“Pal, to be honest with you, I don’t even fuck with Asian girls like that.” He’s sipping coffee, saying this. His arm on the bar. This was before they started tearing out the old dais. 

“That’s real. Yet we’re here, surrounded. Besiged. Buried alive, this whole world of Asian girls without asses. Wrap your mind around it. Think about what all this means. Black heroes. That’s you, that’s me. In exile, from a country that despised us. Stubbed us out. That crushed us, a thousand times over. We were humiliated, spat upon by women. The idea of an artistic life was unthought of, an absolutely-  

“No, right. Listen, can I take the room for a couple of hours? I can barely stand up anymore.” I said. Could have been that I was hiding it. Maybe I was pissed off, maybe, but more than that I was exhausted . . .

That’s what it was like. Suffocating. Purple lights along the ceiling. Third floor, the Wing-Wah, no windows. The mirrors. A maze of mirrors, and hallways, and once the image sneaks in, it’s over everything, every surface, and when I closed my eyes I could still see Khira rearing back, stretched out on the bed, Benoit gripping deep into the flesh of her waist, fucking and spanking her, and I don’t even remember what day it is, night or day, or if I was even sleeping or not . . . 

And everybody’s got problems! Waking up in the stairwell, rolled in my jacket. Green sequins, throbbing, painful hard-on. Get up, stocking feet, the hallways. Out into the palace, the Wing Wah. And weird without the music, the floodlights, with scaffolding all around. I sat down with the Chinese carpenters, the three of them, in flip-flops, they stopped to give me a once over, then back to laughing, eating. I lit a cigarette. By now I could tell it wasn’t a stage they were building, rather, a tri-level, wraparound couch. Artistic, if that wasn’t exactly the word. Benoit was a megalomanic, that was his deal. My problem was I now spent too much time trying not to think about Khira. Khira, with her watergun at the faucet, holding it up to the light, tracing bubbles in the tubes. Khira, laughing, teaching me the Cantonese words, watching cartoons . . . Khira. And just about everyone you meet thinks they own you.

Uzodinma Okehi writes and draws a zine called Blue Okoye.