The Archivist and the Arsonist

The air conditioner in Adanna's tiny office had been broken for three weeks. She sat at her desk with her sleeves rolled up and a thin layer of sweat on her forehead, staring at the same spreadsheet for the last hour. The numbers blurred together. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes, but the numbers did not get clearer. The problem was not her eyesight. The problem was that she was about to lose her job. Her boss had called her that morning with bad news. The digital archiving project was losing funding. They could not keep her on full time. She had two weeks to find another position or she would be out on the street with nothing but her laptop and her student loans. She had been working at this museum for three years. She had digitized over two thousand documents. She had built their entire online catalog from scratch. None of that mattered when the money ran out. Adanna leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. The paint was peeling in the corner. She had noticed it on her first day and it was still there, a small sign that nobody cared enough to fix anything. The whole building was like that, old and tired and falling apart. She had come to Onitsha hoping to build a career. Instead she was barely scraping by, living in a cramped apartment with a landlady who kept raising the rent and a mother who called every Sunday to ask when she was going to get married and settle down. She thought about her mother's voice on the phone last week. "Adanna, you are too educated for your own good. What is the point of all those degrees if you cannot find a husband who can take care of you?" Her mother did not understand. She did not want to be taken care of. She wanted to be the one doing the taking care of. She wanted to be the person who uncovered something important and made a real difference. Instead she was stuck in a dead end job with no future and nothing to show for all her hard work. Her phone buzzed on the desk. She glanced at the screen and saw an unknown number. She almost ignored it. She hated answering unknown numbers because they were usually telemarketers or people trying to sell her something she could not afford. But something made her pick up this time. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was just curiosity. "Adanna Okonkwo?" The voice on the other end was a woman, older and formal, with the crisp tone of someone used to giving orders. "Yes, this is her." "I am calling from the National Archives restoration project. We received your application. We would like to offer you a contract position restoring our colonial era documents." Adanna sat up straight. She had applied to that project months ago and never heard back. She had assumed they had chosen someone else, someone with more experience or better connections. "I thought the position was filled," she said carefully. "We had a candidate drop out. The work is extensive and the conditions are not ideal. We are working with water damaged materials in a building that has not been properly maintained since the nineties. Most people find it too overwhelming. But your application said you specialize in digital restoration and you have experience with fragile materials. Are you still interested?" Adanna looked around her office at the peeling paint and the broken air conditioner and the stack of termination papers she had not signed yet. She thought about her rent and her student loans and her mother's disappointed voice on the phone. "Yes," she said. "I am very interested." The woman on the phone gave her an address and a time. "Be at the archive tomorrow at eight in the morning. Ask for Mr. Reed. He will be your supervisor for this project. Do not be late." The line went dead before Adanna could ask any questions. She stared at her phone for a long moment. Mr. Reed. That name sounded familiar but she could not place it. She set the phone down and started packing her bag. She did not even have a proper job yet and already she was tired of the name. Something about it made her uneasy.