Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  Ruth called at 7:30. He’d been up late, first calling Roger to tell him the news, then working on Luna until after two, nodding off with the blue pencil slipping from his fingers, descriptions from the script morphing imperceptibly into dream.

  She’d had a terrible night, she said. She didn’t trust herself to drive. She needed to see to the cremation, to go by the funeral home, buy a dress, and then she would need his help making phone calls in the afternoon. Had he checked the paper for the obituary?

  “I just woke up,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, and went back to her list of tasks.

  “Give me a few minutes, all right? I’ll call you back.”

  Finding his way back to sleep already seemed an impossibility. He washed his face, pulling at the skin to erase the lines that made him look like his father. Then he poured a glass of orange juice and had time for one swallow before Ruth called again.

  *

  Ruth had planned the memorial for that Sunday, two days away. Halloween. The funeral home, Hall-Wynne of Durham, had found them a 9 a.m. time slot. Michael had failed to convince her to delay it for a few more days. Ruth wanted to return to Texas as soon as possible, a reasonable enough desire in the circumstances.

  Michael had not yet told her he was not going with her.

  By three o’clock he had checked his watch so many times that Ruth asked, “Do you have somewhere you have to be, dear?”

  “Maybe,” he said, hope fighting it out with fear. They were in Ruth’s room at the Brookwood, and Michael was making the calls to Robert’s friends and family that Ruth said she was unable to put herself through. Robert’s friend Arthur, with whom he’d been in business for years, broke down and it was all Michael could do to hang on to his own composure. Arthur’s grief seemed so much more real than his own.

  On the other end of the scale, Ruth’s one surviving sister, Esther, took the news with little comment. Michael had only spoken with her a few times in his life, in keeping with his father’s policy of ignoring Ruth’s family. He sensed that she was disappointed—though not surprised—that Ruth hadn’t called herself.

  It was nearly four when his own phone finally rang. Michael took it out on the room’s tiny balcony. “Hello?” he said.

  “Whatcha wearing?” It was Denise.

  “Oh, the usual. Leather thong, some handcuffs.”

  “How far are you from your hotel room?”

  “I can be there in 15 minutes.”

  “If you get there before I do, go ahead and take your clothes off. You won’t be needing them.”

  *

  For all her big talk, she was shy at first, once they were alone in the room, the door locked, the curtains drawn. Michael didn’t ask her how much time she had. Enough, apparently, to make love a second time as the sun was going down. Michael was hovering on the edges of sleep when she finally extricated herself. “What time is it?” he mumbled.

  “Eight-thirty. I have to go. Can I put the light on?”

  “Sure.”

  She gathered up the bits and pieces of her clothes, which lay on a path from the door to the bed. “I want you to spend the night tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Yes. What about Rachid?”

  “He’ll be there. We talked. He’s pretty grown up. And of course you charmed him.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “He wants to know what I’m going to tell his father. I said it was none of his father’s business. I know it won’t be as simple as that.”

  “He’ll be jealous? Rachid’s father?”

  “He won’t admit it. There will be remarks. Nothing I can’t handle, and it’s time I started acting like a normal adult with a life of my own. I may not be as uninhibited as I was this afternoon. You’ll be patient with me, right?”

  “Yes. Will you come to the funeral with me Sunday?”

  She hesitated. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I want you there?”

  “Am I going to be the only black person there?”

  “Other than me, you mean?”

  “Other than you.”

  “Tommy Coleman will be there for sure. There may be others. Harriman, maybe. Does it matter?”

  “It shouldn’t matter. But you’ve only been black a few days. There’s a lot you don’t know yet.”

  “That sounds like the punchline to a bad joke.”

  “I’m serious, Michael. I don’t want to minimize the shock of what you’re going through, but you’re not black the way I am, and you never will be. You look white, you were raised white, you have that sense of privilege totally ingrained in your personality. You don’t know what it’s like to walk into a big room full of white people and wonder if you’re going to make it out without something happening. A look, a word, a man brushing his arm against your chest.” She pulled on her red silk T-shirt as punctuation.

  “Yeah, okay,” Michael said. “I guess I had that coming. I still want you there.”

  “Then I’ll be there. I’ll get to meet your…Ruth.” She hesitated again. “You don’t want me there just to shock her, do you?”

  “Are you still going to be questioning my motives ten years from now?”

  “Ten years should be close to enough. She is going to flip out though, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “And maybe I do want that. What if you’re right? What if I’m just using you somehow? I would hate that. How can I be sure my motives are clean? Can I even trust my own feelings?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up his hand. She was fully dressed except for her shoes, fully separate from him. “It felt pretty real this afternoon. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt for both of us to keep asking questions.”

  She pulled her shoes on, stood up, and kissed him. “Call me tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Michael said.

  “You, too.” She blew another kiss from the doorway and was gone.

  Saturday, October 30

  Late Saturday morning, Ruth called and begged him to come take his father’s clothes away. They still smelled of him, she said, and it made her think he would be standing there every time she turned around.

  It took him two trips to carry the clothes down to his car. He was painfully aware of his father’s ashes, sitting on Ruth’s bedside table in a brown plastic container the size of a hardcover book. He felt his father’s presence in them. Though he knew it was a projection of his own feelings, he couldn’t shake the idea that his father had after all wanted something from him, something he had never been able to ask.

  He drove the clothes to Thrift World, a cavernous space in a run-down strip center a few miles from the hospital. His cell phone buzzed as he was carrying the last of the clothes through the back door.

  It was Roger. “I don’t mean to be in the way or anything,” he said. “I’m at the Sheraton out by the airport if you’ve nothing on at the moment.”

  “You’re here? In North Carolina?”

  “Thought you might need a bit of moral support at the funeral.”

  “Wow.” Michael was deeply touched. “That’s really…I’m glad you’re here. Is it just you?”

  “You mean, did I bring the trouble and strife? Not likely, mate. So do you know your way out here?” As usual, Roger was not to be diverted. Michael got directions and promised to be there within the hour.

  He finished up at the thrift store and decided he didn’t need to go back to the Brookwood, where Ruth would only find more busywork for him. He wound his way to the Durham Freeway and fought heavy traffic to the Page Road exit from I-40.

  “Sit anywhere,” Roger said as he let Michael in. As always, he wore black jeans, black sneakers, and a black T-shirt. If he got cold he would add a black leather jacket. His thick black beard was always a shock, at odds with his young, pale blue eyes. “Be with you in a tick, trying to lay hands on some notes I had a minute ago…” He began to circle t
he room, rifling his possessions.

  The room had high ceilings, muted gray-on-white wallpaper, thick carpet, solid hardwood furniture. It made Michael’s suite look like a doghouse. Or it would have, had Roger not already cluttered every available surface with fallout from the chaos that constantly swirled around him—books, magazines, cameras, cell phone, clothes, used towels, unfinished food and drink, piles of photocopies, notebooks, scraps of paper with images, dialog, addresses and phone numbers, in one case just a single word, “arachnotype,” scrawled on a bar napkin with a fine-point black Sharpie, the only pen Roger ever carried. All of it smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

  Michael moved a Discman and a stack of CDs out of an armchair and sat down. The CDs were all field recordings of vodou ceremonies from Haiti. Michael picked one up and turned it over.

  “I brought those for you, actually,” Roger said. “Thought you might want to hear what that sort of racket sounded like. Here.” He took the case from Michael’s hands and put the disc in the player, fussing with a pair of battery-operated speakers until he got a loping, chaotic mix of drums and chanting voices to emerge.

  “Do you have all this in your house?” Michael asked. “Filed away somewhere, on the off chance that you might need it some day?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “How do you keep track of it all?”

  “I’m very well organized.” Roger seemed unaware of any irony in the statement. “Sod it, let’s talk.” He perched on the edge of the king-size bed, facing Michael. “Tell me some more of what your father said.”

  Despite the distraction of the music, which made his stomach flutter, Michael summarized the high points. It took fifteen minutes. Toward the end he found himself drawing the story out, enjoying the novelty of having Roger listen to him for a change.

  When he was done, Roger said, “I can’t imagine pulling all of that out of him and then having him die. It’s like the old myth of the killing joke, only not funny, and turned in on itself.”

  “Ruth blames me for him dying.”

  “Yeah, she would do, wouldn’t she? He was all she had.”

  “I don’t know how to respond to her. We’ve never been physically comfortable around each other, you know? Even when I was a kid. That’s not a good basis for a mother-son relationship, and it doesn’t give us a lot to go on now.”

  Michael paused and then said, “There is one more wrinkle. It turns out she is related to me after all.” He told Roger about Harriman’s revelation.

  “Christ, this is amazing, isn’t it? Hang on, let me get some of this down.”

  “Get it down?”

  “Just a few notes.”

  “I thought you were here to give me moral support.”

  “I am. Without question. You have to admit, though, this is bloody great material.”

  “It’s not material, Roger. Look, I don’t think I want you using this.”

  “All right, no problem then, not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “All I’m saying is, you ought to think about it.”

  “Roger—”

  “This is primal stuff, and the next bloke that comes along with a dead father—and that’s all of us, sooner or later—could learn a lot from this.”

  “Learn what, exactly? That it sucks to find out your mother is your aunt, your real mother’s dead, you’re black, and now your father’s dead, too? How big is the demographic for that, Roger? How many millions of lives is this going to save?”

  “Look, you’re upset, obviously. This is not a good time—”

  The voices on the CD player were screaming, tearing at Michael’s nerves. He jabbed the STOP button and said, “I’m upset? I’m upset? Like I’m the problem here?”

  “This is not like you, Michael.”

  “Not like me to stand up for myself? Not like me to object to being the doormat?”

  “Now you’re starting to hurt my feelings. I can’t believe you would want to do that, when I’ve come all this way.”

  Everything Roger said, with his calm tones and injured innocence, made Michael crazier. Worst of all was feeling like he was only seeing what had been in front of him, unacknowledged, all this time.

  Michael stood up. “I have to go.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Roger said, as Michael crossed the vast room toward the door. “To make sure you’re okay.”

  *

  Traffic was unreasonably heavy on the short stretch of I-40 between the Sheraton and Michael’s hotel. The reason proved to be a wreck at the Durham Freeway split, where somebody in an SUV had tried to change his mind at the last minute in front of an 18-wheeler. The legacy of the Interstate Highway System, Michael thought. Urban sprawl, pollution, crowding, hurry, frustration, mutilation, death. This is what my father’s dream has become.

  A shower and clean clothes failed to dispel his mood. It still clung to him as he rang Denise’s doorbell for dinner, carrying his shaving kit and his suit for the funeral.

  Dinner itself was pleasant enough. Rachid held forth through most of it about school, friends, the basketball team, television, and anything else that flitted through his hyperactive mind. Afterwards, Michael and Denise sat on the couch as Rachid, to Michael’s amazement, did the dishes with only minor prompting.

  “Am I naïve?” Michael asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Is that what’s been eating at you tonight?”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “Yes. So why are you asking?”

  He told her about Roger, and then said, “Listen to me. It sounds like I’ve been nursing a grudge for years.”

  “Sounds like he’s been taking advantage of you for years.”

  “It feels weird, like waking up one morning and realizing you’re married to somebody who never loved you.”

  “I happen to know exactly what that’s like, if you ever need a point-for-point comparison.”

  “The thought of not working for him anymore is…it’s too strange. I can’t wrap my brain around it.”

  “Don’t think about it, then. Not now. You’ve got your father’s funeral tomorrow, you’ve got all this other chaos in your life, you can leave this part of it alone for tonight.”

  Michael closed his eyes, nodded, and let himself slump on the couch.

  “Whatever happens,” Denise said, “you’re going to be okay. Whether you keep working for Roger or not.” She raked her fingernails through his hair, which calmed him as if he were a nervous cat. “You’ve got your skills, you’ve got the person you are inside. The chaos will pass. It always does.”

  “My god, that feels good.”

  “Let’s go say goodnight to Rachid and I’ll show you something that really feels good.”

  “Don’t we need to make a show of staying up with him for a while?”

  “The weekends are the only time I let him play video games. He couldn’t care less about us.”

  Sunday, October 31

  Denise’s alarm buzzed at 7. She shut it off, rolled over, and put her face on Michael’s chest. “How long have you been awake?” Her voice was still slurred with sleep.

  “An hour and a half,” he said. He’d woken up hard, heart racing, thoughts jostling and bumping against each other in his head. Roger, Ruth, his father, Mercy. Memories of himself as a child, pointing a cap gun at Ruth and firing six shots, and Ruth bursting into tears. The panels he’d already drawn and lettered in the current Luna that exploited his relationship with his father. The image of Mercy floating, cartoonlike, above a blur of whirling feet. There was no chance of falling asleep again, so he’d propped himself up and watched sunlight slowly leak into the room.

  “Are you okay?” Denise asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to do this.”

  She pushed herself up on one arm. “Michael, you have to go to your father’s funeral. Now get up and get going.”

  Her will power got him up and dressed and out the door
with coffee and a piece of toast in his stomach. Denise drove.

  “How should I introduce you?” Michael said. “As my girlfriend, or what?”

  “Why don’t you just tell them my name and let them figure out the rest for themselves?”

  The funeral home was on Main Street, a few blocks west of downtown, in a 1920s-era brick building with a vast parking lot and its own freestanding chapel. Ushers led them to a long parlor in the main building with a sofa, stuffed chairs, and a tasteful floral pattern on the far wall.

  Ruth sat on the sofa with Roger next to her. He held her hand in an odd, Victorian way, as if it were a cup and saucer. With a jolt, Michael realized that the willowy blonde standing next to the two of them was Helen Silberman, their Vertigo editor. He’d only seen her twice before, at comics conventions. On a chair by herself some distance away was Mitch Antree’s widow, Frances Stanley. Tommy Coleman stood uncomfortably in the middle of the room with another late-middle-aged black man.

  The other eight people in the room Michael guessed to be members of Ruth’s extended family. Greg Vaughan, the dog lover, was in the middle of them, and their brown suits, wide ties, and 1970s haircuts all cried out Johnston County.

  Tommy Coleman was relieved to see Michael. He took Michael’s hand, then pulled him into an awkward hug. “I’m real sorry,” he said. “I never should have started all this. Look what it’s come to.”

  “This wasn’t your doing,” Michael said. “We talked a lot there toward the end, and I could tell he was relieved to finally get all that business out in the open. I think it helped him go easier.”

  The man with Tommy was short, very heavy, and wore a large hearing aid attached to the earpiece of his thick glasses. “This here is Booker,” Tommy said. “Booker knew your daddy. Ain’t that right, Booker?”

  “What’s that?” Booker said. He was squinting at Michael through the glasses.

  Michael introduced Denise, and then Booker shook Michael’s hand. “Thought you was the Cap’n,” Booker said. “Give me a turn.”

  Out of nowhere, Michael suddenly thought he might cry. He made excuses to Tommy and Booker and led Denise over to Frances Stanley. After the introductions she said, “I told myself I wouldn’t go to any more funerals. Yet here I am.”