Feb 25, 2057, 0031 Hours (UTC +3)
Addis Ababa, Pan-Republic of the Horn
Club Athens
Tarik’s favorite liquor was honey brandy and his favorite brand was called Negus because they back-sweetened their brandy with more honey, ginger, and cardamom. The tej his mother brewed was lighter than a brandy and more sour, but Negus reminded him of it, so it was his drink of choice. In summer he had it chilled, in winter warmed, and never with anything in it but ice cubes or a slice of lemon depending on the season. Aisha, owner of Club Athens, made sure his glass never ran empty.
The Ice Cream Boys had a corner table to themselves where they held court and B and C-circle socialites who were acquainted with them came to pay homage and, more importantly, block the path to Tarik Haile so randoms couldn’t bother him. Sure, they were probably sycophants and hangers-on, but they were sycophants and hangers-on who were familiar enough with Tarik that they wouldn’t badger him for autographs and photos and stories from the Unification Wars.
Paths were made for pretty waitresses in short dresses who delivered bottle after bottle to the table, flirting the whole time. Keeping things free and loose on the flirting front required Tarik to intervene and make sure it didn’t involve money or favors exchanging hands. He did this by tipping the enter bar—from dishwashers to DJs—ahead of time. Even in a Pan-Democracy continually rearranging itself to make sure everyone got what they needed and most of what they wanted, there was still the tacky desperation Tarik didn’t care for. So the people around him put up with his eccentricities in trying to sanitize the flirting game to the extent he could.
“It’s fun, but treat it like the fun it is,” Tarik told Joe with his arm around the 20 year-old’s shoulder. Both were pretty drunk by this point. “If you want something real you gotta search for a woman with your soul, not your cock.”
Joe laughed, but there was something off-put in the laugh, so Tarik pulled his arm back and repaired the mood with some self-deprecation. “But I’m drunk and old, so don’t listen to me. Make your own mistakes, kiddo!”
“I know, I know. It’s just hard, gwad. Girls my age don’t want something real. Or, I’ll think they’re loving on me, and then suddenly they start asking about you,” Joe said.
That part genuinely hurt Tarik. He knew it happened, but the other guys had stopped telling him when women pulled that. Maybe because it happened too frequently. Of course, women did the same thing to him, getting him excited and then all of a sudden letting slip they were trying to sleep with the handsome pilot from the TV and not Tarik Haile, the man right in front of them. What he was looking for—and what he was looking for for his boys—was a nice, stable woman who could help make a nest and wanted to know him for who he was and not the piece of machinery he piloted. Did such a species exist in the club? Tarik doubted it. But he also hadn’t met any in church or in public either, so maybe women like that didn’t exist anymore.
Done with that thought, Tarik stood straight up, bottle of Negus in hand and shouted, “Yo! It’s disco time, baby! Let’s get some disco!”
The 20s EDM playing over the booming speakers was switched up with a cheesy record-scratch and replaced with the sparkling melodies of European Nu-disco. Tarik waded through the crowd to the dance floor where everybody was hitting the Addis hustle, wheeling and turning and throwing out their limbs like God had them on puppet strings running them through the master groove plan. Tarik himself was the beating disco heart underneath the ball lights and it seemed wherever he moved and wherever he grooved the whole crowd moved and grooved with him. This was some Garden of Eden-type fun where sin and darkness couldn’t penetrate and the vibes were as immaculate as outer space.
After a timeless stretch of disco, ice and tingles ran along the disco membrane and Tarik realized something was off. Dancers slowly stopped dancing and drinks were going down and phones were coming up.
“Then do something, fucking pussy!”
It was Mehari’s voice. People moved aside for Tarik as he ran to find out why his friend was angry amidst a wonderland of disco. What he found was Mehari squaring up with a significantly larger and more muscular man beside the bar and an attractive, long-haired woman on the stool between them.
“Oh, there he is! There’s your owner, doggie. Play time’s over and you’re going back to the kennel,” said the guy Mehari was arguing with.
“Get fucked by a donkey and die from it, loser nobody,” Mehari said.
“Me? A nobody? I stand on my own two feet, boyo. I don’t ride anyone’s coattails. And I don’t let another man tell me what I can fucking do in the club. Gwad.”
“You wanna find out what I can do? Huh?” Mehari said, drawing his fists up.
“Ey! Ey! Ey! Mehari let it go, brother,” Tarik said, stepping in front of Mehari and pressing his palm to his chest. “He’s using us for reputation and you’re giving him what he wants. Chill, gwad. Just relax. You’re better than this.”
The larger man laughed and reached in front of the woman to take a swig of her beer. Her chin was tucked down, but Tarik caught a glimpse of a grin on her face. Getting the two of them to fight had been her goal, no doubt, and now her eyes were flicking to him, looking to see if the TOCU pilot would deign to notice her. On that point, she succeeded, but it certainly did not make her seem more attractive.
“All good vibes, brother. All good vibes! Just let your boy herd you around like a sheep, tell you who you can and can’t fuck with. No woman wants to be with a boy like that you know,” the man said, beating his chest.
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He was being too obvious now, Tarik thought. Mehari could see right through the provocation. The other Ice Cream Boys and the club bouncers and Aisha were walking over now to settle the dispute and kick the guy out. No one would be on his side, including the woman they were arguing over, and once everything was resolved and the club was back to its natural state, everyone could get back to disco dancing their worries away.
But Mehari punched the guy in the face.
There were gasps from the crowd, the loudest from Tarik. Unfortunately, Mehari was not a fighter, so the blow only succeeded in hurting his hand on the man’s jaw. His opponent blinked and, realizing his gambit had succeeded, grabbed Mehari’s collar and used it to guide his own fist into Mehari’s cheek. One punch from the stronger man was all it took to drop Mehari. Seeing the crowd was going to let him fall, Tarik lunged to grab Mehari before he banged his head while Kaleb, Joe, Yonas, and Neway rushed the guy.
“No! Not in here! Stop!” Aisha said, sprinting over in high heels.
Tarik wasn’t able to see how it happened, but apparently the man missed one of the other Ice Cream Boys and caught Tarik with a blow to the forehead. There was a dull throb, but it didn’t hurt that bad. More surprising was the shock that he’d been punched, a shock he shared with the entire crowd, including the man himself who looked down at Taric in horror, holding knuckles most likely broken.
“Shit! Gwa— Mr. Haile, I didn’t mean to—”
“Hands behind your head!”
Tarik heard screams and shuffling feet and people shouting “gun!” He exhaled as though he could breathe this nightmare out of existence. When it didn’t work, he set Mehari’s unconscious body against the bar counter. Entering the club in arrowhead formation were seven soldiers with assault rifles drawn, motioning for people to back away from the man who had punched Tarik Haile. Aisha froze in horror.
Tarik rubbed his head and let out a groan that morphed into a growl. “Agh! What are you guys doing!? There’s nothing here, go back to the car! This is a private thing!”
The man who punched him stared numbly at the soldiers all the way up until they were throwing him on the floor and frisking him with a gun barrel to his head. He kept babbling about it being an accident and Tarik babbled back that it was an accident and the soldiers kept doing their job by dragging the man away and pulling Tarik outside against his will to run concussion checks, keeping him away from everyone else including the other Ice Cream Boys.
The soldier observing him was an NCO by his chevrons. “Captain Haile, I need you to state the date, day of the week—”
“February 24th, 2057 in the year of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Or, fuck, the 25th now I guess. I’m ordering you to let me get back to—”
“Sorry sir, I have orders to run a concussion diagnostic in the event that you—”
“Orders from who!?” Tarik screamed, knowing damn well they were standing orders from Lieutenant General Siye Kahinu for the safety of the TOCU pilots.
He pictured in his head Araari going through this farce completely straight-faced and serious and yapping about the deep significance of the orders for the sake of the TOCU program and the country and blah blah blah. The Pan-Republic of the Horn was not a glorified dictatorship like China or Russia or the US, it was a Pan-Democracy, and no one was going to tell Tarik what he could and couldn’t do. Instead of waiting for the soldier to continue, he stood up and started walking away.
The soldier grabbed his arm. “Sir, you can let me run this test that takes five minutes to administer, or I can call the Lieutenant General, wake him up, drag him down here to give these orders to you in person, and we turn this into a big affair that will look even worse for the owner. Are you okay with that?”
The soldier’s eyes flicked to Aisha who was watching, fist to her mouth, as people took videos of her club that would soon be sold to news companies. Depending on how the Addis Ababa Council of Entertainment ruled on the incident, it might result in the club being shuttered. It wasn’t beyond Tarik’s ability to understand she probably had rivals and enemies in the CoE who would find any excuse to put her out of business.
“Fine. What’s next, the national anthem in reverse?” Tarik said.
The soldier gave him an even shorter version of the concussion test before releasing him back to his friends. Four of the five were already turning the night’s events into a saga. Like the azmari of old, they sung praise of Mehari standing his ground to the adversary and Tarik being struck on the head and walking it off as he bore his friend’s body to safety. The only one who was not happy was Mehari, standing off to the side of the entryway and stroking his mustache over and over which Tarik knew was his friend’s nervous tic. Tarik told the others to stay put so he could talk with Mehari alone.
Tarik wasn’t sure what he expected his friend to say, but it wasn’t what he actually said.
“Why do you always do this shit?” Mehari asked.
“Huh? Do what? What are you talking about, brother?”
“Smoothing out everything. Nothing but harmless fun, all the time! Never any trouble your name can’t take care of. Even this!” Mehari said, gesturing at the soldiers interrogating the man Mehari had been rowing with.
“Why do I do it?” Tarik said. “Because I care about Aisha’s establishment and don’t want her to lose business. Because I care about my friends and I don’t want them to get punched in the head. Because I care about— Gwad, you think I’m doing this for my ego?”
“I don’t! I wish you were doing this for your ego, Tarik. That’s something I can understand. That’s human. My problem is you’re a fucking saint! You make the patriarch look like a sinful whore! And you’re so good at being good you make everyone around you good too. Well, I’m sick of trying to keep up! You know I started that argument. That was his girl and I knew it was his girl! I bought her a beer because I wanted to do something naughty for once and start a fight. A fight where you couldn’t come up and smooth everything out. So I threw a punch. I did it on purpose, gwad, and it felt good. It felt… fucking manly, even if I got sowed into the ground.”
Tarik stared into Mehari’s angry eyes and for once had no idea who or what was looking back at him. Tarik’s genius, like Araari’s, and like every pilot’s, was to bring people together and create a harmonious social balance. It wasn’t sainthood (at least Tarik didn’t think about it that way), but it was centripetal. It was togetherness. It was cohesion without coercion.
It was Pan-Democracy.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” Mehari asked.
Tarik shook his head numbly. “Nah, brother. I don’t.”
Mehari pointed at the guy who punched him. “Right now, I respect him more than you. He looked at me, saw one of the most popular bastards in Addis, and he said, “fuck you, let’s fight.” I respect that, Tarik, because honestly, this idea of a lovey-dovey forever peace Colonel Ahmed keeps talking about on TV? It sounds like hell. I don’t want it. And if you’re gonna do the same thing, I don’t want you.”
Mehari glared at Tarik for a second, giving his friend a chance to slap him across the face which would’ve made everything alright. But Tarik just kept staring back like a mentally-damaged goat and Mehari walked off in disgust.