_He’d plotted this desperate journey to Spain on foot and by bus, through off-grid routes in Niger, Algeria, and Morocco, inspired by the many young pioneers from Japa Town—heroes to him—who’d huffed it out of Japa, Nigeria. Off to Italy, off to Spain, to Utah in America, to Cottbus in Germany, to Zanzibar in Tanzania; they hadn’t set foot back home, where a repetitive life waited. From the beginning J-Boy was scared to leave—he’d be a solitary target; the desert sun would grill him into a mummy—but he’d finally kicked off the trip days ago, the afternoon people in Japa Town had whooped at a long, shimmering cloth rippling through the sky like a pale UFO. It had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Some had pointed up and screamed, “Angel Michael’s amure!” Boys, girls, old queens, and codgers on motorcycles revved through the streets intending to snatch down the fabric and rip a lucky piece from it. When J-Boy’s sister, Consider-Ajah, brought home the news, he had attacked the belief that Angel Michael let loose his sash over Japa Town, this was not the nature of modern miracles. But after he dashed out of his father’s house and tipped back his head to behold the material blowing against a cloud like a silver scythe, he’d promptly recognized the cloth’s preternatural significance in a religious place like Japa. People in Japa, like those Puritans in long ago America, always searched the heavens for signs. He’d judged the appearance of the flying textile a holy augury. Later, J-Boy pulled on his favorite cassava-yellow sneakers and bleached, extra large hoodie—the one that made him look like a rapper—because he needed to show those Europeans in Spain that he kept up with the fashion. In any case no spying Spaniard would mistake him for an irregular immigrant, or a lawbreaker, as he hopped the border. An obvious rookie mistake because, now in Agadez, three days after leaving Nigeria and arriving at the connection man’s stash house, that hoodie was quietly transforming into a grimy mechanic’s shirt on his back. His only insurance against the chaos out there was the scrap of Japa “miracle” cloth he carried in his backpack. And his mother’s long-distance prayers.

_In the sleepy Agadez neighborhood of Nasarawa, J-Boy’s group of migrants—after spending two days hiding in the stash house—piled into the back of a Toyota Hilux truck, and Musa, the Tuareg smuggler, quivering with impatience, tossed some of them the shemagh scarves they’d purchased to drape on their faces against the flying, red-brown desert dirt. J-Boy gripped the warm edge of the vehicle and hunched forward as he perched on the twisted jute rope strung across the bottom end of the truck, his legs hanging over the plastic-wrapped tailgate. The eleven-year-old motormouth (who often sat with his elbows on his knees in the safe house as though watching an imaginary TV) found a spot beside him, sucking on a lollipop; the child’s rust-yellow dreadlocks gave off the smell of unwashed fish. J-Boy helped the boy stick his backpack securely between his thighs, then tilted away from the odor.

People were singing Igbo Christian hymns in the back as J-Boy knotted his shemagh behind his sweaty neck. This group of about thirty men was often a goosey, bull-roaring lot. Packed tight like beads in a jar. Sitting on empty jerry cans and thick, rolled up carpets, and their own backpacks. Last night in the hideout—which was the storefront the truck parked beside—where everybody lay on skin-thin dirty mats, the men had carved phone numbers of family members in the mud walls, in case they perished in the desert. Telling puerile jokes. Laughing with glazed eyes.

J-Boy peered at the Toyota’s tire as the bespectacled smuggler passed around a long hose whose tail was shoved into a large jerry can of water. The dust-laden tire had lost its roundness, compromised into a square shape by the weight of the company. God abeg o, J-Boy prayed. Hosanna see me o.

He spat into the dust, wondering how he, who raised hell when his sister stuck her mouth into his stainless-steel mug, allowed himself to share a drinking hose with a pack of strange men whose origins were likely plain vanilla compared to Japa’s luminous history. He latched on to the singing, Chineke i di mma, e! i di mma o…and halted, amused, when he heard an unbearably thin, squeaky voice join the chorus. He knew its owner stared out through the window of the truck’s cab in a red-orange scarf. The only girl in the group. She’d told J-Boy her name was Mummy Skippy back on the Sokoto bus—the Nigeria to Niger leg of this trip—after he had introduced himself and asked why she seemed so afraid. She had sidestepped that question, repelled by something self-important in his voice, and remarked that he was the “photocopy” of the administrator who’d flung her out of the French Village program in Badagry after the school found out she brought her dog to live with her. Then somewhat embarrassed, she’d told him her name.

He spotted the connection man walk up out of the gray storefront, one hand on his hip. It pleased him that the man was conscious of his place in the “waiting line.” That the man had probably held off until Musa served the group its supplies and collected the $200 fare for this journey from Agadez to Guezzam. J-Boy imagined him biding his time, like a new barbershop customer, peeping through the store’s windows, which advertised toilet soap and baby food. Musa wagged his finger to stop the singing.

“Dis Musa actually has a small instrument in his pocket…dat shows him di way. It will stop working in di desert,” the boy beside J-Boy whispered. J-Boy turned to the child.

“See your hair like tomato Bob Marley,” he scoffed. “You just dey make noise like gambler.”

The boy stared at him with wry disapproval. He licked his lollipop.

“Wetin be your name?” J-Boy asked.

“Radio-Without-Battery.”

“No wonder.”

They watched Musa grab the connection man’s shoulder and then say to the group, in a mix of French and English, “Please ecoutez to this…man. Yes?” As if the group had any choice but to listen. Musa fished out a faded brass compass from his pocket, pulled off his glasses, examined the compass, and raised his creased eyes to the dusk sun. Half the men in the truck gazed up at the sun, too.

“Have you pushed your dollars inside your ass to hide them from bandits?” the connection man asked seriously, starting his Desert OT, or Desert Orientation. All questions he’d asked them before. J-Boy saw how confident he looked compared to the smuggler, with his powerful build, his clean shave, while Musa was spare and supple in his flowing robe, quick to bend like cane in the wind. Could you trust a man like Musa to get you from one hill of your destiny to the other? J-Boy wished it were the muscular man who’d drive them to Algeria, help them fend off desert robbers who often raped their victims. But he was merely a “runs contact” whose phone number a “runs agent” in Nigeria had given J-Boy. God abeg o, he prayed again. Hosanna for Japa cloth, abeg.

He and others had already shoved their money, rolled to the size of tampons, into their buttholes. The connection man had shown them how, stripping naked in the hot safe house, squatting, and sticking a thick finger up his rectum. J-Boy had been surprised how, once he got past the shock and discomfort, the tight tube of plastic-wrapped cash appeared to suck right into his stomach.

“Have you traveled to North Africa before? Did police shoot you in Melila?” cried the man, unhindered by their jaded faces. Casually he walked to one of the truck’s tires and delivered violent kicks, doing a safety check. Musa switched on the truck’s blinkers. He strolled into the storefront, where customers with dust in their hair and under their fingernails milled with uninterested faces. Agadez was a smugglers’ den, and only a gun going off would make buyers turn in the truck’s direction.

“Do you have any brother in Europe?” continued the connection man, his turban blowing in the wind. “Can you use your hands? What work can you do? Can you work as barber? Electrician? Do you know anything about welding? You will need to work in Algeria if your money finis. You will need to work in Europe. You!” he pointed to the child beside J-Boy.

Radio grabbed the long wooden pole between his thighs and leaned forward. Everyone sitting on the truck’s edge had been handed one to brace themselves against going airborne once the wheels got in motion. He grinned nervously.

“Come with me, Eleven-years-old!” commanded the connection man. “Let me take you back to Nigeria. You’re too young, petit garcon, I tell you before. You will die in the desert. It is too hot. Or it is too cold. Or there is no water. Or can you drink your piss-water, like that man?” He gestured at J-Boy.

The boy began to weep. He was an orphan, he said. There was nothing in Nigeria to go back to. The fish in his village were slick with crude oil. His school had been blown up by oil bunkerers who needed a clear view to the sea in their fight with the military.

J-Boy expected some of the older men—with graying beards, not people in their twenties like himself—to rescue Radio, but nobody said anything. He didn’t know if they were in OYO mode. On Your Own. Or merely siding with the connection man out of grownup allegiance. He turned to look behind him. People shifted their eyes uneasily. It wasn’t the first time an older man would disappoint him—his father had back in Japa—and his instinct was to avert his eyes out of respect and then lambaste them, tell them he’d protect the boy like an elder brother. But this group moved as one giant eye, with a unified vision. If they figured him for an outlier, they might isolate him. J-Boy tilted toward the boy as though to say something. When he’d first encountered the boy in the hideout, he had sensibly mistaken the sleeping child for a pygmy fleeing the Congo. Later he learned the child had entered Agadez on a different bus with some of the men. J-Boy pulled up his knee and rested his chin on it, his back pushing against the hard bodies of other men. The boy glanced at him, his face open and suspicious. Though the boy’s cheeks had begun to sink, J-Boy noted the fat of early adolescence below the eyes, around the big lips. Radio was a walking advertisement for UN child causes in Africa. The evening wind spun the dust into a small lasso, pelting everybody in the back. A film of red dust dyed the forearms of J-Boy’s hoodie.

Musa appeared out of the storefront— after searching the windowless room in the back where the migrants had lodged for a detached car mirror he spotted earlier. He gripped a green-brown hookah bottle in his left hand, which swung as he walked.

He reached the connection man and shook him until the brawny man faced Musa. “We see that the boy is un enfant, but what can we do?” he reasoned. “Everyone has their own destiny. You don’t know where you’re going to die.”

“I know I’m not di one to die!” piped the child. J-Boy’s leg slipped off the tailgate, the snark in the boy’s voice surprising him. He saw that the eleven-year-old still clutched the lollipop tight in his fist, despite his agitation. Some of the men behind them shouted the boy down. Some taunted, “So who’s going to die, little sardine?”

Musa shook a reproaching finger in the boy’s face. “I warn you to be quiet!” he threatened. Next, he and the connection man knelt in the dust, in the direction of the nearby mosque’s spiked minaret, and prayed to God for luck on the trip.

It was completely dark when the truck rolled through the dense streets of this ancient city, once a hub in the sub-Saharan trade in gold and salt. J-Boy watched the beeswax-yellow lights of the low-slung houses with wooden eyes, squeezing the linen scrap of Japa cloth slowly in his fist, like a rosary. On the edge of the city, Musa killed the headlights.

_Here’s what Musa told the group: I will not stop this vehicle. If somebody falls off I will not stop. If somebody cries I’m thirsty, I will not stop. If bandits fire machine guns, I will not stop. If fuel empties in the tank, I will not stop. You cannot stop this thing. If the government stops people here, they will just go another way, because we cannot stop. This truck will not stop, I’m warning you now. This migration business, anyone who has experienced it can never stop. Many travelers have died. I don’t remember all their names. There are too many who come and go. I can’t keep them all in my head. The truck is like an infantry soldier. I say go, and it does not stop.

_You couldn’t make out anything in the cold, blanketing blackness of the Sahara. As though you were flying in the jaws of a cave. You could hear the river of sand hissing underneath the wheels. Tires sprayed out dirt, which burned the eyes of J-Boy and the other men, so they thrashed their heads side to side. Musa often drove blind into deep pits gullied by winds, and some of the men slammed foreheads into each other, Aaaarrgghhing into the night. One fellow, on whose finger J-Boy had spotted a wedding band, muttered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Over and over.

The night chill lay on J-Boy’s bones like wet skin. Radio shivered like a day-old goat, his arm hooked into J-Boy’s welcoming arm. “Somebody is going to roll over and die,” the boy prophesied. J-Boy didn’t ask who. They were all dead, as far as he could tell. If you couldn’t track the outline of your body in physical space, how were you sure of the reality of the external world, and your place in it? He wondered about Baba Ramadan, Japa’s most-talked-about son who’d escaped to Utah in America. Baba motored through the Sahara with his group of adventure-voles. Had he driven his fear so far inward, he’d become the brave, mythical hunter, Aramada Okunrin, celebrated every Ajala Travel Day in Japa, alongside Jesu of Oyingbo? And how could he, J-Boy, reach that plane, with his spirit coiled back into its grotto? The effect of the “trip advisory” Musa offered the group. J-Boy tried to rationalize it. Musa was like a mean mom. The desert, a “deal” J-Boy had cut with the Devil. The truck like a “marvel” in Japa’s sky. He couldn’t quite tell how these pieces hung together, but there had to be logic in there to ensure the preservation of his destiny. Ultimately it didn’t matter. He was pretend-flying through the foreign darkness. And every moment of his life was a miracle.

Of course some of the men were sleeping. The truck made a wrong turn, then swerved to correct, and J-Boy heard a shriek and a thud as some somnolent person swooped into the air, crashing somewhere in the dark. “Ah-ah,” J-Boy gasped, frightened, but the truck rocketed on. Stop the truck, somebody shouted. Hey, a man dropped, another screamed. Stop! Stop! Stop! the men begged.

Musa lashed out through the window, “Idiots! Tu veux nous faire tuer!”

You fools, you’re going to get us killed, Mummy Skippy interpreted loudly in the cab.

“Si je m’arrête, les soldats vont ouvrir le feu!”

If I stop, the soldiers will fire.

“C’est pour cela que je conduit san phares, et ils sont payés par l’Union Européenne!”

They’re why I’m driving in the dark, and they’re paid by the European Union.

“When they arrest you,” Musa finished off in English, “that’s not a law coming from here. That’s a law coming from Europe!”

J-Boy was skeptical of Musa’s rhetoric, not his message, for he’d heard that Nigerien gendarmes had switched loyalty from the smugglers, who used to bribe them for safe passage, to the EU. Backed by European cash and Europe’s desire to stanch the flow of migrants into its borders. To J-Boy and the others, Europe portrayed itself as a “garden,” where everything worked, and had cast Africa as a “jungle,” where nothing worked, and though Europe vowed the jungle would not invade the garden, they were coming.

The men did not let up their pleading. After all they hadn’t spied nor heard the soldiers. Not their so-called drones. J-Boy bore up his voice through the chaos, though he wished it were deeper than that of other men, crackling like the voice of his father, who’d been a member of Japa’s Livestock Guard in the brave years of his early youth. Someone began to ring an emphatic, tiny bell. It sounded like a ritual accompaniment, and it took J-Boy some time to realize it came from beside him. From Radio the child. Wasn’t that a violation of propriety? So he nudged the youngster, who neither faltered nor stopped. As if on cue, Musa cracked on the headlights. Then he aimed the truck in a semicircle and went to fetch the unfortunate soul.

_In the morning, J-Boy asked Radio, “How did you know somebody was going to fall?” The boy shook his head. “I did not know.” But J-Boy stared at him with mild suspicion; he was intrigued by the likelihood that the boy’s bell ringing had seized Musa’s mind and dragooned him into whipping the truck around. It was not an improbable proposition. “Powers” existed. In Japa, he’d heard of witches who drove neighbors’ stationary vehicles with only their minds. And when you woke up in the morning and touched the bonnet of such a car, the engine was hot, though you couldn’t find any tire tracks. He questioned Radio on how he became an orphan. “It was raining. We were traveling on a boat from Yenagoa to Ayama,” the boy confided. “My parents were garri sellers. Di driver gave us a large tarpaulin to hold over our heads from di rain. Twelve of us. Di wind blew off di tarpaulin and it covered di driver’s face. We hit another boat. Our boat capsized in di river. I am di only survivor.”

“Sorry,” J-Boy said, helping the boy re-tie his shemagh over his ear. He wondered if the mermaids inside the river had given the boy magical powers.

At noon they napped in the murderous heat. Prone under the truck. Squatting in the shade of a jacket propped over a head. Musa smoked his hookah, the bottle dug into hot sand. Somebody broke a tablet of Paracetamol in two and gave half to Radio, who nursed a migraine and several muscle cramps. J-Boy shared his can of Monster energy drink with the man who had catapulted off the truck. His name was Kpo! Kpo! Named for a rifle sound. A plumber and part-time preacher.

The following dusk they ran into three men clutching their bellies as they crawled out from behind an abandoned well. The posse waved the truck down. Musa parked a safe distance and brandished a pistol through the window. Who were they? They said they weren’t desert bandits. They had been on a different truck. Two days ago, their driver asked them to push the “broken down” truck, and when they jumped down, the man took off with their luggage and money. J-Boy watched Musa make a call on his Thuraya, alerting drivers in Agadez of the emergency. At first J-Boy averted his eyes, as if he knew the gaunt men, recalling the Soyinka poem where a man confronts the dead body of another man hit by a car and suffers a crisis of recognition; then he grabbed a pack of Golden Morn cereal from his bag and lobbed it at the men, all of them with folded fingers, shrunken necks, and popping eyes. “You fool!” cried Musa. “You don’t know yet if you have enough to manger.”

_Musa’s compass stopped working on the fourth day. The truck slowed to a halt in no-man’s-land after a blundering drive for hours. The men watched silently as Musa struggled up to the top of the vehicle and stood on the cab, squinting into the horizon, trying to spot the approaching dust of oncoming drivers. He settled on the roof, lotus style, and shook the compass violently inside his fist. “The stupid pivot jammed,” he said, laughing uncomfortably. “Don’t worry,” he reassured the migrants, “I know the Sahara like it’s my bedroom.” Although J-Boy and the others were alarmed at their fate, tired, filthy, surviving on sugar and water already, smelling of shit from the times they reinserted money rolls after defecating, they fooled themselves into believing the driver’s guarantees because the alternative offered bleak melodies. They alighted from the truck for a walkabout, like jejune royalty, while Musa made a Mayday call on his Thuraya. J-Boy told himself he’d never get used to this sun’s stinging hotness, no one could. The soles of everybody’s shoes immediately getting sticky in the scorching sand. J-Boy scrutinized the faces of these men who had come this far with him. Eyelashes coated with dust. Foreheads and fingers heavily powdered with the same desert talcum. They looked like clowns, but this was no laughing matter. Had their fathers forbidden this trip, like his own father did, insisting J-Boy get a diploma before jumping headfirst into an inscrutable future?

He moved toward a group of squatting men, also including Mummy Skippy, and joined them, wishing he were a wall mirror with the power to divine the reason for the group’s misfortune simply by studying each person’s reflection.

“We’re just one day from Algeria, o,” one man guessed, his voice muffled through a balaclava. The top of his face was scabby with skin disease.

“We’re just waiting here, o, looking,” another said. The closed-up face of a pessimist. A man you’d never take advice from. “We don’t even know where to go.” Then, “Do you think those three men we saw will die?”

“Countries at war are better than Nigeria,” complained a fellow wearing dark glasses with one missing lens through which J-Boy could see his blinking, dusty eye. “That’s why we commit crime going to another man’s country. E pain me sha.”

“My fiancée died,” said a man whose small hands were encased in thick goalkeeper gloves. “A cockroach came through the surgical opening as the doki operated on her. I had to get away from it all sharp-sharp.”

“Eeyaaaah,” Mummy Skippy commiserated. “May Virgin Mary grant Jesus the power to wipe Oraimo cord on the back of anybody who wants to rape us. Amen.” She sighed and rocked gently, staring off to the side. “My mother’s school building collapsed in Ita Faji and overnight we became umu nnunu,” she said. “The first thing I’m going to eat in Spain is ukwu poulet.”

J-Boy studied Mummy Skippy’s jutting cheekbones, her drawn, anxious, masklike face, trying to imagine Consider-Ajah, in her place. She’d shown him a halftone photo of herself and her laughing mother, carrying the hairy pup, Skippy—a dog they’d bought to help them get over her father’s death. Neighbors who complained of the dog’s barking had poisoned Skippy. Mummy Skippy hoped to become a dog breeder in Spain. She said Skippy would be proud in dog-heaven.

J-Boy rambled, “In Japa, I was a barber running a Bet9ja business out of the same shop.” He loosened the shemagh and massaged his arm, as if recalling the sensation of holding a humming clipper as the vibration traveled from your hand to a customer’s head, which gave you a feeling of raw power. “I was supposed to protect my little sister from Cousin Sixtus-Akure, a visiting pedophile. Instead I’ve chosen to go to Europe to barb hair so I can build a house with a basketball court for my parents, exactly the same kind of house Big-Boy Baba Ramadan built for his own parents. When Japa people see the big house and heap praises on my parents for its beauty, my parents will say, Our son in Spain built it for us.” He revealed how people in Japa had gotten more superstitious as more youth voyaged abroad, as if trying to attribute successful migration to something in the culture, which was not a bad idea. He showed them the Japa cloth, o Hosanna, and spoke of its glory. “Japa traders immediately spread it on their cartons of milk. Bike-taxi operators carried it inside their helmets,” he said. “I think it’s protecting me.”

The men nodded, their minds elsewhere. One said, “At home, life was simply too difficult. We were farming but there was never enough.” Another said, “I traveled with my family’s gold jewelry, and I’m running away to Europe.” Understood to mean, I stole my family’s gold jewelry. But inside the social amnesty granted everyone in this in-between world there also existed moral amnesty, all judgment frozen. The men began to chant a Yoruba Islamic prayer J-Boy had heard the Emir of Japa sing at the commissioning of Japa’s newest bus terminal. Bismillahi, Rahmani Rohini, e je ka dupe fun Oluwa… He got up and wandered off because he did not speak Yoruba. Though the most widely used language in Japa was Wazobia, a patchwork of Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa.

Looking around, he surveyed the swirled heaps of sand, the stretching dunes. Scattered yellow shrubs grew away from what appeared to be tire-swept paths, though that had to be a mirage, because sandstorms routinely recast the features of the desert. He found an Adidas sneaker rotting in the ground. Sand spilled through its eyelets. The shoe’s back stamped flat by the exhausted heel of the migrant who’d once worn it. J-Boy refused to imagine what had happened to the fellow, if the truck he journeyed on had lost its bearings. He clutched his hip and felt the sharp, hard hipbone there. There was sand in his mouth. He ground it between his teeth. He’d had this idea of Europe as an El Dorado, wondered if it was located on the same earth as Japa, or Nigeria. That beautiful vision was fading in this loveless reality.

He covered his head with the shemagh and squatted in the hot, bright sand. Had this all been a spurt of youthful exuberance? His aunt, Glo-Glo, had told him, “Think about the ones that love you and idolize you before you make any life-threatening desert journey. For they are okay now, but if you die, how many can bear the loss?” J-Boy didn’t want to die here. Why should he perish in the wild if Baba Ramadan hadn’t? But Baba had been raised in a house of philosophy. His parents were ungovernable Yoruba philosophers who’d refused to farm their land because their ancestral name, Adekogbe, translated to “a prince should never indulge in menial labor.” They were hunger artists, and perhaps it was this purist philosophy that boosted Baba through the desert. Into Libya. Italy. Then America. He knew what his mother would say should he call to announce his bad break: Don’t come back. Try again. There’s no free lunch in Freetown. Although she was a cold-blooded pragmatist who never complimented you on a good report card, so it didn’t go to your head, she was also the diabetic mom who while dangerously low on insulin had power-walked to Japa Cathedral to pray for him one day during his secondary school-leaving exams. The thing was you didn’t completely understand who she was.

If J-Boy had to choose, he’d do better to ring his father, an army deserter who’d learned to read by watching the moving mouths of lectiophiles at newspaper stands. “I’m going to call everybody I know in Nigeria to come and get you,” his father would say. “Be ready to face the law!” But why did his father always turn Bokito the gorilla when J-Boy put a foot wrong, while he played hit-the-penny with other offending young men? When J-Boy told his father how Cousin Sixtus-Akure had peeled off Consider-Ajah’s panties at night while the thirteen-year-old slept and jerked off to her face, his father had blamed “eighteen-year-old boy hormones,” and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone what my sister’s only son did, you know your mother hates my family.” Aghast, J-Boy had felt like a pushover who, at twenty-two, couldn’t protect his own sister; though later that night he’d yanked Sixtus-Akure into the room they shared and threatened to hack off his testicles, turning him into the newest eunuch.

The desert sun dipped, color drained from the earth, and in the distance, before J-Boy’s eyes, a kind of dust-mist seemed to form. His body shook all over as if he’d sighted a ghost, and letting his shemagh fall, he wrapped his arms around his shoulders, got to his feet, and turned around. He found Radio waiting there, close to him, at his back.

“Your father,” the minor said slowly, “is a harsh man, isn’t he?”

J-Boy stood there for a moment, dazed. The wind stirred on his cheek. He noticed some of the men sitting on the ground beside the truck, elbows resting on knees. Some leaned against the truck. Others stood with arms folded.

“What?” he asked. He saw that Radio’s head was cocked to the side. The boy’s gaze was solid. And Radio smiled slightly, as though with insight. The boy had peered into his head?

“You’re a seer,” J-Boy accused. The boy nodded several times and pulled something out the pocket of his beige drainpipe jeans. It was brass-colored like Musa’s compass—then J-Boy saw it was a tiny bell; but already something startling, a seductive, fuzzy memory, had launched in his mind.

“Musa wants to do a roll call,” Radio said. He squinted at the bell in his hand and looked at J-Boy expectantly. J-Boy raised his eyes and glimpsed Musa bent at the waist, praying. He studied the dirty, bottle-green turban that wrapped up the boy’s dreadlocks. This young boy was like a masquerade with two faces—two eyes on the past and two on the future.

“You knew Musa’s compass would spoil,” J-Boy said. This was the unclear memory he’d just experienced. The evening Radio predicted the compass’s malfunction. The boy had misnamed the compass, a word J-Boy could no longer remember. J-Boy had either laughed or shouted at the boy. Now he felt foolish, even angry at that “un-Japa” image of himself.

The boy stared softly at J-Boy, rotating the bell on the pads of his ashy fingers; he touched his lip with the point of his tongue, saying yes without speaking.

“So why didn’t you do something to stop it?”

“Some tragedies in life are ordained by the Universe,” the boy said, with bittersweet candor. “They have to happen.”

J-Boy glanced away. “What else do you see?” he asked, rubbing the tips of his fingers together. “When are we leaving this ‘seven kilometers to hellfire’?” He slipped his hand in his jacket and squeezed the Japa cloth like a talisman. He noticed Mummy Skippy scratching her butt as she returned to the truck for the headcount.

“Dat piece of cloth in your pocket,” the boy began, pointing the bell at J-Boy. “You fought off many others before you could rip it from a very large one. More than one hundred yards long.” J-Boy blinked and said nothing.

“Written in capital letters, on dat large cloth, was di word, ‘HOSANNA.’”

J-Boy frowned with momentary doubt, wondering if the eleven-year-old had somehow googled it. No? He hadn’t revealed this detail to anybody. Then he said, self-importantly, “The cloth fell from heaven.”

“Actually, it didn’t fall from any heaven, broda,” the child smiled smugly. “Di wind snatched it off di fence of a woman’s house. She spread it out to dry. And God didn’t write any ‘HOSANNA’ on di cloth like you think. ‘HOSANNA’ is di name of di woman’s events company. She printed it on di cloth herself.”

J-Boy gripped the Japa cloth so hard his fingernails hurt. He could see that Musa had stopped praying and was now shaking his sunglasses at the two of them, furious at their aloofness. J-Boy stared at Radio with a quiet, caustic wrenching. But he had heard the certainty behind the boy’s voice.

“You’re lying,” he said, his voice a mere squeak; he didn’t let go of the cloth.

“A sandstorm is coming,” Radio warned, ignoring him. He pointed at the sky in the direction J-Boy had observed the dust-mist. “I’m going to slow it down so I can tell you something.” J-Boy followed where he’d gestured. Above the wobbly line of sand about half a mile off, a blob of pink colored the sky. It appeared to be moving.

Working quickly, Radio stooped and drew a circle in the sand with his foot, his trouser leg pulling up to expose skin gray with filth. He pulled an empty Coca-Cola plastic bottle out of his wrinkled nylon jacket and whipped it upside down. Then he shoved the bottle headfirst into the middle of the sand-circle. He tossed the tiny bell beside the bottle, mumbling incantations as though the words he spoke were bits of fruit he crushed between his teeth.

“You and me and the others are like characters in a story,” the boy said. “I think it’s really hit me now.”

J-Boy studied the pink sky nervously, his mouth dry. Sandstorms buried cities, armies. Congeries of Persian soldiers thousands of years ago had been swallowed by a sandstorm in the Sahara. He couldn’t tell if the pink up there was fanning out; he moved his legs impatiently, planning a dash to safety, but feeling a powerful, viral need to hear the boy. He scratched his groin. “I’m not a character,” he said.

Radio gave him a look.

“Dis is how di story ends, broda,” the boy continued. “Actually, we’ll have three terrible sandstorms in three days. You will survive it. Mummy Skippy will survive. So will Musa and Kpo! Kpo! and me. Everybody else who didn’t die on di second day will die of hunger and thirst on day three.”

J-Boy glanced at the truck. Musa had disappeared after the count. The men were crowding into the back, pulling one another up the side, gesturing them over. Pointing fearfully at the sky. Look at them, mused J-Boy. So full of motion. How could these moving people die? He would not believe it, frightened by the knowledge that their spirits even now hovered above their heads, ready for what came next.

“Di five of us alive will walk for six, seven hours, until we feel as if our legs have been cut off,” the boy said. “I’ll faint when we reach a village. Musa will barter his hookah for granary-millet to nourish us. Four of us will get a ride to Guezzam, where we will be sold by bandits. Actually, they’ll sell you to a Nigerian madam in Tamanrasset. A pimp. You will work for her as a prostitute. She’ll hand you a whitening cream and a soap called “Casanova.” To make you appear very sexy for di rich women clients from Dubai.”

“Nobody can turn me into a male prostitute,” J-Boy vowed. “That day ‘B’ will come before ‘A.’”

“Don’t interrupt me, broda!” the boy said angrily. He observed the sky for a brief moment and then hurried the rest of the prophecy. “After your escape from Madam, you’ll be beaten in Magniya, and in Nador by Arabu thieves. You’ll lose an eye, but you’ll finally get near Ceuta.”

J-Boy pinched the skin on his little finger hard, trying to slow his descent into a hole inside himself. “Will I get into Spain?” he asked.

The boy bent down again and pulled the bottle from the circle. He snatched up the bell. J-Boy felt several grains of sand, carried by the wind, hit his face. In the sky the pinkness rose before his eyes and quickly spread up into the white clouds. His jaw slackened. He was mesmerized. It was like God painting.

“I don’t know if you’ll reach Spain,” Radio said, concerned. “Di Universe stopped me from looking further; and when I asked why, in my mind I was told, DO NOT ASK.”

J-Boy took a deep breath. “That Spain, I’ll get in,” he said with determination. “I’m going to cut white people’s hair inside that Spain. Whether I have one eye or two.”

He walked back to the truck as if his head were padded against the world. And though it was hot, he felt it only in his arms and forearms. Not even on his face, and definitely not inside his chest. He could hear the wind roaring behind him, and the puff of red-brown earth the storm kicked up, which bounced past him and Radio, seemed so unreal, like the stuff of dreams.

They hunkered down in the truck, feet scuffing the tailgate, Radio’s thin arm on his back. And as sand blasted down on them with a howling, menacing energy, J-Boy reached inside his pocket, eyes quivering shut, and grabbed the Japa cloth and loosed it into the wind. He imagined it flying over their heads, high above the truck, into the blurry sky, high, high into the heavens, all the way to Japa.