The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  25.

  “It’s important!” Raptor was trying to pull Moon into the back room of the Hyper-Market.

  Sunday afternoon, gorgeous weather outside, not many people were cyber-caféing it. Even so, Moon had a thing about leaving the floor unsupervised.

  Raptor: “We have a Pyrite in our midst. A khetit.”

  The explosion from that bomb lifted Moon’s eyebrows.

  Fiend. Demon.

  They went to the back room.

  “I’ve got something really—I don’t even know how to start! Something . . . disturbing to tell you. About Maãhotep.”

  The corners of Moon’s mouth turned down. “Explain.”

  Shot out the details: what he saw, how he saw it.

  Moon said, “And?”

  “And? And? He’s a faggot!”

  “Young brother, number one, lower your voice!”

  The glare.

  Moon peeked around the corner, but the only two customers were headphoned.

  “Number two,” sword-finger arcing, “I don’e-e-ever wanna hear you talk like that again about anybody, let alone Brother Maãhotep, your teacher and your senior Alchemist!”

  “Did you even hear what I just told you?”

  “Oh, I heard you—”

  “Well what are you gonna do about it?”

  “Do? What’re you talking about?”

  “The Street Falcons! The Alchemists of Kush! This is a programme for young people! Some of them desperate! Vulnerable! You can’t have a, a, a—”

  “Gay brother?”

  “I never figured you for somebody who’d get all caught up in PC vocabulary, Brother Moon!”

  “PC? How about Polite Consideration? You love NWA, but I never hear you saying ‘nigger.’ So why should you be using the word ‘faggot’?”

  “You can’t compare those things! We’re born African! They’re—”

  “They’re born gay—”

  “Being ‘gay’ isn’t a heritage or culture or a race, it’s a, a, a sickness!”

  Rolling his eyes. “Raptor, this is the twenty-first century—”

  “You don’t think they’re sick?”

  “No! Absolutely not! They’re normal people, like you or me.”

  “Like me? Are you crazy? What they do, it’s, it’s, it’s totally unnatural! N, Nature, right? How’re we supposed to harmonise with Maãt if we’re unnatural?”

  “Number one, everything that exists in nature is by definition natural. Number two, N equals Nature means we need to X-ray the geometry of a thing, how it operates, what it achieves—not rule on whether it is natural, since everything is.

  “If a thing causes pain and no joy or wisdom, yes, it’s pyrite. If it causes joy and wisdom and no pain, it’s gold. Figuring out the nature of everything in between—which is almost everything that exists—that’s the hard part.”

  Raptor, with something thick in his mouth. Tasted like pickle juice. “You’re telling you think there’s something good about men, like, you know, doing . . . that?”

  “Having sex?”

  Raptor curled up his nose.

  Moon: “How’s anybody’s sex life my business unless they’re hurting somebody?”

  “They do hurt people!”

  “Some of them, yeah. But so do some heterosexuals. All the time, in fact! And I don’t hear you calling for banning straight people—”

  “It’s not the same thing!”

  “Why not?”

  “It just isn’t!”

  “You know how to X-ray when somebody’s run out logic and facts? When they use the word ‘just’ to defend themselves.”

  Raptor half-turned to leave. Moon leaned against the counter, opening his hands to soften his body language. “Look, you want a Ting? Or some tea?”

  Raptor shook his head.

  “I can see you’re barely at the edge of even being able to hear me anymore, so I’ll keep this ultra-brief. Sometimes our mind is gold, and our heart is lead or pyrite. Sometimes it’s the other way around.

  “In the Judgement Scene—you know, the painting, where the Scribe Ani’s standing in front of Lord Usir? Yinepu has to weigh Ani’s heart against the justice feather of Maãt.

  “But you, right now, when you said ‘just,’ you’d run out of arguments. Your mind is one way, your heart’s another, and you have to weigh them both against the feather.

  “A three-way scale, that’s a helluva thing to try to operate, transform?

  “But when it comes down to turning our backs on someone who cares about us, we’d better be really, really careful when we’re running that scale. Especially when someone else’s fate hangs in the balance. And Brother Maãhotep, he cares about you, young bruh.”

  Just hearing that: Raptor’s skin itched, ants crawling and slime slicking down his face, his chest, his ass.

  “Right now, I know you don’t wanna hear that. I can dig that. But—”

  “Are you telling me that you knew?”

  Moon sighed. “Maã’s been my best friend for twenty years. We were room-mates for a while. Why wouldn’t I know?”

  Raptor started to walk out.

  “And he shouldn’t hafta be secret,” said Moon, letting him leave, “about something that isn’t hurting anybody.”

  Hit the door. Flew away on his bike.

  Downtown. Rice Howard Way. Red brick buildings lining the fancy cobblestone intersection. A stack of rough-hewn boulders looking like an obelisk made by sasquatches.

  And a seven-storey parkade.

  Hit the brakes on his high-speed flight. Sweating from the heat, heart pistoning like a train. Locked up his bike, ran up the parkade stairwell, walking the last two flights and puffing the final one to the top floor.

  No cars up there. Sunday afternoon, and it was just too damn nice out. People were biking and walking, not ACing it in steel boxes on wheels.

  Raptor perched himself on the ledge, watching foot traffic seven storeys down.

  Gazing at the warbled reflections of Scotia Place’s twin gold towers considering themselves, infinitely. Then at the blue glass and steel of Manulife towering above them them all.

  Put on his headphones, music on shuffle. First song up: Orchestre Baobab’s “Dée Moo Wóor.” Guitar echoes, bass-thunder like the hammer of Ptah.

  Feeling sweat trickling behind his ears, under his pits, down his sides.

  Sometime later all the sweat was gone.

  Stayed up there past supper time, and he hadn’t even had lunch. Hunger he could deal with. Hunger was one of his homies.

  A friend he could actually count on.

  26.

  “I don’t know what we’re gonna do, Brother Moon,” said Jackal.

  Raptor’d just walked in on the conversation. And he’d caught him, talking about him behind his back right in front of his face to Brother Moon.

  “Hang on, bruh,” said the old man, nodding to Raptor and then turning to the customer, a White woman in her thirties with glasses and a pony tail. “What can I getcha?”

  “Two Coolios, please. Large.”

  Evening. Hyper-Market was half-full, but there was steady traffic for coffee slushies. Moon’s new drink machines were hopping in the heat wave.

  A list of specialty drinks day-glowed from chalk on the menu board. Lupe Latté. Coolio. Ice-T. Ice Cube (bubble tea with cubic tapioca pearls made inside an ice tray). There was no Vanilla Ice.

  But you could order a Baaba Maalkshake (made with coconut milk and pineapple) or a Fela (a plantain-chocolate smoothie, and delicious; Moon had had to explain to an embarrassed Ãnkhur why they couldn’t name a drink Felatté).

  After the woman walked out with her boyfriend and their Coolios, Brother Senwusret made his case.

  “My whole thing is, we’ve been working her, pushing her for weeks. I thought she was gonna make it . . . . ”

  Raptor’s stomach flip-flopped. Jackal hadn’t been talking about him after all. Relieved. Disappointed.

  But Senwusret looked
horrified. Like he was ordering someone to walk the plank. Whispered, “The Kush Party’s only a week away. Whole thing is, if she can’t sing full-out by now . . . . ”

  Thandie. The big-eyed alpha-girl with the bootay and the arctic smile. At last they’d wised up. Good. For a second he’d feared they were talking about ’Noot.

  Jackal finally saw Raptor, did a double-take, then turned back to Moon.

  “What’re we supposed to do? She’s expecting to, like, perform a whole set! We can’t have the Falcons looking like a buncha chumps! This is our big day!”

  Moon: “I was wondering when you brothers were gonna talk to me. I’ve been hearing this exact same thing for a month from a bunch of Falcons.” He sighed. “Okay. I’ll talk to her.”

  “The girl’s trouble,” said Raptor.

  The other three looked at him, then looked back at each other. Phone rang. Moon took it.

  “Whoah, whoah, slow down . . . Noot, sister, c’mon . . . no, hey, wait up . . . ’Noot, ’Noot, are you crying?”

  Raptor: the burn. Like a lash in a gash.

  “No, c’mon. Let me talk to him, then. I’ll—. Yeah, but you never know—. I’ll—Noot!”

  “What is it?” said Raptor, once Moon had clicked off.

  “Ah, hell.” The old man shook his head. “’Noot’s dad won’t let her perform at the Kush Party.”

  Three-boy chorus: “What? Why not?”

  “But her family’s liberal,” said Sen. “That’s their whole thing.”

  “Yeah. Cept when it comes to like, dads and daughters.”

  Man, he knew Maãhotep had her completely pyrited, even defending him, but was she actually quitting just because Raptor’d had the guts to speak the truth?

  “So many men from the old country like this,” said Moon. “Even the ones who think they’re liberal. Think there’s only one way to be. When somebody steps out of that, they feel threatened.”

  Raptor rolled his eyes, but only Moon saw him do it. He knew damn well Moon was talking about him and Maãhotep.

  ’Noot’s father was wrong. An intelligent, hard-working daughter could make beautiful music with her voice, and he was gonna stop her?

  And Moon was wrong. How was Moon gonna compare doing something great like being a singer to being a Pyrite pervert psycho, a monster in their midst, like a crocodile just below the surface of the Swamps?

  Raptor headed up to the roof to check the peregrine falcon roost. July light. Sun still burning above the buildings at 9 PM. But even from the stairwell he could see the chicks and adults were gone.

  Took the spade and dustpan and scraped away the birdshit, then sat on the ledge and took an hour watching the sun go down.

  11 pm. Through his bedroom window, the sky was electric purple.

  By lamplight Raptor was re-reading issue #7 of the old Milestone title The L*A*B.

  Gorgeous painted Mshindo cover and crackling Eric Battle interiors—the one where X-Man, Dreadlocker and the Dark Fantastic find out that the Klandroids had developed new models with dark skin.

  “The Klandroids look like us, now!” declared X-Man, uniformed in black suit, white shirt, black shades. “Which explains how come Councilman Shakazulu, outta nowhere, up and joined that country club and married that Marsha Brady-looking freak—”

  Front door lock rattled. Raptor shut off his light.

  “The girl’s amazing,” said Moon from beyond his door. “And now her father’s just gonna yank her like that, one week before the gig?”

  “The key is to talk to the maather. She’ll convinnice him.”

  It was his mum. His mum . In Moon’s place. And it was almost midnight!

  “Yeah, but I’m another man. This guy’s not gonna let his daughter sing. How’s he gonna handle me talking to his wife?”

  “Lett me handle it. One Somali sister to anaather.”

  “’Weelo, uh, you know, I appreciate the offer and everything, and you know I respect you, but from what you’ve told me about you and Somalis—”

  “I cannutt argue with you on thatt one.” She sighed. “Lett me . . . lett me go to the maather with Seshat, then. She’s not Somali, but . . . she’s a social worker, and between thatt and your Laboratory, she has a goodt repootation in the commoonity. The maather will at least listen to Seshat’s advices.”

  From the living room, music. Water running. Pans clanking. Couldn’t hear the conversation anymore. Except once, when he heard his mother ask how her son was doing, and Moon told her about Maãhotep.

  And she didn’t even react.

  Clock radio. Bloodshot LED. His mother left at 1:37.

  Mind splashing, thrashing, in a bog. Fog murdered his cries for help, and there were no stars, and there was no moon.

  If he’d remembered to gold-mind, he could’ve slowed himself to sleep.

  But he didn’t.

  27.

  “Now, everybody, check these outt,” said Araweelo, opening up her mystery cardboard crate. Raptor winced: Check these outt . . . .

  The Falcons flocked round her in the Street Laboratory that Thursday night. No one, not even Moon, knew what was inside the box.

  Black pyjamas?

  No, check that cut: karate gis, but with the sleeves tailored Nigerian-style. Cuffs and lapels all glittering in gold hieroglyphic brocade.

  And for belts: sashes of gold-black kente cloth.

  Gasps. Wows. O-o-h, snap!s. And one da-a-a-a-yum.

  Questions crackled: How’d she find them? Where were they from? Who made them? How much were they gonna hafta pay for them?

  “I’ve workedt with a lot of immigrant women from many commoonities,” said Araweelo. “A Ghanaian sister gott the kente for us. A Vietnamese sister had a baanch of karate uniforms she couldn’t sell. Andt a Salvadoran sister didt the alterations. Oh! Andt the best part!”

  She turned the jacket around.

  On the back: A giant, gold-on-black falcon, wings spread, talons grasping shen-rings, inside the starburst and the words IN THE NAME OF THE FALCON. The Alchemist crest Raptor and ’Noot’d designed.

  “I convinnicedt a shop to sponsor the Kush Party. This is their contribution.”

  And they applauded and whooped.

  Moon hugged her, and then so did all ten Falcons on the martial arts demonstration team as she handed each one a uniform.

  The last two were adult-sized: one for Moon, and one for Maãhotep, the only person who could match Moon in the ring. But Maã wasn’t there.

  Raptor wasn’t on the demo team—performing with Golden Eye was plenty—but he loved the look.

  “Da-a-a-a-yum, boy,” said Jackal, “your moms is crazy-connected! She gets stuff done, fuh real! Hey—maybe Golden Eye should go on tour with the demo team, huh? Like our own S1Ws?”

  “Now that’s what I’m talkin about!”

  Inside the Lab filled with Falcon calls, Raptor heard Moon ask his mother, “Any word from ’Noot’s mum?”

  “Seshat and I hadt a nice chat with her.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know if we gott through to her. Or if we didt, if she can get through to her husbandt. You know men. They call it pridte.”

  “I know what you call it.”

  “But I don’t want to use thatt kind of language around your school of Falcons.”

  Laughed and smiled with each other.

  Fire, beginning at his feet, racing up his legs . . . .

  Breathed. Deep, deeper. Deepest. Again.

  What are you afraid of?

  Of him taking her? Or of her taking him?

  Or of them, together, abandoning you?

  “Anyway,” said his mum, “now itt’s in her handts.”

  The Street Laboratory’s front door clanged open. A skinny woman stormed in, too much make-up and too-wild eyes. Her daughter at her side, a younger copy of herself: Thandie.

  Oh, no.

  The woman, at Moon: “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  The room crisped into silence.

  Thandie stood b
ehind her mother, giant eyes blazing like jailhouse searchlights on a bunch of escapees about to get shot.

  “Mrs. Braithwaite,” said Brother Moon, “we already went through all this the other day for about four hours—”

  “My daughter,” snapped the woman, helmeted in a bright red hat, the kind of thing Raptor’d seen Caribbean people wear to church, “is not some dog you can just have put down because she won’t perform tricks to your satisfaction!”

  Araweelo: “Whatt are you implyingk?”

  The woman glanced to her daughter, who whispered something to her.

  “Oh, ri-i-i-ight,” she sneered. Spanking each word: “The mother of the boy whose gangsta rap group’s got a starring role in this little concert of yours! The boy who’s living with you, Mr. Man! And you—what kind of mother hands her teenaged boy over to some bizarre—”

  Araweelo: “Now you listen to me!”

  Raptor’d heart smacked against his ribs.

  “Don’t you dare castt your asper-a-sions on me or on this man! If your headt is so sick with such perver-a-sions, maybe it’s you who’s the sicko—”

  “Now you listen to me, Miss Africa—”

  “—and too bad for you your doughter cannutt sing! Boo hoo! This isn’t American Idol! Go live outt your dreams some aather way!”

  Moon: “’Weelo—”

  “—think you can get away with this, Mr. Cult Leader, you got another thing coming! I know a-a-a-all about you and your dirty little secrets—I don’t care what nonsense is on YouTube!”

  Even Thandie looked embarrassed. But she was just a kite in a thunderstorm.

  “And forget about this bush party concert! I’m calling the police, the mayor, the media—everybody! You hear me? You’re done!”

  “You crossed the line, lady,” said Moon. “You wanna abuse me? Fine. Go ahead. I’ve taken a hell of a lot worse. But you start threatening my kids and their months—”

  “Oh, they’re your kids, are they now? You hear that, kids? Man thinks he’s your father! Wonder how all your parents’re gonna feel when they—”

  “You’re trespassing. Get off this property now!”

  “Oh, I’m going,” she said, yanking her daughter with her. “I know your type. You’re nothing but a new Black Hitler!”