The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  A small wooden box. Opened: two withered envelopes kissed with Sudanese stamps. He could read enough Arabic to make out his mother’s surname, and his father’s full name in the return address rectangle, but that was it.

  Three photos he’d never seen before. A shot of his mum: a Somali Muslim woman in Dinka wedding clothing, beside a man who was obviously his father, at the centre of a Dinka wedding party in what was probably the city of Juba. She was the palest one there by far, and mum wasn’t pale.

  Next photo: his father, standing in front of a wall of waving, golden wheat.

  His father.

  No crackle of the familiar. Like looking at a history book. A famous stranger.

  And yet that face, with skin and eyes that cloned his own, so dazzlingly dark his scleras were amber. A smile like a supernova: radiating love at whoever was standing behind the camera.

  Third photo: mum lying down and laughing on a couch, his father stethoscoping his ear against her harvest-time belly and smiling like he was listening to his favourite song.

  His eyes.

  His nose.

  His smile.

  His future.

  Why hadn’t she ever shown these to him?

  2.

  9:35 AM and it was already hot. Radio said it was a record Labour Day. Was gonna hit thirty-five. But biking made it cooler.

  Helmetless, on his scrappy third-hand ten-speed, Rap zipped underneath 127th Street’s ceiling of leaves, and smiled, imagining himself in goggles and a trench coat with the wind whipping his jacket out behind him like a cape.

  Then he’d’ve been Static, riding his electromagnetically-levitating garbage can lid like a ’hood Silver Surfer on his Galactus-brand board. Making any problems disappear by finger-pointing ten-thousand volts at them.

  But that wasn’t true even for Static. Course, Static had a team, the Heroes. Rap hadn’t seen any of the Street Falcons in weeks. And Static had Frieda, his sorta/maybe-not girlfriend. Rap didn’t even have a girl friend.

  107th Ave, Kush’s southern border, quiet on a holiday Monday morning, and plenty of stores closed for the long weekend. Maybe most grade twelve kids really were out buying school supplies and new clothes, but with twenty-five bones, all he was gonna get was—

  WHY DID THE DESTROYER

  KILL MY FATHER?

  —hit the brakes so quickly he damn-near crashed into a too-skinny, too-young prostitute hike-skirting across the street. Apologised, backed up, checked it out again.

  Posted on a rectangular green street-lamp marked NO POSTING ALLOWED.

  Glossy sticker, gold printing on black. No pictures. No copyright line. No url.

  But no question who created these. That was the fifth question from the Revolution Scroll.

  Glanced up. Damn.

  105th Street.

  No such thing as magic or miracles, the old man’d told him. Just the universe giving you endless chances to reflect and learn something through your Daily Alchemy. Up to you whether you actually did.

  Whatever. Give him shit for telling the truth about a bunch of punks, but then let these other kids break the law putting stickers up on decorative poles?

  Still.

  Hadn’t asked his mother anything about his father since . . . actually, had he ever?

  Growing up in refugee camps in Kenya, and then Ethiopia, and then Chad, and finally in basement apartments here . . . to his mother, today only mattered for how it affected tomorrow. So better forget every yesterday they’d ever had.

  All he knew was that his father had died in a car accident in Khartoum on the way to teach university, and then the country had gone to hell and his mum’d been running ever since.

  Who was his dad? What was he like? If he’d lived, what kind of relationship would they’ve had? Would he’ve spent more time with him than his mum did? What would he think of his art? Would he’ve been proud of him? Would he’ve—

  On 107th Ave, two Somali kids probably headed for grade ten slowed down and stopped to look at him.

  “Oh, shit!” said the taller boy. “You’re—you’re—”

  “You’re famous!” said the other one.

  Weirdos.

  Shoulders and neck burning, stood up on his pedals and rolled along without looking back.

  More stickers yelling at him from lamp-posts, bus-stops and building-sides, and he read them all:

  WHY COULD I NOT RECOGNISE

  MY OWN BROTHER IN THE SAVAGE LANDS?

  HOW DID THE DESTROYER DEAL WITH ME

  BEFORE I WAS READY TO FACE HIM?

  WHY DID I AND MY MASTER’S CHILDREN

  RAISE A GOLDEN FORTRESS?

  DO NOT DROWN IN THE SWAMPS OF DEATH,

  BUT DRINK FROM THE RIVER OF LIFE

  Two Sudanese kids pimp-limping by in bandanas, maybe even the same Lil Wayne and Lil Bow Wow he’d seen weeks before, slowed down to whisper to each other while chin-nodding at him.

  One squeaked something at him in Nuer (he knew it was Nuer, even if he didn’t know what it meant). The other kid tried Dinka in which Rap was equally useless. Both kids jabbered excitedly.

  What the hell was going on? Checked his fly. Nope. Didn’t look like they wanted to fight, either. And they weren’t laughing . . . .

  Whatever. Weird shit was in the air.

  Would’ve be so simple to head east to 111th Ave and 96th Street and check out what everyone was doing, maybe even—

  Stood on his pedals, eyes west, and pumped to 124th Street with Lil and Lil squeaking behind him.

  3.

  Down in the basement comic store on 122nd Street and Jasper.

  Rap saw it, stopped to gawk. His heart blasting an old-school 88-beat.

  A glossy bookcaser screaming Buy Me.

  A Static Shock collected edition.

  Wiping handlebar sweat on his pants, he reached up, cradled it, flipped pages without even breathing, glancing secrets he’d only been able to infer from the out-of-sequence issues he’d spent years collecting.

  The book was twenty-three bones and then some.

  When he and his mum arrived in E-Town he was twelve. They shared the basement of a house on the north side with another refugee family, and he went to school at Sifton where the only teacher he’d ever liked, the principal, Mr. Jack, used to dole out hugs to his school full of refugees, immigrants and misfits like a nurse dispensing vaccines in the UNRWA camps.

  After the first time, the man never tried hugging him again. His smile shook—like Rap’d stabbed a needle in his arm. Real pain. Not something else. But every day after that, Mr. Jack always gave Rap a manly handshake and a smile that Rap finally decided he could trust, when he no longer felt the need to put a knife into the man’s neck.

  Back then his mum still wore hijab. Mr. Jack, an honest-to-god White man, used to kid around with her and the other hijabun, threatening to hug them, too.

  These were women who expected White people to fear them, or ignore them, or condemn them. And here was a White man offering them hugs? In front of their children? Was this mzungu crazy? Didn’t he know they could all strap on dynamite or something?

  But those women thought Mr. Jack was a hero. And finally so did Rap. Especially after the man gave him two wrinkly, water-damaged Static comics he’d found in some desk, probably assuming little Raphael Deng Garang’d be thrilled to see a superhero kid who shared some of his skin colour. And fact was, Mr. Jack’d been right as rice in a bowl.

  Rap’d heard of superheroes, but he’d never had his own comics before. Couldn’t even read English. But Mr. Jack taught him how through those two comics. He could still remember the first English sentence his mind could decode from text, a line from Static: “Sorry I kept you on hold for so long.”

  And when his mother got them a basement apartment all to themselves at Al Hambra, they fled the north side like Muhammad skipping Mecca.

  So Rap never got the chance to say goodbye to Mr. Jack, the only White man he’d ever trusted, and even actually liked. Lost him
like he’d lost everything else in every other midnight flight and terrifying river-crossing of his life.

  After that, teachers were . . . they were all like the ass-wad he had the next year in grade seven. Mr. Manna didn’t know he understood English, and with him sitting right there in front of him, Manna’d told another teacher that Rap was “dumb as a sack of hammers.”

  Rap didn’t speak because he didn’t want to. And that was true now, too.

  “Rap!”

  He glanced up from the bins he was scrounging through.

  “Shit, dude! Where you been?”

  4.

  The black pine-cone mini-locks, longer now.

  “Hey, JC.” Kept scrounging.

  “Oh, man, you are not gonna cold me like that,” said JC, standing next to him. “You don’t answer my emails, my Facebooks, my phone calls for like half the summer, and when I find you, you act like you saw me two minutes ago?”

  “Well . . . I’ve been busy.”

  “Really?” said JC, still standing. “Doing what, exactly?”

  “Stuff. Aiight?”

  “Lemme get this straight. You get me involved in some crazy shit with some cappa-worstas that could’ve blown up like a brawl, but you’re treating me like I somehow messed you up? Please tell me you are not doing me like a bitch.”

  Rap’s neck burned. “Yeah, and you got a job out of it!”

  “Oh, you are not using that against me!”

  JC, the kid who was always smiling, joking, head-bopping or otherwise talking it smooth-n-easy, knelt beside him in front of the bottom rows of comics and actually snarled.

  “Brother Moon was ready to offer you that exact job, Rap. But you seriously coulda cost him, and you know it!” He jabbed a finger at Rap’s face. Rap leaned back, fighting the urge to snap that finger off.

  “Don’t be mad at him cuzza some shit you pulled,” said JC. “Least ways own up to it. Don’t be going all bitchified at the man cuz he doesn’t want everything we’re working for getting smashed up fore we barely even started. Cuz that’s some bullshit right there.”

  The hipster store attendant walked over. “There a problem here, JC?” said the White dude, his soul patch bobbing on his chin with every word.

  “Naw, naw, Dave,” said JC, smoothing and soothing with a smile. “Just trying to get my knucklehead friend to stop being such a knucklehead.”

  Dave looked at Rap for a second as if he recognised him, but didn’t know from what. Then he shrugged and went back to the till.

  JC dropped his whisper further, sandpaper on stone.

  “Dude, I let you be for a while, cuz I figured you needed your space. But seriously, you can’t be leaving me hanging like that. We boys. My Nubian. My best friend, man. Aint sposta be just cold desertin your number-one like that!”

  Hit him like a fist in the ear: best friend.

  Barely ever had a friend. And now, guy just drops the b.f. bomb on him? What do you say to that?

  And worse, he knew he’d punked out on him.

  “Let’s get outta here,” said Rap. He pulled out his five fives, paid for the Static book Rebirth of the Cool, and they hit the street baking in the strangely hot September.

  5.

  Biking to Rap’s place in silence, the words “best friend” flapping behind them the whole way, like torn newspaper stuck in his spokes.

  Had no clue what to do with a house guest. Never’d had one before. Well, not exactly. There had been one, the same and only one, off and on for two years when his mother wasn’t home, which was most of the time. But that was totally different.

  And now here was this guy, who by virtue of being his only friend was in fact automatically his best friend. Who was mad at him. And now for a second legit reason.

  Wasn’t until they were in Rap’s room that JC stopped mad-moping, cuz in desperation Rap finally cracked open what he’d never shown anybody before.

  “Da-a-a-a-yum, bwoi!” JC kept saying, flipping through Rap’s art pads bursting with inked drawings of Adam Warlock, Nightcrawler, Cyborg, Hawk Man, Morpheus, Blade, Marvel’s Falcon, Lupe Fiasco, Fela Kuti, Baaba Maal, the original five members of NWA, and Static riding his electro-hovering garbage can lid.

  “Oh, man, this shit’s the bomb! Damn, bwoi! Damn!” JC pointed at a lanky caped man with a big C on his tunic. “Zat who I think it is?”

  “‘Super Chappelle.’”

  “What’s his powers?”

  “Makes you laugh till you puke.”

  “Snuh-app!”

  JC grabbed Rap’s newest drawing pad off the shelf: almost thirty fully-inked images straight outta The Book of the Golden Falcon: Hru and the children swallowed by the Devourer, Hru and Yinepu meeting Master Jehu at night, Yinepu and the Sorceress, Hru fighting Set . . . .

  “Man, you got so many ink-styles! Like all these ones in the Swamps, and with the Devourer. The line work’s so spooky!”

  “Yeah . . . that’s wood-cut style. I was really influenced by John Totleben on those. And Wrightson.”

  “They did, like, Swamp Thing, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But over here,” he said, flipping carefully to high contrast picture, “Hru fighting Set, that’s more like Mignola.”

  “Definitely. Or Michael Golden.”

  “You old school f’real, dude!”

  “Well, ’snot like I’m doing Kirby or Ditko.”

  “True dat, true dat. Yo!” He jabbed at the full-colour pages of the Sorceress, Master Jehu and Lord Usir at the end of the book. The pages were warped from water colour. “’Slike Mshindo . . . or Alex Ross, bruh!”

  Rap could feel his own smile poking into his ears. Mshindo was a brilliant comic painter, but Ross did interiors, too. There was no higher compliment for a would-be comic artist than being compared to Ross. Like being a young martial artist and getting sized to Bruce Lee.

  “How you learn to do shit on this level?”

  He thought about it. “I always loved to draw. Even in the refugee camp in Kenya—there was this aid worker from Nairobi who used to give me paper and pencils after she saw me drawing in the dirt with a stick. When I got here, I started reading comics and just copied artists I liked. Then I got books outta the library.”

  “And this one,” said JC, flipping through another book he’d grabbed off the shelf, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. “Yo, who’s WW?”

  Shocked, Rap glanced over JC’s shoulder. He’d forgotten about the inscription. Below the weird, shitty, pen scribble of a muscle-man in a tank top were the words

  Rap never forget

  your powers littel dude

  WW

  He blinked hard several times.

  Powers?

  “Just some guy.”

  “Can’t believe you held out on me!” said JC, putting back the drawing pad. “How come you never showed me these? You could be working for Marvel or DC right now!”

  Rap laughed. “Naw, naw, c’mon.”

  “Fuh real! Hey, where’s your comics, anyway?”

  Rap glanced around, eared the hallway, even though he knew his mother wasn’t there. Knelt. Flipped up the blankets at the foot of the bed, tugged down and slipped away the cloth that covered the box-spring.

  JC goggled: half as tall as the box-spring and hidden inside was a reinforced box, wide as the bed, topped by springs so even if you sat on the bed you wouldn’t feel it there.

  “How the hell you build that?”

  “Grade 8 Industrial Arts.”

  “You built that just to hide your comics?”

  Shoulders and neck chafing, Rap blanked on his way to a lie. Never had anybody to explain the box to before.

  Pulled out three columns of comics in mylar bags with acid-free cardboard backings. Handed JC his treasure trove, eager to see JC cackle and snap over them.

  But all JC cared about was answers.

  “Why, Rap?”

  “Aw, my mum threw out my comics once,” he said, skin burning. “Byrne X-Men, Sta
rlin Warlocks . . . probably worth three hundred bucks’ worth! She just trashed em!”

  “Dude, how the hell’d you afford three hundred bucks worth of comics when you were in grade eight?”

  Rap froze.

  Stupid—

  “JC, can you translate something for me?” Flailing. Probably even more stupid than taking him to his room. But if you fire your gun once, might’s well empty your clip . . . .

  “Translate what?”

  “Something from my mum.”

  “You speak Somali.”

  “Yeah,” said Rap, pulling out the last contents of this stash-box. The letters he’d stolen from his mother closet that morning. “But it’s written in Arabic.”

  “Whoah, you serious?” JC barely glanced at the first lines of the first letter he opened. “You wanna be reading your dad’s love letters to your mom? Dude, you even sure they’re from your dad?”

  Rap’s head creased down the middle. Love letters? And maybe not from his dad?

  Forced himself. “Yeah.”

  “O-ka-ay,” sing-sang JC. Like he was about to jackhammer open a case of dynamite.

  Felt like one of dreams where you were at school naked. Having his friend invade his mother’s privacy, invading the privacy of his phantom father, even invading even his privacy by letting JC know things about him a second before he translated black squiggles on crinkly blue paper into English. Assuming he’d even tell him the truth—

  Naw. This was JC.

  His best friend.

  And since he had no other way to do this archeology on the ruins of his own family, he pressed ahead.

  “‘My hilwa’—that means, like, sweety, honey-pie, cutey, ‘You’re the woman . . . I dream of . . . every night.”

  Rap glanced over JC’s hands, making sure he wasn’t greasing the letters with cheeseburger grease or whatever. But he was holding the letters like a Qur’an.

  “I sometimes think of you . . . when I’m teaching class . . . and supposed to be concentrating on these students. But . . . I miss you all the time . . . . ’”