The Son of Mr. Suleman, page 1
ALSO BY ERIC JEROME DICKEY
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Copyright © 2021 by Eric Jerome Dickey
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CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Eric Jerome Dickey
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Summer 2019
The Secret Life of Pi
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
The Secret Life of Mr. Suleman
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
The Secret Life of Gemma Buckingham
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.
—Anaïs Nin
Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end?
—Stephen Baxter, Proxima
I was too trusting, too naive. I felt like it was all my fault. It would take me years to accept what now seems obvious: rape is not a punishment for poor judgment.
—Chessy Prout, I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope
So long as you remain blindly obedient to your own culture, other cultures would always remain as “other” cultures.
—Abhijit Naskar, Build Bridges Not Walls: In the Name of Americana
Inside each story lives a thousand more tales waiting to be told.
—Eric Jerome Dickey
SUMMER 2019
THE SECRET LIFE OF PI
CHAPTER 1
When gods became bored in heaven they walked among mortals.
The stranger to my green eyes was dressed in a skirt with stunning embellishments and intricate tailoring that rode her curves like a Chevy cruising Riverside Drive at sunrise on a Sunday morning. Her sleeveless blouse was on the same level. Voluptuous woman, thick hips, rounded backside, small waist—an impeccable figure to die for, an hourglass. About five nine without the five-inch heels, she was akin to a movie star in a room of extras. Under her gravitational pull, a victim to the weight of her presence, I watched her as I engaged in conversation with my colleagues.
She stared at this BMFM, this Black man from Memphis, with the same curiosity.
I was thirty-one, five eleven, 180 on the scales fully clothed. Hair short on the sides, six inches of trendy pillow-soft kink from forehead to neck, a radical Black man’s Mohawk. Skin a light ebony brown, the complexion that said sometime after the mass kidnapping in Africa, my ancestry, the bloodline of the first mathematicians, philosophers, kings, and Moors, had been integrated either voluntarily or by force.
We were at an annual repeat of a Cybill Shepherd movie called Being Rose that popped off on Main Street at the state-of-the-art Halloran Centre, an astonishing thirty-nine-thousand-square-foot space big enough for almost four hundred people and open to the public. It had an amazing theater and the night was sponsored by the University Along the Nile. UAN was my alma mater, and where I worked as an adjunct. By someone determined to take control of both my career and my life, I’d been mandated to socialize.
When the open event moved to the ultraprivate reception at the Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium, we peeped at each other across the room. The UAN after-party was a high-priced classy affair with plenty of alcohol and finger food, where they played Marc Cohn’s hit song “Walking in Memphis” on repeat. I took in her amber skin and cute smile. She had dimples, those beautiful indentations, plus freckles and a pronounced chin cleft that gave her face symmetry. Wide eyes paired perfectly with pillow-soft lips, soup coolers painted dark with mystery. Simply. Gorgeous. Beautiful enough to make it impossible to ignore. Her eyebrows were on point, but her lashes were an omen, two black butterflies confronting me each time I spied her way.
I went to her, but not too fast, not with thirst, introduced myself. “Professor Pi Suleman, UAN.”
“I’m Gemma Buckingham, from Brixton.”
She walked slowly, an invitation, and I moved with her at a snail’s pace.
Without preface she said, “Meghan really is beautiful, innit?”
“Thee Stallion?”
“Meghan Markle.”
“Everyone is beautiful to someone.”
“Even a stallion.”
British humor touched American hip-hop humor and we laughed.
I asked, “Big fan of the duchess?”
She beamed. “I’m in America. Her America. I get to see how she lived. I get to see her world.”
There were murals and displays on Native American pottery, which spoke to us as we strolled with the crowd. She nodded in approval at pre-Columbian relics, the same with Clyde Parke’s Miniature Circus, then became interested in the fossils and dinosaurs, mounted animals. She took in our past in silence. For thirty minutes she became a student. She wasn’t interested in the displays on World War I and II, had no idea who the significant Black Memphians were, but she read the identifiers for the history exhibitions that focused on the roles of song and cotton in my city on the Nile, tuned in on the exhibit regarding the changing roles of women.
We paused in a living room with adornments from the 1920s.
I continued talking as if we’d never paused the conversation, said, “Brixton?”
“London, where American Meghan Markle moved, only to be ridiculed and treated harshly.”
“Ridiculed?”
“For being mixed race. As if that means subhuman. They’ve attacked her mother as well.”
I nodded. “For being gifted with melanin.”
“Incessantly. By the tabloids. Battered on Twitter by racists. Waves of abuse and harassment.”
“Racism that bad over there?”
“Not as blatant as here, but yeah. The West End is hostile. My sisters get charged twice as much to enter a bloody club. Some have had to change names to get jobs. I swear to you, it’s unending. A cesspool of racism. Worse for Meghan than anyone. Being American has exacerbated the issue.”
“I bet she regrets that choice, same as Princess Di did.”
“What should be a fairy tale has become a nightmare. I feel her pain and depression.”
“Had no idea.” I stroked my soft beard. “The nasty Thames is your muddy Mississippi.”
The transition was awkward, but her body language told me it was appreciated.
“Pretty much. You’re landlocked here. You have the river, but that’s not like having a real beach. Only a fool would get in those nasty waters. So sad you have to drive six hours to Dauphin Beach.”
We stopped moving and I smiled a little more, fascinated. “You grew up on a beach?”
“No, but I could get a train from London Victoria to Brighton Beach in an hour.”
“Still, we both grew up in port cities.”
“Mine has over thirty bridges connecting East and West End; yours has only has two.”
“Yeah. The Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and the New Bridge, the Hernando de Soto Bridge.”
“So, tell me about the University Along the Nile.”
Wearing my best smile, I told her what made the UAN Pharaohs stand out was the main building, which cost three hundred million dollars and was a duplicate of the defunct glass pyramid that sat on the Mississippi. We had fifteen- to thirty-foot-high statues of Egypt’s pharaohs across the yard.
“How large is UAN? Sounds massive.”
“UAN has about twenty-two thousand people, seventy countries represented, three hundred areas of study, one hundred seventy buildings. There are sixty statues of pharaohs, mini-pyramids, and Egyptian hieroglyphics placed over a thousand acres, which makes the campus a museum from end to end. It takes twenty minutes to walk the yard.”
She said, “Wasn’t there a terrifying incident at UAN a few days ago?”
“Almost. We had word some racist was on the way. He’d posted his intentions on social media. He made it on campus. The active-shooter alarm sounded, and UAN was put on lockdown for a few hours. Our security had the racist cornered by the Little Pyramid until he surrendered.”
“So you’re famous.”
“We were mentioned on CNN.”
Gemma Buckingham said, “Everyone I passed seemed to be in little groups, whispering like it’s a bloody secret. They talk so loudly, then whisper concerning certain topics, but they are bloody whispering louder than their regular speaking voices. Almost everyone in here uses their outside voices.”
“UAN is a proud uni, so of course we talk about the attack by a lone-wolf, southern-fried terrorist in whispers, the way southerners do all of their families’ dirty laundry.”
She said, “Also overheard campus police here are like the military in Israel.”
“With all the campus shootings in the USA, and with a couple threats directed at UAN for some unknown reason, the university thought it was a good idea to let the security company they had contracted go and hire the Aggressive Six to protect the students. They’re a team made up of steroid-chomping men built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Cena, the Rock, Rambo, Lou Ferrigno as Hercules, and Popeye the Sailor. They are some mean motherfuckers, no doubt paid to be that way.”
She laughed at my descriptions, then mocked me, “Motherfuckers.”
“Pardon my French.”
“In French motherfucker would be enculés or enculées, perhaps connard, couillon, or conasse.”
“Lots of ways to call someone a motherfucker in France.”
“Because there are a lot of motherfuckers in Paris.”
We laughed together.
Her scent was erotic, the kind that made a mortal fall in love with a deity.
She grinned. “By the way, love your Memphis accent.”
“I thought you had the Brixton accent. My bad.”
“Southern, wise, deep, intellectual. You’re an African American Matthew McConaughey.”
“He wishes he had my swag.”
“If only you were the rule and not the exception.”
“Something happen?”
She chuckled. “I took an Uber to Graceland, had the ultimate VIP tour to see your royalty. Not exactly Kensington Palace or Windsor Castle. Interesting décor, to say the least. I paid two hundred US and saw Elvis’s collection of over-the-top jumpsuits, his famous pink Cadillac, the gold records, jets.”
“That whole strip, Elvis Presley Boulevard, is dedicated to the King from end to end.”
“Noticed that. I realized I was in what is called Whitehaven, saw a mall nearby, thought it would be akin to Knightsbridge.”
“Oh boy.”
“I thought the circus was in town. One fellow talked so loudly, bragged about how much he spent for his forty-six-inch rims. Must one have rims so ginormous it makes your car look like a bloody clown car?”
We laughed at her snark.
She asked, “What’s your name again?”
“Professor Pi Suleman.”
“Professor.”
“Pi. Call me Pi.”
“Pie? My weakness, especially a meat pie, a good posh pie. What’s yours?”
“Not the food, the number 3.14.”
“The mathematical constant.”
“Been called worse by my own skinfolk.”
“Curious. Why did your mother name you Pi, Pi?”
I paused. “Because I was born on March fourteenth.”
“You were born on Pi Day. This is truly odd. Talk about odd birthdays.”
“Yours?”
“April twentieth.”
I laughed. “For real? You’re a four-twenty baby?”
“It seems to be a big deal here in this part of America, not so much where I’m from.”
“You were born on Colorado’s get-high day. A day to celebrate marijuana.”
“If I’d been an American, I would’ve been called Marijuana and teased all my bloody life.”
I said, “You’re a Taurus.”
“And you?”
“Pisces.”
“I used to be all into Zodiac signs when I was a teenager.”
I asked, “What you remember?”
“Taurus needs a physical connection; Pisces are emotional. But are supposed to have amaze-balls sex.”
“Gemma.”
“Gemma Buckingham, if that is not too much to ask. Hate to bother, but I’m particular.”
As we stood to the side, Blacks chatting among whites who occasionally spied our way with suspicious eyes, as if we needed to integrate for their comfort, I asked, “What’s your IG?”
