Page 59 of Death of the Author

“No,” Zelu said, pushing them away. “I can do it.” But she knew she couldn’t. She shoved herself to sit upright, but even with the exos, there was no way she could stand back up. Not without help. Getting up from sitting on the floor was impossible without someone there to haul her up, even with her exos. She didn’t want to, but frustration and helplessness made her whimper. “I hate this body,” she hissed to herself. “Hateit.” Her world drained of color—everything became a wash of gray, white, and black. All the air was gone, sucked out of her lungs by the fall. Her legs lay flat on the floor. Motionless. Limp. Dead. “Hate it.” She shut her eyes, not wanting to see any more.Let everything just stop, she thought. Just for a moment.Fuck!

She opened her eyes.

Her father stood, looking down at her with deep concern. Her mother was hurrying back with her old wheelchair. They helped Zelu into it. It wasthe first time she’d used it since returning from MIT nearly a year ago. Zelu sat there for a moment, her arms hanging at her sides, her back slumped.So. Fucking. Pathetic, she thought. She bit her lip hard, barely able to contain her rage.

She took a deep breath. She looked up at her parents. Smiled. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad,” she said, calm and reassuring.

“Eh heh,” her mother muttered, her brow furrowed. “You all right?”

Zelu rolled backward, toward her old room. “I’m fine,” she said, keeping the fake smile on her face.

“Let’s leave her to rest,” her father said, nodding at Zelu.

Zelu wheeled into her room. She hated navigating the chair through the small space; her exos made it all so much easier. She touched the pad on the side of her exos and the display showed they were charged to 88 percent and ready to support her. She was about to stand up when her heart started racing. The grass flashed behind her eyes again. “Ooooh,” she groaned. This was her first time back in her childhood room since she’d moved out again. The nearly dead English ivy she’d given her father had been moved in here from the living room, its vines now overtaking most of her windowsill—lush, green, and happy. Aside from this, the room looked to be untouched since she’d left it. It was like traveling back in time—before her exos, before her book, freshly fired. That was a time she didnotwant to return to.

She moved herself onto her bed. When she’d come home from the hospital after the accident, she’d awaken in this room, staring at the ceiling every morning, thinking of how just one fall had messed up her entire life. But it wasn’t just one fall. She’d fallen from that tree countless times since then and told no one about it.

The panic finally broke open like an egg. For a while, she let herself be lost in it.

26

Opened

Zelu walked down the red carpet of the Hollywood theater wearing a gorgeous pantsuit made from Ankara cloth that had been custom designed for her. If you looked closely, the white-and-blue pattern was made of shapes that looked like cogs, nuts, bolts, and processor chips. Similar cloth hung in fringes from the sides of her exos, the effect making the exos look like part of the suit itself. This was an outfit designed for a proud robot, and she loved it so much that she’d had a swatch of the fabric framed and hung it in her condo.

The media had started calling her the “African cyborg,” which she rather liked. As she moved down the carpet, photographers shouted at her to turn left, right, smile, show off her exos. A journalist shoved a microphone in front of her and asked what had inspired her look.

“In the story, the robots draw from the best of humanity,” Zelu said. “Well, I like to draw from the best of robotics. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

The line to get into the theater was moving at a snail’s pace. The paparazzi cameras kept flashing in her face, and the more she accommodatedtheir requests to pose, the more fixated she became on how her uncovered legs must look, unmoving within the exos’ metallic molds. Her outfit had been designed to draw attention to them, but these people didn’t understand how the technology worked or why it was so miraculous. Why would they, when they took being able to walk for granted? They probably thought the exos were a gimmick to promote the movie.

Zelu had nothing to do with the creation of this movie, and everything inside her was screaming that watching it now would be a bad idea. However, her agent had absolutely insisted. “It’s only a few hours. This all came from your mind, Zelu. Your fans want to seeyou.”

Zelu had decided to pick her battles. She was okay with this—the red carpet, the fake smiling, the stupid questions being screamed into her face by indecipherable silhouettes hiding behind camera flashes. At least she’d been able to get an extra ticket for Msizi. He was a few steps to her right, looking hot as fuck in his matching Ankara pants and kaftan. He was having a great time, posing obnoxiously beside her while holding out his hands to present her as “the Queen of Robots.” She was okay with him shouting that he was “her best friend” to journalists when they asked who he was. She was okay with random people whose faces she recognized from her favorite TV shows and movies pulling her into group shots with them. She was okay.

And then the movie started.

Rusted Robotswas a story that would translate well to the screen, her film agent had told her back before they auctioned the rights. And the studio that had snapped up the option was one of the best in the world, with an endless list of commercial and critical hits. She’d decided to trust them—the director, the writers, the producers. She knew nothing about making movies, and they were professionals with decades of experience in the field.

No one had reached out to ask her about the script or the casting or the sets. No one had even invited her to an early private screening. That hadbeen fine by her. She didn’t want to meet and interact with all those people. She was busy riding the wave of her novel’s early success. And her film agent had kept reminding her, over and over, how lucky she was—so many movies were optioned, even went into production, but were never made. But now, as the opening scene began to play, she wondered if, even then, they’d known.

Her novel was set in Nigeria after humanity had died off. The robots populating that world carried digital DNA left behind by their creators. Zelu had written her characters as holding African DNA. She hadn’t fully expected her readers to understand this, but it was at the heart of the plot, just as much as the theme of humanity was. The drama, the twists, the communities, the languages, the accents, all the robo-bullshit was drawn from Nigerian cultures and people and politics.

All this, the movie chopped away. Ankara’s character had been renamed Yankee and Ijele was Dot. Zelu had known that from the trailer, but it only went downhill from there. If Zelu’s novel were an Ankara fabric, it was as if the movie had stolen, scraped, bleached, stretched, reshaped, and inverted it, and mass-reprinted some botched shadow of the original. The whole movie was set in the United States, not a hint of Nigeria. This wasn’t an adaptation. It was a gutting. This film was cliché, vapid, confused, steaming trash. She didn’t recognize the story she’d written at all.

And the audiencelovedit.

There was a standing ovation at the end of the film. When the lights came on, people were laughing, completely enchanted, congratulating each other. Strangers reached over the aisles to pat her on the shoulder. They were taking up all the air in the room; there was none left for her.

“What an accomplishment, Zelu!” some stranger shouted toward her. “You’re a genius!”

People thought she had done this to herself?!

She was sinking inside her seat. She was falling. Only Msizi noticed. He grabbed her hand and pulled up so they could get out of the theater asquickly as possible. People kept congratulating her as they passed through the crowd.

If they like this trash,she thought,what will they expect of me with book two? Fuck!

She wanted to spit.Msizi did the smiling and laughing and responding to comments for her. When people tried to approach Zelu, he stepped in front of her to head them off.

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