Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole

or she had reached into the machine. The blades had whirred, and she’d lost a lot of blood.
    I’m distracted by this thought when Henry asks me something.
    —Sorry?
    —I said, Did you think you could move back here?
    —Oh, who knows? The money would have to be right.Things would have to fall into place. It’s easier for bankers than for doctors. We have good banks and bad hospitals.
    Another pause. Traffic outside. Generators. There are many lives and many years, and relatively few moments when those individual histories touch each other with real recognition.
    At no time is Amina awkward in handling objects. It is she who gives me the glass of water, in the clawlike grip of her right hand. When she writes (but this I know only from hearsay) she writes with her left. She had to learn again, with a hand different from the one that used to write to me. On the television, the camera zooms in on a man with wide eyes, then cuts away and zooms in on another man, with whom he’s locked in staring combat. The little girl finally wakes up. Hello, Rekia, I say. She shies away.
    Amina says:
    —So moving back has crossed your mind?
    —It has crossed my mind.
    This is the answer I have heard others give. It will be many weeks before it rains again. When I leave their house, I wipe water from the side-view mirror to get a better glimpse of the three of them waving me bye. They are close together and small, as in a medallion of the Holy Family.

TWENTY-ONE
    I escape family and go out into the city on my own to observe its many moods: the lethargy of the early mornings, the raucous early evenings, the silent, lightless nights cut through with the sounds of generators. It is in this aimless wandering that I find myself truly in the city. The days go by. I do not delve, as I had thought I would, into my childhood, do not visit my former schools or look up other old friends.
    One afternoon, a few days before Christmas Day, as I walk on Allen Avenue with no particular destination in mind, I happen on a sign for a jazz shop. I follow the arrows and enter a small room at the back of a building. Here at last is something that caters to the tastes of the minority. Allthat is available at the many street-side record shacks is Nigerian music and records by popular black American and Caribbean artists: hip-hop, dancehall, reggaeton. The interior, covered in glass cases and mirrors, is like a miniature version of the set for the final fight scene in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon . The glass cases have a decent selection of music. There are the “smooth jazz” artists with their cloying offerings, but there are also many discs by the giants: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and many others. The modern jazz adventurers such as Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau are also well represented. The ceiling of the shop is, like all the walls, a mirror. The reflective surfaces, in combination with the bright fluorescent lighting, have the peculiar effect of making the room feel not bigger but, rather, smaller and weirder, as if one were stuffed into one of those camera obscura boxes so favored by the early Dutch lens grinders.
    A woman and a man are talking at the cashier’s table when I come in. The woman is also working on an accounts book. I look around the shop, and when I have taken note of what is available, I ask about prices.
    —Oh, sorry, none of it is for sale.
    —Excuse me?
    —The compact discs are not for sale. Unless you want to pay three thousand five for each one.
    I am confused. A jazz shop, but the discs are not for sale. Unless I pay twenty-five dollars for each, an absurd figure. Most of these discs wouldn’t cost me any more than fifteendollars in the States, and some of the reissues would be considerably less. What could be her meaning?
    —But, sir, if you see something that you like, what we can do is make a copy for you. That applies to any disc in the shop. And that costs one thousand naira. But the originals are not