“Go to sleep, brother.”
They never spoke of it or the stiffened stains of it, but it was there, a pearled bond. The boys, now men, knew pieces of each other that no one else did. In the twenty years that followed, no man ever gasped Kalu’s name again, let alone with all that surrender in his voice.
In the raging silence of the office, Kalu’s brain staggered against his skull, and Ahmed’s hand on his shoulder felt like a brand.
“How old is she?” Kalu asked, his throat dusty.
“What?”
“How old is the girl you hired?” He made his voice more solid, less like a shadow. Ahmed sighed and stepped back.
“Kalu, come on—”
“Tell me!” Kalu was shouting now, shouting at the books that lined the shelves of the office because he didn’t want to look at Ahmed’s face, didn’t want to shout into his eyes or let the volume of his voice bruise his cheeks.
“She’s seventeen,” Ahmed said, sounding tired.
Kalu laughed, lacking the energy to cry. It hurt to be right. “Those men are in there fucking a seventeen-year-old girl and you’re telling me she’s not a child?”
“Because she’s not legally eighteen? Where do you think you are, Kalu?”
Ahmed had no bile in what he was saying, just a weariness from even having to debate the topic. Kalu could hear it and it infuriated him. He turned so Ahmed could see him, see the contempt seething under his skin, the way it was molding his face.
“I don’t know, Ahmed. Tell me where I am, because I seem to be standing in front of a man who lets a girl get raped under his roof because his palm got greased enough, like a fucking pimp. Is that where I am?” Kalu knew he was going too far, but he was losing everyone already. He felt so betrayed—he just didn’t care anymore.
Ahmed’s face went blank. “Okay, so tell me, Kalu, which part of what you saw actually surprised you? Is this setup really so impossible to believe?” His voice was silk now, dragging and collecting filth. “Tell me you’ve never wondered if they really do feel tighter the younger they are. Tell me I was wrong about you just wanting a turn.”
Kalu winced. Ahmed knew the soft places to aim his barbs at. “You’re just a fucking pimp. Selling a child—how the fuck do you live with yourself?”
“This isn’t fucking America, brother, where they hide the ugly things they do.” Ahmed was snarling now, his lip curled, his teeth striking. “You can’t walk in here and judge my business by your fucking standards just because I’m not pretending. She’s a prostitute, Kalu. She was spreading her legs and having abortions before she was fourteen, and if she wasn’t here tonight, she’d be doing this somewhere else. I give her more fucking money than she’ll see in two years, and my people take her to a clinic to get checkups because if she goes alone no one will agree to see her. I put a fucking bodyguard there to make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and all she has to do is put on an act so these bastards can get off on their fantasies. I do more for that girl than you and your self-righteous bullshit ever will.”
Ahmed stepped forward and his eyes glittered. “You’re a client just like those men—you come under my roof, fuck my women, and then think you can lecture me because you walked in on her? She’s lucky, Kalu. She works for me. What about the other ones, the ones you don’t see because your windows are tinted when your car drives past them? They get ripped apart and beaten into a bloody pulp, but what the fuck do you care? You don’t see it, so it doesn’t happen? Don’t fucking come at me. I’m a businessman. I hire whores who are old enough to fuck and I take fucking good care of them!”
Kalu felt the air on the wetness of his face before he realized he was crying. “She’s still a fucking kid, man. Don’t you see that?” His voice was breaking, and if it was any other man standing before him, he would be humiliated, but it was Ahmed. “She’s still a kid.”
Ahmed stared for a minute, then turned away, cursing in a stream of words, a hand pressed to his head. Kalu sat down heavily in a swivel chair, dropped his face into his hands, and wept. Ahmed crouched before him and leaned his forehead against Kalu’s. Kalu knew his friend wouldn’t apologize—after all, no one had forced Kalu here. He came in alone, by his own free will. He did this to himself.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Ahmed. “You know I’ve always welcomed you to my parties but…this is the gutter. And it’s ugly and we’re ugly inside it. You don’t belong here.”
He stayed like that, balanced against Kalu and breathing his air. Kalu felt like the sky had fallen except he was the sky and also the ground it landed on and the fractured air in between. He pulled back from Ahmed and tied his mask back over his face, the leather pressing against dried salt as he stood up from the chair. Ahmed quietly put his chalk face over his real one and they left the party so quickly that Kalu barely saw anything, just a glimpse of the bartender watching him with a tracker’s eye, Ahmed’s hand settled again in the grooves of his shoulder. Thursday with the milked eye helped Kalu put on his shoes and the doorkeeper hovered anxiously.
“What happened?” she asked Ahmed. Her lace was blurred in Kalu’s eyes. “Was he drugged?”
She leaned toward Ahmed’s body and Kalu almost laughed. He could tell that she loved him just from that.
“Saidat, back off. I don’t have time for this,” snapped Ahmed. The girl shrank back from the serrated razor of his voice, and Kalu wanted to console her, to tell her that Ahmed was just worried, that he was always sharp when worried. You should notice these things, Kalu wanted to say, but his tongue felt like foam expanding in his mouth. You should notice these things if you love him.
Ahmed draped his arm over Kalu’s shoulder. “Come, let’s go,” he said. They took the stairs one at a time and slowly made their way to the glowing pinprick of Kalu’s driver. Ahmed laid Kalu down in the back seat, arranging him so he was half sitting up. The driver started the car and Ahmed took Kalu’s face in his hands, sighing.
“You have to get your shit together. Call Aima tomorrow after she’s landed. You hear? Stop trying to prove this senseless point. We all surrender on some level. Call her.”
He patted Kalu’s cheek gently and closed the door, stepping back as the taxi pulled past. Kalu tried to breathe as Ahmed’s silhouette blended with the night. He thought of Aima, of every time he’d touched a woman who was not her only to come home afterward and kiss her cheek, dropping a lie on the bone behind her ear. Is this not Nigeria and was he not a man just like those men in the locked room?
He lay in the back seat like a corpse as the car drove through the gates. The security guards lifted the metal bar quickly, as if they wanted the smell of damp fear and shame gone from their estate. Kalu willed his ribs to stay together, to hold his lungs in deep breaths.
When the taxi drove past the women who walked the night, he closed his eyes.
three
Saturday, 12:45 AM
Ahmed ground his teeth together as he watched Kalu’s car pull away. The mild tremor in his left hand started up again, just a whisper, and he wrapped his fingers into a fist to stop it. Anger was coughing up his throat from the bottom of his lungs.
A car entered the parking lot, pulling past him toward its allotted space as the woman inside stared out, a strange look passing over her face. Ahmed frowned back, then realized he was the one standing out in the night, shirtless and with a bone-white mask over his face. He turned and went back into the building, jogging softly up the stairs and pausing when he reached the flat in front of the cracked number plate. Saidat was going to open the door, and Ahmed knew she’d be upset about how he had spoken to her on his way out. When she first started working for him, he’d found her innocence endearing. He usually didn’t fuck young girls—they were too emotional, showing their hands and their hearts with no control, but Saidat was achingly sweet, enthusiastic, simple. It made up for her age. His hand was still shaking though, and his lungs were still full of rage, so if she expected tenderness tonight, she was going to have to wait.
Saidat opened the door after the first knock, sweeping her veil off her face and stepping into the doorway. She braced her hand against the frame and looked up at Ahmed with wide and pained eyes.
“Is everything all right?”
Ahmed forced a smile from beneath the edge of his mask. “Everything’s fine. Let’s get back to work.”
Saidat’s jaw set. “Don’t lie to me, Ahmed. Something is wrong. What happened to your friend?”
Ahmed’s smile ended. Kalu’s jaw was under his hand again, Kalu’s forehead against his as his friend wept into his air.
“Not now, Saidat,” he said, gently pushing past her to enter the foyer.
“Ahmed, please—”
