The last thing Ayaan remembered clearly was the ceiling fan in his cousin's flat in Hargeisa, turning too slowly to matter against the heat, and the sound of his own laughter at something on someone's phone. Then there was a gap the shape of nothing — not sleep, not falling, just an absence — and after the gap there was sand under his palms and sun so total it had a weight to it, pressing down on the back of his neck like a hand.
He did not recognize the sky.
That was the first wrongness, before he even had the sense to check his own body. Somali sky he knew the way you know a face — the particular bleached blue of it, the way dust hung in the light near evening. This sky was a shade harsher, and something about the arrangement of scrub and grass and the reddish cast of the earth told him, with the flat certainty of a body that has traveled more than a mind that has reasoned, that he was very far from home. Not just far. Elsewhere.
He sat up. His hands were his own hands, scarred across the left knuckle where he'd split it open on a door hinge at fourteen, and that steadied him more than anything else could have. Whatever had happened, it had not made a stranger of him. He still had his name, his memories in the order he'd lived them, the ache in his lower back from sleeping wrong, the phone in his pocket that when he checked it showed no signal, no carrier, and a battery icon that seemed unwilling to commit to any color at all.
*Alright,* he thought. *Alright. One thing at a time.*
He had grown up hearing his grandmother's stories about djinn and men who walked into the bush and came back changed, or didn't come back, and some quiet superstitious corner of him wanted very badly to believe this was one of those stories now happening to him personally, which was a ridiculous thing to think and did not stop him thinking it. What he did not feel — and he noticed the absence the way you notice a tooth that has stopped aching — was afraid. Disoriented, yes. Thirsty, increasingly. But not afraid, and he filed that away as strange without knowing yet that it was the first sign of anything.
He walked because sitting seemed like giving up, and he walked in the direction that had the faintest suggestion of a slope downward, on the reasoning that water runs downhill and thirst was going to become the only problem that mattered within a few hours. The land was not empty in the way he'd have described empty a day before. Grass moved in long pale sheets between low, flat-topped trees. Something with a body like a deer and horns like a joke picked its head up out of the scrub two hundred meters off, considered him without much interest, and went back to eating. Insects sawed at the air in a register just below thought.
By the time the sun had dropped enough to throw his shadow out long and thin in front of him, he had stopped being able to make his mouth make enough spit to swallow properly, and the ground had started doing a slow, unconvincing tilt whenever he stopped walking. He did not remember deciding to sit down the second time. He remembered the sky going a bruised orange, and the sound of dogs, and then hands — several sets of them, unhurried, competent — turning him onto his back.
---
There were four of them, he would learn later: two men and two women, out from a small cluster of homes and cattle posts a half-day's walk further on, checking snare lines in the last cool hour before dark. The one who found him first was a compact man with deep laugh-lines already worn into his face though he could not have been much past forty, who took one look at Ayaan's cracked lips and swollen tongue and made a short, disgusted sound, the universal sound of a person confronted with someone else's poor planning.
They gave him water in careful amounts, not all at once, which annoyed him even as some sober part of his brain recognized it as correct. Nobody asked him anything on the walk back, partly because he had nothing left in him for talking and partly, he suspected, because you did not interrogate a half-dead stranger before you had fed him.
The homes were low and round-walled, arranged with a looseness that took him a day or two to understand was not carelessness but a kind of fluency — this was a language of space he simply hadn't learned yet. Dogs came and inspected him and lost interest. Children did not lose interest nearly so fast, and stood at a companionable distance watching him drink a thin, good porridge with an attention he found almost restful, since none of them wanted anything from him except the spectacle of a strange man eating.
It was the older woman, the one who had carried nothing on the walk back because her hands had been busy the whole way pressing a wet cloth to the back of his neck, who eventually sat across the fire from him that first night and studied him with an expression that was not quite a question and not quite a diagnosis.
"No people," she said, in the halting trade-Setswana that turned out to be the only language they shared enough of to use. Not a question. An observation, the way you'd note weather.
"No people," Ayaan agreed, because it was true in a way that went deeper than she could have meant it. He had turned the fact over already, in the hours of walking and the worse hours of not walking: whatever door had opened under him, it had opened onto a version of the world with no record of him in it. No family across an ocean who would think to look. No documents, no history, no name filed anywhere. He existed here the way a stone exists, entire and unaccounted for.
He should have found that terrifying. Lying by the fire that night, listening to the specific, unfamiliar music of a language he didn't speak moving between people who plainly loved each other, he found instead that it had produced in him something closer to clarity. Nothing here owed him anything, and he owed nothing back except honesty and whatever use he could make of himself. It was, in its bleak way, the cleanest start a person could ask for.
---
He stayed. There was no other plan available to him, and the small logic of the camp — water fetched, snares checked, a woman's bad hip that needed the fire kept close to it, a boy learning to track duiker by dragging his own foot through soft sand to compare the print — absorbed him easily enough into its rhythms. He was strong and willing and useless at everything that mattered here, which turned out to be a fine way to be liked. People forgive a man who laughs at his own uselessness while he learns.
It was eleven days in — he had lost the habit of naming the day of the week and started counting instead in fires — that he first heard the clapping start up after dark, quick and layered, three or four sets of hands finding a rhythm against each other that kept almost-but-not-quite locking into unison, which he would later understand was the entire point. The women sat close around the fire, clapping and singing in overlapping lines that folded back on themselves. The men danced in a ring around them, rattles of dry cocoons strapped tight around their calves, feet stamping the beat into the packed earth until the whole camp seemed to be standing on the surface of a drum.
Ayaan sat where he'd been sitting most nights, at the edge of the firelight, and understood almost immediately that this was not simply entertainment. There was a seriousness under the singing, a held quality, like people carrying something between them without spilling it. He asked, in his patchwork Setswana, what it was for, and the compact man who had found him in the bush — Kagiso was as close as Ayaan could render his name, and Kagiso had stopped correcting him after the third try, which Ayaan suspected was generosity rather than surrender — said one word that Ayaan didn't have, and then mimed, with his hand rising slowly from his stomach to the crown of his head, something that looked almost like heat climbing.
*N/um.* He would learn the fuller shape of the word over the weeks that followed, in fragments traded around cooking fires and on long walks checking snares, never all at once, because it was not the kind of thing anyone here explained in a single sitting to a man who had appeared out of the bush with no people and no history. It lived in the older dancers, they said, a potency you could feel described as heat, coiled low in the belly, and the dancing and the clapping and the concentrated attention of everyone present was how you brought it up the spine until it boiled — that was Kagiso's word, boiled — into the place behind the eyes, and past that boiling point a person crossed into a state with its own name, !kia, half-death, the door standing open onto something that let you see what was wrong in a sick body and sometimes reach in and put a hand on it.
He watched three dancers cross that threshold that first night, each of them changing shape without changing shape — spines arching, breath dragging, one of them dropping to hands and knees and moving between the seated women with his palms trembling an inch above their chests and backs while the singing built a kind of scaffold around him to keep him upright inside whatever he was standing in. Nobody explained what he was seeing as it happened. It did not seem to require explanation for anyone but Ayaan.
He felt something too, and this was the part he did not mention to anyone, because he had no way yet to say it that wouldn't sound like fever talk. Watching was not the same, this time, as merely watching. There was a familiar and entirely unfamiliar sensation of a lock finding its key — not power arriving from outside him, nothing dropped into his hands, but something already coiled at the base of his own spine recognizing, in what it was being shown, a shape it could grow into. It was less like being taught and more like being handed a true description of himself that he had not previously had the words for. Whatever this dance was reaching for in the men and women crossing over into !kia that night, it was real, in the specific and complete sense that his own body was quietly beginning to make it real for him too, without asking his permission and without any interface, any ledger, any voice narrating his progress — just a private, absolute certainty settling into his gut the way understanding settles when you have finally seen how a hard thing is actually done, rather than merely being told that it can be.
He did not dance that night. He sat at the fire's edge with his knees against his chest, feeling something low in his stomach that had not been there a season ago, or a life ago, or wherever the accounting for that ought to be kept now, and thought: *whatever this is, it is only the first door. There will be others.* He did not yet know how many, or how far the last of them stood from a Somali man's dead certainty, three weeks ago, that the world had exactly one layer to it.
The fire burned down. The clapping thinned, then stopped. Somewhere off in the dark a jackal answered another jackal, and Ayaan lay back to sleep with his hand pressed flat against his own stomach, waiting, with something that was not quite patience and not quite hunger, to see what would climb.