The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  Frightened, the fluffy chicks squawked their beaks open wide enough to swallow squirrels. Everybody shushed Ãnkhur.

  “Sorry!” she whispered. “Seriously, we should call ourselves that. We could get t-shirts. Or jackets! With big crests!”

  Moon smiled in the sun. Rap winked at him.

  2.

  10 am. 107th Avenue, Kush’s southern cataract. Across the street from the All Nations Café, while parents and children and teenagers strolled along, the seven youth formed a shenu in a parking lot to perform their Daily Alchemy.

  “Today is August first, the day Lord Usir revealed himself to Hru,” said Rap. Except for JC, the others were still new to the Daily Alchemy, so Rap took the lead, making eye contact with everyone in the shenu like Brother Moon had taught him.

  “That way,” his sbai had told him earlier, “if people are feeling weird or whatever out in the street, they can focus on you and not how self-conscious they feel.”

  Rap said to Jorrel, “August begins with A , Africentric, and it’s the first letter in the Alphabetical Alchemy. And one is Resurrection.”

  “And the first pledge of the Nub-Wmet- Ãnkh,” he said to Sixpac, “is ‘By the sunrise, I choose to resurrect myself, purifying my body, my mind and my spirit. I choose to drink from the River of Life and I refuse to drown in the Swamps of Death.’ Am I right?”

  He’d learned call-and-response from Moon. As everyone threw in nods, mm-hms, yeses, true dats or Speak, brother! (that one came from Ãnkhur), Rap grew bolder, and projected his voice so that pedestrians could hear him. Deepened it, too. (“You always do that when you’re spitting game with Ãnkhur,” JC bugged him later.)

  “Now, Lord and Usir are four letters each,” said Rap to Crystal, who nodded, “and Lord Usir being the ultimate ancestor, I think of pledge four: ‘By the sunrise, I praise my ancestors and their struggles to bequeath me my legacy, not for me to bury or squander my gold, but to create justice today and forever. My ancestors and I are one, for their gold and the marrow of the pharaoh are in me.’

  “So to me,” said Rap to a smiling Sixpac, “that means that to be Africentric I need to remember my ancestors, which is the way to resurrect myself.”

  To Almeera, he said, “Resurrection, meaning waking up from the illusions and the lies of the Savage Lands.” To Ahmed, “Which I can do, so long as I refuse to drink from the Swamps of Death, and choose to drink from the River of Life.”

  And to Ãnkhur, “That way, I’ll have the strength to share my gold—my knowledge—so together we can raise the Shining Place.”

  After JC’s turn, Sixpac threw down, and Rap was impressed. Crystal passed, and so did Almeera, but Ahmed and Ãnkhur also raised gold.

  When they broke before postering around Kush to advertise the Hyper-Market, Rap told Ãnkhur he was impressed by how she raised in the shenu. JC stood behind her, shifting foot-to-foot slinkily and making what he called his “smooth Denzel love-daddy face” at Rap.

  When Ãnkhur glanced behind her, JC turned statue.

  It took everything Rap had not to crack up.

  At the South Sudanese youth drop in centre—so tiny it was barely a hallway fronted by a door—JC started heading inside, then noticed Rap wasn’t going with him.

  “Dude, what’s up?”

  Rap shrugged, looking up and down 107th Ave. His rough white cotton shirt chafed his shoulders and neck on the thirty-plus morning. Was gonna be a scorcher.

  “I just don’wanna get bogged down in there. Most of them don’t speak enough English for us to really do any Alchemy with em. An we got a lotta posters to put up.”

  “Aiight,” said JC, doubtfully. “Lemme just drop off a poster inside.”

  3.

  South of Kush. Downtown. Noon.

  While postering along Jasper Ave, Rap and JC were talking hip hop: the new beats JC was producing with Fruity Loops at Sixpac’s house, and Rap’s plan to write a song about Djehutmose III, the Alexander before Alexander, after ripping through World’s Great Men of Colour.

  But they stopped at Beaver Hills House Park. Not because of the park’s parasol-trees dotting its small hills, or its cascading waterfall, or its mini-creek gurgling with life inside downtown’s concrete greys.

  But because of the crowd and what they were gawking at: a group of ultra-fit, white-clad, White twenty-somethings, tumbling and spinning.

  “Dude, your lucky day,” said JC, nudging him in the ribs. Across the park from them was Ãnkhur.

  “Thanks!” said Rap. “I mean, shut up.”

  “Careful, bruh,” said JC. He chinned towards her partners: Ahmed and Sixpac. A three-person postering crew. Rap felt his heart creasing at how much she was smiling at them, and without him.

  He almost jetted right then, but JC stopped him, saying, “Can’t score if you don’t play.”

  After a quick Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh—not the pledge, but just the phrase—all of them but Rap stood staring at the show.

  Gyrating, dancing and round-house kicking, the capoeristas kept time to the bass-twangy berimbau, the bow-string/gourd combo their instructor was playing to drive the performance. Sounded like a jaw-harp.

  Rap had no eyes for capoeira. Too busy sneaking glances at Ãnkhur. Anyway, he knew enough about capoeira; once during kung fu class, Brother Moon’d said it came from Brazil, a martial art that West Africans developed to fight back against their oppressors.

  These capoeristas didn’t look like they’d ever worn chains or like they’d ever been West Africans. Except for the instructor, who looked like Taye Diggs but with hair, they were all White. All of them were ripped, and they flew through the air in white flowing pants and tight t-shirts. More than half were women. A couple had deadlocks.

  Rap snickered. “Looks like a bunch of crumpers dressed for yoga class.”

  “Yeah,” chirped Ãnkhur. “They’re like The Matrix dressed by lululemon.”

  Rap didn’t know what that was, or even if it was a compliment or an insult.

  “Look at that!” she squealed, even more excited when the instructor handed off his berimbau so he could “spar” with a student.

  Taking off his shirt, he revealed a chest and abs that a welder would’ve taken all week to make out of steel.

  Ãnkhur’s eyes sparkled. Rap’s heart didn’t just crease, it folded.

  After the instructor finished dazzling all the applauding women and an eighth of the men, one of his students addressed the crowd with a microphone.

  “Thank you. Thank you very much,” said the young White man. Sharp rectangular specs and chiseled jaw—guy looked like he modelled eyewear. Or maybe underwear.

  “Capoeira’s great cardio, and if you love dancing, it’s awesome,” he said, panting and smiling.

  The other students nodded and smiled back. Two of them bounced their blonde deadlocks when they did.

  “It’s a martial art,” he went on, “that comes from African slaves in Brazil who needed a way to defend themselves while shackled . . . . ”

  Rap instantly ran mental simulations of how he’d use wing chun kung fu against the guy in the glasses. Figured he’d hafta learn jiu jitsu, too, since with all that spinning and hip-rotation, the capoeristas looked like they probably knew ground-fighting.

  Imagined what it’d be like to split those glasses in two. Just one single punch to the bridge of the guy’s nose.

  “Carla’s got pamphlets, and you can talk to me if you have any questions,” said Mr. Sharp Glasses. His teacher shot him a concerned look.

  “Oh, or like, of course, you can talk to Professor Nascimento, too. So anyway you can find us here every Wednesday afternoon, if it’s sunny, for the rest of the summer.”

  “Let’s go,” said Rap to JC.

  He had a plan.

  Clasping hands in the Throne salute with the other Street Falcons (as baptised by Ãnkhur), Rap hauled JC off so they could finish their job.

  4.

  “If you hafta fight a grappler and you’re not trained as a grap
pler, then advice-one is, don’t fight im,” Brother Moon said to Rap.

  The man handed a slip of paper to an Ethiopian teenager— the login for web carrel #4. “Enjoy, bruh. You’ve got until two-thirty-three.”

  The Hyper-Market wasn’t bustling, but it felt busy. Five of eight carrels were in use, and all the customers were buying coffee.

  But even Rap, with zero business experience, knew it was just dimes for the dollars Mr. Ani was spending every day to keep his doors open.

  If the place felt busy, it was more because the Hyper-Market was overstuffed with continental and Caribbean products and Africentric books and merchandise.

  “If you’ve got no choice, advice-two is,” said Moon, continuing to answer Rap’s question, “use a weapon from a distance, like a gun or a bow-and-arrow or an F-16.” Rap chuckled.

  “Advice-three is attack him in a group. Ground-fighting is all about going after one guy. If you’re head-locking and arm-barring a guy on the ground, you can’t be fighting off the guy’s two friends.”

  “Uh huh,” said Rap. The advice wasn’t helping. He fiddled with some sugar packets at the coffee station.

  “And advice four is always remember advice-zero: avoid fighting. Avoid places where people are likely to fight. And avoid places that make you feel like fighting. That’s how you keep from drowning in the Swamps, by fighting isfet and serving the cause of Maãt.”

  “Okay,” said Rap, slipping a dozen sugar packets into the pockets of his giant shorts. Not noticing, Mr. Ani kept pouring coffee for the Somali undergrad standing in front of the till. “You brought your own mug, so it’s only one-fifty,” he told her.

  “And if you do absolutely hafta fight,” he whispered to Rap when she’d paid and was back at her carrel, “never fight for some bullshit reason, like trying to impress a girl.”

  Rap looked up at him, his eyebrows almost jumping off his forehead.

  “Nice try, lil brother. Mouth open, got your hands up in ‘shock.’ I was your age too, once, about a million years ago.”

  “No, but I—”

  “Don’t shit a shitter.”

  “Yeah, but honest—”

  “You gotta be more subtle. Girl like Ãnkhur doesn’t wanna be chased. She wants to be the chaser. Just like her aunt, and you know Sister Seshat’s tougher’n iron knuckles. You dig?”

  Rap turned his hands palms up, put his wrists together, like he was surrendering to cuffs. Mr. Ani laughed.

  “Yeah, okay, okay. But, but how’m I . . . y’know . . . . ”

  “Supposed to make a girl chase you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “Either she wants to or she doesn’t want to. But trying won’t make it happen, and it’ll just drive you crazy trying to.”

  Rap’s shoulders fell.

  “I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, brother,” said Mr. Ani. He handed Rap a sambusa from the tray he’d just taken out of the toaster oven. “But women aren’t like, like . . . computers or suh’m. You can’t just get an access code and then programme em to do what you want em to. Trust me. About three billion guys’ve had to learn the same lesson.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You hear me?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “But, y’know, you think I could, maybe, try with the jiu jitsu again?”

  “Rap, c’mon.”

  “No, really, I just wanna learn.”

  Moon looked at him, shook his head, raised an eyebrow. “Okay.” He changed gears. “You ever ask your mum how she and your dad got together? Who was doing the chasing?”

  Rap’s eyes probed the ceiling. It’d never even occurred to him to think about his mother dating his dad, romancing and all that, falling in love. The idea of his mother and father laughing or flirting or dancing or actually—

  His father was barely a ghost to him. A couple of honeymoon shots at the Meroë pyramids, a slim book he’d written on the South Sudanese independence movement based on his master’s thesis, a gold chain wrapped inside a carved wooden box. The box was stained with henna, rubbed with amber. It felt and smelled like memories.

  He knew they’d met at the University of Khartoum. His mother was one of the many Somali women there, and according to her, more than half of all students there were female. Maybe she had had to chase his dad.

  “I don’know,” said Rap, wonderingly.

  “Ask,” said Moon. “Maybe your mum knows something you can use, y’know? Something in your DNA.”

  Moon went to make coffee. Rap grabbed another sambusa and wrapped it in a couple of napkins, then stuffed it in one of his cargo pockets.

  He wanted to talk with Mr. Ani about the capoeira demonstration. To tell him about the nearly all-White group of performers who looked like runway models. To quote him the line from Mr. Fashion Glasses about how capoeira was “created by African slaves.” But he didn’t.

  Nor did he know why thinking about it all made his shoulders burn.

  5.

  Grabbed an internet station, set up a Facebook group for the Street Falcons, then grabbed a stack of handbill-coupons advertising the Hyper-Market and went walking into the bright, hot August afternoon.

  Ãnkhur.

  Every time she giggled, Rap felt giddy. Every time she smiled and nodded at something he said, he felt the top of his head pop open, like the sight of her teeth could wind him up like a jack-in-the-box.

  But so what? Couldn’t compete with guys like Ahmed or Sixpac. And definitely not with that capoeira master.

  Didn’t even know how you asked a girl out. Or what you did after you did.

  He wasn’t a fool. Or a monk. Wasn’t like he’d never seen porn. But he didn’t like that shit, didn’t like how they treated those girls. And he wasn’t trying to bone Ãnkhur, anyway. What he wanted . . . .

  Yeah, like that movie Amelie.

  All of it was great where she was having fun and wondering and yearning and waiting and trying to meet somebody she was crazy about. But then at the end, after all that build-up, when she finally meets the guy, she just up and insta-bones him.

  There were guys who did nothing but blah-blah-blah in school bathrooms about getting some, or how the pussy was so good, or how much they wannid to get summa that.

  And even he—he, who’d never gone on a date—knew that almost all of them were bullshit vendors who’d never made a single sale.

  On 97th Street in front of the Chinese Lucky 97 Market, he injected handbills into the palms of a group of Rwandan teenagers, chatting them up and pointing the four blocks up and one-over to the Hyper-Market. They were all nods and smiles and saying how they’d check it out, and he felt good about it.

  So if he did ask her out and she said yes, what would he wear? What about his teeth? He had better teeth than most kids who’d grown up in refugee camps, but still. Every time these days he saw himself in the mirror brushing his teeth he winced at his snaggles.

  107th Ave. Dropped in on one African-owned business after another, except the Somali internet café down there (the competition), talking to the owners like Mr. Ani’d taught him to. Liked getting so many smiles from adults, treating him like he had legit business. With respect.

  When it came to dealing with authority figures, what with all his recitation and interpretation of the Scrolls and The Book of the Golden Falcon, and titrating the Daily Alchemy, he was ten times more confident than he’d ever been in his life.

  But dealing with girls? Nope.

  Read this one book he’d found in the library, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. There was this one part where Malcolm used to take his wife Betty to the beach and read her poetry. Man, you had to be smooth with a capital oo to pull off shit like that. Otherwise you’d get called corny, which was like having a girl shove you into the guillotine and have all her friends pull the lever.

  But if you could do it, man, she’d be talking to her friends about you forever, until they were all jealous or sick of hearing about it. That’d be nice.

&nbs
p; But get real. Plus, he was too skinny. And he had facial scarification. Sure it was way subtler than it was with most South Sudanese, but still. And what if she didn’t like dark guys?

  Make sure you ask her about herself, said Mr. Ani. Don’t be like some knuckleheads and just start blabbing about stuff she doesn’t care about, like PS3 games or some action movie or Tupac trivia whatever.

  Maybe he should ask Sister Seshat? Get a woman’s . . . nah. Ãnkhur was her niece. She’d tell her everything.

  And he didn’t have a car, and neither did his mother, and he couldn’t even borrow Brother Moon’s cuz he didn’t know how to drive.

  And pay attention, cuz if she starts telling you stuff about herself and you’re not interested—

  I know, I know—make sure I’m listening so I can ask her about it anyway—

  No, brother, no. The opposite. If you’re not interested in what young sister’s saying, it means you’re not interested in HER. In which case, you gotta fly on. Listen. L: Liberate. Transformed?

  On the avenue, dapping flyers in hand after hand.

  Tried imagining her hand. Putting his fingers on it. Wrapping them around and looming through hers. They’d be cool, slender and soft. Piano-playing fingers. She’d giggle when he took it.

  Figured after a few minutes of that, he could level up and check out her eyes.

  6.

  “So Moon, you want this store to fail?”

  Sister Seshat. Man, she could rock and shock Rap at will. Even Brother Moon scratched his head.

  But he didn’t look angry. Just leaning against his till, wearing a my fly’s down smirk and looking over his cramped Hyper-Market.

  Then he switched tactics.

  “What?” he said, as in, Aren’t you seeing what I’m seeing?

  Place was full, on a Wednesday night, and everyone was drinking coffee.”

  Seshat: “You got people paying, what, a crummy five bucks an hour—”