Page 51 of Death of the Author
“Omo!” her father hissed at her mother. “Stop it. You’re not helping.”
“Ah, I’m not trying to help,” she said.
“I will kill Hugo,” Zelu said solemnly. “I’m not a child. Jeez! This is so unprofessional.”
“Wewere the ones who kept calling and calling,” her mother said. “Then I got his office number. We’re your parents, no matter how old you are.”
Zelu sighed, letting the thought of them harassing Hugo all theseweeks sink in. If she’d known, what would she have done? At the least, let it distract her—at most, maybe given up. Suddenly she was glad he had chosen not to say anything.
“When are you coming home?” her mother asked.
Zelu rubbed her forehead. “Tomorrow.”
She answered a few more obligatory questions before hurrying them off the phone. Next, she dialed Msizi. Better to just tear off the Band-Aid. As she waited for him to pick up, she felt her heart begin to pound in her ears. She didn’t know what she would say to him. The last time they’d spoken, he had told her not to go to Boston, and she’d hung up on him. She hadn’t texted, emailed, or called him since. And he hadn’t reached out to her, either.
He didn’t answer. Stung, she threw her phone on her bed. “Fuck him, then.” But she stayed where she was, looking at her phone for the next ten minutes. He didn’t call back. She got up and continued packing. It didn’t help much, but it was something to do.
The next day, when the cab came to take her to the airport, she was still feeling agitated and hurt, and it didn’t help that the driver asked to help her with her wheelchair. An idea popped into her head and she acted on it. No need to dissect it. She was holding the exos case in her lap, having planned to take it as a carry-on item on the plane. She pulled out the wand, spoke her own name, and within a minute the case had unfolded itself to become the exos. The metal moved like a snake, molding around her legs. She stood up and folded her chair, ignoring the driver’s wide eyes. Obediently, he took her chair and folded it into the trunk.
She walked through the airport just like anyone else. The driver carried her bags as she approached ticketing. The airline agent had a copy of her book sitting on the desk next to his computer. He stared at her face, then her exos, then managed to ask her for an autograph. She gave it, and then she walked on, both the agent and the driver staring after her. She even noticed the driver bring up his phone and take a picture of her, but she had to concentrate on walking, so she tried to ignore him.
Getting through TSA took a good half hour. She had to wait ten minutes for them to bring another wheelchair for her to sit in, just so she could take off the exos and go through the metal detector. A small crowd of people had started to gather behind her, not because she was holding up the line but because they recognized her.
She walked to her gate slowly. To others, she must have looked like someone half built with hardware, her cyan-colored legs taking her for a leisurely stroll. She kept her head up. One step at a time. She made it to her gate. It was time to board. When she reached her seat in first class, she made eye contact with no one, though she knew all eyes were on her exos.
I did it, she thought. She’d email Hugo to tell him the good news when she got home. He would be shocked.
What she didn’t know was that as she’d been walking to her gate, a young woman who’d read her novel five times, had created a dedicated blog for it, considered herself the authority on all thingsRusted Robots, and said so in all her social media bios had seen her. And immediately this woman had reached for her phone, recorded clear and dynamic footage of Zelu “walking on robot legs,” and posted it on her blog for her one million followers to see. Then she’d posted the video on all her socials with a caption proclaiming that Zelu was gradually “becomingher main character, Ankara.”
As Zelu slept on her flight, the world was speculating vigorously. When the plane landed in Chicago and she turned her phone back on, it buzzed, zinged, whammed, and boomed. “What the fuck?” she whispered. There were texts and messages from her parents and siblings, and even a text from Msizi. She’d gone up in the air in peace and quiet and come down into chaos.
Everyone was asking her to call or text them, and no one was explaining why.
What are you doing?
Are you all right?
Don’t you have any sense of privacy?
Hugo had also texted her. It was a GIF of an audience giving a standing ovation.
Only Tolu had bothered to provide context. He’d sent a link to the post, and Zelu clicked it open and watched the video of herself taken by some stranger’s phone.
“Holy shit!” she wheezed. She replayed it five times. She looked good, walking with a confidence almost as solid as Hugo’s.
Her phone continued to buzz. Her social media handles were getting tagged and quoted over and over again. She clicked open the latest one, from some random person.
@ZelunjoOOI have questions.
“Fuck your questions,” she muttered. “It’smylife,mybody.” The joy she’d felt watching the video moments ago faded. Now she wanted to cry. Spying eyes and chattering mouths were everywhere. But this wasn’t their business. Why hadn’t she thought about what would happen when people saw her? Her fault.Stupid, stupid, stupid!She’d been so focused on proving something to herself. Her fault. She hadn’t been thinking. Reckless.
Zelu rubbed her face. As she moved through the terminal, she focused on her exos and made eye contact with no one. Tolu met her at baggage claim. She’d taken so long that he’d already gotten her two suitcases and wheelchair and loaded them all on a cart. He stared at her exos as she slowly walked up to him, his mouth hanging open. She stopped in front of him, and still he did not speak. Finally, he raised his eyes to meet hers.
“Fucking amazing,” he said.
His words took her breath away, and she couldn’t hold back her tears.
He took her in his arms and hugged her tightly. “You did it.”
