Page 45 of Death of the Author

45 #Adventure

Zelu lay on her bed, flipping through her own novel. She’d open to a random page and read a passage, and the scene would flood

through her memory like water. When you wrote and edited and polished something so many times, it became branded into your

brain. It took only a few words to bring it all back, despite the fact that she hadn’t reread the novel in years, since it

was published. Yet she still could not summon book two.

She rarely went on social media these days because the harassment was so annoying. She could post a random quote, a response

to something in the news, a photo of a dolphin, even a passive-aggressive comment about the Rusted Robots film, and eighty percent of the responses would be along the lines of “We don’t care about anything you say. Shut up and

give us book two.” But she couldn’t give what wasn’t there. That was just a fact. She wrote short stories (that she never

submitted anywhere), she journaled, she sketched, she took notes, but none of this led her down what she’d mentally started

calling her “robot runway.” She wanted to get there more than anyone, but it was what it was. She wished everyone would shut

the fuck up and leave her be. Including her “gently nudging” editor and agent.

She read through the beginning of her first novel again, visualizing Ankara’s green face screen in her mind. Feeling her. She seemed close enough for Zelu to touch. “Turn back, Ankara,” Zelu said with a laugh as she read. “Lagos is not a good place to be right now.” She maneuvered herself onto her back, thinking about where she wished she were right now. The Galapagos Islands , she thought. She’d always wanted to swim with the aquatic iguanas that looked like miniature Godzillas. Or maybe all alone on a small but luxurious yacht run by robots and AI, out in the middle of the ocean, where there’s nothing

in sight but blue water and sunshine. Well, maybe Msizi could be there, too, if he wanted. Yeah, I like that.

She leaned her head back against her bed’s aqua-blue cushioned headrest and shut her eyes. Outer space. In the black void. The Earth beneath me. Free. She pinched her chin, enjoying the idea. She thought of the Chargers in Rusted Robots . They were able to travel the universe forever. The sane ones, at least. “What would that be like?” she whispered to herself.

The freedom of it. The being of it. Untethered from Earth, the mother ship. I can imagine it , she thought. She blinked as it softly settled in her mind like a tiny organic spaceship from another solar system. She nodded

to herself, realizing it. I want to do more than imagine it.

Instead, she picked up her phone and doomscrolled for a while. Then, she didn’t know how she got there, but she wound up on

a website full of Rusted Robots fanfiction. There were hundreds of works written by people frustrated that there was no book two, who’d taken it upon themselves

to produce one. There were chapters, short stories, novellas, and even thirty full novels! All posted for everyone to read

and comment on. She frowned, knowing she should click away. Knowing she should leave her fans to have their fun and revel

in her worlds the way they chose to. Leave it alone , Zelu muttered. Leeeeeeave.

But she didn’t leave. She kept reading. And she kept fucking reading. By the time she got to the novel titled Yankee and Dot Fall in Love in New New York , which had been downloaded more than a thousand times, she was gnashing her teeth and holding back tears. “No, no, no!” she groaned. Only one short story she saw called her characters Ankara and Ijele. Everyone else was using the film as the foundation. How was this possible? These were readers, right? If they were writers, weren’t they usually also readers? She squeezed her eyes shut and took several deep breaths before finally breathing the word “Clarity.” She still felt like crying, though. “Fuck this shit,” she whispered.

She pulled up her email application, quickly wrote a message, and hit Send before she could overthink it. She turned her head

to look at the lake stretched out beneath her condo. “Would be cool,” she whispered to herself. To get away from the world

and everyone on it with their bullshit. To go to a place where no guns were necessary.

Minutes later, her phone chimed with an email. A response. Already! She skimmed the message and then read it seven times.

Then she sat there with her mouth hanging open. What did I just do?

Jack Preston’s response said, I was hoping I’d hear from you! You ready to do that thing that’s bigger? Then he quoted back to her the very words she’d said on that terrifying night in Nigeria when she was running for her life:

I’d be more prepared in outer space than all of you who can walk . And then Jack asked if she was ready to go, because he was putting together the group of civilian astronauts for his company’s

next mission.

Zelu wasn’t going to respond to him. But he didn’t bother waiting for her response, calling her a half hour later. Despite the more rational part of her, which knew this would only lead to trouble, her incessant curiosity convinced her to pick up. She was surprised to find that she enjoyed the conversation they had. Jack’s enthusiasm and genuine nerdiness for the program was infectious, even to her. The first mission that she’d turned down had gone well. On this next one, he himself would be the fifth civilian astronaut. He’d gone on and on about how it was going to raise money and awareness for the climate change and heart disease research funds he’d put together. Honestly, Zelu didn’t really understand or care about this. Her motives were more self-driven. But it was nice to listen to someone so ambitious and optimistic about the future. Jack had a lot of projects he was looking forward to, including the construction of a new hospital and public university in Nigeria. Both would receive funding generated by the momentum of this next adventure into the cosmos. “Progress both ways,” he said. “On the ground and beyond our planet. Zelu, join me, please . Be that sci-fi writer. I want to do this with you.”

“I hate roller coasters,” she blurted. “Ever heard of an astronaut, civilian or otherwise, who can’t stand roller coasters?”

“We can train that out of you,” he said. “You learned how to use those exos, right? All it takes is training and ambition.

See, the difference between NASA and #Adventure is that NASA will do everything to show that you aren’t good enough, and with

#Adventure, we’ll do everything to make it possible . If you want it, you can get it.”

By the time she got off the phone, she was overwhelmed. She’d written Jack on a whim, but she’d known how he’d respond. Now

she’d set something in motion, just when her life had been settling. Why’d I just do that? , she wondered. But she knew the answer to that, too. Oh yes, she knew. She wasn’t finding book two here. Maybe she’d find

it somewhere else.

Msizi pressed his temples and groaned. Zelu licked her lips, trying to figure out what more she could say to somehow make

this conversation less painful. But nothing came. She’d told him everything, and even as she’d said it, she’d wondered if

maybe she was making a terrible mistake. She hadn’t thought this through, and she knew it. And yet, she couldn’t find it in

herself to hit the brakes. Telling Msizi now, it all began to feel real. She reached out to take his hand, but he pulled back, jumping to his feet.

“Zelu, let me understand this,” he said, his voice louder than usual. He shook his head, striding to the large window that

overlooked Lake Michigan. “Oh my God,” he muttered. Then he said something in Zulu. Zelu caught only the last part, which

she knew was equivalent to “Fuck!”

“What?” she said. “Understand what?”

“ You reached out to him ?”

“Yeah. It was spontaneous, but I—”

A vein in his forehead looked ready to burst. “After all that’s happened... Mind you, the Nigerian madness happened because

of your impulsiveness, too!”

Zelu flinched. Msizi had never blamed her for that before. He sounded like Chinyere.

“Says the man who returns to Durban every two months,” she snapped back. “I guess when you do it, it’s not ‘impulsive.’”

“I’m from there!” he shouted. “I know where I’m supposed to go and what I’m supposed to leave alone.”

His words bit her and she winced. He didn’t think she was “from” Nigeria. He thought what had happened to her was her fault.

“I wasn’t some fucking tourist,” she whispered. “I grew up going there. That’s where my parents were born and raised, it’s

not the—”

Msizi seemed to realize, then, what he’d said. He held up his hands in a gesture for them to slow down. “Zelu, you don’t have

to prove who you are to me. I know who you are. I understand it.” He closed his eyes briefly and seemed to think hard on his words. “But you almost got yourself

killed over there. Your family, me , we all nearly imploded. We couldn’t do a fucking thing but sit there and hope the Nigerian authorities saved you. Imagine

how that felt.” He turned away, but then he whirled back around. “And now you want to do it again, but even worse! In space!

You keep wanting to go where I can’t follow you!”

Silence hung between them, punctuated only by their shallow breaths. Finally, she began, “Msizi, that’s not—”

“It is,” he insisted.

“It’s only three days in space.”

“ Three days? Oh, dear God! I thought it was for, like, a few hours. Do you hear yourself? Three days not on this planet !”

“I thought you were down. We talked about this before.”

Msizi looked more wrecked than she’d ever seen him. “Zelu, Zelu, Zelu , that was years ago! Come on! Look at all that’s happened in those years!”

Zelu stared at him. Oh yes, she’d made a mistake. She really hadn’t considered a lot of things. Like whether she should include

the person closest to her in the decision. Like how it would make him feel. Like how bonkers her family was going to go. Like

that three days wasn’t short when you weren’t on the planet. Like all the ways she could die up there. Now she wanted to curl

into herself and disappear.

Msizi sat back down beside her and took her hands, holding them very carefully in his own. He looked her hard in the eyes.

She didn’t look away, couldn’t blink, though the sides of her eyes twitched. It was difficult. For nearly a minute, they sat

like this, looking at each other, a silent conversation passing between them that couldn’t be put into words.

Abruptly, Msizi scoffed and stood up.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Seriously, Zelu?!” He turned and left the room. She heard the front door open and shut.

They’d never fought like this before. When the rest of the world was against her, Msizi was always by her side, not perfect,

not without flaws, but steady as a rock. She should have been crying, but instead, she found herself smiling. Maybe that was

manic of her, but they’d just had a whole argument with their minds—when had they learned to do that? And what else could

she have said to him? She wouldn’t have lied or held back the truth. She still wanted to go, and if she’d pretended otherwise,

that would have blown up in their faces, too. She’d told him what she wanted, and he’d heard her. He knew her, knew who she was, knew what she was capable of, whether he liked it or not.

They never said “I love you” because they didn’t need to. Their love existed in the space between words, in the moments when

they were apart, before they came back together. Zelu would just have to believe that when she left, he’d keep loving her.

He came back to the condo three hours later with a bag of Harold’s Chicken and two pomegranates. Zelu was on the living room couch watching a video about the previous space mission, and she quickly shut her laptop. He threw his jacket on the couch beside her, glared at her, and then silently went to the kitchen. She watched him clear the counter, wash his hands, and then cut, peel, and disassemble one of the pomegranates. He liked to prepare food as a way of relaxing, and Zelu was glad because he needed to relax.

Without looking up, he said, “I don’t want you to go.”

Her heart dropped. “I want to go.”

He picked up the second pomegranate and held it up. He slammed it on the counter, picked up the knife, and sliced into it,

red dribbling from the puncture wound. “I won’t stop you.” He paused, looking at the pomegranate juice bleeding out. “It hurts.”

Zelu’s heart ached. She hated causing him any type of pain, but this one she couldn’t help. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He picked up the severed half of the pomegranate and tore it open to expose the juicy red seeds. “What is the timeline of

this shit?”

“Three months.”

He began to pick out the seeds and put them in a glass bowl. “ Hayibo! ” he muttered.

“I’m scared,” Zelu admitted quietly. “I hear being on a spaceship is synonymous to sitting on top of a bomb.”

“Then why the fuck are you doing it?” he snapped.

She pressed her lips together. He already knew the answer, but he didn’t want to hear it.

What if I die out there? she wanted to ask, but that wasn’t the right question. If she died, then it would have been her time. Period. What will you do if I die out there? That was the question. But she didn’t voice it. She was already burdening him with enough.

“Do you love me?” she asked. She held her breath. She’d never asked him to say it, hadn’t thought she even wanted him to.

But in case something did happen to her up there, she at least felt it was important to understand what she was leaving behind.

He didn’t hesitate. “More than anyone in this galaxy.”

Eyes open, she took in all she felt: Fear. Surprise. Hope. Fear. Suspicion. Worry. Wonder. Fear. Her fault. She wanted to

whimper.

He finished disassembling the second pomegranate, and as he stood there, scooping up the lush red seeds and loudly crunching

on them, he gazed at her, his expression blank.

Then he said, “You want some of this chicken?” They moved on with the day.

That night, she woke to a thunderstorm flashing and rumbling over the lake. Msizi was still snoring away beside her, sprawled

out on his back. They always slept with the curtains wide open, since they were so high up facing Lake Michigan.

Zelu got into her chair and wheeled to the window to look outside. She wasn’t afraid of getting struck by lightning, though

she assumed it was possible. It just didn’t bother her. The waters were gray and barely visible in the clouds and rain. A

bolt ripped through the horizon like an electric-blue vein. A glorious interruption. Burning a break in the atmosphere. Unexpected,

lethal, beautiful. For a split second, it danced in the air, mighty, magnificent, and free. Then it disappeared. She exhaled.

She watched every flash until the storm was done, letting them blaze their shapes into her memory. However, when she blinked,

their features blurred behind her eyelids, and all she had to prove to herself that they’d been there were the crashes of

thunder that came in their wake.