DANIELSON: Yeah? What about the bird antibiotics? What’s that? Science project too?

KHADIM: Give me my flute back.

DANIELSON: No.

I want an explanation.

KHADIM: (to himself) Fuck you . . .

DANIELSON: What was that? Cursing?

KHADIM: Can I have the flute back?

(beat; Danielson isn’t budging; Khadim relents) Look. What do you want?

DANIELSON: I want to know what you’re doing with this crap.

KHADIM: It’s stuff I need.

DANIELSON: For what?

KHADIM: I have other things, okay? There’s more to my life than . . . this place.

Danielson puts his hand over the flute case.

DANIELSON: Tell me.

KHADIM: I spent a summer in Mauritania. It’s in Africa.

DANIELSON: I know.

KHADIM: Yeah. Cause you’re African. And so am I.

DANIELSON: That’s right, my brother.

KHADIM: I met this guy, this merchant, he was moving to Guinea. He sold a lot of things, and one of the things he sold was parrots.

DANIELSON: Parrots?

KHADIM: Parrots, like the birds, you know?

These little green parrots are all over the place in Guinea. Over there, you can buy them for like two dollars. In America, they cost like four hundred bucks apiece.

So we set up this thing, me and him.

I got back to the States, and I went to this pet store and asked the owner if he wanted to buy those birds for three hundred bucks. And then I had my guy in Guinea ship me the birds.

You can’t do that without proper licensing, so what he did was, he took twenty birds and this PVC piping. And he poked little breathing holes in them. And then shoved the birds into the piping. He fit twenty birds in three lengths of it. He packaged it and mailed it to me. Except I had him mail it to Eagleton, because if my parents saw it, they’d open it.

Most of the birds would die, but say you get one or two that make the voyage . . . I’d make some money.

Once, though, a package got lost in the mail for awhile and then showed up at Eagleton and it stunk. And so the headmaster opened it and shook the PVC and ended up with twenty dead birds all over the place, most of them with maggots all in them.

It was nasty.

That’s why I left Eagleton.

DANIELSON: Of course.

KHADIM: U.S. Customs got involved because I was violating health code laws and I was smuggling illegal wildlife into the country. Can I have my flute back?

DANIELSON: And so what, you got a slap on the wrist?

KHADIM: Well, I had to leave Eagleton. I had to come here. Give me the flute back.

DANIELSON: You’d be in jail.

KHADIM: No, I wouldn’t be. Can I please have the flute back please?

DANIELSON: No. You can’t.

KHADIM: You shouldn’t go through people’s personal stuff.

DANIELSON: How’d you get out of it?

KHADIM: What?

DANIELSON: U.S. Customs. Wildlife laws.

KHADIM: How do you think?