Born and raised in Nigeria, Vincent Anioke is now a software engineer at Google Canada. His stories and essays have appeared in MIT Technology Review, Callaloo, and Literary Orphans, among others. Follow his stories on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.
It took our second encounter for me to guess, and the third to be sure, but his hair was alive. It breathed its own breath, as sentient beings do, and revealed its fearlessness in the wild swings it took, the delicately combed dreadlocks, the coiffed and oily Afro, the knotted braids that cascaded past his neck like a waterfall, stopping just short of the tip of his spine, from which wings would sprout if man could fly.
He never brought it up. I didn’t either. I suppose it became one of those axioms that settles into the background, even as it continuously shifts, like the clothes we wear, or the meals we eat. No, when we communed about hair, it was always mine. How did I want it today? Number 1 or Number 2? Skin-faded or slightly taller? And for the beard, he could leave it dark and full but sculpted, or remove it entirely, or settle somewhere in the middle for a stubble. I always got the same thing, but he always asked, and I liked that he always asked.
The scissors snipped. The clipper whistled in a low drone. Hair fell like cashews shaken from a tree: bunches of it at first, pieces big enough to fill your fist, then smaller bits, soft stone landing on my cloth-covered lap, on the floor of his living room, the quartered-off section of it near the front door where he set up the pillow-topped chair and the slanted body-length mirror and wrapped the black fabric around my neck, never too tight.
He asked how Calculus 101 was going, and I said I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t too hard yet. At seven weeks in, it wasn’t supposed to be, but I could tell I would struggle when integrals and derivative equations popped up. I had them highlighted in green marker, on sheaves of paper Professor Markham had handed out on the first day of class. A thick filled-in circle over the narrow typeface of “Week 11” and “Week 12,” when they would jump from the confines of the page to populate my nightmares.
“Or maybe a good dream,” he said, blowing on bee-buzzing blades. Particles of hair and dust fell to the ground. In the glow of his tall lamp, reposed beside me, they looked like sunlit snow. “You haven’t failed yet. You probably won’t. Be confident.”
I could not respond because the clipper was moving around my mustache now, dancing along the terrain of my upper lip. At his direction, I turned my mouth inward, allowing him to expose and excavate any stray follicles in hiding.
“How’s your girlfriend doing?” I asked, when his focus shifted to under my neck, where the shrubbery knotted like interlocked fingers. He raked through the bowtie tufts with a metal comb, and I felt them resist at first, reluctant, slightly ashamed, and then part. The initial wave of...not pain exactly simmered into an almost ticklish comfort.
“She’s good, good,” he said. “I finally met her parents at their brownstone cottage near Woodson Lake; you know where that is, right?”
I shook my head, at least as much as one could when fingers fanned over the top of their scalp, holding it in place to unleash a second wave on thinning sideburns.
“It’s not far from here, a ninety-minute drive, maybe two hours with traffic on the 401. Well, I don’t want to say they’re racist, but I don’t think they like me. She made them sound like Golden Retrievers, all sunny and energetic, but they were cold.”
“Frosty the Snowmen.”
He pulled away from me to shake with laughter, the animated kind with bent knees and a palm on your chest. “Exactly. I hope it’s something else; maybe they were tired that day, cuz it was pretty late. I don’t know.”
I thought he did. In these lands, where snowfall was not just fiction plumbed from the movies, a young truth was taking shape, gleaned from thinly-pressed smiles and hastened footsteps, from the evanescent glances of passersby on winter streets. It wasn’t malice, not particularly, but it wasn’t home either, where a stranger’s approach bore no weight. There was an ever-present guardedness, taut in the air like an unspoken rule. In its recognition, I curled beside dew-tainted windows on twilight mornings. I watched droplets form on glass panes, tiny contorted mirrors. Tears traced snake-paths on my face until my eyes reddened and the hiccups started. I’d traveled a thousand miles to seek the future; instead, I found faces that turned away in proximity to mine. I found all the ways my tongue’s tip buried words in a silent graveyard.
The first time we met, I found necromancy.
Back then, he still worked at the Student Center Barbershop, tragically named Stylez For All. Four chairs were available, but I took his without hesitation. His fingers probed my skin. His questions probed my mind. I wondered about this alien energy, vivid, curious, slightly unnerving. Even back home, I often lingered in the shadows, the back corners of large crowds, the places where the sun couldn’t reach. In the sight of too many eyes, my voice had a way of crumbling, like beach sand tugged by waves. It crumbled even faster in this world, where on my first day, I learned from a garrulous taxi driver that I had an accent.
So my responses emerged slowly. They arrived in bursts of one or two words, the air of a customer intent on keeping a transaction a transaction. But he laughed easily; his questions never ceased. That day, a snapper turtle let loose of its shell, released it to the faltering sand dunes, the crashing waters, and stepped into the light, slowly still, but ever onward.
He left Stylez shortly after. When I asked why, he simply shrugged. Later, he said he wanted to run his own salon. Another day, he said he would determine and then return to his ancestral roots; he would live on the warm shores of Cameroon or Ivory Coast. Then he talked about managing a designer clothing store in the Caribbean. In any case, this city, which had thus far circumscribed the entirety of his life and his parents’ lives, would not be where his story ended. He said the world was too small for that.
He promised not to surrender my fate to the three remaining “incompetents” of Stylez. Only if I were willing. It was strange at first, watching my hair collect on his carpeted floor, while muffled conversation and a whiff of stewed chicken wafted from the apartment next door. But strange had a way of dissipating when a thing became two and then more.
Stranger yet was hearing my voice, unwavering, say, “If Mr. and Mrs. Frosty don’t fuck with you, that’s their loss. Hers, too.”
“Amen. So tell me, who has your heart these days?”
“Nobody. I’m going to be a monk for the next six months.”
“Right.” He scrubbed the back of my head with a wood-backed brush. “That’s what all the players say.”
Words didn’t always fill the din. Sometimes, there was silence, the kind that shapes itself like a high-backed chair, one you could sink into and close your eyes and feel the breeze of an overhead fan on your scalp.
In the last month of my past life, my ex-girlfriend and I had discovered that forever and always had an expiry date, that the flames of twin beating hearts couldn’t burn across vast blue oceans. She cried on my shoulder, and I held her tightly, wishing I could summon the words from the stew of them frothing in my mind, wishing I could twist and turn them into a small gift, offered to her.
Here. This takes the pain away.
I was no alchemist.
All she and I had left was the silence of that lingering moment, and I realized, when I stopped fighting so much, that it wasn’t so bad. Soft voices whispered beneath her tears, light on my cheek; they murmured in the grazing brush of her perfumed hair.
There was nothing so grand now, not with him, or perhaps it was grander; perhaps the tranquility was communion, the kind of covenant that allowed one to grant his bare throat to the bladed hand of another.
“Get ready,” he said, turning a bottle of liquor-scented aftershave onto several cotton balls. I used to be a church-goer. Liberated from the watchful eyes of devout parents, I hadn’t gone in weeks, but I recalled how, at the end of mass, the priest would dip his gold-tinted aspergillum in a goblet of holy water and sprinkle sanctified droplets on the faithful, purging us of our sins. Mama and Papa closed their eyes so tight when the mist descended on their faces, supplicating hands raised to an arched ceiling. On my skin, the drizzle felt like the dotted javelin pricks of an unwanted sneeze.
I found true penance in these damp cotton balls, massaged into the pores of my neck and scalp, stinging fire trailing his motion. I closed my eyes and released a low stream of air through gritted teeth.
“So dramatic,” he said, unhooking the barber cloth from my neck and shaking it with a magician’s flourish. “You’re all set, boss.”
This was the covenant’s conclusion, the promise fulfilled. In front of his mirror, my head turned left and right, this time at my behest. It lifted in the direction of his tiled ceiling, where speckled stains gathered like brown constellations on a white sky, so that the otherwise hidden parts of my jaw glistened in the reflection.
Last night, I had surveilled myself similarly, running two fingers through the untidy forage that framed my face. I had pinched my cheeks, twisting them in the nip between my thumbs and index fingers, wondering if it was their jowls, or the melanin, or the tricks of a paranoid mind, that robbed me so profoundly of solidity.
“Hello,” I said then, dragging out each syllable, listening to the way the words bent and lilted as they left my throat, ears seeking the accent, what they called it when you sounded like another.
The alchemy of his own mirror was in seeing how newly-cut hair sat on my skin. How it breathed its own life, birthing a smile I could not hide even if I tried. To communicate the extent of it all was hard, and possibly strange, and would take forever anyway, so I simply said, “Thank you. It looks really good.”
I counted three neat tens from my wallet. He bunched them inside a fist and slid them into his pocket. “You look ready to roam the streets. Right now, mothers are hiding their daughters.”
I chuckled. “Nah. I’m probably going straight to bed.”
As I worked my feet into my shoes, a small puddle forming from the thaw of snow-covered soles, he picked up a broom and swept all the liberated hair into a dustpan, where they coalesced in a single blob.
He said, “I’m a night owl, so I’ll probably be up watching TV. I don’t like horror movies because I believe in all of it, the ghosts, the demons, the trapped souls, but I rented this one online.”
I grabbed my jacket from atop the cherry shoe bench he had by the front door, filled with his many red sneakers, and flanked by two potted plants, their brownish-green fronds bending. “What’s it about?”
“A serial killer, hunting two mute buddies at their cottage. My friend already told me they win at the end, so I think I’ll be okay to watch it.”
Clad in my jacket, I was ready to leave, to step out into the world again, with its solemn rules and steady march of new deadlines. Except I wasn’t.
“Hey,” I said. Drums came to life in my chest, banging and thrumming. “I don’t have anything planned for the rest of the night. Do you mind if I watch it with you?”
He went still for a moment, long enough for me to ponder how well-received it might be if the ground parted beneath my feet, and a void swallowed me whole. Then he beamed, that wide smile of his that revealed shiny teeth.
“Sure, bro, come on. Get your ass on the couch. I’ll grab us drinks from the fridge.” I reversed the last thirty seconds, shaking off my jacket and then my right shoe and then my left shoe. I walked past the little corner of the living room that had always defined the extent of my reach here, the entryway portion of it with the indented chair and the swept-up hair and the slanted mirror. I moved on to new territory, where his mahogany-brown couch, aged by gray lines and bits of leaking foam, faced the television. Beside it, a coffee table sparkled with half-full bottles of bourbon and dog-eared books about Commonwealth nations. A mini-fridge sat in the corner, and he squatted before it, rummaging within.
I sank onto the couch and accepted a bottle from him. It was an unfamiliar double IPA, its green surface polka-dotted with flaming skulls. The tang was bitter in my throat.
“That’s strong,” I said.
He plopped beside me, taking several steady chugs from a second bottle. “That’s nothing.”
I scoffed. “Let’s see how tough you are when the killer shows up waving a giant machete.” I hadn’t eaten much today, and already, I could feel a heady buzz, liberating my anchored thoughts so that they floated like clouds. He chuckled and raised his arm. Our bottles clinked. The sound was a single dulcet note, stolen from an orchestra’s symphony, lingering overhead.
On the screen, over brooding synths, a masked man approached a cottage in the middle of the woods.
