Rap jumped back, sent his chair crashing—
—but it was only Jackie Chan standing there in his mini-dreads.
“Dude, chill,” he whispered. Everyone was staring. He picked up Rap’s chair.
His ever-present headphones were absent. Which is maybe why he wasn’t bopping, and his pine-cone locks weren’t keeping a beat.
“Have you seen this?” whispered Rap, nodding towards the paper.
“Yeah.”
“They charged the guy who saved us with aggravated assault! He’s in jail right now!”
“Really?”
“I thought you said you saw this!”
“I didn’t read it—I just saw it.” He picked up the paper, scanned it. “Damn.”
“What’re we gonna do?” said Rap, grabbing JC’s upper arm. “He saved our lives—we can’t just leave him in jail!”
JC jerked his arm back. “Dude, I already told you about the car! We go to the police . . . look, you already saw what they did to a guy who stopped a coupla killers. Whaddaya think they’ll do to us?”
Rap: caught like a moth on a pin.
“Well, we gotta do something. Maybe call one of those anonymous tip lines or something. Like Crimestoppers.”
“I’ont know. Maybe. Just don’t get us caught, aiight? You know they record those calls, know who’s calling—”
“No they don’t—”
“They say they don’t.”
Rap nodded, scowled.
JC said, “Funeral’s tomorrow. Up at the CIC. You wanna come with me?”
Rap was used to the burn—that was his name for it—the buzzing, the tightness, the wincing-stab between his eyes, the heat that bit his skin like a lit match. He walked with it, slept with it, ate with it, showered with it, brushed his teeth with it, went to school and went home with it.
But this was worse. Now it was someone’d yanked open his collar and dumped glowing coals down his neck and back, burning the meat right off his shoulder blades and ribs.
Almost fascinated him, it was so intense, until the pain spiked and he thought for just a second he was having a heart attack or a stroke. Then he remembered from Bio class that if he were having cardiac arrest his left arm would be tingling, and since he could remember the digits of his own telephone number, it couldn’t be a stroke, either.
Grade 11 was less than a month from being done. Term essays and projects were due and final exams were rolling toward him like a line of tanks, followed by two months of nothingness until his final year.
And bass to that treble, here was this nut JC expecting him to go to the funeral of strangers butchered on a store’s killing floor right next to him.
He’d lived. They hadn’t. Because of a stranger that he’d let police club like an animal.
A stench, like someone’d taken a shit behind the carrel a week ago and no one’d cleaned it up yet.
But it was only JC, standing there in front of him, unwrapping the foil on an oily-onion-dripping burger. Reaching into one of the pockets on his mega-jeans, he pulled out three Kraft slices so creased they’d’ve crumbled without their plastic wrap. Then he un-bunned the top of the burger, laid down his cheese.
“God,” said Rap.
“What?” said JC, slobbering. “Sjust a cheeseburger.”
“’Sdisgusting.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“All that cheese. How can you load up a burger like that with all that congealed cow lactate?”
“What’re you, Jewish? No mixing your meat and milk?”
“If they don’t do that, then I’ll convert.”
“No food in the library!” snapped the librarian from across the room at his checkout desk. “Take it outside!”
“Well?” said JC, rewrapping and pocketing his burger, nodding for them to leave.
“Well what?”
“You coming with me to this memorial service or what?”
“Fine,” said Rap as they cleared the book-scanning gate just when the bell rang the end of lunch. “Fine.”
English class, five minutes later.
Thinking about the memorial service.
Knowing he had a duty to get this man out of jail but not knowing how without maybe going away himself.
Knowing he had a duty to thank this man who’d save his brains from getting pizzaed.
From across the room, hearing and smelling JC finishing his cheese-monster.
Made it as far as the trash can before puking up the tuna sandwich and apple his mother’d packed him.
“Oh, shi-i-it!” razzed Matej, the skinhead-looking Croatian kid who thought he was the White Tupac. “Dawg, thass nasty, dawg. Don’t be killin forties at lunch no more, yo.”
“Matej, enough,” said the teacher. “Rap, can you make it to the office?”
Evening. Mum wasn’t in yet, as usual. In front of their glacial-speed computer, sipping Lipton’s Chicken Cup of Soup broth just so he didn’t starve.
An email popped up. Which was weird, since he never got email from anyone. But the school insisted everyone have an email account linked to their and their parents’ home accounts.
It was that fool JC with a link to Somal-E-Town.com, a video story posted from the CBC news site, with still photos and footage doubling up on the reporter’s narration:
Part Good Samaritan, part Bruce Lee, Mr. Yimunhotep Ani is a Kush-area store-owner who intervened on Saturday night’s multiple homicide while it was unfolding next door to his own store, as this stunning security footage leaked to YouTube demonstrates.
Freaking amazing! Rap’d been face-down—there he was, that was him, nothing to ID him, thank god—so he never actually saw what’d happened.
This old man, Yim-something-something, smashed through the two killers like an axe through dry branches.
Rap jabbed the spacebar, rewound, watched it again. And again. And again.
According to the video file clock, the whole combat lasted two less than two seconds.
Clicking, frame by frame:
Killers in long coats standing over victims.
Black blur slipping from the back.
Hand chop into neck of Killer #2.
Rushing leg takes out #1’s feet.
#1 spinning mid-air, as if his hips were on an axle.
#1 on floor, blur moving towards Killer #2 turning round.
#2 hefting shot gun.
Blur’s left hand intercepting barrel, gripping, yanking forward.
Rotating trunk, right hand spearing into #2’s throat.
Right hand raking #2’s eyes and face, right foot puncturing #2’s groin.
#2 on the floor.
Blur slowing into a man, stomping #1’s knees.
Then #2’s.
Finally Rap let the rest of the video roll:
Crippling the two assailants, Ani saved the lives of two unidentified teenage boys who escaped immediately after.
But when police arrived, instead of thanking Ani, they arrested him. And, says Mr. Ani, they brutalised him.
Although police initially denied any wrong-doing, the leaked security footage has gone viral, becoming an internet sensation and racking over a hundred thousand hits in two days.
The resulting public outcry has forced police to change their story, release Ani and issue an apology.
Meanwhile, the reluctant internet icon has issued no statement of his own, but is now widely known online as “Blackbelt Jones,” “the Bulletproof Monk” and “Morpheus.”
Thousands of adoring comments from a range including pro-gun groups and inner-city-renewal activists have claimed Ani as a hero.
In regard to a civil suit against the police and the City, Ani’s lawyer, Bamba Diabate, says “all options are on the table.” Ben Coxworth, CBC News, Edmonton.
Was this guy for real? Had Rap actually been inside the same room as this superhero?
Hoped when he finally went to apologise to him, the man would shake his hand and not rip it off.
; 3.
The next day Rap and JC were busing it up 127th Street, a traffic-clogged lane of stout, drab businesses that city planners must’ve forgotten during extended lunch breaks, or maybe designed while sniping at each other.
Rap tried spacing out through his music, a One Self track called “Fear the Labour” with a strings like a Russian folk song (he knew the sound from a documentary he’d seen on the USSR in Social Studies).
Jolting him back to reality was the sight of Jackie Chan on the opposite seat drinking chocolate milk out of a Tupperware soup container.
JC caught his look.
“I buy the, like, big cartons, the two litre ones,” said JC between slurps, embarrassed. “I usually, you know, fill my water bottle with it for school. But, uh, I lost it.”
“What happened to your i-Pod?”
“Huh?” Slurp.
“You always usedta have your DJ headphones on. Even in class. You’re not wearing em.”
JC came over next to Rap, spoke softly. “I, uh, lost it . . . on Saturday night. At WEM. When Nuke was, like . . . finding a car.”
Rap didn’t even try keeping his voice disapproval-free. Too tired, and the burn was smoking his patience into ashes. “Why you do that, anyway?”
Jackie Chan looked out the window, probably for reasons.
“I’ont know. Wasn’t really my thing, to be honest. Nuke . . . we grew up together. Usedta go biking together. Even bowling when we were in grade six. Now . . . . ” Shrugged.
“You’re taking this pretty well,” said Rap. “If you guys were really so roped.”
“We go back, true dat.” Long drink, then back-of-hand mouth wipe. Then he sealed the lid on his drink-tub and slid it into his knapsack. “He was like an old t-shirt. Fulla holes, got Old Spice-crusty armpits, but you still can’t throw it out.”
He was trying to be funny, but he looked like he wanted to cry.
4.
They rode in silence, got off on 132nd Avenue and took a transfer over to 113th and the single minaret that stood in front of the CIC.
Building’s front had onion-peak arches built over the doors, and a white exterior aging into perpetual dirtiness. Above was a dome with a crescent-and-star glinting the high sunlight of a late afternoon in June.
The parking lot was jammed with cars, and so were the streets. People streamed towards the CIC, Somali men either in blazers or flowing white jalabeeyahs or sometimes both, men with short hair and men wearing embroidered fezzes, and muhajabaat in long iridescent skirts and black blouses floating down the sidewalk like a rainbow of swans.
Cop cars, four of them, up and down the block, and a few jive plainclothes White men with short mustaches joining the marchers who looked like the only time they’d ever seen the inside of a mosque was from surveillance photos.
Rap and Jackie Chan slipped inside a throng of mourners, hoping like hell the cops wouldn’t see them or connect them to the security camera footage up on YouTube—maybe there’d been more that hadn’t made it onto the news that showed their faces. Who’d posted it, anyway? Wasn’t that Morpheus guy still in jail?
Burn was bad as ever, sizzling his legs and arms and forehead. He thought he was going to pass out on the way inside, but JC caught him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just tripped. Thanks.”
5.
Found two empty chairs together near the back of the auditorium. Jackie Chan went to make wudu.
When he came back his face was still wet from washing.
Rap didn’t practice his mother’s family’s Islam or his father’s Christianity. So he didn’t make wudu or genuflect or look in vain for holy water or anything else.
What he did do was sit raging to himself how JC could walk around the CIC with Somalis by the boatload nodding to him like he was a cousin, but him, looking Dinka right down to the facial scarification, might’s well’ve been invisible.
To these people his mother’s side was invisible or didn’t count, and it didn’t matter that he could speak Somali or that he almost got murdered on the same floor as the two Somalis who got shot did.
And that’s who this funeral was for. The service for the two murdered Sudanese was going on at the same time somewhere else, which he knew because his mother, in her morning briefing to him, said that’s where she was going to be.
She still had no idea about his connection, and so he didn’t say word-one about heading to any funeral.
“Our commoonity has suffered another loss,” said Mr. Bashir.
Fifty-ish, a community organiser. Chubby-cheeked and happy-faced, Bashir man looked sadder than his facial anatomy should’ve made possible.
Every second he spoke, the room got muggier and hotter. Rap wished he had some of JC’s cold chocolate milk, even if it did come out of a Tupperware.
Bashir shifted back-and-forth from Somali into English, English for the benefit of the reporters who came for the blood and didn’t care about Black people unless they were shooting, crying, rapping, singing, running or throwing a ball.
“How many uff our young people haff we lost in the laast few years?”
Shouts and wails.
“Yes, you’re right—nutt only young people. Our braather driving cab, Mr. Yussef, who wuss left to die inside his own traank?”
Murmuring engorging into shouting, a grass fire turning inferno.
Mr. Bashir waved it down with his hands and a few insha’allahs.
“The young men at the, the . . . Foolton Place party?” Grumbles from somewhere up front. “Yes, that too—the drive-by shooting at the lounge. How many more haff there been? And, and how many more will there be?
“Some uff our young men, they haff lost. Lost their baliefs. Lost their sense of right and wrong. Lost their hope that they can do something or be something . . . something more than a confficted prisoner or a, a, a jaankie. That they could be fathers. With careers . . . . ”
Mr. Bashir eulogised the dead Somalis: Hassan the store owner. Hard-working businessman. Loved to discuss the news. Committed soccer player. Twenty-eight. Had a twenty-three year-old wife. Two sons, one three, other only three months. Both orphaned by a shotgun shell that permanently interrupted their father’s attention.
6.
Then it finally came time to talk about eighteen-year-old Dawud Abdi.
Mr. Bashir must’ve microscoped that boy’s life to find something, anything to say that wouldn’t shame his ghost: about his loving parents, great smile, sense of humour, his dream of owning a restaurant or a record store or his own music label.
Didn’t mention that the streets knew him as Nuke, a long-time car-thief guaranteed to die by steel one way or another.
And didn’t tell the mourners any time that afternoon that drug-related assaults were plaguing the Somali community so much that a whole lotta people didn’t even bother reporting them to the police.
But quadruple-homicides, yeah, those still filitered through to the cops, and to the news.
Mr. Bashir’s speech ended with thanks to the people who’d come up from Calgary and all the way from Vancouver, Winnipeg, T.O. and even the States. Rap wasn’t surprised—Somali families (other than his) were always big and tight enough to form their own FIFA divisions.
And then there was an appeal from another speaker to join some local Somali group with the name “Brotherhood” in it, and someone else asking on the imam’s behalf for everyone to come for prayer at the front.
Rap moved aside for Jackie Chan, stayed by himself.
7.
After prayer, with the congregation breaking up, Jackie Chan scrambled back from the lobby, shoving a folded-over newspaper at him.
“That guy who rescued us?” whispered JC. “Paper says the police only let him go after his lawyer got involved. Betcha Mr. Lawyer-Man’s the dude who YouTubed that kung fu tape.”
Screen-caps from the tape blared up on the page.
Rap shook his head. “What if the cops’ve got our faces off tha
t tape?”
“Cops can’t tell us apart, man,” said JC, actually smiling. “Otherwise they woulda grabbed us on the way inside here.”
“Unless they didn’t want cause a riot and’re waiting until we leave. To follow us home—”
“Kinda paranoid, fuh real.”
“Don’t ‘paranoid’ me! I wouldn’even be in this mess except for you!”
Jackie Chan looked down, chewed his lip. “Thought you’d be happy. Cuz the guy’s out.”
Rap hit JC’s shoulder. “That him?”
JC looked over. Shuffling out with the rest of the mourners was a moustacheless man with a goatee, a black-and-gold skullcap and Band-Aids marring his neck and face.
The boys tried getting to him, but the crowd crushed them back while they wedged their way with excuse mes and sorrys.
They almost caught him near the door, until several old men in white jalabeeyahs stopped in front of them as if the doorway were the most natural place in the world to have a conversation.
Over the shoulder of an old man with a beard red from henna, the boys saw their saviour descend the stairs and disappear.
By the time they cleared the blocking-line of seniors, Morpheus was gone.
And Rap didn’t feel like tearing all over the place looking for him to thank him and beg forgiveness for abandoning him, just in case the cops could tell Sudanese apart from Somalis. He had more to lose than JC did.
“Now what?” said Jackie Chan.
“I don’t know,” said Rap. “Wait. What’s his name again?” He scanned the paper. “Yimunhotep Ani . . . and get this, you know why he was even there that night? He owns the store next door, the one—”
“The one with the ‘opening soon’ sign?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay!” said Jackie Chan. “Let’s go!”
Even though he’d just been chasing the man, hearing JC’s words dropped Rap’s stomach like he’d stepped into an open elevator shaft.
The Alchemists of Kush Page 4
