The Red (2)
I. Detroit
Marlene calls herself the queen of medical sodium, though "queen" is generous for someone who's been mixing IV bags in the basement pharmacy of Henry Ford Hospital for twenty-three years, two stories underground where everything is beige except the exit signs (red) and the sodium chloride solution, which catches the fluorescent light and glows like something that could save your life or kill you depending on the dose, which is true of most things when you think about it.
She's fifty-one, has a theater degree she did nothing with, a daughter in Phoenix who video calls once a week out of obligation, and an ex-husband who moved in with someone named Crystal who sells essential oils and thinks Marlene's "energy is blocked," which might be true but is also none of Crystal's business.
The hospital parking structure went up three years ago on the site where Brewster-Douglass used to stand—those projects that housed 2,500 people in 629 units before the city decided 2,500 parked cars were more valuable than 2,500 people living. Marlene remembers those buildings, not fondly because they were falling apart by the end, but she remembers Mrs. Washington who sold candy from her first-floor window, twenty-five cents for anything, and the teenagers playing basketball in the courtyard, and the whole loud messy geometry of people existing in proximity.
Now it's seven stories of poured concrete with red lighting. Some architect's idea of making it "less hostile," which is hilarious because how do you make a parking structure built on demolished housing anything but hostile? But the red is striking, she'll give them that—at night the whole thing glows like a wound, like the city's embarrassed about what it did but can't stop displaying it.
Marlene parks on Level 4 every morning at 5:45 AM. Walks through the red that makes everyone look slightly dead or slightly beautiful or both, she can't decide which. Takes the elevator down, swipes her badge, descends another two floors to the pharmacy where she spends eight hours making sure people don't die from electrolyte imbalances, which is important but also boring, which is true of most healthcare—critical and tedious simultaneously.
Her supervisor Kevin is twenty-eight and recently discovered Marx, which would be fine except he won't stop talking about the "carceral nature of healthcare infrastructure" while Marlene is trying to eat her turkey sandwich.
"You ever think about complicity?" he asks one Thursday.
"In what?"
"In this. The machine. We charge people $300 for a bag of sodium that costs us a dollar fifty."
Marlene looks at him. "Kevin, I think about it every time I mix a bag. Every single time. And then I keep mixing because people need electrolytes and I need a paycheck and complicity is just another word for existing in a system you didn't build but can't escape."
"That's depressing."
"That's honest."
Kevin nods like she's said something profound when really she's just said something true, and truth is only profound when you're twenty-eight and just discovering that everything is terrible.
That night the parking structure elevator is broken, so Marlene takes the stairs—seven flights in red light, her knees complaining, her thoughts going where they go when she's tired and climbing. She thinks about Mrs. Washington's candy, about Brewster-Douglass filling with police during the riots, about the city's long slow decision that people are less important than vehicles, less worthy of space, less deserving of infrastructure that doesn't glow red like a warning or a wound.
On Level 4 she stops, breathing hard, and looks out over the city. From here you can see everything the red illuminates—the hospital complex, the freeway, the empty lots, the few houses still standing, the whole industrial sublime of a city that peaked at 1.8 million people and now holds 600,000, everyone else having made the calculation that elsewhere was better, and maybe they were right, maybe staying is its own form of complicity, maybe loving Detroit is just another way of participating in its slow death.
A man is sitting in his car on this level, engine running, just sitting. Marlene recognizes him from the hospital—billing, maybe, or transport. He's crying, which is common enough in hospital parking structures that she almost keeps walking.
Almost.
"You okay?"
He startles. "Yeah. Just. Long day."
"Seven-story climb because the elevator's broken kind of day?"
He laughs, wet and rough. "Yeah. Exactly that."
They stand there in the red light, two strangers in a monument to cars where people used to live, and Marlene thinks: we're all complicit, but we're also all just trying to get home, and maybe those aren't different things, maybe that's exactly the same thing.
II. Port Harcourt
Chidinma teaches chemistry at the secondary school but everyone calls her the gas flare princess, which started as an insult when she was young—this girl whose family compound sits close enough to the Shell facility that the flare lights her bedroom at night—but she's claimed it now, wears it like armor, introduces herself at conferences as "Chidinma Okafor, gas flare princess of Port Harcourt," and watches people try to figure out if she's joking.
She's thirty-four, has a PhD in chemistry from University of Ibadan that she uses to teach sixteen-year-olds about ionic bonds while the gas flare burns off methane that could power the entire Rivers State if Shell bothered to capture it instead of venting it into the air and setting it on fire, which they've been doing for forty-three years, since before Chidinma was born, so the red glow is as much part of her childhood as her mother's cooking or her father's laugh before the respiratory disease took him at fifty-six.
The flare is blood red at night. Emergency red. The red that means something is wrong, has always been wrong, will continue being wrong because wrong is profitable and profit is why Port Harcourt exists at all—the oil, the extraction, the entire reason anyone cares about this particular piece of Niger Delta is because underneath it is something valuable, and above it are people, and people are always less valuable than what's underneath them.
Her students ask why the sky is red. She tells them about gas flaring, about waste products, about how the methane has to go somewhere so the companies burn it. She doesn't tell them about the carcinogens, the particulate matter, the way everyone within five kilometers has elevated cancer rates. They'll figure it out themselves eventually, probably when someone they love gets sick, probably when they're old enough to understand that the pretty red light is killing them slowly, which is how most beautiful things kill you—slowly enough that you can pretend it's not happening.
Her classroom used to be someone's house. The whole school is like that—a neighborhood turned into educational infrastructure after the families were relocated for pipeline expansion. Some rooms still have kitchen tiles. Bathroom fixtures. Small evidence of people who cooked here, slept here, loved here, before the oil company decided their houses would be better as classrooms, which is another way of saying the oil company decided the houses would be better gone.
The red light seeps through the windows even during the day, tinting everything rust-colored. Chidinma has learned to grade papers in this light, to write lesson plans while the flare roars in the background—a sound so constant she only notices when it stops, which happens maybe twice a year for maintenance, and then everyone wanders around confused in actual darkness, in the absence of emergency.
Her best student is a girl named Blessing who wants to study environmental engineering. "To fix this," Blessing says, gesturing vaguely at everything—the flare, the polluted water, the fish kills in the creeks.
"You can't fix it," Chidinma says, then immediately wishes she hadn't.
"Then what's the point of learning about it?"
And Chidinma doesn't have a good answer for that except: bearing witness is its own form of resistance, understanding how you're being killed is better than not understanding, education is the only thing they can't take from you except they can, actually, they can take everything, but we pretend they can't because the alternative is too terrible to teach to sixteen-year-olds.
That evening, Chidinma walks home through the red. The flare is particularly bright tonight—some kind of excess production—and the whole compound is lit like a darkroom in reverse, everything visible, nothing hidden. She can see her neighbors outside, her mother's garden struggling in contaminated soil, the water tank they installed after the creek became too polluted to use.
Her phone buzzes. Cousin in Lagos: "Why don't you leave? Come here. Get out."
She types back: "And go where?"
Her cousin sends three thinking emojis, which is answer enough. Because Lagos has its own problems—the traffic, the flooding, the generators running because NEPA is NEPA. Everywhere has its own red light, its own emergency made normal, its own slow death dressed as daily life.
III. Seeing Each Other
Marlene's daughter sends her an article: "The World's Most Beautiful Pollution Sunsets." It's one of those Vice pieces that tries to make apocalypse aesthetic, and there's Port Harcourt, right there, the gas flares photographed at golden hour, looking like something from a movie about the end of the world directed by someone who thinks the end of the world should be pretty.
In the comments, someone has written: "I live here. It's not beautiful. It's killing us. But yes, it looks nice in photos."
Marlene clicks the profile. A woman named Chidinma. Teacher in Port Harcourt. Photos of a red sky, of students, of a flare burning in the distance.
She comments: "I work in a hospital in Detroit. We have a red parking structure where housing used to be. Different red. Same violence."
Chidinma responds within an hour: "I looked up your parking structure. 2,500 people displaced for 2,500 cars. We have gas flares for oil profit. Both are red. Both are emergencies everyone ignores."
They start messaging. It's strange and not strange—two women on different continents, both living in red, both existing in the space where infrastructure becomes violence becomes beauty becomes normal.
"People take photos of your flare?" Marlene asks.
"All the time. Tourists. 'Africa is so photogenic.' They don't ask about the cancer rates."
"People take photos of our parking structure too. 'Brutalist architecture is having a moment.' They don't ask where the people went."
"Where did the people go?"
"I don't know. Elsewhere. Nowhere. Died. Survived. Probably all of the above."
They video call once. It's morning in Detroit, evening in Port Harcourt. Marlene is drinking coffee in her kitchen. Chidinma is grading papers by flare light.
"Show me your red," Chidinma says.
Marlene holds up her phone, pans to the window. You can just see the parking structure glowing in the distance.
"It's beautiful," Chidinma says.
"It's terrible."
"Both things are true."
Chidinma shows her the flare. It's massive on the small phone screen. Burning bright red against black sky.
"My father used to say it looked like sunset that never ended," Chidinma says. "He thought it was beautiful even though it killed him."
"That's the most devastating thing I've ever heard."
"It's Nigeria. Everything here is devastating and we just keep living."
Marlene laughs. Not funny-laugh. Recognition-laugh. "It's Detroit. Same thing."
They talk about their work—Marlene mixing sodium, Chidinma teaching chemistry, both of them participating in systems that help people and harm people simultaneously, both of them complicit and victimized and surviving, which is just another way of saying they're human, which is just another way of saying they're doing their best in situations designed to make best impossible.
Before they hang up, Chidinma says: "We should keep talking. Us red light people."
"Red light people. I like that."
"We're everywhere. Just usually we don't notice each other."
IV. The Red Continues
Marlene keeps working at the hospital. Keeps mixing sodium chloride. Keeps parking on Level 4 in the red light. The man who was crying in his car shows up in the pharmacy one day to pick up medication. He recognizes her.
"Hey. You're the woman from the stairs."
"That's me."
"Thanks for checking on me that day."
"No problem."
"I mean it. I was having a bad time. You helped."
Marlene wants to say: I didn't help, I just asked if you were okay, which is the bare minimum of human decency, but maybe that's what help is sometimes—just witnessing someone else's pain, just standing there in red light and acknowledging that this is hard, that we're all drowning in different ways, that survival is a collective project even when it feels desperately individual.
Kevin brings her coffee one morning. "I'm sorry about the Marx speeches."
"It's fine."
"It's not. I was being an asshole. Acting like I just discovered that healthcare is broken."
"You kind of did just discover it."
"Yeah, but you've known for twenty-three years and you're still here."
"That's not virtue. That's just inertia with better lighting."
He laughs. They drink their coffee. Go back to mixing medications that cost nothing to make and everything to buy, and Marlene thinks about Chidinma teaching chemistry while breathing poison, and about Mrs. Washington selling candy from a window that doesn't exist anymore, and about all the ways we survive things that are designed to kill us slowly enough that we can pretend we're living.
In Port Harcourt, Chidinma's student Blessing gets accepted to university in Abuja. She's leaving. Getting out. Chidinma should be happy but mostly feels abandoned, which she knows is unfair—the girl is sixteen, she should escape, everyone who can escape should escape—but also Chidinma has been here thirty-four years and if she hasn't escaped yet, she probably won't, which means someone needs to stay and bear witness, someone needs to keep teaching chemistry in red light and explaining to children why their sky is the wrong color.
"Miss, will you be okay?" Blessing asks on her last day.
"Of course."
"Really?"
"Probably not. But I'll be here. That's something."
After Blessing leaves, Chidinma stands outside in the red light. The flare burns. Her mother comes out, stands beside her. They don't talk. Just watch the red together, mother and daughter, two more people existing in the space between catastrophe and Tuesday.
"Your father loved that flare," her mother says eventually.
"It killed him."
"Both things are true."
Chidinma messages Marlene later: "My best student left. Got out. I'm happy for her and also I want to lie down and never get up."
Marlene responds: "My daughter wants me to move to Phoenix. Away from the red. I said no and I don't know why."
Chidinma: "Because leaving feels like admitting defeat."
Marlene: "Is it defeat?"
Chidinma: "I don't know. Maybe it's just practical. Maybe staying is the stupid thing."
Marlene: "We're staying though."
Chidinma: "Yes. We are."
V. What the Red Shows
Six months later, Marlene still parks on Level 4. Still walks through red light. Still mixes sodium chloride in the basement. Kevin is less annoying. Her daughter calls more. The man from the stairs waves when he sees her. Small accumulations of ordinary life in red light.
She takes a photo one evening—the parking structure glowing, the city behind it—and posts it. Caption: "Where 2,500 people used to live."
Chidinma comments: "Where 2,500 cars live now."
Someone else comments: "Brutalist architecture is so striking."
Marlene responds: "It's a monument to displacement dressed as parking."
In Port Harcourt, Chidinma takes her students outside for chemistry class. They measure the air quality. Document the particulates. Calculate the carbon output. Make the emergency visible through data, which is its own form of resistance, which is maybe the only form of resistance left when the emergency has been burning for forty-three years and nobody with power cares.
"Miss, will this data change anything?" a student asks.
"Probably not."
"Then why collect it?"
"Because someone should know. Because maybe in fifty years, someone will ask why nobody did anything, and we can say: we knew. We measured. We documented. We taught chemistry in red light and we knew exactly what was happening to us."
That evening, Chidinma messages Marlene: "Taught my students to measure their own poisoning today. Very cheerful lesson."
Marlene: "Mixed medications for people who can't afford them today. Healthcare!"
They laugh across continents, across time zones, across the shared understanding that sometimes you survive by making the terrible funny, by finding others who see the same red you see, by refusing to pretend that normal is acceptable just because it's everywhere.
"We should meet someday," Chidinma says. "In person. See each other's red."
"You want to come to Detroit?"
"God no. You come here."
"I don't want to die from your air quality."
"You're already dying from your parking structure. At least our emergency is honest. Yours is brutalist architecture."
Marlene laughs so hard she cries, which is the only way to laugh anymore, really—with tears, with recognition that everything is terrible and we're joking about it because joking is survival, humor is resistance, and finding someone else who sees the red you see is as close to grace as you're going to get in a world designed to make you feel alone in your drowning.
The red continues. In Detroit. In Port Harcourt. In every place where infrastructure replaces people, where profit erases housing, where beauty masks violence, where emergency becomes normal becomes permanent becomes the thing you have to explain to tourists who think it's pretty and don't want to hear about what it costs.
The red glows on.
Marlene parks in it. Chidinma breathes under it. Kevin mixes medications in its reflection. Blessing escapes to Abuja. Mrs. Washington is probably dead. The flare keeps burning. The parking structure keeps standing.
And two women keep talking across continents, keep bearing witness, keep existing in red light and refusing to pretend it's anything but what it is—beautiful and terrible, seductive and violent, the emergency we live inside, the crisis that looks like infrastructure, the red that shows us exactly what we're worth to the systems we inhabit.
Everything and nothing.
The red knows.
We're learning.
