Kalu had one of his drivers rent out a regular taxi to take him to the estate by the lagoon so no one would recognize the car. Security at the first gate waved it in with a flick of their torchlights, and Kalu felt invisible, masked in the yellow metal. The car seat was worn and frayed, a spring glinting through the ragged padding. It reminded Kalu of his childhood, before he’d left to plan a life away from home somewhere in an American suburb. Before his mother fell ill and turned into a muted and folded woman, thinning out until her fragility called Kalu home to take over the family’s luxury car-service business. Every time she blessed him, her palms felt like spun paper about to flake gently over his scalp.
As his taxi pulled through the second gate, Kalu turned the invitation over in his hands, feeling out the weight of the heavy paper. His driver spun the steering wheel slowly and drove the taxi into a corner of the sprawling parking lot. Kalu handed him a fold of thousand-naira notes and he handed Kalu a mask in return—soft leather made in battered oxblood. Kalu held it against his face, and for a quick moment, it felt like another skin, almost like he wasn’t the man Aima had walked away from yesterday, the man who had watched her crumple against a wall the week before, sobbing.
“You’re never going to marry me!” she’d wailed, tears dragging her eyeliner down her heart-shaped face. “Four years of my life that I went and threw away on you! How do you think this looks in the eyes of God?”
Kalu had just watched her. He knew he was supposed to pick her up and hold her and tell her that of course he loved her, of course he would marry her—but the raw bitterleaf truth was that he simply didn’t recognize who he was looking at. Aima sounded as if another woman’s mouth had eaten hers, like a church had spat over her face. Finally, she stood up and wiped her face. She’d looked as beautiful as she always did—with her delicate wrists and soft arms, her hips flaring into lush curves, and her dimpled thighs he used to sink his teeth into.
“I’m going,” she’d said. “Call me a taxi.” She went upstairs and threw her things into a suitcase, drawers rattling and slamming as she packed. He’d run after her and held her, begged her to stay, and it had worked for a week. Then today he’d come home in the late afternoon and she was packed, about to call a car. Kalu had convinced her to let him take her to the airport, but he hadn’t recognized himself when he had let her walk away. That feeling of being someone he didn’t know had stayed with him since. Tonight, his plan was to forget about everything, including the way Aima hadn’t even looked back.
The driver dangled a leg out of the car, striking a match to light one of his cigarettes. Kalu stepped out of the back seat and unbuttoned his jacket, the silk lining glinting a jealous green as he walked through the gleaming accumulation of cars. He was surrounded by residential prison blocks looming next to one another, dark units broken up by squares of blue and yellow light from the apartments. It was amazing how much people paid to live in projects like these. Kalu fastened the mask over his eyes as he climbed up the stairs, the leather sinking on his skin like a relieved breath.
The door was nothing, a smudged beige portal with half the number plate broken and missing. He knocked once, a lonely sound that seemed inadequate, then waited. There was a click from the lock and the hinges swung briefly, stopping at a crack. The doorkeeper’s face showed through, covered in a heavy black veil of fine lace and thin gold thread, shining lines that Kalu followed with his eyes. His mask shielded his cheekbones but left his mouth open and vulnerable, one corner undecided, almost smiling in his nervousness. It had been a while since he had come to one of these parties. Kalu thought of the girl he’d just left, how she had smiled drowsily from a pillow that didn’t belong to her. She was a random hookup he kept on deck, and he’d called her to meet him at his house as soon as he returned from the airport—it was his house now that Aima didn’t want to live in it—before, it had been theirs.
“Your mouth is almost as expressive as your face,” the girl had said, laughing when Kalu flinched from her hand. He had thought she could help distract him from the emptiness of his bed and chest, and she had, a little, before she started talking. “See,” she said. “Like that. It just went tight. You don’t like your face to be touched?”
Kalu almost told her that it was her hand he didn’t like, that he used to let Aima run her fingers over every pore of his face in the cool mornings before the day kicked in. But he kissed her instead, ran his hands down her tight stomach, and washed his face after she left. Ahmed’s invitation had been waiting on the kitchen table, humming softly in its scalloped gold, and it led Kalu here to this frayed welcome mat. The doorkeeper took his hand and pulled him into the apartment.
He knew the routine—turn off your cell phone and turn it in. Allow Thursday, the tall man with the milky eye, to pat you down. Give him your signed report from the approved doctor. The doorkeeper knelt and lifted Kalu’s foot to unlace his shoe. Kalu flattened his palm against the wall to stop himself from falling and sighed. He already knew it was pointless to ask for explanations. You just showed up and went with whatever flow Ahmed had picked for that night. The first party had been eight years ago, and even though Ahmed and Kalu had known each other for long years before that, ever since they’d been inseparable in boarding school, Kalu could never predict what each party would look like. He made a mental note to ask Ahmed about the shoe thing later, but then he looked down at the veiled woman kneeling before him, her henna-stained fingers quick and deft with his laces, and something dark stirred in him. Kalu caught his breath. This was just the kind of thing Ahmed liked to do—awaken coiled desires you didn’t even know you had. Kalu watched as she peeled his socks off his feet and he felt the beginnings of an erection as blood shifted in his body. Once he was barefoot, the doorkeeper unfolded to her full height and Kalu took a deep breath, stepping toward the weighted velvet curtains separating the foyer from the parlor and touching his new face to make sure it was still in place.
“Wait,” said the doorkeeper, her voice winding out like soft ribbons from under the layers of gold-shot black. She lifted her veil just enough to uncover an unstained mouth so full that Kalu’s throat went dry. When she raised herself up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his, Kalu cupped her jaw lightly. Things slithered in him as her tongue flickered inside his mouth, the wet muscle depositing a damp pill before she pulled away. Kalu swallowed it obediently.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Something to help your mood,” she replied. He reached for her veil and she slapped his hand away, the lace drowning out her mouth. “Not now.” She pulled back the curtain to let him pass and Kalu stepped into the parlor, sweeping the scene with a practiced eye. Ahmed, that hedonistic bastard! He laughed softly to himself.
The apartment might have been something sterile and white when they gave Ahmed the keys, but it was sinuous now, a boudoir that cannibalized every room. The walls were deep blood orange and burnt mustard, lit by scrolled lanterns dropping from the ceiling on delicate chains. The heated light seeping out in dim streams made everyone’s skin glow. And, Jesus Christ, there were skins—writhing, sweating, gleaming skins. People were pressed up against the walls, shirtless bodies crowding one another, teeth and fingers shining everywhere. Kalu’s feet sank into a thick rug, and he smiled at the fabric soaking the floor, the embroidery on the floor cushions, the wine-tinted leather ottomans.
“You made it!” Ahmed appeared beside him, tall and dark, his gleaming teeth open under a chalk-white mask. His head was shaved, and together with the white caftan he had on, it made him look almost ascetic, nothing like the debauched ringmaster he really was. After Kalu had moved to America, Ahmed had left Nigeria as well and traveled almost nonstop. From London to Dubai to Cape Town to Melbourne to Nairobi, round and around. His voice sounded like nothing had stuck to it. The two men embraced, and Ahmed clapped Kalu on the shoulder, gesturing around him. “Just like when we were in Casablanca, oui?”
“Hell yeah,” said Kalu. “Looks just like it.” That had been a wild stop, sixteen hours of Ahmed squeezing the city with long-fingered hands until juice ran down his arms. Kalu had followed him blindly, drunk and half-afraid, envious of the ease with which Ahmed touched life and it bent before him. “How’s the party going so far?”
“No complaints.” Ahmed kept his body relaxed and his mouth curved, but his slitted eyes raked over the room, as vigilant as his guards. In the city, Ahmed’s careful reputation was that of an unserious playboy, someone people could underestimate until he severed their vital tendons and left them neatly fucked-up and floundering. Kalu had a lot of respect for his friend, and the two of them occasionally traded information on clients—Ahmed hiring Kalu’s cars because those drivers could be deaf for him.
“Don’t work too hard,” said Kalu. “It’s still a party, you know.”
Ahmed laughed and grabbed his balls, thrusting forward slightly. “Oh, I know. I’ve been taken care of.” He winked and Kalu bit back a smile. “That’s the face of a man with too much weight between his legs,” said Ahmed. “Go and take care of yourself, my friend.”
Kalu laughed and looked out toward the balcony doors. A bloated moon hung low and swollen in the sky. Ahmed’s hand gripped his arm, gold rings bracing the knuckles.
“Listen, Kalu,” he said, his voice low. “Try and forget Aima, ehn? There are other beautiful people here tonight.” He squeezed once, then left.
Kalu watched his friend’s white caftan recede and tried to settle his shoulders. He was here for the night. Ahmed was right—there were other people and they were here, and he needed to leave Aima behind. Kalu stepped through the small crowd and went to the bar. The bartender was a young man in a satin waistcoat, his face curiously exposed and his eyes wide as he mixed drinks and poured champagne with quick hands. It was clearly his first time at one of Ahmed’s parties. Kalu almost wished he didn’t look so excited. Ahmed liked to leave some of the staff barefaced, their identities unprotected. You’re not important enough to be covered, it said, and if you open your mouth about what you see tonight, a mask won’t save you anyway.
Kalu took a rum and Coke from the boy, sipping it as he looked over the buffet table. Half-shell oysters balanced on crushed ice and peppered snails curled around each other. There were meats and cheeses and fruits, skewered and roasted and raw. A large man in a deep-blue suit elbowed him aside to reach for the snails, strings from his gilt mask cutting into the flesh of his head. The mask was a mere formality—Kalu recognized his face easily, the man was a senator, a popular one. Sometimes Ahmed allowed politicians into his parties—he called them the money bodies—and they all seemed to smell like this man, clogged cologne and damp sweat. The senator was followed by a boy with a dancer’s body wearing a bright feathered mask. Kalu moved aside for them and started heading for the balcony so he could look at the moon over the lagoon, let it settle the tides in him. He’d never been the type of man to gaze aimlessly into the sky, but two years of being back home had left him dreaming of flight and stars and levitation.
When he’d first returned, his mother had touched his face and told him plainly that she would like grandchildren. Before he could reply, she dropped her hand and changed the subject. That had always been her way, as gentle as a flame, only blistering afterward. Kalu had looked away, biting the inside of his cheek into a raised line. He had wanted to shout at her, to ask why it wasn’t enough that he had come home, dragging his girlfriend all the way with him, but this was his mother and she was old, so Kalu held his peace. Months later, when he reached for a condom while in bed with Aima, she stopped his wrist with a soft pressure from her fingers.
“Would it truly be so terrible?” she whispered. “Let’s see what God allows.” Kalu stared at her in shock, at the woman who used to joke about him getting a vasectomy, and Aima quickly covered her question with a light laugh, taking the foil packet and tearing it open herself. “I’m just playing,” she had said, but in that small space between her question and the delayed laugh, Kalu had started to see that he was losing her.
Inside the party, he passed a hand over his face as his eyes stung. This was no way to forget anything. The music filtered back into his ears, Bonobo sliding into Sutra, and two models sashayed past him arm in arm, their small breasts cupped in matching filigreed pearl, long weaves swaying down their backs. They were tipsy and giggling, flirting under thick eyelashes that stretched out from their golden masks, ruby lipstick framing pretty teeth. Kalu raised his glass to them and they burst into soft chattering giggles, glancing over their shoulders to appraise him. Perhaps later. They looked familiar. They’re probably sisters, he thought. Or lovers. Or both. It was that kind of night, that kind of place.
The television was a black slab against the wall and a woman was dancing in front of it, a twisting collection of sinews and soft flesh. She moved privately—the way women move when they have stopped dancing for hungry men, a thing faithful to the music. It was beautiful and none of his business. Her hair was in long braids and someone had made her a lacquered ankara mask that draped over her face like wax. The low carved table in front of her was balancing towers of empty shot glasses and lines of coke. People were seated around her in a half moon, clapping in a steady rhythm as her hips snapped and snaked. A few of them were passing around a joint, frail smoke winging out as they threw their heads back to expose smooth necks. Kalu reached for the belonging he used to feel when he came to these things, but this time there was only a curious numbness. He felt imaginary.
The woman with braids was wearing half of a traditional outfit, a tight printed skirt that clutched her thighs and sliced her ankles. Her top was gone. Her bra was triangular and white, more functional than sexy, covering her breasts wholly. It looked like something his mother would wear, something he’d seen dangling from the clothesline of his childhood. Aima would never have let something like that even touch her. The thought of her clawed its way back through his chest and Kalu stopped to catch a breath. He hadn’t tried to stop her at the airport because the peace offering she wanted would sink him. They used to lie in bed when they lived together in Houston and make fun of friends who rushed to get married after three months.
“What will ninety days tell me about you?” Aima had asked, her breasts spilling over his hands. “See ehn, I want to know what kind of man I’ll be looking at in ninety years.”
“We won’t live that long,” Kalu had told her.
“Shun the unbeliever,” she’d joked, and leaned in to kiss him. Her mouth had tasted immortal, so he believed her. After they had moved back home, to this city, Aima had changed so slowly that Kalu almost missed it until she was collapsing and God was in her every second breath and she was begging him for a ring and all he could do was wonder at the briny taste of desperation this city had put on her skin.
“We said we’d wait until we were both ready,” he had said, and she looked like she could spit on him.
“It has been four years, Kalu! How much longer do you expect me to wait?” Each word had been a small and sour betrayal.
Kalu slid open the door to the balcony with Aima’s voice reverberating in his head, and for a wild second, he thought she was the woman standing against the railing. Maybe Ahmed had kidnapped her before the flight took off and got her to come here. Maybe he took pity on Kalu’s vast landscapes of pain and orchestrated a costumed reunion, a story that Ahmed would then tell at the wedding during his best man toast while Kalu stared at Aima and wondered how many children it would take on top of the ring to make her happy.
But it wasn’t her. This woman was yellow like a firefly, her skin a window in the backless dress she was wearing. She half turned when Kalu stepped out to the balcony, a cigarette perched lightly between her fingers. Her nails were dark-red porcelain, curved and blinding, and the moon swung low over her head.
Kalu smiled politely. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“Do you see anybody else out here?” Her mask was a smooth collection of blues with exaggerated cheekbones, and she’d painted her lips a deep pink. The color clashed with her nails. She offered the cigarette to Kalu as he leaned on the railing next to her, and he took it because the brightness of her mouth led him to think maybe he’d kiss her before the night was over. It would be better to smoke his own tongue instead of tasting it only on hers.
“I hate this city,” the woman said, as if continuing an old conversation. “Don’t you wish you had never come back sometimes?”
“How do you know I ever left?”
Her laugh was like a man’s, low and swinging. “Ajebutter like you. See your head.”
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.
All the sounds of the men talking and cheering faded into vague roars of static in his ears. The girl was a waif, tiny breasts and smooth skin everywhere. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back and her underwear was stuffed into her mouth. She looked maybe fourteen or fifteen and was lying on her side, crying. There was a naked man pumping into her like she was salvation, one of her legs draped over his shoulder as his hands pressed her down. Kalu tasted tears in his mouth and his hands stung with noise. His legs bent and uncoiled as he leapt on the bed and seized the man by the throat. The girl screamed behind her gag and the man’s eyes swelled in surprise as Kalu tore him off her body, throwing him away from the bed. He tumbled to the floor, his penis slapping wetly against his stomach, too startled to be soft. Kalu stepped off the bed, intending to stomp on his testicles, to crush them like the balcony woman had ground her cigarette. The rage was almost a relief, the first pure thing he had felt in a long time.
The bouncer stepped through the other men and sunk his fist efficiently into Kalu’s side, right over his kidney, dropping him to the ground and dragging him out of the room. Kalu cried out and the rest of the men shouted in entitled outrage. Through the cluster of their sweaty, hungry bodies, Kalu saw the girl’s wide eyes from where she lay toppled on the mattress. He thought he saw another man climb on the bed as the bouncer forced him out of the room, forearm pressed against Kalu’s windpipe. He was quick and brutal, throwing Kalu into the empty office.
Kalu ricocheted off the desk and thudded down to the carpet, blinded in bright pain. The door slammed shut. He curled up on the floor, groaning and dry heaving. His mouth tasted like coppery nicotine, and he was high and hurting. What kind of man would he be in ninety years? A dead man, his kidney said back resentfully.
“Aima,” he whispered to the air. “I was not a man who folded his hands and watched, Aima. Why couldn’t you wait for a man like that?” Kalu sobbed against the carpet. He could feel the pill twisting his head. “I didn’t bend, not even when it meant losing you. I had to stand for something.”
He tried to think of her face, of the black wing-tipped lines above her eyes, the tart fullness of her lips, but the only face he could see was that girl’s, the mucus from her nose and the thick tears clotting on her cheek. Kalu ripped off his mask and screamed into the rug as the door clicked open.
“Kalu, what the fuck did you do?”
Ahmed knelt beside him and pulled at his shoulder to turn him over. Kalu spat in his friend’s face as soon as he saw it. It took a moment before Ahmed blinked and wiped saliva off his cheek, cleaning his hand on his white trousers, his eyes dropping in temperature. The caftan from earlier was gone and his bare chest was slightly damp, a smudge of lipstick stamped on his neck.
“Fuck you,” said Kalu. Ahmed stood up and waited for him to struggle to his feet, watching with a hard mouth.
“You’re trying to fuck up my party?” he asked, once Kalu was more or less upright. “You can’t assault my clients, Kalu! Just wait your fucking turn next time.” He shook his head in disgust. “Fucking hell.”
Kalu roared and rushed at him, his fist connecting with Ahmed’s jaw smoothly, snapping his head to one side. Ahmed staggered and caught himself heavily against the edge of the desk.
“I don’t fuck little girls, you sick bastard.” Kalu was panting and it felt like everything in his eyes had burst. Ahmed massaged his jaw and looked up at his friend.
“Little girls? Did you just fucking hit me, Kalu?” He slid a finger inside his cheek and felt around. “You’ve gone mad. Completely mental. How much have you had to drink?”
“You have a child in there. You have a child handcuffed in there while men old enough to be her grandfather fuck her till she cries. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Just saying it out loud had turned his stomach and Kalu fought back the urge to vomit. He ran his sore hand over his face and turned away.
“Kalu.” Ahmed was behind him, speaking slowly. “Listen to me. Listen. She’s not a child.”
“Fuck you, man.” He was running out of venom, the horror coating him like a paralytic.
“I swear to God, Kalu. It’s just a setup. The older men pay loads of money for that fantasy, I find a girl who looks like a child and I pay her loads of money to act it out with them. I keep one of my men there to stop them from going too far. It’s clean. On my father’s grave.”
Kalu leaned his head against a bookcase and closed his eyes. “She was crying, Ahmed. Was that part of your setup?”
Ahmed sighed. “They like it like that. There’s more money if she cries, if she acts like she doesn’t want it. More money for her.”
Kalu didn’t want to believe him. It was too easy, a nice package of a story. “More money for you,” he said.
“I’m a businessman, Kalu.” Ahmed’s voice spread like open palms, trying to soak and soften the brittleness. “You know that. Shit, you’re a businessman. But for fuck’s sake, I do not let people rape children at my parties! I don’t let children into my parties. What kind of person do you think I am?”
Kalu’s side was bruised badly, he could feel it pulsing. He rotated his neck till the wood of the shelf was pressed against his temple, so he could look at his friend. Ahmed’s arms hung heavily, and the earlier sharpness of his face had given way to shadows under his eyes and fatigue in his mouth. The white chalk of his mask was scattered on the desk. Kalu couldn’t tell if his friend was lying.
“You just let them ‘pretend’ they’re raping children.” Kalu didn’t need any heat in his voice, the censure boiled out all on its own. It didn’t make sense. This was New Lagos. Those men could find children so easily—why pay Ahmed for a farce? Did Ahmed believe Kalu was naïve enough to fall for this?
The lines by Ahmed’s mouth took on sharp right angles and his voice was a strip of cowhide cracking in the air. “Would you rather they were actually out there doing it?”
Kalu didn’t say anything. He wanted to tell Ahmed that he wasn’t a savior, that any sins these men committed in here were just controlled versions of what they did somewhere else. Kalu wanted to ask him if the young girls in these men’s homes were safe, if you could buy a child’s consent, and if Ahmed knew the answers to these things or, failing that, if he could tell Kalu how much money had been enough to assassinate his curiosity. Instead, Kalu let his eyes close again and felt Ahmed’s hand on his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t have had to see it, Kalu. I’m so sorry. That was a private session for some very rich, very sick people. I wish you had stayed out with the main party, had some fun, unwound a little. I know you’ve been having a tough time of it with Aima leaving.”
Kalu didn’t plan to tell any of his other friends that Aima had left. He already knew how they’d react.
“Why can’t you just marry the girl?” they’d say. “It’s not as if you don’t want to marry her eventually, so what difference does it make if you do it now?”
They had married old girlfriends who were due for a ring, married whomever they happened to be dating when they finished their degrees and got their jobs and the next step was to get married, so they did.
“At least you love her,” they would say. “Marry her, jo. It won’t change anything—you can continue having fun afterward. What’s your problem?”
But Ahmed was different. He understood the small rebellion and what it had cost Kalu. He understood things Kalu didn’t tell anyone else, like how he was struggling to hold on to who he was even as the city tried to strip him of it. Somehow, living here hadn’t affected Ahmed the way it did other people.
“That’s because they don’t know their own dirtiness,” he once told Kalu. “They come here and the rot grows like a weed inside them. Then it’s a year later and they’re surprised by what they’ve sunk to. Me, I started from the gutter, so I was prepared. There was nowhere left for me to sink to.”
Women flocked to his playboy self, to his carnivorous charm and his incisive honesty, tumbling into his bed, some coy, some wild. He had girlfriends, one after the other although never at the same time, which was strange for this city.
The relationships all faltered and died anyway. “They don’t believe I’m real,” Ahmed said.
One of his exes used to email Kalu. “He scares me a little,” she’d written. “It’s like loving a snake who thinks it’s a man and can’t see it’s a snake. The skin doesn’t fit well.”
Those stretches of being single were when Ahmed first threw his parties, and the invitations would find their way to Kalu no matter where he was. He woke up in a hotel in Dubai one December and found thick paper pressed under his breakfast plate. A small note was waiting inside his in-flight magazine on a plane to Amsterdam a few months after that, and a girl he spent a weekend with in Cape Town had whispered quick instructions before she threw on her clothes and left with a smirk. Ahmed had pawns everywhere; the whole thing was a joke to him, a playground.
Kalu had flown to Johannesburg for that murmured invitation, and Ahmed had stayed sober for the entire trip, even during the party. It was after a sour breakup with a woman he’d considered marrying and he was moody, an island of gray surrounded by his colorful guests.
“My women say they want me, but they’re lying to themselves,” he told Kalu, his mouth twisting. It was the first time Kalu had seen anything in the shade of bitter about him, so he just drank his wine and listened.
“They don’t want a real person; they want someone pretending to be a real person, a character fitting himself to the role. They want me to follow the formula.” Ahmed paused and gripped his friend’s shoulder. He did this so often that Kalu’s skin had placeholders for his fingers, shallow grooves waiting for Ahmed’s hand. “Don’t ever fall for the formula, Kalu. It’s a bloody lie. We know better; we know to live outside it; we know how to live true.”
There were times when Ahmed spoke as if he and Kalu were a unit, complicit in their own private freedom. It was true, they were a team; they had been ever since they were children at that boarding school. They had spent their last school holiday together, sharing a room in the family house in Kalu’s hometown. It was night, all suffocating darkness and whining mosquitoes. The boys were sleeping on mats on the floor, and Kalu had been masturbating in the blackness that covered them, his hand repetitive and slick with saliva, his back turned to Ahmed. His orgasm was reluctant to arrive, and his forearm had started to ache, but Kalu gritted his teeth and tried to focus. When Ahmed sighed in exasperation and slid his hand over his friend’s hip bone, Kalu’s heart screamed into a shocked halt. He stopped moving. Ahmed tugged on his side until Kalu rolled over and lay on his back, staring into the darkness and forgetting to breathe.
“Relax,” Ahmed whispered, and his wet hand replaced Kalu’s, stroking and coaxing. Kalu’s heartbeat resumed like a stampede, and he wondered if he should stop what was happening, but then Ahmed flicked with his thumb and slammed his hand to the base and Kalu stopped thinking completely. His body was moving in unplanned ways, a rocking pelvis and a searching hand that reached inside Ahmed’s trousers and found him hard and hotter than white iron. The sound Ahmed made in response to his touch was like an animal in the sweating night, and when he gasped Kalu’s name, Kalu had a fresh understanding of what power could be held in a palm. His forearm forgot that it was ever tired and his ears wanted to hear Ahmed say it again and again, so he moved his hand faster and faster and so did Ahmed and he said Kalu’s name over and over and Kalu wanted to say his name too but it was a seed stuck in his throat and Ahmed said his name; he said his name until the brightness washed the insides of their eyes as they climaxed. In that moment, Ahmed made a monopoly of him. When Kalu finally managed to crack his voice open, his friend was already turning away.
“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.