The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  “Why not? I know them all.”

  “You know these guys.”

  Araweelo chuckled, but rolled her eyes while doing it.

  “Yes, Raptor. I’ve helpedt all of them with publicity. Even with Politic Live’s annual ‘Hip Hop for Hunger’ concert, even though I keep telling them to change the name to ‘-Against Hunger.’”

  She turned to Moon. “When he was little, he was shockutt when I didn’t know something. Now he’s shockutt when I know anything!”

  Raptor tensed. But the laugh was gentle and open. And no slap in it.

  And he found himself joining in their chuckle, marvelling at it all.

  Moon at his mother’s kitchen table, a mug of milk-thick sugar-shai steaming in front of him.

  His mother sitting casually across the table from a man, a real man, laughing without even a hint of desperation’s cackle cracking his eardrum. Her smile, calm and tender, her eyes soft without the panic-lights of scrambling to stall the inevitable blow-out with the man across from her.

  Those two adults on either side of the rickety Formica table, leaning millimetres more towards each other every day they met, probably not even aware they were doing it.

  His own shock—and joy—at feeling no burn anywhere, at not suspecting her of trying to take Moon away from him to wreck him and then destroy everything.

  For the first time he could remember, she was actually happy.

  Didn’t have to picture it in his head or draw it or write about it, and it was better than any video game, movie or TV show. Because it was there, three-dimensionally in front of him. And if he wanted to, he could actually touch it.

  Right there in his family home.

  The phone rang.

  His mother looked at the phone-screen. Eyes, flinching.

  She took it in the bedroom.

  Voice muffled behind the door, raised. Angry. Pleading. Trapped.

  He turned away from Moon, knowing he knew, remembering 8:20 in The Book of the Golden Falcon and the fate of Master Jehu’s wooden fortress.

  10.

  Two days later, evening, in the Street Laboratory, Brother Moon wrapped a long blue belt around the waist of an eight-year-old.

  Mrs. Abdi and the Somali mother crew cheered, and so did everyone else.

  Ibrahim Abdi bowed to his teacher, then ran over to hug his mother, his brother Jackal, and the rest of his family. Moon came over with him.

  And Mrs. Abdi, in front of everybody, hugged Moon.

  Jackal’s face: like his mother’d practically just stripped own to a halter top and danced to Lil Kim. And Moon and the Somali mother crew had the same reaction.

  Mrs. Abdi finally let go of tall Moon, wiping her eyes.

  “Lastt year,” she choked, “Ibrahim could nott speak ten wordts. And now . . . more than three hundredt. And this! The martial artts!”

  “I’m glad I could help, Mrs. Abdi.”

  “Next year,” she said, like she was talking about flying to Jupiter, “Ibrahim starrats gradte one!”

  “I just wish,” said Moon, “every child’s parents could learn about this treatment when their kids were young. Before they’ve lost too much time.”

  “Now itt’s supper-time!” said Mrs. Abdi. “You come!”

  11.

  The next day, afternoon at the back of the empty Street Laboratory.

  At the PC carrels. ’Noot, singing like she was on Heaven’s playlist, finally peeped over her shoulder and saw Raptor standing there.

  Jumped and nearly fell out of her chair, yanked off her headphones, mortified.

  “I didn’t even know you were there!”

  “Don’t stop singing! You’ve got a beautiful voice!”

  Straightening herself, glancing between him and the screen. Eyes flashing: Are you “even” teasing me? “No, no . . . . Now, Thandie, she can sing. I just holler and croak.”

  “No way, ’Noot!” Pulled a chair and sat. “I mean, she’s all right in a there’s-this-girl-I-know way, but you? You’re ready to make a CD. Like, today!”

  Waved if off, pointing at the screen. “Anyhoo . . . . ”

  “What song was that, anyway?”

  Waved it off, and he kept pushing. Shifted into appeasing for her fastest escape. “It’s taarab music. It’s from Kenya and—”

  “—and Tanzania! Sister, c’mon, think I don’know taarab? Zuhura Swaleh, Bi Kidude, Siti binti Saad—”

  At those stars’ names, she beamed a concentrated smile at him so beautiful it almost made dizzy.

  “Yes, yes! Yeah, I was singing a song by Asha Abd—”

  “—Asha Abdow Saleebaan, from Somalia.”

  She shook her head in amazement. “Yeah! How do you know Somali singers?”

  He almost said I’m half Somali.

  “Public library. And you?”

  She laughed, unjacked her headphones from the PC so Raptor could hear her taarab playlist. They chatted music until Raptor abruptly said, “’Noot, tell me about a movie that makes you cry.” (One of Moon’s X-ray questions.)

  After a microsecond: “Hindi movies.”

  “Really?” Shock suppressed his laughter. To him, Hindi movies made the average Avengers comic look like Shakespeare.

  “Yeah. When I first moved here I worked at grocery store/video store in Millwoods, in, y’know—”

  “Little India—”

  “Exactly. So I used to take out movies.”

  “And you could understand them?”

  “Yes. I can speak Hindi, but I’m better with Punjabi.”

  Amazing. Add in Somali, Arabic and English, and she was practically a UN mission, which wasn’t so off—her Christian grandfather had been an MP in Haile Selassie’s parliament.

  So she was a hybrid, too.

  Blurted: “Why don’t we do a duet at the Kush Party?”

  ’Noot: “What?”

  “Golden Eye’s performing. You knew that, right? You could join us. We’d be like the Fugees!”

  “You’re crazy!” she giggled. “Thandie—”

  “Aw, forget Thandie. You could sing her into the Swamps! ’Noot, seriously, what good’s your gold if you keep it buried in the mines?”

  She swivelled her monitor towards him, showing him the graphics she’d been working on. “Do you think Wa-Wa’s gonna like this?”

  Blasted through that barricade. “You wanna be watching the stage from the street and thinking, ‘That coulda been me?’”

  “—because I could even make this flag bigger, or move the silhouette over here. And whaddaya even think about this font?”

  “You could be the next Lauryn Hill, ’Noot—”

  “Stop!” Laughing and smiling.

  12.

  Dark and hot inside that damned black bag he was wearing. Almost tripped cuzza the damned flare right in his eyes—might’s well’ve been police headlights.

  Jackal shouting . . . from somewhere out there in the darkness. His mother whistling and wailing Dinka-style, embarrassing him in the way all teenagers were embarrassed by their parents.

  Squinted, saw her in the front row of the auditorium sitting next to Moon, the two of them smiling and applauding, and his embarrassment disappeared. Kept walking across the stage.

  To Raptor it was 99% meaningless. Grad? A full month before they’d even written their finals? Stupid.

  And anyway, even with his high English 30-1 grades, he still had to upgrade a bunch of other course next year at the blandly named Centre High, where all kids who’d smartened up too late finally had to go.

  Then there was the empty symbolism of the mortar board and the gown. What good were symbols if nobody knew what they meant?

  Alchemy was all about symbols, etymology, geometry: developing your Shining Eye to see the secret science of the world surrounding you.

  And why should he celebrate some school that gave him nothing but pyrite about himself and his people? The Street Laboratory was where he’d gotten real gold.

  Why should he celebra
te the school where, just when he was starting to shine, they called him “difficult” and “aggressive” and accused him of “recruiting for some Black Falcon gang”?

  During the March 21 anti-racism school assembly, Golden Eye had performed, dazzling students and even some teachers. But then came whispers and secret complaints from secret complainers and his vice principal demanding a print-out of his lyrics and them telling him point-blank they were investigating him and even combing his online content to see if he was “violating school policy.” And of course, eventually, the VP told him “someone was concerned” that his song “racist.” And no proof. Not even a solid argument. Just “someone was concerned.”

  Kot-tam. He’d been concerned about racism his whole life. No teacher or principal had ever asked him about that.

  And his VP called in his mother and she showed the man why she was called Araweelo.

  Accepted his diploma from the principal who’d never done a damn thing for him, raised his hand up like a black-gloved Olympic athlete, heard Jackal and a whole chorus yell, “Supreme Raptor!” and “Raise the Shining Place!”

  Adjusted his kente scarf—Moon’s grad gift—and left the stage to the applause-thunder of all the Street Falcons he’d recruited in person or by YouTube.

  Far as he was concerned, his real graduation would be when he knew all ten scrolls, when he be transformed into a Master Alchemist.

  13.

  Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy, what the Leadites called 111th Avenue. Hot June night. Muggy. Like the air was sweating.

  A full block east of the Street Laboratory, on the south bank of the avenue, on the corner next to the Burger Baron. Raptor and Wa-Wa slanging product to a steady stream of young male Somalis. And making bank.

  Two customers looked up, saw an angry skullcap coming straight at them, and split.

  Wa-Wa’s eyes lost their whites. Raptor froze, bills bunching out of his hands like he was harvesting spinach.

  “What’s in the bag?” demanded Moon.

  Wa-Wa handed over the plastic shopping bag. Raptor groaned inside.

  A t-shirt.

  Front: against a giant field of blue and with a single white five-pointed star above his head, a silhouette-man defiantly hoisting a machine gun. In the movie poster font of Pirates of the Caribbean was scrawled the title “Pirates of Somalia.”

  Moon flipped the shirt around. Raptor knew well was what there, since Wa-Wa, ’Noot and he had designed it. The slogan Defend Your Mother blared overtop an ancient exchange:

  Alexander the Great:

  “How dare you

  prey upon the seas!”

  Pirate:

  “I have one ship

  and so am called

  PIRATE.

  “You have a great fleet

  and so are called

  EMPEROR.

  “How dare you

  prey upon the

  WORLD?”

  Choked. Was this gonna be another show-down, like after he’d called out the capoeristas?

  They’d sold a hundred shirts already to a legion of laughing Somali teens and men. He knew that when Blackhawk Down came out, pirated copies got shown across Mogadishu, even inside movie theatres, with Somalis cheering the battle scenes in the way Hollywood never intended.

  Moon, lasering the shirt with his eyes, his eyebrows up like Sputnik.

  Even though the film was one big lie—a flick in which Somali generals dressed like Crips, a David vs. Goliath bullet-fest that fucked up which side Goliath actually was—Somalis cheered seeing even caricatures of their countrymen slingshot a stone right between the giant’s eyes.

  And those t-shirts popped-and-locked from the same culture-jamming mortar-fire as that Blackhawk-down-low.

  Raptor knew he was doing with clothing what he did with rhymes and poetry: sampling. Remixing . . .

  From a faked-out FOX tale

  Nailing patriots as pirates

  Hailing and sailing from a distant sandy ghetto

  Gangbangers ship-jacking on the high seas

  CNN damning them for fighting foreigners fixed on

  Stealing their nation’s naval food supply and

  Drowning their shores in death-tides of the Pyrite Empire’s radioactive excrement.

  And now Moon was gonna come down on them? For this? Because this wasn’t “a positive image of the community”?

  Kot-tam—

  Moon pulled out his wallet and counted out seven fives.

  “This enough for for two?”

  14.

  Sitting inside Maãhotep’s law office, Raptor felt the couch trembling. It was blue and Scotch-guarded. He didn’t know if it was him or Jackal making it shake.

  Moon looked more angry than scared.

  “How the hell can they do that?” he demanded.

  Maãhotep opened and closed his hands like he was letting a bird out of a cage. “They were both seventeen when they committed the crime, so under the Young Offenders Act—”

  Moon: “They’re kot-tam murderers! Murderers get to go free? I mean, I could see a coupla rich White kids going free—”

  “Those dudes were only seventeen?” spat Jackal. “Seventeen? You serious? Fuh real? They looked, like, twenny-five or suh’m—”

  For Raptor: the room. Tilting hard right. Clutching the couch’s rough arm so he didn’t keel over.

  Those spliffed-out ice-blooded killers Mahamad “Marley” Moallim and Hassan “Lexus” Awale were now eighteen, and for whatever reasons their prosecution was taking too long to come to the bench, so the judge’d said they had the right to walk free until they had their week in court.

  All their bones that Moon had broken had long since healed.

  But the hearts of those Leadites—

  “Damn, Brother Maã,” said Jackal. He hadn’t even opened his chocolate milk. “What the hell we sposta do now?”

  Maãhotep swivelled in the chair behind his desk. He sighed, pursed his lips, obviously weighing his words.

  Framed behind him on the wall were two pictures. One, a signed portrait of dark-haired White man in a suit, signed To Bamba: For Justice, Ralph.

  Two, the classic portrait of the Senegalese Sufi mystic Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba, shadow-faced and cowled, like a Jedi Knight in white. To Raptor, at that moment, he looked more like a Grim Reaper.

  Finally Maãhotep offered slowly, not even looking at them, “If they go anywhere near you, we can get a restraining order . . . . ”

  Nobody even bothered to dignify the remark.

  Moon, Jackal and Raptor stumbled outside. Raptor chewed the hot, dusty June air, stenched by the smog of rush-hour traffic clogging past them.

  Maãhotep’s storefront office was on Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy in a terra-cotta building facing a McDonald’s and Kingsway Garden Mall. Broad daylight. High visibility.

  All three of them looked around, scanning for revengers with guns.

  “Brother Moon,” said Raptor, “I’d like to learn how to grapple.”

  Instead of lifting double-eyebrows, all Moon did was nod.

  That night Moon changed the work schedule at Hyper-Market so he could teach two extra martial arts evening classes per week at the Street Laboratory.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Moon, after pinning his student in a yet another Sanuces-Ryu floor technique.

  Moon got up off him at once. Raptor leaned up instantly.

  Being held, clutched, grabbed, sat on, mounted. That’s what ground-fighting and grappling required, and for a year he’d avoided it. Now he forced his mouth to de-sneer, replace-elevating his face out of disgust and into “curiosity.”

  Brought his new face towards his teacher while he wiped sweat off his forehead with his forearm.

  “Amazing,” said Moon, “how being bitten by a hyena doesn’t seem so bad when we’re worried about being eaten by lions?”

  15.

  ’Noot abruptly stopped singing and turned off the music.

  “What is it? Seriously, this time.” Head forwar
d, hands on hips.

  Raptor shook his head like a wet dog, like he could fling the demons out.

  “And don’t deny it,” added ’Noot, “cuz it’s outta character for Brother Supreme Raptor to be just even forgetting his own lyrics.”

  Saturday morning. They were the only two Falcons at the Street Laboratory, but there’d be more any minute, gearing up for their Kush Party performances.

  But he wouldn’t snitch on himself.

  She filled the kettle, plugged it in next to the window, and hummed out her song for the three minutes until the water whistled.

  Sunlight and steam and singing.

  Eyes beaming the morning. Her, running and giggling while he chased her past tents and tin shacks and desperate people ignoring them or yelling at them, jumping piles of trash and thrashing through puddles, dancing and laughing and singing and never knowing there was anything more to life than hunger, fear, flight and joy.

  ’Noot poured the water into the pot, adding Somali tea spices from a baby food jar.

  Cloves and cinnamon. He could taste them on the steam.

  Sunlight and singing and steam.

  “Steam”—jazz he’d learned from Moon. An Archie Shepp number, almost a hymn, a lyric explaining that few joys could equal the intensity and ineffability of the end of pain.

  ’Noot spooned sugar into a tumbler, poured the red mixture over it, handed it to him. “This is how they drink tea back home.”

  He didn’t say I know, just took it and thanked her.

  Sat down, the both of them, looking out the window at people strolling Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy . Looked up into that face of hers, just like Queen Hatshepsut’s, and he told her everything about the killers who were free and probably after Jackal and Moon and him.

  ’Noot leaned forward. “So what’re you gonna do?”

  “I don’know.” Feeling the chair wedging the metal hardness of the butterfly knife in his pocket against his leg.