My grandfather once told me a story about a baby who, having just been born, spoke in complete and cogent sentences, saying, “Where am I?, saying, ” Hello, I am a doctor from Hertfordshire, saying, ” Can somebody help me?
We were sitting in his living room, each part of it rote and familiar like my multiplication tables. The pale cloth over the opening into the kitchen. Birds custard steaming on the coffee table. Roosters pecking outside. My grandfather’s wizened voice, reading out from the yellowed newspaper clipping that held the story of the speaking baby.
There was a life behind the baby’s eyes, my grandfather told me, something spinning and hot, and as these eyes whirred from doctor to nurse to mother to father to sister, open and understanding, all the room’s occupants were too terrified to do language back. Finally, blessedly, after two minutes, the eyes lost their spark and took on an innocent glassiness. The baby began to wail.
The fact that this had all been written down proved it true. My grandfather was a professor of literature and a very kind man. In his spare time, he translated Benin texts into English. He taught me to do the same. We spent many hours knitting language together. The act of translation made the words on both sides grow deeper and wider. When I stumbled over Benin or couldn’t grasp an English word, my grandfather was patient. Let’s try speaking it aloud, he would say. With his help, the correct words would always appear.
Now, when I read and write in English, his voice is the one I hear in my head.
My grandfather died the day I was born. He was getting hip surgery. The moment the surgeon cut into his flesh, his heart stopped beating.
He was dead for approximately five minutes and thirteen seconds. It was a miracle, the doctors said. To be dead for that long, and then to be revived with no brain damage. This story, too, was in the newspaper.
The same day that happened, my mother gave birth to me. I did not emerge speaking complete sentences; the moment I arrived on this earth, I began to howl. My mother told me the sound frightened her so much that she began to pray for my life. She was worried I might die. It sounded as though I was in a great, great deal of pain.
I have a memory. It goes like this: I am in my grandfather’s living room. My grandfather, bustling and agile, gets up and moves around the axis of his left hip. I watch him disappear behind a gauzy curtain into the kitchen. I see him come back into the living room holding a glass box with a small wooden wheel inside. It is like a bicycle wheel, with spokes radiating out from the centre. One of the spokes is nailed to the bottom of the glass box. The whole wheel is spinning.
In my memory, I am confused – how can the wheel be spinning, if it’s inside an enclosed box? I cannot see any place where the box might open. It is smooth and shut all around. I ask my grandfather, Did you push the wheel?
No, he says, and in my memory I can hear his laugh, wheezing and loud. My father gave this to me, he says, and his father gave it to him. It never stops. It only keeps going. It is called a perpetual motion machine.
I am proud that my grandfather thought I was big and smart enough to be shown this scientific machine. We eat small chops and work slowly through a translation of Jacob Egharevba. It is the most sure-footed I have ever felt; I am weaving Benin into English like it is nothing. Every line I finish, my grandfather reads aloud. As he reads, I watch the machine spin in its box. Eventually, the two things merge; it is like the sound of my grandfather’s voice is coming directly from the wheel. The air smells like camphor and lavender incense. The wheel spins, spins, spins. Quiet and relentless, a snake eating its own tail. Moving language from my grandfather’s mouth into my open ear. I look up and catch my grandfather’s eye through the glass box. He winks.
I learned perpetual motion machines were impossible at Oxford. I was there studying physics, to the thrill and delight of my father, who expected me to come back to Benin City when I was done and work for his company. I was in class one day, and we were going over the laws of thermodynamics, and suddenly my hips yowled, and I blurted, but what about perpetual motion machines? There were a few sniggers then, from English boys whose first guess at trying to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun would probably have been to take a measuring tape and hop into their daddy’s helicopter. The professor frowned at me and said, well, of course, they’re an impossibility.
I reached into my mind and caught hold of the sight of that silent spinning. Walking back to my student hall, I thought, I really ought to just send along a letter to ask Grandpa about the machine. And then suddenly, I was on the ground, curled up into myself, wailing into my hands, my hips crimping and cracking. My palms caught my sound and choked it.
This was how it had been ever since my grandfather’s death. I would forget he was dead – and then I would remember.
A few weeks later, I wrote my father a letter asking him to locate my grandfather’s machine. He wrote back that it was too late; he had already taken out all the things left in my grandfather’s compound, and the structure itself was in the process of demolition. I knew then that if I wanted to see the machine again, I would have to build it myself.
I bought lavender incense and began to burn it in my tiny room. I filled my closet with camphor. I quickly gathered that most things undergraduate physics professors wave off as impossible are real in the field of quantum physics. I manhandled time, electrons, quarks.
A quantum object is, essentially, two things at the same time. To be in a quantum state is to exist as multiplicity, as probability. This has many practical applications. Imagine a computer chip holding memory in discrete bits. The amount it can store grows infinitely greater if one bit can be two things at the same time. Imagine having a great stack of books in your room that you need to organise – and then being able to stack them not only horizontally and vertically, but also across a fourth dimension.
Years passed, and I got nowhere. And then one day, while I was working on my doctorate, a professor mentioned the symmetry-breaking properties of crystals. A strange, physical truism – crystals are not balanced. They form repeating patterns in some directions, but not others. And I thought to myself, perhaps the same is true about time. Constant stillness in some directions, and constant motion in others. My eye twitched into a wink. I imagined. I theorised. And then, on paper, it appeared – my own perpetual motion machine. A tiny, but true-looking theory. Quantum ions in ceaseless, celestial spin.
My grandfather’s laugh, wheezing, loud, leaked through the letters and numbers on my notebook paper.
The more I studied, the more I recognised my mind as a quantum system, the soup floating inside the box containing Schrodinger’s cat. When straining to remember that afternoon watching perpetual motion with my grandfather, there was a non-zero chance that I would retrieve another memory:
I am a young child, in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, looking at the back of his head. It is dusk. We are driving home through dust between guava, fishtail and rubber. I remember two motorcyclists. They are wearing denim and helmets that make their heads slick and black like the eyes of a fly. My grandfather’s hand moves over to the glove compartment and pulls out a gun.
Uwafiokun, he says, and I am startled because he never uses my full name. Watch closely.
One cyclist pulls up to the front of the car, forcing my grandfather to stop. The other pulls over to my grandfather’s door and starts shaking the handle furiously. He is shouting something I cannot hear through the helmet and the car door. My grandfather unlocks his door, so with the next yank, it swings open, and the cyclist goes flying backwards. The other cyclist approaches my grandfather on foot as he gets out of the car. There are four shots.
I see the first cyclist’s knees buckle. He thuds to the ground. And then my grandfather gets back into the car, closes his door, locks it, and drives forward. The car lurches up and then back down as we go over the body.
Uwafiokun, he says. Listen closely.
I remember my voice coming out an octave higher. Yes grandfather?
Remember. Survival is a bloody business.
And I remember the smell in the car. Camphor and lavender.
My machine was just letters and numbers until Bertrand.
Bertrand had no last name because he was a duke. He had learned about quantum computers from some Americans while visiting Cambridge – the one in America, he clarified. These Americans reckoned the first person to get hold of a working quantum computer would be standing on the shores of a new world. My postdoc advisor had alerted Bertrand to a promising young student way beyond the quantum cutting edge – well, how did I feel about building him the computer I was always scribbling about?
Not for the first time, I was enormously grateful for the foolishness of big men with money.
I went home and, with the money Bertrand gave me, began to build a new world in an enclosed space. I bought steel machines, lasers, and molecule processors. A generator, and then a second and third. I began each morning with a pilgrimage to my grandfather’s grave, a 15-minute walk from my lab. I asked him about his machine. Where had it gone? Who had made it? How could it be recreated? The ground that held him was stiff and unrelenting. There was no room in this world for my grandfather’s mouth to be opened once more. I had once crumpled in the face of this fact. Now, I stood upright.
I built gas-less, gravity-less glass boxes. I scented them with lavender and camphor. I built ions that I poured into these boxes and realised I didn’t, and tried again. I beat numbers over the head with my pen. I strained my eyes looking for all the things I could not see.
I was building a new world. It took time, time, time.
And then one morning, the ground on top of my grandfather softened into a mouth, and from it came a wheezing laugh. I had done it. I ran to my lab and saw that my computers were tracking the movements inside the glass box. They told me that the ions in my box were spinning. They were spinning, and they would never stop. I had created a system unable to rest. A perpetual motion. I had built a perpetual motion machine. And I was caught up in the infinity in it all, feeling insurmountably the way I moved through space as a tenuous collection of an uncountable number of things that had all always existed, and finally, now, they were all in my sightline. I was a newborn baby speaking full sentences. I was the gash of a cut-open hip howling into wet air. I was language being widened and weighted. I was always, always, always.
I watched my machine work, and for the first time in years, I heard my grandfather’s voice. He said: Uwafiokun. Listen closely.
Adesuwa Agbonile is a Nigerian-American writer, journalist, and audio producer. She is a Goldwater Fellow at New York University’s MFA program and the creator and host of the Audible Original podcast Backlash: The Myth of Political Progress. Her fiction has appeared in Pleiades, Hobart Online, and The Loveliest Review. Across genres, her work seeks to challenge dominant conceptions of reality and imagine new ways of thinking and being. She won the Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize 2025 (Short Story).
