Riot Baby, page 11
“I smell smoke!” someone screams, running into the waiting room.
I turn back and see, in the chairs, what looks like my sister as a child. She’s squirming in one of the chairs while Mama, belly swollen, rocks back and forth, eyes squeezed shut in pain. A broad-shouldered man in dark slacks and suspenders holds her hand, or, rather, lets her squeeze his.
“Somebody shut that damn TV off!” Mama shouts. To the man, “Brother Harvey, I ain’t lettin’ them cut me open. Not this time. God, I just want this baby to be born.” There’s a nurse in front of her who keeps glancing back at the doors to the hospital operating rooms and who keeps saying, “Any time now” like some kind of mantra. Like she’s forgotten how to say anything else.
“Ella, is that…” I trail off.
She takes a step toward the cluster of people, and I follow her, and suddenly we’re outside where the chaos hits me in hi-def. A gray Cadillac races toward Florence and Normandie, and it’s dusky out, but this place looks familiar. Feels familiar. I’ve been here before. The car skids to a stop. The man behind the wheel flicks the safety off a gun and hops out. A woman jumps out the passenger’s side and runs with him to a row of stores being looted.
Helicopter blades whip overhead. Spotlights sweep the streets and sidewalks.
A rig rolls to a stop at the intersection, country music lolling out of the open windows, heard faintly through the rioting, then a piece of the mob breaks off and tears the truck door open, hauling the driver out. Rocks and chunks of concrete smash the windshield. Someone darts forward and swings down with a hammer, and the truck driver crumples.
Ella’s walk is stately. I can’t stop staring at the beating and the smashing and the hurting. I lose her, then run to where I last saw her. People are passing around a bottle of Olde English 800, rapping N.W.A. lyrics, some of them twisting the words of Negro spirituals to fit the rhythms. There’s no police.
There’s another swarm around a lone car. I get there just as a Korean woman is being dragged out by her hair. The whoop-whoop of police sirens sound as the black-and-white screeches to a stop. Two officers jump out, guns drawn, and there’s a moment of hesitation before rocks and bricks arc in a storm toward them. Then they’re gone.
Someone takes a near-empty bottle of Olde English left on the floor, folds up an issue of Vibe magazine, lights it, and hurls it at a nearby corner store. Kids nearly run me over on stolen bikes. Further down the block, guys with red and blue bandannas tied around their faces take crowbars to a pawnshop and a group of them dash in, then come out half a minute later, draped in jewelry and carrying the guns they got from the back.
A woman struggles past me burdened with toilet paper on her back and bags of kid’s shoes on both arms.
I move to follow her, and I’m back in the hospital room. Mama is screaming something fierce while nurses scramble around her. A doctor breaks her water, but there’s no progress. Then he and a nurse hook her up to a drip for Pitocin. I track the contractions in the changes in her face, and it’s like her features are sinking even deeper into her skin from the pain. I’ve never heard screaming like this.
The doctor looks back and forth between Mama and the screen where I’m supposed to be showing, then shakes his hands and takes what looks like a pair of spoons and reaches into Mama beneath her gown. He fumbles around, then gives up. On the screen, I’m still not moving.
I’ve lost Ella, and when I rush for the hospital room door, I stumble out onto the corner of Martin Luther King and Vermont. Above me, National Guardsmen perch on roofs with their M16s aimed at the crowds, and looters hug the sides of buildings. It’s late afternoon, and this can’t be for real if time is moving this fast and what about Mama where’s Mama?
In deserted parts of the city where the violence has abated, taxicabs pull up and keep the meters running while their riders hop out and come back with VCRs.
Smoke rises in columns over the city. I run farther, past overturned police cars and roadblocks. I have to get back to Mama. Time runs as fast as I do, and when I blink and stop running, Centinela Hospital looms over me. Night has fallen. Over a bullhorn, an official-sounding voice announces a curfew. Sirens wail as ambulance vans make a regular circuit up to and out from the hospital’s main entrance. Those who walked, weak from gunshots or stabbings or dehydration or beatings or weary from having lost everything, stagger toward the doors for treatment.
Far back, I see a car stop. A two-door. And a man in dreadlocks gets out. Dark, angular face. Some of the bones still twisted in the memory of a beating. He looks at the city, looks at me, with horror. And … guilt. That face looks so familiar, then I nearly fall over when I realize who it is, and he’s staring right at me.
“Is this my fault?” Rodney King seems to mouth at the mass streaming into the hospital. He snaps out of his trance, then gets back in his car and drives away.
Mama.
I shove my way past people who don’t notice me into a waiting room filled to bursting. Blood stains the linoleum floor in pools. I crash through another set of doors, calling out “Mama! Mama!” and look into each room for Mama and Ella and me. Nothing here. I find the stairs and run up and it’s on the second floor that I find them and, through the door’s glass, I see Mama in her hospital gown, sweating a waterfall into the hospital’s bedsheets while child-Ella looks curiously at the squirming new baby in Mama’s arms. Mama’s face is loose. Like how it would get when I used to catch her watching me and Ella play in that cramped Harlem apartment. It’s slackened, wrung out. Liberated.
“This is how you were born,” Ella says at my side.
“Why are you showing me this?” Something deep in me has cracked. I feel myslf slipping, then I land with a thud on my bed. Ella stands over me.
“This is what made you.”
“Ella, please, stop.” I have my head in my hands. My head is pounding. My arm is on fire. “Ella, please. Make it stop.”
“It will never stop.” Her voice sounds so distant, faraway, even though she’s standing right in front of me. I feel like if I were to look up, I wouldn’t recognize her face. What did this to her? “This. It will happen again. And again. And again. It already has.”
“What do you want me to do?” I scream.
In the silence that follows, I’m huffing. Sweating. Shaking. I can’t stop shaking. Whatever cracked is getting more broken, and I need to put it back together. I know I need to put it back together. I’m struggling to put it back together, but it’s like I’ve got my shoulder pressed against a screen door in the middle of a flood. My body strains. I know what she wants. I know what she wants, but I can’t give it to her. I won’t.
“Ella,” I tell her through gritted teeth, “I can’t afford to be angry anymore. I can’t. I don’t have it in me to keep being this angry.”
Ella kneels down so we’re eye to eye. “Did you ever stop being angry?” she asks me, softly but with Mama’s sternness.
“But my life,” I say to her, and she knows without me saying that I mean my job and my house. She knows I mean not having my back on fire from tension, walking up and down the walkways of Rikers waiting to defend against harm. She knows I mean the fact that I haven’t seen a white person since I got here. “I can’t see ’em to hate ’em. Please don’t take me back out there.”
“Kev, it was never just ‘out there.’ It’s here, too.”
And that’s when she shows me the metal Miguel and Royce and Marlon and Mero and I have been working on, have been bending, building. Shows me that it doesn’t just go to damaged workers in the factory but that it’s being put on cops outside to increase their reflexes, to upgrade them. That those misshapen pieces of metal we’re forming make shields on their bones, beneath their skin, so that no bullet can kill them. We’re building the turrets mounted on our street corners. We’re working to make the police invincible.
“You were never free.”
My thumb is on fire. Ella looks at me with this pained, sorrowful gaze, watches me hold my hand and try to bear the hurt. And I close my eyes and grit my teeth against the hot needles piercing every inch of skin on my thumb where that fucking chip is, and it gets bigger and bigger, the pain, until I’m blind with it, the whole world white, then it stops.
There’s an arc of blood splashed in a single line down one wall. My thumb is cut open. And there on the rug in front of me, past Ella’s ghost, is the chip. Glowing blue in the near-darkness.
“You took it out,” I say between heavy breaths.
“No. You did.” She’s smiling when she says it.
Instinct tells me I should be afraid. That this is the same as cutting off my ankle monitor. They can’t watch my bloodstream anymore, can’t see if I’m sleeping right, can’t inject compliance into my veins when I get angry, can’t tell me when curfew is, can’t pay me my wages, can’t get me into my home, can’t see me—
She touches me and there’s weight in my arms, a warmth. It smells of milk. A baby.
Ella shows me. Shows me the doctors who looked down on Mama, this woman they were supposed to care for, with such disdain. With such disgust. Feeding her the wrong medicine. They didn’t care whether she lived or died. Whether her child lived or died. Our sister.
Ella’s looking at her. “This child could have seen the world. But they killed our sister before she even had a chance to breathe.”
The weight vanishes. I can’t move. “I don’t want—I just want to go home.”
“There is no home.” Ella is gentle. “Mama prayed we would happen,” she tells me. “God is a loving God, but he’s also the architect of our revenge. He delivers us from Egypt. But he also brings the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.”
All this time, I’d wanted it. Somewhere in the back of my mind. As a kid in those interrogation rooms, as an older kid in Rikers. Then it gets beaten out of me, and I’m convinced we’re too small for it, Ella’s too small for it, for burning it all down.
Is this what Ella’s been doing while away?
“I can see the future, Kev,” she says quietly.
I breathe deeply. Against every instinct, I say, “Show me.”
She puts a hand to my head, skin against skin.
Fire and blood and screaming and singing. Shattered chunks of marble littering park grounds. Monuments to the Confederates pulverized into dust. Police stations turned into husks, watch posts unmanned and creaking with rust. Cities, whole cities, rising into the sky. So much death, but there’s joy in it.
Apocalypse sweeps the South. Vengeance visits the North.
When she lets go, I’m trembling.
“Now, you can see it too,” she tells me. She sticks her hand out, and I shake myself back into the present. “Tell me what you see,” Ella whispers into my ear.
I see the After.
Grassland, hills that undulate, green everywhere, except when there’s fire coming out of the ground and when craters appear and the new government men knock on doors to order newly poor whites to leave, condemn houses or purchase title. The first orange and white and red fire, that time the local trash dump bursts open, is, for them, the beginning of the end. Streaks, fingers almost blue as the anthracite underground creeps closer to the surface and the asphalt is hot to the touch. The air rancid, everybody coughing, always coughing. One day, a house gets emptied, first of its things, then of its people, and a big red slash gets painted on the front door, marking it for condemnation. From the hilltop, the town is nothing but a mouth with just a few broken teeth left. They’ll feel us in every corner of this country.
Then and only then will we clear those forty acres of poison, pull the radiation out of the air. Use our Thing, jettison it into space, make the land ready for our people.
“What do you see?” she says.
There’s so much. It’s a jumble in my head, but Ella and I are in the scorched middle of it.
“Freedom,” I tell her. “I see freedom.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, like its title character, saw a fiery birth. Formerly a swirl of disembodied phrases and feelings and half-characters, the story of Ella and Kev began to coalesce while, in Paris, I learned of the non-indictments of the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After the revelation of the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, I began to hear, with greater force, the stirrings of Ella’s voice and Kev’s. Each new horrifically regular death, whether upon initial police contact or later during police or carceral custody, made clearer what I wanted to say. Because while I mourned, I thought of the families left behind and how the orbit of hurt at the center of which sits each of these tragedies is spread almost beyond imagining. In a fiction genre that traffics in the impossible, I wondered how such people, such families, might find themselves situated.
What might the opposite of injustice look like?
My fearless, peerless editor at Tor.com Publishing, Ruoxi Chen, helped turn my questions and convictions into this book. Its fiercest advocate, she challenged me like I’d never been challenged before to write my way into a story that at times seemed beyond my abilities to tell. From the beginning, she saw this book, saw more of it than I could. To say that working with her has been a dream would be to indulge in criminal understatement. Our Gchats shall remain some of the most cherished and expansive conversations I’ve ever had the privilege and pleasure of having.
I must thank my agent, Noah Ballard, who kept me levelheaded and focused and who was ceaseless in his encouragement.
And I send my everlasting gratitude to Irene Gallo and Christine Foltzer for directing the creation of a cover that, to this day, renders me breathless. Jaya Miceli delivered one of the most stunning pieces of art I have ever seen in my life. I am the most fortunate author in the world to have been able to have my name on this cover.
My family, of course. For your steadfast belief in me pursuing this career, in which I am neither a doctor nor an engineer, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Finally, I must acknowledge N. K. Jemisin. Until I’d read her Broken Earth trilogy, I did not know how to write angry, the type of angry that still leaves room for love. Those books unlocked a gate. The reader in me is ever grateful.
So is the writer.
ALSO BY TOCHI ONYEBUCHI
Beasts Made of Night
Crown of Thunder
War Girls
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOCHI ONYEBUCHI is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African; its sequel, Crown of Thunder; and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a master’s degree in economic law from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana magazine, Lightspeed, and Uncanny. His nonfiction has appeared in Nowhere magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, Tor.com, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut.
Visit him online at www.tochionyebuchi.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
I. South Central
II. Harlem
III. Rikers
IV. Watts
Acknowledgments
Also by Tochi Onyebuchi
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
RIOT BABY
Copyright © 2019 by Tochi Onyebuchi
All rights reserved.
Cover art and design by Jaya Miceli
Edited by Ruoxi Chen
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Onyebuchi, Tochi, author.
Title: Riot baby / Tochi Onyebuchi.
Description: First edition. | New York: A Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041049 (print) | LCCN 2019041050 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250214751 (hardback) | ISBN 9781250214768 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Dystopias. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3615.N93 R56 2020 (print) | LCC PS3615.N93 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041049
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041050
eISBN 9781250214768
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First Edition: January 2020
Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby
