The Closed Shutter

The taxi dropped Cody Lopez at the end of the red dirt road because the driver refused to go any further. He paid the man, got his bag out of the trunk, and stood there in the last light of the day listening to the engine fade away behind him. He was forty-two years old and he had carried a record bag through better neighborhoods than this one, but his hands were sweating anyway.

The brickfield spread out flat and wide in front of him, rows of wet clay bricks drying in long lines like loaves of bread somebody had forgotten about. Smoke came from the kilns at the far end, gray and slow against the sky. Off to the side, a long shed with a corrugated iron roof sat on timber posts, and under it he could see a woman in a green work dress counting bricks with a pencil behind her ear.

Maya West. Forty years old today.

He walked toward her and she saw him before he got halfway there. She did not wave. She just stood there with the pencil in her hand and watched him come, the way you watch weather roll in.

"You're late," she said when he was close enough.

"The taxi driver thought I was crazy for coming out here." He set his bag down. "Happy birthday."

"I'm forty," she said. "Say it out loud. I want to hear how it sounds in the air."

"You're forty," Cody said. "Forty."

Maya laughed and shook her head. "Yeah. That's what I thought too."

They had made a pact about this, back when. He was twenty-three and she was twenty-one and they were broke and stupid and lying on the roof of her mother's house, and Maya had said that the one thing she would never do was turn forty alone. Not a joke, exactly. She had said it in that flat voice she used when she meant a thing, and Cody had said he'd be there, and then eight years later he had left anyway. He was thirty-one when he went. He had told himself it was a job opportunity, the DJ circuit, the travel, and she had nodded and helped him pack and never once called him a coward, which had made it worse.

They had crossed paths again three years ago in Abidjan, at a wedding neither of them wanted to be at, and they had spent one night together in a hotel with a broken air conditioner and then traded a few emails that trailed off into nothing. So this was the second time he had come back. He was trying not to think about what that meant.

"Come on," Maya said. She picked up a lantern off a nail. "The kilns seal at dusk. We should be inside before then."

"Inside where?"

She pointed at the drying shed. "The old rule. You'll see."

The shed was longer than it looked from outside, maybe forty meters, open on one long side and shuttered closed on the other. Stacks of dried bricks made walls and furniture both. There was a table made of two barrels and a plank, and two camp chairs that had clearly been set out on purpose, and against one post, hanging from a rope, a bamboo bee hotel.

Cody had seen these things before in gardens, little bundles of tubes for solitary bees to nest in. This one was cracked down its face, split lengthwise, and through the split he could see a dead wasp curled up in one of the holes, dried brown, wings folded.

"What's this?" he asked, though he could see what it was.

"Was here when I took the job," Maya said. She touched the bamboo with one finger, gently, like it might still feel something. "The old brickmakers hung them. Bees are good luck around clay, I don't know. Something about pollination and the flowers they used to plant between the pits. This one's dead. The whole thing's cracked. Foreman wanted to throw it out and I told him no."

"You kept a broken bee house with a dead wasp in it."

"I kept it," Maya said, and her voice had that flat note in it again, and Cody understood that they were not really talking about the bee hotel.

She lit the lantern and hung it from the same rafter, so the dead wasp swung in and out of the light. Outside, the sun was going down fast the way it does that close to the equator, no long golden hour, just the light turning off like a switch.

"Watch," Maya said.

Down at the kilns a man shouted something, and two figures Cody could barely see pulled the iron doors shut and dropped the bar across them. Almost right away, all along the shed's closed side, hands began pulling shutters down over the windows, one after another, wooden slats banging into their brackets. Within five minutes the whole brickfield was closed up tight. No light showed anywhere except their lantern.

"That's the tradition," Maya said, sitting down on a stack of bricks and patting the spot next to her. "Once the kilns are sealed at dusk, nothing opens until sunrise. No window, no door, no shutter. Not for anything. Old superstition. The men who built this place believed the fire needed one night of privacy, and if you peeked, the bricks would come out crooked."

"Crooked bricks."

"Crooked bricks, bad luck, whatever you want to call it. The workers still do it. I've been here two years and I've never once broken the rule. Even the night the generator died and I sat in the dark with my phone at four percent." She shrugged. "One night of closed shutters. Whatever happens inside stays inside until the sun comes up."

Cody sat down next to her. The bricks under him were warm from the day, and dry, and they smelled like dust and clay. From a crate under the barrel table Maya pulled a bottle of palm wine, the cheap cloudy kind in a plastic bottle, and two tin cups.

"So," she said, pouring. "Tell me what you've been doing with your life, DJ Lopez. And don't give me the version you give people at parties."

So he told her. He told it honestly, more honestly than he had told anyone in a while, maybe because the shutters were closed and the rule was the rule and she had kept it even in the dark with a dying phone. He told her about the cities that had blurred together, Abidjan and Accra and Douala, the same rooms with different stains on the ceiling, the same promoter promising the same door money and delivering half of it. He told her about the sets that went great and the sets where eight people showed up and four of them were the other DJ's cousins. He told her about the women he had not called back, and there had been a few, and he did not dress it up.

"There was one in Lomé," he said. "She was thirty-six, maybe thirty-seven, a nurse. Smart as anything. She asked me once what I was running from