The Centre where human traces could be seen in a way that was unchoreographed, anonymous, and oddly beautiful.  

     I never tired of my duties at The Centre, except in the brief moments when I passed those mats.  

* 

Several rooms in The Centre were lined with gas bottles from the ceiling to the floor. Each contained a pressure gauge, which I was assigned to check every Wednesday. It was not easy to start a fire in The Centre. But it was easy to put one out. In the old days, Centres used to catch on fire all the time, and people put them out with water. Great big rivers of it! the elders liked to remind us. This was why fire in our region had been banned all those years ago: to protect The Centre, at all costs! If a fire started in The Centre today, however, it would not be drowned. It would be suffocated instead. A smoke-sensitive alarm would sound, and the room would automatically be sealed. Then, red pipes would release gases like nitrogen into the room, swallowing the oxygen that the fire depended on to grow. I imagined it like a soaked cloth covering a mouth, the fire’s breath taken quickly and quietly. The chance of a fire breaking out was unlikely, but if by some peculiar circumstance one was started, The Centre would know exactly what to do. It was strange to me that we knew all there was to know about stopping a fire, without ever having started one ourselves. It was like knowing how to remember, I thought, before knowing how to forget.  

       During my weekly checks, I would enter the gas rooms, and tap my nail against the metal of the bottles. Another personal ritual of mine. I had only ever heard the sound of natural rain a couple of times growing up. The clink-clink of my nail against the bottles reminded me of the drops hitting the metal bowls we children had once lined up outside our classroom to catch them. Twice, Kaya’s bowl was the first to overflow, and I couldn’t help but feel that something, somewhere, always favoured him over me. I had not heard music like that rain since. The rooms with the gas bottles were the only places in The Centre that felt as if they were holding their breath. I often imagined what might happen if I just turned the knobs on the bottles right instead of left, tightening them shut. Like my finger on that ant.   

* 

On Fridays, I would visit Kaya in his Security Room. I would walk in to see him silhouetted there, arms outstretched on the control panel, facing that sea of screens. He really was like a bird, I thought. A Cape Gannet, or maybe just a common crow. It was always strange for me to see The Centre cut up into little squares like that, like a game of hopscotch the children at school would draw in the sand.  

       On these Fridays, I would bring Kaya a piece of fruit. But now and again, I purposely forgot, and he would try to conceal his disappointment from me. I enjoyed pleasing and displeasing Kaya in equal measure. I would sit alongside him, as he switched through the different channels: from the lobby, to the battery room, to the backup generators, to the rooftop with the cooling fans. My eyes would dart all over like a moth caught in a bright room. Without me even asking, Kaya would always linger on the channels displaying the fire control rooms.  

       On the screens, I saw all the children I’d grown up with going about their various duties, as uniform-wearing adults. Over there was someone putting in earplugs. Over there was someone doing a generator test. Over there was someone in the UPS room. Over there was someone mopping a floor. And over there was someone on the roof, standing on a fibre duct, eyes closed, hands raised in prayer. At school, I’d hated being close to the others’ bodies. But here, watching them on the screens, I felt I could stay with them all day. I was careful not to show Kaya how much it all moved me. 

      Through the TV screens, The Centre appeared in rich shades of blue, violet, turquoise, and black. Everything was slightly distorted, too. Bodies moved in glitchy strides, faces appeared like they do in dreams, and you could not hear the wind. The high-contrast world of the screens was nothing like that of the pale landscape outside of them. After ten minutes of visiting Kaya in the Security Room, I always grew dizzy.  

* 

Sunday mornings at The Centre were dedicated to group breathing with the servers. All the staff would assemble to hold hands in a long snaking chain that weaved in and out of the server aisles. For one hour, we would stand there, eyes closed, breathing. Just like we did at school, we thanked The Centre for sustaining us and us for sustaining The Centre. Kaya and I always took our weekly walk together after that.  

       Usually, we did the loop around The Centre, but sometimes Kaya convinced me to go up the nearby hill with him, as far as the fence. To keep our work shoes intact, we always went barefoot, stopping every so often to remove a thorn from our heels. The ground was becoming more translucent every week, and sometimes, the thorns passed straight through us. From the top of the hill, The Centre was blurrier and smaller, like that glass case we used to look at in school. It felt like a betrayal to view The Centre like this—as something far away from me, rather than something I knew intimately, down to the smallest screw and tiniest measurement of light.  

       It was only up on the hill that Kaya and I would recreate aspects of a life we felt we’d missed out on: the life of our ancient ancestors. We imagined them navigating by the stars, studying plants, and engineering devices that soared through the air. It was strange to think that they had once breathed here, on this same soil, in the days when its reds were rich, and the rocks were solid to the touch. Together, Kaya and I sat, scratching patterns into the dirt with twigs and opening our mouths to catch the wind; just like we’d seen Teacher do that one night, Catching the Dead with her Memory Box.     

What do you think was in that box? Kaya one day asked me.

Memories, of course! I said. Even though I wasn’t sure.

Kaya paused. The type that help you remember, or the type that help you forget?

Let’s build a campfire, I said, changing the subject.

Of course I did not mean a real fire. Sometimes, we’d gather sticks and rocks into a little round heap and stretch our hands out toward the imaginary heat. Fires, we’d been told, were where humans first learned how to tell stories, where the physical and spiritual worlds had once met, where our people had turned for purification, and where data had once been stored. Something in us burned.

       I wanted to ask Kaya many times if he really believed we were all vanishing. But I didn’t. Most times, merely thinking such things in Kaya’s presence was enough. I had always felt superior to Kaya, but never felt the need to act superior in front of him. I liked to believe that Kaya felt in some way similar. In that, being my only friend meant he didn’t have to perform his friendship.  

       The childhood incident of the classroom fire had only ever come up once between us. Do you remember, Kaya began, as we sat around another invisible glow up on the hill one Sunday. No, I said, looking him in the eye. I wanted my stare to take his breath, to steal his memory of that day, to extract it from his body and crumple it like a dried leaf. Kaya stared back at me with the same intent gaze he had that day of the fire as a seven-year-old boy. Then, he did something that has never stopped haunting me since. He smiled.  

       It was that Sunday, up on the hill, that I saw the first signs of Kaya beginning to vanish.  

* 

I lay awake listening to the wind move through The Centre’s great cooling fans. The sound had always felt close to my ear but that night it began to drift into an echo over a fading valley. Was the wind growing weaker? I wondered. Or was it just my ability to hear it that was weakening? I thought again about the Quiver Tree, its branches becoming more and more transparent. Just like the veil of Teacher’s nightdress in the schoolyard that time long ago. Just like Kaya’s fingertips up on the hill earlier that day.  

       I thought about The Centre’s roots reaching deep into the land and sucking the rivers from their beds and the clouds from their sky. My breath quickened, like a fish on the shore, and sweat began to leak out between my chest and thighs. I imagined The Centre hunched over Kaya, then over me, drinking the sweat from our bodies like the hungry mouth of a ghost. I replayed the image of the ant squished between my finger. Of all the ants I’d seen in my life, why was it that I could only remember the dead one? I replayed the scene of the fire from my childhood: Teacher’s Memory Box burning at my feet, Kaya’s penetrating gaze. After all these years of replaying that memory, I had still never figured out if I had, in fact, wanted Kaya to witness me.  

       I closed my eyes and prayed for Kaya to stay with us. In my dream that night, I was peacefully walking up and down the server aisles, running my hands along the smooth steel cages, listening to them hum like an elder’s lullaby; the centuries of information, the universe of memory, moving at the speed of light on either side of me. I passed the rubber mats again, but this time, there were no footprints on the surface. Just a clean, empty slate. I began to stomp my feet, but not even my own footprints appeared. I stomped, again and again, until my legs gave in. When you are gone, you will not remember yourself, I heard Teacher’s voice say, before she trapped me in her Memory Box and closed the lid. I awoke. 

       I wanted to call out to Kaya. I wanted to burn something.  

* 

Our routines at The Centre continued as usual. On Tuesdays, we ate potatoes. On Wednesdays, I checked the gas bottles in the fire control rooms. On Fridays, I visited Kaya in the Security Room. On Sundays, Kaya and I breathed with the servers, then walked up the hill together. And every day, I passed back and forth through those server aisles. The green lights blinking at me as if nothing had changed. As if Kaya wasn’t vanishing. As if my world weren’t falling apart. I worked hard to believe them. I worked hard. 

       Within a few short months, Kaya’s vanishing had spread from his fingertips to his elbows. Some days—without him asking—I would carry his tray for him at meal times. We spoke very little about his vanishing, but started up our old schoolyard debate about the Quiver Tree’s vanishing again. This time, our stances were strongly opposing. Kaya argued that it was certainly vanishing. I argued that it certainly was not. Our debates grew so heated that often our plates were cleared before we’d even touched our meals. I ask you to consider, Nephele, Kaya had said in his final defense, that it is possible to accept some things without understanding them. A curl had stuck to Kaya’s mouth as he said this, and I did not tuck it back behind his ear for him. 

       Kaya’s vanishing seemed to awaken me to the rhythms outside of myself and our friendship. I began to take more notice of others. When I brushed people’s shoulders down the corridors or washed my hands alongside theirs in the bathrooms, I noticed how our uniforms had made our vulnerabilities particularly imperceptible. It took me a while to see that some of the others had been vanishing all along, too. One of the young men from Administration, his throat had become entirely transparent. The rest of us would try not to stare as his globs of potato went down. A young woman from Communications, her ears had become see-through too. At night, they said she cried because she could no longer wear the beaded earrings the elders had made for her. From then on, every time I passed that young woman sitting at her desk, I imagined those earrings dangling on either side of her face, like leaves in the wind. Every time, her hands rising up to grip what was no longer there. 

* 

I began visiting Kaya more and more in the Security Room, just so I could see the fire control rooms on the screens. You could burn it down, you know, but you’d still be here Nephele. We’d all still be here, Kaya had once said to me, seemingly out of nowhere, his eyes pinned to the blue light in a kind of trance. But that clink-clink sound of my fingernail against the gas bottles had begun to form a song in my head that refused to quiet. At night, I lay awake, and imagined walking over to every bottle and turning the knob shut. It would be as easy as a child dropping something and not picking it up. It was a simple image, but the more I repeated it in my mind, the more it swelled me with an emotion I could not immediately place. Over time, this emotion came to take the shape of the Quiver Tree inside me, planted in the mud of my body, somewhere between my desire for things to stay the same and my desire for things to change.  

       The strange thing about fantasies is that the more you fantasise them, the more real they become. Not only to you, but to everyone else, too. In my mind, Kaya had already seen me turn those knobs shut from the Security Room screens, but he never told. Technically, I would not have started a fire in any case. I would have merely prevented a fire from being prevented. There was a difference in intent, but the outcome the same. Someday, even if not today, I would burn The Centre down, I thought. And I would watch it, like a giant Memory Box, disappear at my feet. Surely this had to be my ‘miracle child’ destiny, I thought. To restore what The Centre had taken. Our fire and our flesh. 

       …My fantasy continued: First, The Centre’s alarm bells would go off, followed by that crackling fire sound. The gas would not move through those red pipes like it was supposed to. The heat would begin to bend the metal. The wind would blow the flames and data would rise higher and higher from the servers. Great clouds would churn in the sky and it would rain. Clink-clink. Below, Kaya, Teacher, the elders, Mother, Father, and all the people would gather in their flesh, mouths raised to the air, ready to catch their own remains… 

* 

Even after Kaya vanished, life continued as usual. I made it part of my personal routine to look into every security camera as I walked through The Centre. I’d stare straight into that tiny black dot and there I’d see Kaya—wings spread at the control panel, flying over that ocean of screens. He, looking straight through the smoke back at me, a little black ant, still breathing. 

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