The Market of Memories

They ask you what Aliyah Danjuma reminds you of, and the word that bursts forth from your lips is the wrong one because you tell them she reminds you of glass.

“Glass?” the man closest to you sputters out, a shaped eyebrow raised in condescension, “She reminds you of glass?”

Yes, you want to say, but not boring glass; not the kind used to fill windows or the ones kept by the rich for drinking water and flaunting wealth, but stained glass. The ones they hung up in large churches to signify that onlookers ought to gawk in reverence, the type of glass that refracts light in a thousand pretty colours, simply beautiful by morning, but at night, when everything is cascaded in darkness, lighting the way in iridescence.

“Glass,” you shakily repeat instead, then bite down on your tongue to halt the rest of your refrain, to stop yourself from telling the extractors that Aaliyah Danjuma reminds you of glass not because she is -or was – clear to read, but because she had a way of delegating light so that in her presence, everyone was worthy of praise.

The man blinks at you, his large eyes magnified by the glasses slowly slipping down his nose. He casts a sideways glance toward his colleague to your left, a dark woman with pink braids tied up in a ponytail destined to recede her hairline. The woman subtly shakes her head at the man, incessantly clicking the pen in her manicured hand.

You want to ask her, no, yell at her to stop, to fidget less and question more. The questioning is the final part of The Extraction, and had the woman been any good at her job, you would have been on your way home by now.

Finally, she clears her throat with a flare that suggests she’d not needed to do so in the first place and rests her hand gently on your shoulder. It smells like vanilla.

“Zainab,” she says calmly, but the sound of your name in her crisp-cut voice nearly drives you mad, “I know I do not have to explain to you why this final part is important. Seeing as you have undergone an Extraction six times over.”

You know she has not spoken unkindly, yet you have never had to ingest such bitter words. Six times is not nearly as terrible as what the people surrounding you have undergone. It is nowhere near as awful as the 16 extractions your neighbour, Ms Aliko, had suffered through, causing the elderly woman in the yellow house opposite yours to forget the nasty colouring of her own home.

Not as bad as your mama’s 20 extractions had been, each mind-altering one done to raise money for you. Your mother, who now sometimes smiles at you with the saccharine facade of someone pretending to be familiar with you, long lost herself to the process.

And six is certainly not as terrible as your husband, Kamal’s, who, after his 41st and final extraction, was found near a gutter in Ikeja, though you live around Maryland. When he was finally brought home by the men who had ruined him, he claimed he did not know who you were or what he was doing there.

But six is still terrifying, and each time you’ve done it, with every invasive question (and even worse, prodding into your mind to dig out the memory of choice), you remember your husband’s now glazed-over eyes, his inability to care about you, though he is vaguely aware he is supposed to, and you stare at the Extractor with the pointed device, wondering at which turn of their hand you were supposed to end up like him.

You look at the pink-braided woman, her doe eyes expectant, and you shake your head, freeing one of your locs from its scarf. “Glass is all I remember about this one,” you lie, moving to stand.” That is all I can recall.”

Her face falls, and it tells you for a fact that she is privileged, the kind of privilege that enables people to believe their eyes are their own form of currency, and with them, they can afford the entire world.

She opens her mouth to speak, most likely a reproach your mind is already scrambling to refute, but the man beside you cuts in before the words leave her glossy lips.

“Thank you, Zainab.” He turns back to you, his lips stretching in an uncomfortable smile. “That will be all.”

Relieved, you climb out of the leather lay-back seat and stumble to your feet, swaying from the dizziness that comes with having a piece of your mind taken from you. When you have steadied yourself, your brain has adjusted to its new loss, and you strain uselessly against your thoughts to try and remember something substantial about Aaliyah Danjuma, to know something other than her name or her beauty or her possible impact on the people around her, but even before you begin trying you know the action is futile.

She is nothing more than a few fragments in your mind, but had you told the whole truth to the Extractors, they would have siphoned even those out. It is necessary to gather as much of the memory as we can, they’d explained to you the first time you’d had an Extraction, a process more gruelling than the next five, where they had to sit you up themselves before beginning The Questioning, and sometimes the purging device is not capable of picking up all that a person remembers, but talking helps.

You were twenty-one during your first extraction. Freshly wed and freshly terrified because, as you tried your best to answer the woman they’d sent in for The Questioning, there was nothing left to tell. Your mind had completely emptied of all the experience you’d been privy to just an hour ago.

In fact, you’d become so hysterical when they’d thrown the first unanswerable query your way that you’d screamed at the Questioner and then thrown your bracelet at her colleague, begging them to tell you what you were supposed to know. Your outburst was answer enough, proof that there was nothing else to scrape out of your head, and the lady simply smiled at you (at least you assumed she was smiling through the blur of your tears) and told you in a chirpy voice that you were free to go home.

“It is because it was your first K’auna,” Kamal whispered affectionately as you cried in his chest over the blank spot in your mind, “The first has a way of being stolen from you, but you must hold on tighter next time.”

That was when Kamal was still your Kamal. When he would make you lumpy pap and underdone Akara every Saturday morning because he insisted on serving you, even at your own expense. The Kamal who would ask you to re-twist his hair whenever you had the chance so that when people asked him awestruck where he got it done, he could pull you closer and boast of your handiwork.

Kamal, the man you loved, who would sometimes freeze mid-task after his 22nd extraction. When this happened, he would stare unblinkingly wherever his eyes were trained, and every time it happened, you would hold your breath. You were always certain when he froze that that was it; that was where all the memories that had been taken from him would make him fold in on himself. Still, he always returned as if nothing had happened, and you would be too scared to admit to him that something had, so the world would continue as it did.

That Kamal was long gone, seized up finally in the fit of unblinking you feared. The type he could not escape.

Mama’s memory loss may have been bad, but Kamal’s was devastating. Brilliant Kamal was what you’d called him, and every time he brought home some elaborate engineering award praising his technological feats, you proudly felt the nickname slot in place. He hadn’t been brilliant through familiarity. No, Kamal’s genius had been objective.

That was before his profession had outgrown its usefulness, and Kamal had resorted to selling memories to make ends meet. The new Kamal could barely comprehend how to knot his laces, much less some quadratic equation, and least of all you.

The first thing Kamal did after the final Extraction that ruined him, when he was able to make out what little was left in his head, was turn to you as though he were facing a stranger and ask you to drive him to the saloon that sat on top of a pizza house.

”I want to shave it off,” he said irritably, gesturing wildly at his hair. “It’s disturbing me.” You had never known he kept it around for your pleasure, just as you’d kept your hair in dreads because he told you once that it made you look dignified.

Now, you fix your locs back in the patterned scarf tied around your head and turn to look at the two Extractors, both bent toward one another as you would as a child, sharing playground secrets. The pink-braided woman whispers furiously at the man, clicking her pen at record speed. Your heart races as he nods at her thoughtfully, stealing glances at you, causing both of your eyes to spring apart like similar magnetic poles bouncing off one another.

You don’t bother trying to listen to what she’s saying because you know she is speaking in Yoruba. It is the only way she would speak to the man from the start, after learning you are Hausa and therefore unlikely to understand her. But at least before The Questioning, she had spoken openly, unafraid of her words being interpreted. Now, her voice was hushed, and her posture defensive. You were certain it meant she did not trust you had given her all of the memory.

A chill runs through you despite the fact they’d turned off the A.C. a few moments ago. If she did not believe you, if she decided to dig through your head and gather more of what “felt” like the correct memory (because all parts of a memory are supposed to feel the same in the purging device), then she would probably take something that you had not offered to her. You eye the door handle, contemplating how easy it would be for you to slip out and run down the elaborate winding stairs of the Extraction facility. But you know you wouldn’t, even if you could get away without slipping or being caught. They had not paid you yet.

Instead, you decide to wait. You push your left hand into your pocket, fingering the utility knife Kamal had given you years ago when he sold his first memory.

“I don’t need this Kamal!” You’d yelled at him, shoving it back in his calloused hands, but he’d gently slipped it into your pocket, unaffected by your outburst.

“K’auna,” he sighed, and immediately he did, you knew you would fold. “People will know what I have started doing. We are no longer safe.”

You hated him because he was right. Kamal’s memories were practically gold. With a mind like his and a heart that loved so dearly, it was no secret that his memories would sell for more; therefore, he was more likely to be kidnapped.

You often imagined the person that would bid for a piece of his mind, some man or woman clad head to toe in perfume-spritzed silk, paying the same amount for his memory that one would for rent, only to add Kamal’s vial to an unending collection, admiring the swirl of it in between other pretentious hobbies.

You stop in your reverie, the cold steel of the pocket knife grounding you in reality. You do not know why you begrudge the rich so thoroughly for Kamal’s downfall. After all, they only fed into a system that had been cooked to suit their insatiable taste.

The Memory business had started the year after you were born, at least that’s what Mama had told you in her brief moments of lucidity. Dr Ifeoma Eze, with his two Masters degrees (as he liked to remind reporter after reporter), began working with an American team of neuroscientists to develop a permanent cure for Alzheimer’s.

The project had failed, but Ifeoma did not return to the country unmerited because rather than some life-changing cure, the doctor presented Nigerians with his highly experimental Memory Extraction—a system by which memories could be sieved out and held as a liquid in special vials or solidified into an uncanny-looking pill.

He paraded this as an alternative solution, telling reporters who were instantly obsessed with his work, “Rather than sit and wait for an individual to simply succumb to their illness, my colleagues and I have devised a way in which we can store the memory of the afflicted so they can take it once again, experiencing and remembering their life one more time at any moment of their choosing .”

The country stood in awe, praising Ifeoma as if he were some ordained messenger of God offering Nigerian’s exclusive salvation.

But his mission, of course, was bullshit.

Dr Eze’s propaganda got him the government funding he required to commercialise his product (though, in hindsight, you know the government would have supported him either way). Within a year, memories were being bottled up, and in two, they were being sold to the highest bidder. Before you were four, memories were Nigeria’s fanciest, most legal vice.

When the rich had gathered so much money that nothing could excite them anymore, the prospect of experiencing what others did, especially the poor, became riveting. It gave them a chance to simulate suffering without ever truly suffering, like a city boy who visited his village once a year and then boasted about its magnificence to his friends. What they got to play in for a moment came at another’s loss for a lifetime. Still, the poor needed the money to sustain themselves, and the rich needed the memories to sustain their interest, so memory extraction was embraced.

Now, as your eyes flicker from one Extractor to the next, you wish it hadn’t been accepted after all. You twist the knife restlessly in your pocket, the plastic handle giving you an ironic sort of comfort. Finally, the pink-braided woman pulls away from the man, her lips twitching, before she turns to you victoriously.

You clutch the knife tighter.

“Zainab,” she says carefully, happier than she had done when you were still lying down. “We have reason to believe you are withholding information from us.” You gasp as the man turns away, his head bent.

“Haba,” you say reproachfully, already backing away into the door. “I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

She nods in what you assume is her attempt at solemnity. “Maybe that is true. So it wouldn’t matter too much if Ade and I took another look in your head?”

She says it like you have a choice, as though the waiver you signed did not already state this was within her and Ade’s rights.

You open your mouth to answer, but no reply has formed in your head that is profound enough to make an impact on the woman. Instead, you let out a small, unconvincing, “No.”

The woman’s lips crook up in a restrained smile, the kind of smile you do when something is utterly amusing, but you don’t have the heart to say it. She looks back at Ade, who is now more preoccupied with the empty vials lining the shelves of the Extraction room.

“Ade,” she says sweetly, stretching out her manicured hand. “The device, ejo.”

He looks up at her, fidgeting with the glasses still sliding down his face. “Akala, are you sure we shouldn’t let her–”

“The device is what I asked you for, Adeyemi, not all this long talk.” She gestures impatiently at him with her outstretched hand, annoyance settling in her eyes.

Ade looks between the both of you, and each time his eyes meet yours, you muster up as much pleading as you can manage into them. You know Akala might be unreachable, but perhaps Adeyemi will understand. Maybe as a man who works five days a week with people’s memories, he will see you beyond this moment, will see that you are still someone’s wife, someone’s daughter, and, if the abstract did not appeal to him, that a part of you existed in the device he held, a happy part, like all the others you still had the potential to experience.

You hope he sees you as a person.

But if he manages to understand what you want him to, the overarching influence of Akala’s desires somehow preside over your well-being because Adeyemi sighs like a man without choice, and with the device in hand, he inches over to where you stand.

Akala smiles again, this time with her teeth bared, and faces you with a look so manic you wonder who is less human, her or your husband?

You back into the wall as Adeyemi reaches Akala, hesitating with the Purging Device. Akala reaches for it, then pauses before staring at you again.

“Don’t worry too much, Zainab,” she drawls. “We’ve seen your memories, and your husband will be proud.”

You lunge.

The action is thoughtless, triggered by the lapse in your brain that screamed at you to fight, edged on by Kamal’s smooth cadence: The first one has a way of escaping you, but you must hold on tighter next time.

The knife sinks quicker than you expect, and the gasp this elicits cannot be identified as yours or the person you’ve stabbed. All you know is your target is sinking to their knees in a way that necessitates you to pull the knife out, your hand returning to you wet and sticky, and you watch, horrified, as Adeyemi collapses at your feet, a red pool gushing from his neck.

Akala screams, and even before you’ve processed that you stabbed someone, you cannot help but think she doesn’t scream as you expected. It is a strangled sound that seems to tear itself from her throat, one so foreign that it pulls you away from Adeyemi’s choking face.

Akala races to the back of the room, her hand desperately reaching for the landline attached to the wall that could only make calls to the front desk. You turn toward the door and quickly grab the handle before you stop, spying the purging device from the corner of your eye.

“Hello!” You hear Akala’s frantic voice. “ Yes, Akala Sowande Room 401! Adeyemi has been stabbed, please, please-”

You tune her out, your focus wholly fixed on the purging device. This was it, then? You fought for one memory, and now you were going to lose them all?

You bend for the device, just to feel its weight in your hands, you tell yourself, but as you hold it, you cannot shake the idea that it is familiar—the shape of it, the particular heaviness, the way your fingers rest on all the right buttons, as easily as they did for Kamal with his machines.

You turn to Akala, all the fear now drained from you, perhaps taken on by her, because she backs into a corner as though she has never seen you before.

“Zainab!” she cries, and finally, you like the way she calls your name, gratified by the breaking of her voice in the end. You indulge yourself in the dizzying fit of power that overtakes you, aware you won’t be alive much longer to feel anything ever again.

“You were right, Akala,” you assure her, pointing the device in her direction with steady hands “ My husband would be very proud.”

You turn something, a knob you know by instinct, and as Akala opens her mouth to scream one last time, she is stunned in the position, no sound getting the chance to leave her lips. The door behind you flies open as Akala’s eyes glaze over, a look you have only seen on your husband, and you watch her fall forward like a plank that wasn’t set down right. She does not get up.

The room falls into silence so heavy you feel as though you can reach out and string it through your fingers. You cannot decide your next move, not with the presence of a third person in the room. Would it be better to plead mercy for a crime you feel little remorse for? Or could you extract from the person who had now closed the door behind you, the sound of the click the only thing that seems to spark you back to life?

But whatever choice you hope to make next is dampened by the voice of the only other functioning person in the room.

“Zainab, Zainab.” You hear them chirp in your ear, and your heart stops at the unfamiliarity of it. It is the kind of not knowing you ought to know, one of those things you try to place, but in every spot your mind has that it could fit, you find nothing of relevance but a blankness.

They walk around you, stepping over Adeyemi in the process, and face you as though they’ve known you for years. The person—a woman with neatly plaited shuku rolling in tight blonde curls down her back—tilts her head at you, her gap-toothed smile reaching from ear to ear.

“What have we done now?” she whispers, her voice full of knowing. Finally, you slot her in, one piece of a puzzle that has lost the rest of its parts.

The woman reaches for your hand, and you let her lead you out of the room, unsure that this is right, unaware of whether she is taking you home or to your demise, but certain, at the very least, that this was how glass was supposed to feel.