Before the Night takes Us - 1. Chapter 1

Despite his tri-annual testimonies to God’s grace, Yinka still did not believe in God. His atheism was not the careful result after a delicate balancing of the ledgers on faith and reason. An opulent joke, he preferred to think of it, something to titillate the God that probably existed, at the very least the brothers and sisters of the church he regularly attended. But really the reasons were more mundane. Laziness was more like it—the laziness of his spirit at failing to grasp the miracle of the heart. And flying a Cessna 172, beholding below the puckered Los Angeles landscape, he could believe in a kind of god—the god of loss.

“There’s a falcon jet five miles ahead of you. Stay north of the approach,” the traffic controller said.

For a shameful moment, Yinka worried about the color of the coral bead bracelets on his wrists before saying into the transmitter, “I’ll remain north of the approach.”

Beneath him sparkled an array of lights, floating reds, boulevard of oranges riding up to the cracked egg of the Santa Monica Mountains, and there, a tree stood resplendent and phosphorescent, embossed against the edge of the world where sea met sky. Loss drummed in him profoundly. His breath was slipping away, and his arms hot, heavy. The dials of the dashboard had coalesced into a gunky luminescent black. He could cry, but Naomi Cohn would not approve.

He glanced at her blue-green-lined fingers gripping the edge of her seat. She seemed to drowning beneath the drab blur of her loose linen blouse and trouser.

“You’re going to overshoot the runway,” she said.

“They haven’t cleared us to land yet. But yes, probably I could overshoot the runway.”

“Oh rats! Bruce should have been flying this.”

At last he squeezed out a second of disgust at the scent of honeysuckle and cucumbers that had stubbornly clung to her during their four hours of a do-or-die day in the sun and clung still even at a 6000ft altitude.

He said, “I think I could crash us into the Getty Villa. Takes a load off my mind …”

Naomi glowered. The twilight could scarcely hide three score and ten years’ worth of sun damage, chemical peels, Winston lights, three am dirty martinis, scrawled over her face.

She tucked back the sides of her grey bob in a queenly manner. “For the sake of complete disclosure before we are charred and smoldering among Roman busts and Rembrandts. I never thought your mud-caked Dinka tush was ever good enough for my son.”

Perhaps another fifty years or sixty before the fact of his being a Nigerian of Yoruba ancestry, not a Dinka of Somalian ancestry, would fasten a knot in her Swiss cheese brain, but he did not care if she ever corrected herself. There was a familiar comfort in her not learning, as it bolstered his faith in inertia, in the weak little demigods that tried to keep order, stability and predictability.

He shook his head and said, “Things ended up well enough despite Bruce needing a less narcissistic mother. Still I can’t complain, as you aren’t my mother…”

The whirr of the 180 horsepower engines shredded the minutes. Just when the traffic controller cleared him to land on runway 21 of the Santa Monica Airport, he realized he did not even remember what his own mother looked like.

“Here’s to dying.” He quirked a smile back to Naomi looking green against the window and made preparations for landing.

He could have put a little more power when the landing gear hit the ground. Other than that, landing was a flawless blur, and helping Mrs. Cohn out of the aircraft was a diffident blur. Offloading her Birkin bag however ended with his arm revolting with pain, and the bag was overturned on the tarmac.

Pain like hot wires coiling tighter and tighter around his arms was hosing down his senses. Utterly restrained, he glanced away from Mrs. Cohn’s liquid fire eyes to the tree embossed on the western sky, pulsing green and yellow against the ochre underbelly of clouds. The name of the tree had since being condemned to the graves of his irretrievable past, but that tree, that damn imposition that had stolen his bland sky for the past three months—What was he going to do about it?

It was a thundering of pain at the shoulders jolted him back to the damson bag askew on the ground. He carefully picked up the bag and handed it over to her.

She kept hitting and slapping the bag as if the injustice could be whacked out of mind. “Be careful with it next time, all right? The bag costs more than the fly-infested hut you grew up in.”

“It cost a little too much, don’t you think?”

Yinka enjoyed watching her huff away to the yellow-lighted entrance with the I-will-not-go-gently-into-the-night gait. Not that her irritation kindled his fascination, but her particularity that must had been battered and dashed over the years and yet still steadfast in her twilight years. Rather her kind resurrected his faith in the weak little demigods that had betrayed him by evincing him of that damned tree, the igi buruku after twenty-five years of blue skies

The weak little gods had particularly failed him again that Saturday morning. He had woken up panting and drenched in sweat, and with the untraceable sounds of panicked sobs wracking from the nucleus of his mind. The tedious phone message from the detective Bill Marot proclaiming fire and retribution spoiled his black tea breakfast. And on his happy drive to the airport, he calculated and recalculated the probability of running into a willing wanting boy amid the azure delights of Catalina Island. Only to run into an irate Mrs. Cohn, who had been waiting for him—apparently Bruce had told her that they were all going to enjoy a little excursion. Bruce could not reached to explain himself. And it was too complicated for Yinka cancel the trip or to explain the truth to a spasmodic Naomi in the middle of the bustling hangar.

Igi buruku, Yinka cursed as he strode across the unnatural brightness of the lobby to the front desk. Tall, composed, a slight sneer to gloss his soft looks, Yinka crafted his swagger over the years in an obsessive end to project a strong and true name long lost to himself. A fool’s errands perhaps in land not of his own, but he had to try. It was the American way. But all his solid strides did not do much to erase the apprehensive feelings, which like an untraceable mephitic whiff, colored the watching souls. And these days the apprehension felt even more palpable, more so the inquisition in watchers’ stares, and the irrefragable fact of his wooly hair, his thick lips, his flat nose, in a hangar full of white people

“Well, Peter, the trip must have been nice.” the front desk clerk asked, handing him paperwork to sign.

He thought her sentiment was a good first effort, but still dull. It was more entertaining to browbeat her tense eyes.

“Clear skies, a quiet day, and now a spoiled appetite. I can’t say it was terrible. Would you?” He signed the form with a florid intimidating hand.

“Happy Easter ….” the clerk said unsurely.

“And you too, Tricia—I forget, you’re Jewish. I guess not.”

He turned away from her pale face to attend to Mrs. Cohn. To her caustic chagrin, her husband had entreated Yinka to drive her back home to their Santa Monica home.

Her silence in the car was touching. Perhaps the silence was a prayer for darkness to engulf the maniacally glittering store signs, or for a swift gale to knock over the youth shamelessly skipping across the sidewalk. Perhaps just a supplication to the absent moon to appear and make their only son have pity on her osteoporosic bones. If only a nice Jewish girl could open his eyes. If only he could feel what joy it would give her to hold a grandchild in her arthritic hands.

Yinka considered telling her the truth. Then again kindness was a weapon, not a gift.

Then he made the final left for her house. Yinka helped her out of the car and stayed back by the doors as she made her proud trudge down the lighted footpath. Her invitation to come inside was not unexpected as was his firm decline, but then she replied, “With your manners today, I’d bet Bruce won’t miss your insufferable company. You’re coming inside.” And the unnamable feeling infusing him was unexpectedly disarming.

But the right to mope alone in the dark of his apartment—he was going to have to deploy all the bazookas of his courage to defend it. A squall of a leathery smell piqued him to the front door where her husband was gangling down the stairs to meet them. Yinka cringed, thinking about the one young bastard withering somewhere in a nightmare, a courtesy of collections agencies, all because the youth had the temerity to disagree indecorously with Naomi.

Yinka locked his car and readied a smile for Abraham.

“Naomi dear, go easy on Peter. He did you a huge favor flying you out to Catalina Island on short notice.”

“He was sure to let me know that on every second of the trip.” She muttered as Abraham gave her a hand, but she had better plans that did not involve his hand. “You go on inside and fix us both a dirty martini. And you Peter, help me to the kitchen. You’re going to have try something African I was planning for a potluck.”

Obedience is a comforting compact. Submission was traded for the spectre of stability, and a good enough exchange for Yinka guiding her up the stairs, caressing the soft boniness of her hand, ushering her into the wood veneer impressions of the kitchen. Then he excused himself to call Bruce to let him know he would be late coming home.

He eyed hawkishly through the verandah screen doors Abraham and Naomi, who were standing by the kitchen counter and apprising themselves of the cool quiet sun that had blessed the day. With a pain contorting his arm, he closed the glass door resolutely to shut off their marital murmurs.

He took a minute to examine his bracelets in the lights. All twelve of the beads, marshmallow-cut coral, still retained their red-pink color. He thought, so far so good, then called Bruce.

Bruce picked up on the first ring, which was damn precious of him, rather wonderfully earnest of the man who during their relationship could not be bothered to speak on the phone unless if it was he who did the calling. Yinka, however, was none the charmed by the bass notes of his excitement and enthusiasm.

“Crocky, you called me.” Bruce was breathless. “Shit, damn. How about dinner tonight at Nobu to celebrate baby steps. I know, I know a bit forward, but you got to fire all the cylinders to shoot into orbit.”

“How about you tell your parents that we have split up?” said Yinka, a little afraid that his gritty tone had carried through the glass doors.

“Crocky come on, ‘split up’? Fuck is that what it is now? I prefer the term temporary disengagement. Anyway I was going to call them until you called me. Things are little busy for me now. Shrimp face is itching to shove me off the Beijing project. Help me out here. I can’t fight a three-front war.”

“I suggest a five-course dinner of beaver munching.”

“Seriously I haven’t fucked Leah in over two weeks.”

Yinka neighed a chuckle at the brazen lie. “Please fuck her and leave me alone and tell your parent’s we’ve split up already.”

“Crocky …”

The grapefruit tree, its branches like curlicues in the moonless dark, quivered in the scented breeze. Yinka abandoned himself to the sweet and sickly scent filling the cold night.

“I’m already at your parent’s place—but you already knew that—I’ll going to tell them myself.”

“Please, please for the love of everything holy, don’t do that.”

“Not my problem, emu.”

“Aww, I’m your darling emu again, huh? Cruel no to declare emu’s sad fate? Look, tomorrow evening, I’ll pick you up, and we’ll smooth this over hundred dollar sushi.”

Yinka turned his back on the dark, and to light dusting the living room. “I need to go. Your mother’s getting irritable.”

“Why won’t you let me be nice?” A few seconds of Yinka eye rolling, Naomi glaring, Abraham mollifying her with another martini, and Bruce said again, “If you tell them, I’ll tell the detective about the bloody mess in the bathroom.”

Yinka fleered. That Bruce Emmanuel Cohn still being the same vicious prick he met eight years ago was deliciously heartening, but good cheer could not eclipse the cruel calculus of the threat.

“All right,” he said readily.

“Yinka,” Bruce said, invariably ruining the proper tones of his name, “I did not enjoy that one bit. I hate it when you make me play hardball.”

Yinka did not mind at all. People will do anything to maintain their position: slit the throat of their virginal daughters, disown their only heirs, repudiate the one and only person who was their chance at happiness—anything really, himself not even excepted. If anything, he was a tad bothered that in the past two weeks Bruce had not mentioned the blood in the bathroom. What else had he missed?

Abraham had a martini waiting for him, and again he had gone too strong on olive juice. Still the drink had a soothing bite; it was delightful enough to make the uxorious Abraham seem handsomely manful, certainly strong enough to erode the daggers in Naomi’s squibs. But when she brandished upon the counter a plate of rice topped with the spinach and onions extrusions of palaver sauce, no drink could quell the nauseous mutiny in his gullet.