Seeing her hand lift. Time fragmenting like a glass breaking in sunlight . . . .
Her hand, skittering forward. . .
Her hijab , drooping corners pointed at her thighs. . .
Her eyes, black and wet. . .
Her hand, passing her knee, drifting towards his hand. . .
His mind, echoing the thought: Even with that loose hijab, I have never seen this sister touch any man’s hand . . . .
Her fingers, almost on top of his . . . .
—and time spewing forth again full speed with Thandie busting in through the Lab’s front door, smiling and cackling with Jackal in tow.
’Noot reared back.
Raptor burnt Jackal with the oldest look in the book of best-friendship: Can’t believe you’re messing up my game like this!
Jackal’s grin ripped into a grimace. The brother knew he’d messed up. Before Thandie could start some shit—which he knew she would, he’d already seen those giant eyes of hers dancing all over the two of them—he told ’Noot, “Let’s fly.”
His heart was speed-bagging his throat. Blood throbbed in his ears, like bass overloading cheap speakers.
Raptor handed ’Noot the package.
“You do like grapes, right?”
Felt like the biggest gamble he’d ever taken. He knew from TV you were sposta buy a woman flowers if you liked her.
But if it turned out she didn’t like you back, after the killer-embarrassment of giving unrequited flowers, how were you sposta stop your skull from popping like a zit? Her walking around holding some decapitated plants while you tried keeping your face from cracking off and hitting the pavement?
No. Red globe grapes were still a gamble, but smarter. Colourful as flowers, and sweet-tasting instead of sweet-smelling. And then, if she didn’t like you, you could eat the evidence and pretend like nothing’d happened.
’Noot: “I love grapes!” she said.
That smile. The eyes. Like sunrise.
They exited the Congolese grocery on Khair-em-Sokar and headed over to the Camel Boys Café.
Inside the sambusa shop’s lemon-yellow walls, Raptor and ’Noot snacked on sambusas, and each sat doodling cartoons on napkins to make the other laugh: sausage dogs, animé kids, explosing robots, and best of all, caricatures of other Falcons.
’Noot sketched a Jackal with dreadlocks so long and tangled they formed a net that made him trip and spill his jug of chocolate milk.
Raptor laughed so loudly he spewed crumbs. Everyone turned to look. He slammed a napkin over his mouth.
Bad enough he was in a Somali joint where Somali parents went, and sitting with this Somali muhajabah (even if her hijab was loose . . . or was that worse?), and with his Dinka face nobody was gonna think he was her brother. Or even a Muslim.
Quickly quieted himself, embarrassed.
“O-o-oh!” said ’Noot, disappointed.
“What?”
“It’s just, it’s just . . . you have such a great laugh, and you don’t laugh very often. And when you do, you usually just even cut it off.”
He felt . . . something. Not the burn. Skin wasn’t crackling. But heat, all over his torso, like a hot shower. Or an actual bath.
She was keeping track of his laughter.
Deflected. Asked her what her plans were now that she’d graduated.
“With my Bio marks, my family expects me to be a surgeon. But me, I just wanna head my own graphic design firm, y’know? Plus even web development and advertising.”
“You’d be great at it. You’re a great artist. And you know all the software.”
Put down her can of cream soda. “And owning a firm like that? I think I’d be a first.”
“Yeah! Definitely. But you shouldn’t rule out medicine. You’re so smart you could probably discover a cure for cancer.”
She chuckled. Flashed those eyes at him.
“Or something even worse,” he said, seizing the moment.
“Worse than cancer? Like . . . ?”
“Like being a jerk!”
Her, laughing, and him reeling her in: “Yeah, y’know, think of how much better school’d be. Your teacher’s a jerk, you just drop a pill in his coffee. Bing! Your parents aren’t nice, bing! Thinka how many marriages you could save. Or if your boss is mistreating you. One pill, jerk’s gone!” Her, laughing still. “And y’know what’d be the ultimate?”
“What?”
“If you went herbal for the cure. Jerk seasoning.”
She howled, covering her own mouth in embarrassment. Now it was her turn to get everyone’s attention. But this time he didn’t care.
“Priceless,” she said. “Jerk season? So people’d get hunting licenses or something?”
“Uh, that’d be good, too, but I was saying—”
“—and that’d be the one time of year you could tell em they were jerks!” She actually snorted laughs, twice, which smacked a smile right onto Raptor’s face. “And they couldn’t do anything about it!”
“Yeah, and in addition, it’d be jerk seasoning—”
She kept laughing and riffing on “jerk season,” going on and on. He smiled, letting it go. So what if he didn’t even say it? She thought he did.
Their conversation moved on eventually to Moon and Seshat and Maãhotep. He laughed when five minutes later, she handed him her finished napkin-doodle of a scowling face in a crosshairs. The logo: JERK SEASON – Limit 100.
16.
“No, over there!” hollered Maãhotep in safety goggles. Falcons were carrying in what looked like sections of scaffolding. “And don’t drop them!”
’Noot and Raptor stepped back inside the Street Laboratory. Place looked more like an Industrial Arts lab. Wood dust was choking the air, spitting out of Maãhotep’s band saw, screaming like a pterodactyl.
Falcons were hauling wood boards and sheets from Maãhotep’s pick-up. Maãhotep had a pick-up? Had to be his, though. Two bumper stickers: one said, “War? How’s that Workin’ For Ya?”, and the other: “Justice or Just Us?”
Everyone lined up beside him to learn use the band saw.
Stacked to the side were the slices. ’Noot told Raptor check out the cuts and assemblies: not squares or rectangles, but carefully measured trapezoids.
Maãhotep the lawyer. Button-downs and cufflinks and silk ties and suits that musta cost two hundred dollars. Brother was kempt.
And now here he was, driving a pick-up, wearing jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt, wiping dust from his face and wielding power-tools like Imaro swinging a sword.
Brother was a lawyer, but he didn’t blink at getting his hands dusty. Moon’d once told him, “Neckties’ve killed more good brothers than rope.” Maybe so, but maybe not always. And using words for a living, to build justice? That was alchemy, right there. Gold. Geometrically Nubian.
Spotting Raptor and Noot, Maãhotep sucked them into the whirlwind: sawing, painting, wiring, drilling and screwing the trapezoidal plates in place upon a framework of four-by-fours.
“Don’t cut your fingers off!” snapped Maãhotep.
Raptor yanked his hands back. The Sbai grinned at him, and when Raptor saw he still had all his digits, he grinned back.
“Like this,” said his teacher, helping guide the board two-handed into the screaming metal teeth.
With the noise of everyone’s labour giving them intimacy, Maãhotep asked him how he was holding together since the news about the “alleged” killers being sprung.
He faked a tough, but Maãhotep locked eyes and asked him again. And a third time. Just like some prosecutor on Law & Order or The Wire or something.
“No shame in fear, Brother Raptor,” said Maãhotep. “But there is danger in pretending it’s not there. Like having a fire in your house and being too ashamed to put it out or flee the premises.”
They cut some more boards, and then Maãhotep stopped.
“There’s a million tough guys out there. Men who spent all their energy distracting themselves from their fea
r instead of dealing with it. Alcoholics, crack-heads, or corpses—dead by hall party, or dead by AIDS. Distraction kills, young brother.”
Ten boards and twenty clouds of dust later, Raptor cracked open his vault. By one millimetre.
“When you’re in the camps, the refugee camps, I mean,” said the teenager, wiping his right palm on his chest like he was taking an oath, “you were always in danger. But that’s life, right? I mean, the Savage Lands are everywhere, right?”
“But Raptor, Hru didn’t just accept the Savage Lands. He used Replace-Elevate.”
“But Brother Maã,” he said, burning, “I’m not Hru. This is real. Real thugs with real guns who really splattered brains two inches from my head!”
Maãhotep gave him a look he’d never seen before: soft and hard, simultaneously. How was that even possible? Maã had serious alchemy.
Maãhotep: “You think The Book of the Golden Falcon’s just some fairy tale?”
“C’mon, you’re not telling me all that stuff really happened? With magic and monsters and people turning into birds—”
“No, obviously not. The Golden Falcon’s not facts. It’s truth. The facts are all the everyday details. The truth is forever. It’s what we all share. In The Golden Falcon, you think, what, Hru isn’t constantly overwhelmed and terrified?”
Sounded like a rhetorical question, but Maã magnetically-locked his eyes. Waiting for an actual answer.
He’d never thought about it. Yeah, it was an exciting story, yeah, and it was great to learn an African legend. And yeah, Moon’d said it was about their lives.
But still, myths about something so ancient . . . they just didn’t seem . . . .
But yeah . . . now that he thought of it, one ãrit after the next was about how afraid Hru was. How he had to run and hide and how only if he got pushed hard enough, did he stand up to fight. How often he was ashamed of what he’d done.
How much he wanted to change things.
Amazing. Maã could alchemise him with a single question.
17.
“‘Tell of Master Jehu’s inquest,’” said Maãhotep. The eleventh catechismal question for the seventh ãrit.
Still standing at the band saw. And Raptor, before he even began reciting the words, heard the verses chiming through the caves of his mind down through tunnels snaking the world, echoing back to his internal ear.
And him, hearing them, as if for the first time.
Using Moon as Eye again, the Master peered inside the shadow of Hru, and found a night of fire inside which children screamed and fled into the darkness . . .
A swath of towns whose citizens were butchered inside blackened, smouldering homes . . .
Countless men of murderous knives and fingers cruel he’d met and never met who wished to strip his bones of meat . . .
And the body of a headless mother on the sands beside a throne.
Maãhotep: “All that pain and that regret, being constantly hunted . . . .”
The armpits of Maã’s t-shirt were soaked. He wiped sweat off his forehead, left sawdust in his hair, like he was going grey.
“It’s not just some fairy tale, young brother. It’s the truth of our lives, of every African, everywhere. You, Jackal, ’Noot, Moon . . . your mother . . . me. All of us live in fear. And all of us have either already faced the threat of death, or one day will.”
“Yeah, but all respect due, Brother Maã—”
“You’re about to ask me, ‘But what are you supposed to do now, against killers walking the street?’”
“Yes!”
“Obviously—”
“I mean, they don’t know my name or Jackal’s, but Brother Moon was all over the news, and he’s still up on YouTube. He lives—I live—right next door to the crime scene!” Shook his head, eyes wild, scanning the room for something, anything.
“You’re a lawyer,” said Raptor finally, as if those words were keys to a safehouse. “Isn’t there something you can do? Sue em or something?”
Maãhotep’s eyes widened. Raptor explained: “Y’know, for psychological distress or something.”
“Trigger-men usually aren’t deterred by civil suits,” said the man. “But you already knew that. Look, could they come after you? Yes. Will they? They’re more likely to run. Or get themselves killed, because people like that are usually pretty stupid and prone to taking stupid risks. And we know they’re desperate.”
Raptor looked at the wood that Maã was feeding into the bandsaw. Flinched as it screamed. Felt like it was him going into those teeth.
“But how’m I supposed to protect myself if they come after me?”
“Well you know Moon and I’ve got your back—”
“Yeah, but—”
“—and I’ve seen your kung fu. You’re good—”
“All the kung fu in the world can’t do anything against a bullet in the back of your skull. You know that.”
Maã nodded. Ran another board through a long cut, let the right side drop, then ran the left piece in his hands through two smaller cuts along the pencil marks across the surface.
“I’m talking to you now not just as your lawyer, but as your sbai,” he said, leaning towards him. “Don’t go hunting these men.”
“I wasn’t gonna—”
“Rap, c’mon. I’m from Jamaica,” said Maa. “Ha ha! Look at your face—didn’t know that, huh? ‘Bamba Diabate’ dun’soun yahd-bwoi nuff fi yu?”
The unexpected accent tickled Raptor enough to make him smile.
“Before I became a Sufi, even before I became an Alchemist, I had a different name and a different life back in Jamaica. And I had my own enemies. People who made it absolutely clear they were willing to kill me. Main reason I left. Back then I was right where you are right now.
“With one difference. You have allies.”
He rested a strong but gentle hand on Raptor’s shoulder. The teen marveled at it, even while Maã kept talking. Because he felt nothing. Didn’t even flinch at it.
But who’d want to hurt Brother Maã?
“Don’t go hunting these idiots, but keep your eyes open,” said his elder. “Watch your back. Have your cell handy. But if these men corner you . . . you defend your life by any means necessary.”
Raptor’s eyes must’ve shown something.
Maãhotep: “You heard me.” He ran more wood straight into the saw.
18.
Raptor. Evening shift. The Hyper-Market.
Pouring out dregs from a neglected coffee pot. Washing out the flask. Filling the maker with fresh water.
Mind kept running back to his talk with Brother Maã.
’Noot agreed with him: Maã was deep. And “cool like ice cream,” said ’Noot.
Woulda felt jealous, but there weren’t any sighs behind those eyes. Just facts. After all, brother was an attorney, an Alchemist, a Sufi, and obviously a carpenter with enough electrical skills to be prepping the wiring for their construction.
And he could do that while calmly directing Street Falcons in screwing the trapezoids onto their 4X4 cube-frames and priming the wood before applying gold paint. Said he learned how to do this kind of thing partly from his father, but he’d amped his skills considerably by constructing sets in theatre.
Taking an orbit inside the Hyper-Market, Raptor scouted empty cups, collecting a half dozen, nodding yes to the people running tabs who wanted refills, hauling the cups back to the dishwasher and running another load.
Plus brother’s Alchemy was so strong that whether they were in a daily shenu or just in any conversation, he could stack up anything with divine geometry or show where someone else’s argument was barely a Jenga tower. And all Maã had to do was tug on a single Leadite concept and the whole damn thing came crashing down.
That Congolese couple was at the till, the one that liked hanging out at the Hyper-Market every Saturday night before checking out all the community hall parties.
He signed out two consoles for them, smiled, told them he’d bring
them their usuals—triple cream, triple-sugar, a Tanzanian fair trade roast called Mwalimu.
He liked watching them. They were old, in their thirties or something, but they were always affectionate and gentle with each other, touching each other’s faces softly like they were wiping away fallen eye lashes.
The woman—he knew her name was Mimitah from the sign-up sheet—always wore intense colours, especially flower prints.
The man, Kanda, always wore continental shirts, which Raptor respected, since from what he could tell, in plenty of communities—Arabs, Indians, Chinese—only women wore traditional clothes.
Seemed like women were always the true guardians of culture. Lady Aset’s hieroglyphic was a throne—sometimes she was even just called the Throne—like she was the centre of the Fortress itself.
’Noot loved how Maã used Sufi stories (she read a lot about Sufism) and even Christian parables when he alchemised. She said that made him extra capable of reaching all these diverse Falcons, using what they were raised with.
Plus, he was always bringing them food: pizzas, falafel, Jamaican patties, roti from former clients of his in the community, sometimes people who he’d worked for cheaply or pro bono. He said they were happy to help.
Plenty of these Street Falcons were so street they maybe didn’t eat three squares or some days even one. How was anyone hungry all the time supposed to learn or get a job?
And these were some rough-looking brothers, too . . . head-hugging braids or bandanas, loping pimp-limps cuz they’d seen it in the videos, staring and glaring outta reflex—the kind he’d’ve crossed the street to avoid back in the day.
These brothers treated Sbai Maãhotep with geometrical respect. He even heard one talking about being, what’d he say, a barrister and solicitor one day, “just like Brother Maã.”
“Brother Maã feeds them twice,” ’Noot’d said. Raptor smiled at that. Put it on the bench of his lyrical workshop:
Brother Maãhotep feeds the bodies
The Alchemists of Kush Page 28
