by Mat Johnson
Snowden, who'd already made a point of admitting he thought Bo Shareef was "the bomb" before Bobby's story unfolded, could take no more. "Dude, did you ever even ask yourself if it ain't the other way around? Like, oh, I don't know, maybe every other human being in the world is right and you're the one that's wrong. Maybe The Great Work just sucks. You ever think of that?"
"Yeah, I thought about that for a minute. But then I reread it. It's brilliant, they're dung beetles, trust me on this one."
The world didn't deserve The Great Work, at least not in this century. So with renewed effort, Bobby spent what little money he had reacquiring every one of its three thousand copies. Besides Harlem and Horizon, Bobby's favorite thing about New York City was its used bookstores, the Strand and Gotham Book Mart, where he spent his money and free time. Also, that there were several Ikea furniture stores in the area, as The Great Work could often be found being used as a bookshelf prop in their faux living room sets. The books weren't for sale, but that was OK because those he stole on principle.
Snowden, having been unimpressed with the three pages he'd managed to plow through of The Great Work, didn't care if it remained Robert M. Finley's only published novel. What annoyed Snowden, particularly since they'd decided to become drinking partners, was that once he got his blood alcohol level up, Bobby Finley never stopped talking about the world he'd abandoned, particularly his theory on the way it worked. Since his mall-front "awakening," Bobby had determined that there were only two roads to success for a male writer of African descent, such as he was. The first was to write a romance novel with an illustration of three or fewer attractive black people on the cover, preferably done in a comic book style so as not to scare off the illiterate. One written in flat descriptions of every action so that the prose was completely subservient to the plot, even though that plot was invariably predictable, as close to the readers' expectations as possible so as not to scare them. This type of book was basically for a readership looking for melaninized, low-tech versions of their afternoon soaps.
"If I wanted to, if I just gave up on humanity completely and wanted to sell out, I could make a million, no problem. I'd just excrete some story about a guy dating four women, but then they find out and get even with him, maybe he ends up married to one, some dumb shit like that. I'd give it a clichéd tide spelled with a bunch of useless Ebonic abbreviations. I could write it in a weekend."
Even more insidious, Bobby liked to declare, was the path toward black male literature. At some point it had been decided that the role of a black male writer was to create a work in the vein of Richard Wright or the great Ralph Ellison, not in the sense that the works be original and energetic, but that they focus on inner-city strife and racism. Whites, who made up the majority of sales in the literary category, felt their own writers could handle the other issues in the universe just fine, they just wanted the black guys to clarify the Negro stuff. The author would do best to deal with those issues in a predictable, derivative manner, as these readers were looking for confirmations of their viewpoints, not new ones. Bobby insisted that works were reviewed, awarded, and hailed based on this principle.
"Snowden, believe me when I say this, if I wanted to, I could produce a critical hit, full-page rave in the Times, TV interviews, no problem. I would just pump out another thing about this poor black person struggling to overcome white racism, inner-city violence, or poverty or, even better, all three. Are you kidding? That's a whole cottage industry. Dung beetles love that stuff. I'll even throw some hip-hop references on top, 'cause you know dey want it all authentic V topical 'n'shit. Nobody ever went broke giving people what they think they want."
This obsession infected every part of Bobby, even his bowels. The man insisted on calling his toilet Irving Howe, after a critic he particularly loathed, just so he could take pleasure in shitting on it daily.
"Look, the problem is you're writing the wrong things." Snowden enjoyed baiting him. Rarely was something so easy, so rewarding. "People don't want books, man. They want movies. Even the bad ones get hundreds of thousands in the seats."
"Bullshit! They only want movies because the film industry spends a couple million dollars on each one to tell them to! If I had a couple million dollars, I could get a hundred thousand people to read anything, but books don't get that. The only way I could get people to read The Great Work would be to do something huge and crazy, create some spectacle for free publicity."
All this was not to say that Robert M. Finley had stopped writing. Bobby's newest work, The Tome, was just not meant for public consumption. With no readers, Bobby had intentionally started writing for no one. The only other person who got close to the 478 pages of The Tome was Snowden, who liked to use its pile to rest his beer on. The Tome was the first example of the principles of the "Robert M. Finley Emulsion Literary Theory," a theory that Bobby himself had invented. To any he could engage in a discussion upon the concept, Bobby often remarked that he was nearly twenty pages into its treatise, but that he would not reveal it until it was completely ready, and then as a mass E-mail. At its simplest (and despite hours of detailed explanation, the simplest version was more than Snowden could comprehend), it was about not actually writing, but showing, highlighting, and amplifying the poetry of the universe around us. Something about humans being imperfect, so avoiding themselves as a source. From what Snowden had heard of The Tome during impromptu drunken readings, it seemed to be collections of random conversations, stream-of-consciousness, and chapter-long descriptions of street noise. His second forty ounce near gone, Bobby would talk about the line between genius and insanity, the importance of walking close to it. Snowden just wished he would walk on the other side. Bobby swore, though, that with the right drugs opening your mind, you could dance to it.
At moments, Snowden found the intensity of Bobby Finley inspiring, something he could just sit and drink in front of for hours, and Bobby's intelligence gave it both a voice and elegance. After a while, though, it could get plain boring. Sometimes Snowden feared that when Bobby got excited (as he did) and pulled out a copy of The Great Work to quote, the thousands of others on the shelf would come collapsing down as well, crushing them. Just another fatal accident, and then Lester would be in here cleaning up, blank faced, except this accident would get press for the sole reason that it was so absurd. The earnest cream puff anchor on Channel 9 news would run the teaser, "Man Crushed by Dreams," during commercials only to offer the story as an almost lighthearted piece slipped in after the sports and weather. Snowden's own apartment was only a block away, and Bobby had even suggested that they go there sometimes, but since Snowden had already given Jifar his own set of keys it didn't seem right, the boy there, them drinking. If the kid wanted to see that, he could stay downstairs.
Those keys had been meant for Bobby in case Snowden got locked out. However, drunk, resting on the space cleared off Bobby's makeshift couch, Snowden didn't see the use anymore in getting another set made for Bobby. Not only would they most certainly be lost in the debris that blanketed every surface and floor, but there were other, even more compelling reasons not to. The most obvious was that while Bobby had implied that the burning down of his mom's boyfriend's house was a one-time incident, and while the fact that he was walking a free man certainly testified to the fact that a judge and jury agreed so, the burnt crap that emerged from beneath the surface anytime Snowden adjusted the mess around him contradicted that. While the majority of it seemed to be charcoaled packs of matches, black and flailing, the variety of what Bobby chose to ignite was nearly impressive. Plastic silverware, just the eyes in an entire issue of Talk, a collection of small colored plastic dinosaurs. Snowden began hunting for new finds, curved round and twisted by the heat, every time Bobby went to the bathroom. Based on one of his findings - an entire collection of male doll heads apparently disfigured and guillotined before melting in some postapocalyptic revolution - Snowden began to believe that Bobby was actually going out and buying things specifically to b
urn them.
LEARNING
A LOT OF people died in Harlem. This didn't surprise Snowden, it was a big place. What surprised Snowden was that almost once a week one of them died in a Horizon property. Sometimes it was a preexisting condition finally taking its toll, but often it was just a matter of one little misstep, a simple accident, and those that were living, weren't. Snowden's Tuesdays were booked with the special project from then on, going in and bagging it up to take it away. Bike riders without helmets or reflective gear, residents who chose to avoid the pedestrian route underneath the scaffolding of renovating buildings, commuters who ignored the plea to buckle up in the back of taxicabs. Snowden would ask the cause and Lester would tell him and then Snowden would spend the rest of the day imagining the end the person came to, piecing together his or her life before as he shoved its remnants into the Dumpster.
In an attempt to prove to himself that sudden death was not this random, that these people had brought this fate upon themselves (and therefore it was avoidable), Snowden looked for clues of moral or discipline lapses that preceded their demise. Snowden wanted reasons. When they were cleaning out the sty of the guy who croaked in his bed from diabetes, Snowden found two cases of Pepsi underneath the sink and caught himself pumping his fist to himself in victory. This was a rational universe. This guy was huge too, his mattress bowed like a hammock from the springs he'd crushed while sleeping. The whole thing had acted like a sponge. It wasn't the smell of the bed that made Snowden vomit, it was the layer of maggots on top of it, the sound of a thousand dry worms in agitated orgy. Together, he and Lester wrapped it in plastic, had to take it straight to the sanitation department and come back because it stank so bad. The man's room was a collection of empty ninety-nine-cent boxes of snack cakes, gun collector magazines wrinkled and stained, and cheap black porno. Videotapes were strewn across the floor of his bedroom, their boxes discarded beneath the bed, images of the poor, tattooed, and desperate covered in a layer of gray dust and the congealed remnants of their late owner. When Lester and Snowden finally unscrewed all the locks on the narrow closet in his hallway ("You can't bust a door like this, that oak woodwork's irreplaceable"), the final evidence in the deceased's damning was the strongest. Shotguns, wood and black metal, some barrels already sawed off by the same hand that had rubbed out the registration numbers, but mostly handguns, piled in boxes according to make, caliber. A cardboard barrel with the letters SNU written on it was the biggest, the visibly cheap six-shooters piled on one another like so many crabs.
The next posthumous eviction was a woman who'd lived in the second-story floor-through on 126th, right around the block from Sylvia's, the victim of a hit-and-run walking back from a bar all the way over on Amsterdam. It was a nice building too, even for a Horizon property, fully renovated the year before. There was a literary agent making an office of the garden apartment, the third floor held a thick bit of brown-skinned cuteness who smiled at Snowden in the hall as he carried up sheets of boxes to be unfolded. Lester said she was playing the role of a dancing plate in Beauty and the Beast, turned back to caution Snowden not to bug her for tickets to the show.
Back to work, walking down the apartment's hall for the first time, Snowden saw the children's room. This was a shock because usually, when they showed up to clear a place out that had housed children, that presence could be felt immediately just by the collage of toys, books, and drawings they left behind. This apartment was spotless. A sparse, mature space without a sign of anyone below legal drinking age. Yet here it was, this kids' room, a narrow area with two bunk beds on either side, barely enough room for an adult to walk between them. Four name tags handwritten in crayon, one on the frame of each mattress. They must have built them in there, that was the only way they could have fit, and now he was going to have to take them apart just to get them out. As always, Snowden packed the children's things separately in the specially stamped boxes. On Lester's request, Snowden also created a different box for each child. They were now enrolled in Horizon's Little Leaders League and Lester intended to relay their possessions to them that night.
Finished, joining Lester in the master bedroom, Snowden was amazed at the contrast in size. The bed was a king yet looked like a little island in the center of the vast room. The mirrors on the walls and ceiling made the space seem like a loft. Lester caught Snowden looking at the costumes lying out on the dresser: a full-body skin of latex with holes for the head, hands, feet, vagina, anus; a leopard leotard whose tail erectly saluted; the mandatory French maid outfit but in red leather this time; countless others obscured below them and shackles straight out of Roots on top.
"She was a whore," Lester clarified, throwing the bulk into a fresh lawn bag, stomping it down with his purple snakeskins to make room for more.
Back to God. It was as if he existed. It was as if he was making up for a century of hands-off management, was considering a new policy of snatching up the unjust and using Harlem as a testing ground. It was a source of comfort, that the bad would be punished. It explained things: Maybe, when Snowden swung on his father and the man just died, maybe that was why. Maybe God was a brain hemorrhage sometimes. It offered solutions to unsolvable problems: This fate could await Jifar's father as well, some moisture on the bathroom tiles and faulty high-voltage wiring ready to claim victory for a vengeful lord, and then one more child would be free of a monster. More troubling was the universal implication of the theory Snowden had begun to imagine. It wasn't long before he began judging himself and his own actions.
Weeks into his special project, Snowden went up on the roof, unhooked the line he had less than two months before connected, then called Time-Warner to get his cable legally this time. The DMV tickets for the rental car, he paid them. He cursed the City of New York Transportation Authority for their contrived alternate-side-of the-street parking, but he admitted his sin and paid them anyway. Snowden's entire collection of Black Tail (April/May, August/ September, October/November, and the double-size Juneteenth Collector's Edition) went in the trash. Snowden even found himself keeping his apartment unusually orderly, fixing the stopper on the Irving Howe so you didn't have to hold the handle to flush, replacing the shower curtain with a plain, mildew-free print, hanging up the framed pictures that had from the day he'd moved in been resting on the floor against the wall. Eventually he would die and someone would be in his apartment as well. The saddest thing, those little tasks undone.
This rest of the world could not be controlled. In light of his new awareness of death's proximity, its random appetite, Snowden looked for safety, found none. On the job, carrying large, visually impairing objects down the steps, Snowden lost the confidence that if he simply dropped a foot blindly to the space below, there would be a stair there waiting for it, ready to carry his weight and the weight he was carrying.
Bobby: 'You look like a little girl trying to figure out if the water in the pool's too cold."
Undaunted, Snowden kept dipping down his right foot only, testing for purchase with his toe before investing the rest of his weight on the platform. The last step on any flight, the one right before the landing, was particularly worrisome to the newly spooked Snowden. His view blinded by whatever crap he was forced to lift at the moment, he kept fearing that he would confuse the final stair with the landing, or the landing for the final stair, and that this miscalculation would result in a fatal fall. One could drown in a thimble of water (or cereal bowl - Brian Lane, 853 East 134th St., Apt. A19). One could break one's neck just by landing headfirst on a steel-toed shoe (Pernell Harris, 432 East 116th St., Apt. E4). Uncertainty guaranteed, Snowden walked slowly. Horus, twice the boxes in hand, just pushed by, calling Snowden a "pussy" when the laggard cringed at contact.
It was nearly ten weeks before they got to do anything as a group besides lift furniture, then training began, late but as promised. Lester announced the change in schedule before handing out checks in the back of the van. "Come to the lodge front door at nine A.M., dressed like a
real estate agent." During nearly every coffee and lunch break for at least two weeks before, Horus had been putting forth his personal conspiracy theory that the whole program was a big scam, that they would never promote ex-cons to agents, that there was no townhouse to be awarded, that they just wanted the cheap labor and to make the sick joke of the banana uniforms. It began as an obvious ploy to throw the others off, but every time Horus made mention of it Snowden found himself succumbing to that delusion as well, despite the contradiction that there was no reason to import cheap labor to Harlem.
The Horizon Property Management office was just one small storefront in a converted stable; the corner brownstone it was attached to was originally built for the Slang Berg Explorers League, a short-lived gentlemen's club that derived its name from the original Dutch tide for Mount Morris. While the lodge was built in the same architectural style as the other brownstones of the Mount Morris Historic District (as all were the product of architect Richard Morris Hunt, better known for his contributions to Carnegie Hall), it was obviously too big to have been intended as a regular home, bulbous around its edge like it was pulling away from a block it had outgrown. There was an abandoned cinder-blocked shell attached to it, but the contrast just added to its grandeur. They all knew it was Cyrus Marks's residence, they all hoped to get a chance to be seen by him. Bobby had even practiced bending down to shake hands so it looked more like a bow than an acknowledgment of how much shorter the old man was. It made sense that Marks should live there. If you could have your pick of any house in Harlem, and were not burdened by modesty, this would be the one.
Wednesday morning, ten to nine, they stood outside, ready for the next phase in their ascension. Snowden had bought his suit the day before at Sutler's, Nineteenth between Fifth and Sixth. It was black, a retired tux rental, he wore it with a red tie and hoped the others didn't notice the strip on the outside of the pant legs. It was the best he could do for under $150. Bobby's suit was expensive. Snowden could tell, but Bobby bragged about it anyway. It was his reading suit, the one he'd bought to wear standing in front of bookstores, award ceremony podiums, glossy magazine shoots, and in the darkened room of a coveted interview show. That didn't happen and now it didn't fit anymore. It was baggy. Bobby'd forgotten to wear a belt so kept the coat buttoned even though it was hot and June, kept his hands in his pockets to keep his pants up while attempting an air of confidence.
