The Alchemists of Kush Read online

  Across the river we saw a camp. Blackened. Smashed. A few embers glowing red. Smoke still lifting into the sky.

  All of it stank from the meat of our people burned to death.

  And hyenas and vultures and rats and dogs, ripping into the bodies of our slaughtered families, howling and gorging themselves like they were having a party.

  I wanted to yell. I even would’ve, but my throat hurt like I’d been swallowing rocks and sand.

  The kids started crying again. I couldn’t take it.

  “Shut up, you idiots! You want them to come murder us? You want devils coming here and sticking claws in your eyes and ripping your ribs out one at a time? No? Then shut your mouths!”

  I knew why they were crying. I wanted to cry, too. I didn’t know where my mum was. For all I knew, all the adults were dead.

  But my mum . . . she must’ve been training me for something like this all along, because I took command of those kids without even thinking about it.

  I knew what to do. And that meant making them focus on me instead of whoever or whatever had orphaned us all.

  We moved out, hiding wherever we could. Sometimes Shai and I scouted ahead to make sure we weren’t being tracked.

  We ate whatever we could found: snails, beetles, and when we were really lucky, fruit.

  4.

  Weeks of walking. Past whole villages that’d been torched. Their crops, too. Animals, their legs broken and their heads half-hacked off.

  And skulls. Sometimes with the eyes still in them.

  When I wasn’t thinking about food, or a place to hide, or where my mum’d gone and why hadn’t she found us already, all I could think of was, who would do this? Why would anyone do this?

  It’s strange, but . . . I can’t remember anything before that raid of fire. It’s as if . . . as if I were born that night.

  The Book of Now

  1.

  There he was, skinny and seventeen, alone on the Saturday night street.

  The night, the darkness itself: electrical. Hummed like the neon above him did. He felt it. Intense. Violent. Almost sexual. Made his skin tingle. Made his teeth feel like he was chewing on aluminum foil.

  To be young, to be a man, to be a young Black man, to be a young Black man in the shadows between streetlights on a night when clouds smothered the stars and the air seeped thick and hot like when he stepped out of the shower.

  To feel the threat of some sinister somebody who could fall in step behind him trying to mess him up and take his shit, to feel that and be excited by it, because that threat was what transformed putty boys into iron men, because that transformation was what made girls’ eyes stop seeing past him to focus on him like magnets on metal, because no knife-handle ever shone as brightly as the blade, that was what it was to walk the streets of Kush on a Saturday midnight with summer’s hotness trickling from his pits and barely enough money for bus fare in his pocket and no girlfriend and no real friends and believing himself when he told himself he just didn’t give a fuck.

  Raphael Deng Garang. Bony. Skin the colour of the night and just as blue. Had a cheap XS Cargo sell-off mp3 player shaped like a thumb drive, under five gigs and under ten bucks, enough to pack a thousand songs and half of them hip hop.

  The rest: Jamaican reggae, Somali ballads, Cubano-Congolese numbers, South African kwaito, Algerian rai and Kenyan taarabu and dozens of Nigerian Afrobeat joints.

  But right then: Orchestre Baobab’s “Dée Moo Wóor.” Song swaggering with power, stomping its drum beats and punching its bass like Tyson hitting somebody’s liver. And somewhere on back-up Youssou Ndour singing high nasal notes like an Eazy E free of madness.

  Loved it. Cuz it strolled with colossus steps like he wished he could, invincible like a black hole and felt as ancient, as if he’d always known that song, as if it’d been sung for ten thousand years, as if its passion could decode all the secrets of his loneliness and pain.

  But he couldn’t understand a single word of it. A Senegalese song, probably sung in Wolof, and his family hailed as far from Senegal as England was from Russia.

  Half of him: Sudanese. Twinned to a Somali half that didn’t show on face or skin. Hadn’t seen Sudan since he was a child with his mother on the run from all its screaming and looting and burning and men with guns.

  And now: seventeen, lanky, alone, on 118th Avenue in the hood and in the night, and telling himself he could do anything.

  Freestyling:

  You braggin about the places

  Where the bullets fly like birds

  Ima tell y’about the spaces

  Where blood flows more than words . . . .

  Bass-throbbing, rumbling: a sick, slick car, hyperviolet lights burning underneath its gleaming cream body. . .

  . . . slowing down. . .

  Stopped. In front of him.

  But the traffic light was green.

  Rims, spinning like roulette wheels in the movies. Except these chromes were strobing streetlights.

  Swallowed thickly. Who the hell could it be? Was this it?

  His hand. Flapped to his back pocket and its butterfly knife. Hovered there, not as casually as he tried to will it to.

  The engine, growling. Window sliding down an electric hum.

  “Yo, Rap, zat you?”

  2.

  Raphael didn’t know the voice.

  Took a step forward. Carefully.

  Passenger side: kid his age, typical teenage Somali baby-face, but draped with junior dreadlocks. Like thin, black pinecones.

  The kid: “Dude, it’s me, Jackie Chan.”

  They were in the same English class. Guy sat on the opposite side of the room. And weird. Earmuff headphones practically welded onto his ears, him always bopping to beats no one else could hear, smiling too much, laughing when no one else heard the joke.

  Real name was Jamal Abdi—Rap’d heard that at the beginning of the semester before the kid asked the teacher to call him “JC.”

  “Right,” said Rap, rising above the ride’s belching bass. “Hey.”

  “What the hell you doing out here, bwoi?” laughed Jackie Chan. “You slangin?

  Kid was always joking about something. Rap scowled. “You got the wrong man. I was just, y’know . . . . ”

  “Chillin? Kickin it?”

  “Basically.”

  “Well, you gonna chill out here by yourself all night?”

  “Naw, naw, I was just about to, uh . . . . ”

  “—ride with us?” He laughed his Jackie Chan laugh: half Flavor Flav, half Bart Simpson. “We’re just cruising. Sweetly! In this fine whip.”

  Rap checked downstreet. Over his shoulder. Peered inside the vehicle like there coulda been a wolverine in there.

  Didn’t know the driver, but it was another kid, maybe a year older.

  “Nuke, Rap. Rap, Nuke,” said JC. “Rap’s all right, Nuke.”

  Nuke. Guy was actually wearing a Kangol cap. Backwards. Smoking a cigarillo. Looked like a goof. He was wearing gloves, despite the heat. Midnight, plus-thirty, and wet-hot.

  Rap didn’t like it.

  “Sall good,” drawled Nuke. Also Somali. And like half the Somali boys his age Rap knew, Nuke spun his syllables like the blood bank’d given him a transfusion of Compton.

  Then Nuke switched to Jamaican, maybe trying to make his own hat feel at home. “Respek, maan.”

  One of those, thought Rap. “Hey.”

  “Well?” said JC, head-tilting towards the back seat, an invitation. “Look, man, at least you need a ride home’r suh’m, right?”

  It was true. And he didn’t want to look like a wuss, either. So when the door swung open he got in. What the hell else was he gonna do?

  But taking that step off the curb’d made his stomach flip, like he’d failed a jump between rooftops and was plummeting to an asphalt death.

  “Yeah. Let’s see what’s crackin,” said Rap, sampling a phrase he’d heard someone else use. Maybe somebody on Youtube or something.


  3.

  Pulled away. The purple blare of blacklights burned the car’s interior into a nightclub, or what Rap thought clubs probably looked like.

  They U-turned it east, rumbled past the old church and a porn shop and a Wee Book Inn and a Burger Baron, over cracked streets and beside cracked-out, kneecap-bony prostitutes, turned north beside the Coliseum.

  The CD—some kinda techno DJ mix—had been skipping all over hell. Nuke hit EJECT and dumped it out the window. He hit a bunch of radio preselects, rejecting every one of them and finally shutting it off.

  “Yo, Rap, whatcha listnin to?” asked Jackie Chan, breaking the new silence. This was the first time Rap’d ever seen JC without his headphones on. He knew what JC wanted, though—to hook his mp3 player up to the stereo in-jack.

  He clicked away from the “Dée Moo Wóor” song he was listening to, over to something he figured would keep the peace with Nuke. Handed it to JC, who plugged it in.

  A thunder-beat struck the car. Jackie Chan smiled. Nuke grinned.

  A Dre-sampled guitar riff tore up the air like lightning. JC pumped the sound way too high, enough to dent Rap’s ear drums. Dre took the mic, handed it off to MC Ren, the Ruthless Villain. Track was older than any of them, from 1991, but classics didn’t ask permission.

  The ghost of Eazy-E rhymed through its nose. And just before the chorus hit, JC and Nuke leapt in with the band: “Real niggers don’t DIE!”

  They’d turned a few times along the way, and were rolling west on 111th Ave past the Stadium. They slowed across from Frank’s Pizza and beside a place called “Hyper-Market” with an “OPENING SOON” sign in the window, stopping in front of a hip hop clothing joint named Bootays.

  It was still Kush, but this was a nicer part. Fewer hoes. No condoms on the street. Nobody stabbing or shooting anybody. Not that he could see, anyway.

  Half-past midnight. Store was open. Through a plate-glass window he saw Somalis—staff, or owners?—chatting at the till with two guys whose backs were turned.

  Nuke killed the engine.

  “C’mon,” said Jackie Chan.

  Rap didn’t like it. Yeah, he was half-Somali, but to Somalis he looked full Sudanese, true Dinka, and definitely darker than most Somalis. Even though he could speak Somali because of his mother and didn’t know fifty words of his father’s language, to Somalis, he was an outsider, an infidel, if not a barbarian.

  Now he was sposta go into some weird dive, way past closing time, with two guys he barely knew, hopping out of a car that—and why he didn’t force himself to think of it earlier, he couldn’t say—was way too expensive for any Somali in E-Town to afford.

  Shit. But what was he sposta do—wait in the car like some little kid?

  4.

  Inside. Figured maybe it was gonna be okay after all.

  The two Somali owners, Hassan and Ahmed, were having a late-night planning session with a couple of Sudanese guys, Deng and Juk, for a mega-jam they were hoping to throw featuring K’Naan, Talib Kweli, K-Os and KRS-One.

  Gonna call it the KKKK Rally. Hassan thought the name was hilarious. Rap thought it couldn’t get any stupider.

  And then two more Somalis showed up.

  Marley. Slim beard. His partner Lexus, smooth-domed. Both reeked of ganja and qat. Night was so hot it was sweat-popping, but Marley, built like a middle-weight boxer, floated in his knee-length leather jacket.

  Rap’s gut burned as soon as the new Somalis appeared. His gut was always on fire, but Marley and Lexus were barrels of kerosene.

  Yeah, the store owners knew them and there were daps all round, but when Lexus passed around a spliff—practically a ganja donair—Rap ached to get up and get out.

  And if he had, if he’d just kot-tam listened to his instincts chirping madly in his ears, he wouldn’t’ve gotten gut-punched and dropped, then stomped and had his feet and hands duct-taped.

  5.

  Ahmed bolted out the back door one second before Marley slipped the shotgun from his coat like an extra arm.

  “Get that muthafucka!” Marley’d ordered Lexus, but the partner gave up the chase after only seconds in the alley, came back and helped Marley usher Rap, Jackie Chan, Nuke, Deng and Juk to the back room and put beatings on them all.

  Rap was face down, his knife stuck uselessly inside his back pocket above his ass.

  Out of his peripheral vision, Rap caught Marley, leering, blunt in his left hand and shotgun in his right. “Where’s my fuckin stuff, Hass?”

  “Mar, man, it aint my fault!” whined Hassan, face-down on the floor and taped like Rap. “Ahmed, he, he, he used it. I told him not to, but, but—”

  Lexus stomped Hassan’s skull into the cracked lino.

  “I aint fuckin kiddin around, Hass!” yelled Marley. “Lex!”

  Lexus stepped around the men on the floor.

  Rap’s gut burned hotter, twisting even harder. He hated Jackie Chan for getting him killed. He’d been on the run since he was a baby, if being carried by your mother counted as running. Sudan. Chad. Ethiopia. Kenya. Here.

  To go through all that, only to die in a rinky-dink store surrounded by racks of giant pants and shitty, puffy jackets gaudied over with ultra-busy platinum designs—

  Thunder—

  Jackie Chan screamed, and so did Hassan and Rap and Deng and Juk—

  Rap’s face was hot and wet on one side.

  Cracked open an eye in that direction.

  Nuke’s head was half gone.

  Rap saw white bone and a piece of eye sticking out of red and black mash.

  “Now, Hass, you know I’m serious,” rumbled Marley. “You only got four more human shields till I get to you. So unless I get my fuckin product—”

  “Bismillah, Marley, I ain’got it—”

  Thunder—

  “Three more. Runnin outta chances, Hass.”

  Rap was quivering, shaking, his teeth chattering in the heat. He couldn’t tell who was the new death.

  “Please, please, Mar, I’m serious! I don’t—”

  THUNDER—

  And then there was chaos Rap couldn’t see—someone got knocked over, and someone else took a hit and went down screaming. Rap shut his eyes so hard he saw flares.

  Shouting and swearing and that gut-puckering sound of a joint being dislocated, a sound that’d puked itself out of his own shoulder in a refugee camp in Chad and there’d been no doctor—now, now, the same sound, four times: POP-POP-POP-POP—

  6.

  Sirens screamed.

  Someone.

  Kneeling beside Rap.

  Tugging at his wrists.

  Jailing the scream behind his clamped jaws, Rap slit open his eyes:

  A man, grunting while he sawed through the tape, sweating, a black-and-gold skullcap above black kinks and grey wisps, matching the mix in the long goatee with no moustache. Black t-shirt. Biceps bulged under skin of trim arms working the duct tape, skin lighter than either Rap’s or Jackie Chan’s, halfway between chocolate and milk.

  Rap strained to swivel his neck, scoped the murderers broken in wrong angles all over floor, screaming the pain of a dozen bones snapped like balsa under ballpeen.

  Couldn’t see a gun, bat or even pipe. Which meant this man’d taken out the killers with nothing but his empty hands.

  And then Rap scoped the bloody, cratered carcasses of what used to be four men.

  Tape was off. Rap and JC jumped up to split.

  “What the hell you two doing?” demanded the goateed man. His widely-spaced eyes glared like a goat’s. If the man’d had horns, he would’ve charged. “You can’t leave now—you’re witnesses!”

  Jackie Chan’s eyes whipped wildly. “That’s why we’re leaving!” He grabbed Rap and Rap’s legs moved before Rap gave them the order.

  “Hey!” shouted the man. “Hey, you freakin little creeps—you can’t just—”

  Outside, through the front door swinging loose like an invitation, the boys bolted past Nuke’s car, sprinted across the stre
et and ducked into the space between two stores just as the cops landed past the diagonal of where 111th Ave start bent into 112th.

  “Get down!” hissed JC under wailing sirens.

  “What the hell?”

  “They’ll see us running, dude!”

  Three cruisers flaring the night into red-blue-red-blue seized the storefront’s street. Red-blue smeared into purple over Bootays’ roof, painting the second storey of the next-door Hyper-Market.

  Goatee-but-no-moustache man, skullcap raked to the side, took position at the door, hands-up, said something to the cops leaping from their cars and plunging for cover at the sight of him.

  “No,” he shouted, “I’m the one who put the call in!”

  “GET THE FUCK DOWN ON THE GROUND!”

  Halfway to kneeling, he had just enough time to raise his forearm against the beating the cops hurled on him like boulders from a cliff.

  “We can’t just let them do him like that!” said Rap. “We gotta do something!”

  JC shook his head. “Dude—Nuke’s car, like, it’s not Nuke’s.”

  “You stole it?”

  “Not me—Nuke! Just a little joy-riding, man—he wasn’t gon fence it! But there’s dead people in there now! Think they’ll believe us?”

  On the ground, Mr. Goatee cock-punched one cop and put him down. Then another lit him up with a Taser. Years later Rap would swear he smelled burning skin and hair.

  With cops fully focused on cuffing and hauling away the man who’d just saved Raphael Garang’s and Jamal Abdi’s young lives, the two youths hunched down the space between two stores like rats chasing through sewers.

  7.

  Thirty minutes of tearing through alleys and side-streets, thirty hours of jumping behind trash cans at every distant siren, thirty days of gasping for breath and failing to stifle the gasps—

  And suddenly Rap realised Jackie Chan was gone, and he was alone.