Kalu laughed and conceded. “It’s not that bad, though. You just have to switch your mind over when you arrive.”
It was the same line he always gave people, as if one simple mental readjustment when your plane hit the tarmac at the airport was enough to fortify against the things New Lagos would proceed to do to you, including but not limited to making your girlfriend unravel and leave you over a ring, or the lack of one. Some of Aima’s friends had convinced her that Kalu wasn’t serious because marriage wasn’t on the table yet, that it was easy for him to talk about marrying her when they lived abroad but that once here he would want a quieter more respectable woman, a woman who behaved like a wife, not a girlfriend, a woman he could press between his palms like pounded yam until she became whatever shape he wanted. They told her that his mother would start to think there was something wrong with her and that eventually Kalu would leave her for a pounded-yam woman because they are easier, and this is Nigeria and is he not a man?
“It makes you complicit, you know?”
The woman was still talking. Kalu returned the cigarette and watched her blow smoke rings out to the sky. The moon was staring at them. Kalu’s mouth was bitter with smoke, and he wondered why kissing her had crossed his mind, why he thought forgetting Aima would be possible tonight, and if the two were related.
“What makes you complicit?” he asked.
“This city. You think you’ll never be a part of things you hate; you think you’re protected somehow, like the rot won’t ever get to you. Then you wake up one day and you’re chest deep in it, watching some perverted gays at a random party in the highland.”
Her bluntness surprised Kalu, but he followed her stare past the glass balcony doors to where the senator was leaning back on his elbows, forest-green cushions bolstering his sides and his belt half-undone. The man’s face was sweating as the boy he’d brought sank to his knees and finished unbuckling the belt for him. Feathers from the boy’s mask tickled the senator’s potbelly and glitter marked out his spine as he bent his face over the man’s crotch. Kalu looked away. He was open-minded, but watching men do things to each other was something else.
“Can you imagine?” Her lip curled up and her teeth clenched the cigarette filter as she stared at them. “I wasn’t expecting that kind of nastiness here. Tufiakwa.”
Kalu didn’t know what to say. He wondered why she wasn’t looking away if it disgusted her so much.
“Gays and pedophiles,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”
Kalu glanced back at the senator, then tore his eyes away, looking up at the moon instead.
“It’s a sex party,” he said. “Not exactly the most conservative scene. Why would you be surprised to see gay people here? Isn’t that the point—to come somewhere where you can enjoy without being judged?”
The woman looked at him properly for the first time.
“Some things shouldn’t be indulged,” she said. “Especially not in front of other people.”
“Maybe that’s the part they like,” Kalu countered. She held his stare for a few seconds, then the muscles of her face rearranged in calculation. She dropped her cigarette and ground it into ash with the heel of her bare foot. Her smile was oily. Kalu decided she was fireproof.
“Do you like that kind of thing?” she asked, taking a few slippery steps toward him. Her dress was plunging, smooth cleavage presented like gourds on a tray. He hissed a breath instead of answering, her hand cupping and kneading at his crotch. “Doing things in front of people? It can be exciting. Maybe we can try it small. Someone from another apartment might see us.”
Kalu thought about it, about her sinking before him, the metal whisper of his zipper and the hot wet of her mouth, spilling milky clouds over her face, over the sky of her mask. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something like this at a party—it wouldn’t even be the first balcony. Ahmed made it too easy. Once in his world, you could believe you were truly somewhere else, that the body rippling around you wasn’t real, that none of this really counted.
“Why do you still invite me to these things?” Kalu had asked once, showering away another woman before heading home. “You know I have Aima.”
Ahmed had laughed and slung him a towel. “You’re an adult, Kalu. It’s your choice and you’re making it alone. Don’t involve me. In fact, don’t come if you don’t like.”
The fireproof woman kneaded Kalu into steel. He grabbed her wrist tightly and pulled her hand away.
“No.” Too curt. He tried to soften it. “Thank you.”
She snatched her hand back. “Suit yourself,” she spat. “I’m sure that boy in there will be happy to service you once he’s done with his oga. Or if you like children, I hear they’re catering to that in one of the bedrooms.” She was already sliding the door open when her last sentence clicked into place. Kalu reached out and grabbed her arm again.
“Wait, what did you just say?”
Even with her mask, the disgust on her face was palpable, a slimy green thing crawling out of her mouth.
“You fucking pervert,” she said. “I should have known you were the type. God punish you.”
She wrenched her arm away and slammed the door. Kalu curled his fingers over the metal of the railing, a dull panic climbing inside him. Why would she say there was a child here? Why would a child be here? The answers came faster than he wanted, news stories running and tripping up in his head, falling into jumbled heaps of fistulas and lacerations and girls bleeding from their grandfathers. But this was Ahmed’s party, and he wouldn’t. It was impossible. Kalu bent over, gasping in shallow breaths as words Aima once said to him lanced through his mind. She’d been disapproving of the work Ahmed did, the person he was underneath his rich family-money playboy exterior. “Is there anything Ahmed would not sell,” she’d asked, “as long as it’s for the right price?”
He threw the door open, pushing through the crowd, searching for the bedrooms. A cold premonition ran down his back, sticky like a cracked yolk. The pill was screaming in his blood and spinning his head. The senator was moaning obscenely, his shirt pushed up his chest and his hands locked behind the boy’s head as he pumped his hips, feathers stroking his belly. Kalu felt a rush of sickness surge through him. How old was that boy? Where was Ahmed?
Someone was waving around that ugly white bra, and its owner was now stretched out across the table, a man and woman sucking on each of her nipples. Kalu found a small hallway and pushed open the first door, his heart erratic. The two models stared back at him from the bathroom, squatting in front of the toilet with thin white lines arranged on the closed lid.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, closing the door as one of them wiped her nose, her eyes loose. How had he forgotten that the parties were like this? The next door opened into an empty office. The door after that was locked. Kalu smashed his shoulder into it and it slammed open with a splintering crack. A knot of men turned to look at him and a bouncer stepped in front of him, black-suited and blocking his view.
“You need a password for this room, sah.”
The men had already lost interest in his maddened entry, turning back to whatever they were gathered around. Kalu let an American accent slide in, dragging a wide drunkard’s smile onto his face. The pill cackled from behind his eyes.
“Hey, man, my bad; sorry about the door! I just heard this is where the party’s at, you know?”
The bouncer looked coldly down at him, and Kalu searched through his memories for a detail—Ahmed on a beach with him in the Maldives, telling him a word that could get him through any door in his parties. “It’s a master key,” Ahmed had said, crystal-blue water stretching around them. “It opens everything. Especially legs.” They’d laughed together, but Ahmed had given Kalu a careful look. “Just make sure it’s a door you want to open,” he’d warned, and Kalu had taken it seriously, hadn’t tried to remember or ever use the key. He needed it now, though, desperately so, because if he didn’t find out the truth behind that woman’s comment, he would lose his mind.
“Gimme a second, bro,” he fumbled. “I’m a little wasted, you know?”
The bouncer took an unfriendly step forward, crowding Kalu’s space. “Turn around and go,” he said. “Before we have to remove you by force.”
Ahmed had spoken of darkness, shadows, and the eating of the light. You could go anywhere in the dark, enter any door, but then the dark could also enter you.
“Husufi,” Kalu said, and the bouncer flinched, his eyes flaring with surprise. The man’s body rearranged itself and his voice lowered into a deferential tone.
“Of course, sah.” He stepped aside to let Kalu pass. “Don’t worry about the door.”
Kalu pushed his way through the small crowd gathered around what he could now see was the bed. The men were all older than him, much older, and there were no women there. Kalu stepped to the front, just by the foot of the bed.
There was a girl on the mattress.
