Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  Horus was dressed in a some sort of military formal wear, but it was not an outfit someone actually in the military would own, rather the type of uniform a doorman or the guy who takes the tickets at a fancy show would be forced to wear. Its felt material was Astroturf green, the rope that lined it gold metallic. Horus saw Snowden looking and, smiling, brushed off absolutely no lint from the glowing rope that lined the shoulders, arms, and five-inch cuff links.

  "How much did you pay for that?" Horus asked Snowden. The question was nonjudgmental, but the way Horus nodded to Snowden's suit, with his nose leading, Snowden could sense the distaste in it. Snowden adjusted his own shoulder pads, both of which seemed to be determined to emigrate south and get jobs as elbow pads.

  "One forty," Snowden told him. Pissing contests were tax-exempt. "

  Snowman, you should have gone with me to the warehouse. I told you." Horus spread his legs, slight and stiff, held out his arms for inspection. "Eighty bones, my son. That's what I'm talking about. Forty for the coat, forty for the pants. Check this out." Horus leaned into Snowden, glanced over at Bobby for mock privacy. "It buttons all the way up the neck so I don't have to waste money on a shirt or tie neither."

  Their first training day set the schedule for the rest: At exactly eight A.M., a man appeared, a Mr. M. R. Linden. M. R. Linden was white and bald except for his beard, which disappeared over his ears and was brown with an oval albino patch on the left side of his face as if he'd fallen asleep in a shallow pool of Clorox. He looked like a genetically modified pig, but he wore a much nicer suit than they did so his students listened intently. Day one was the basics: the difference between rent controlled ("a set rent price that increases slowly for the length of the rental") and rent stabilized ("a controlled rent price that can be raised by a citywide certified percentage each year"). From there Mr. Linden flew without pause into the particulars: Rent control is over, the only people who have it are the elderly or live-in descendants who inherited the robbery; rent-stabilized status applies to an apartment regardless of the owner, and even when a tenant leaves the rent can be raised only by a controlled percentage. The first postlecture discussion topic: Are rent control and rent stabilization the cause of Manhattan's exorbitant real estate prices?

  Snowden leaned forward in his chair just to get a look at Bobby. Bobby the preparer, Bobby memorizer of manuscripts, dark prince of data. Bobby, who in less sober moments had confessed that since he was long and weak his best chance at proving himself to the powers of Horizon was to intellectually dazzle, was preparing to use this opportunity to display the depth of his knowledge of the ruling argument of New York housing questions: whose fault were the prices, the realtors or the renters? Snowden could tell Bobby was reciting his speech in his head, raising his hand with no intention of waiting till he was called on. Brushing off one of the techniques that got him through high school, Snowden quickly excused himself to the bathroom, tried to make it to the door before Bobby could start talking.

  The hall outside was poorly lit, the lights were on but were too weak to manage the cavern. During the building's second incarnation as the Upper Manhattan Guild of Hebrew Men, the basement floor had been lowered ten feet to serve as a respite from Prohibition for the distinguished gentlemen of Judea. The bathroom was porcelain, tiled and equipped to facilitate a regiment struck by incontinence at once, but unfortunately a sign on its door said all of its services were temporarily unavailable, so Snowden headed instead for the WC on the second floor as the text instructed.

  Snowden had never been up there before and the action of climbing the wide wooden steps felt both naughty and one of employee entitlement. The hallway off the balcony had the same institutional feel as the basement, the same oak-lined walls and porcelain doorknobs, but the colored glow of the animal-shaped night-lights plugged intermittently along the floorboards gave the space a life missing below. Also missing: the bathroom. It had been Snowden's expectation that this floor would be built on the same grid as the one he knew, but much to his disappointment there was not even a doorway where he'd expected the bathroom to be. What doors he could find had signs on them, but they said things like TV and PLAY SPACE instead of MEN or WOMEN.

  Congressman Marks's voice came from down the hall after Snowden was already walking back, resigned to the thought that he would just have to hold it in for as long as it would take for Bobby to shut up and class to end. Moving toward the sound, Snowden wondered for a moment if he would be chastised for his intrusion, but then he located the door it was coming from and the sign above it said BOYS. Snowden, relieved to relieve himself, burst right in.

  Marks sat in a rocking chair dressed in a smoking jacket of green satin, Wendell's lump of brown canine flesh was snoring on the floor beside him. There was a book in the man's lap, one Marks stopped reading aloud as he turned up to look at Snowden. So did all the kids. From where Snowden was standing, it looked like at least twenty bunk beds filled the length of the room. Each one had a boy in a maroon blazer and short pants sitting on top of a mattress, looking over his shoulder to get a view of the intruder.

  "We have a special guest, one of Horizon's future leaders come to tuck you in for your nap. Say hello to Snowden, men." The bored, elongated welcome of children directed in unison. Snowden waved to them. A hand waved back. It took Snowden a moment to recognize that the boy it was attached to, probably around ten as most seemed in the room, had a question for him.

  "Yes, Mr. Godfrey?" Cyrus Marks asked, smiling.

  "Is Snowden your first name, or your last name, or is that a made-up name?"

  "Last name," Snowden told him. He looked over to Cyrus Marks, expecting some sort of explanation for the scene he was witnessing, but the man just sat there, legs folded, finger holding his place in his book, waiting for Snowden to answer like the rest of them.

  "My first name's Cedric," Snowden continued. "I just don't use it."

  "How come?"

  "Cedric was my dad. I'm just Snowden."

  "Junior!" a child's voice came from the other end of the room, the laughter it emitted from the other boys was what finally got Cyrus Marks out of his seat. The discomfort of stifled urination and the sound of Wendell farting: the only things that kept Snowden positive this vision wasn't his creation, staring over his shoulder as the congressman grabbed him by his shoulder and pulled him politely out of the room.

  "Mr. Snowden, so good to see you." Cyrus Marks in the hall, whispering, door closed behind him. "I really wish I could spend more time with our men of the Second Chance Program. You can use their rest room up here, but I wouldn't suggest sitting down: One of the boys seems to like urinating on the seats. I'm still trying to find out which one."

  "I'm sorry, sir, but what was that? It looked like a boarding school in there."

  "Are you pulling my leg? Lester hasn't informed you three about the Little Leaders League? I'm surprised. Lester is very thorough."

  "I knew there was a tutoring program, but those boys look like they live here."

  "Oh yes, of course they do. And you should see our strong little ladies, on the third floor; they've done a lovely job decorating their room. We're just starting to expand, take in more of them. Hale House used to have the same kind of services, but less so since Mother Hale died - God bless her, she was a lovely woman - and all their financial troubles. This is the first time many of these children have had a peaceful, orderly home. You should volunteer sometime! Lester says wonderful things about your work, I'm sure you'd be perfect for it."

  "Forgive me, sir, but how can there be so many? This won't be a permanent situation for them, right?" In response to the question, Cyrus Marks pulled on his shiny lapels, smirked amused disappointment.

  "Mr. Snowden, Mr. Cedric Snowden of 124 Winona Street #2, Philadelphia 19144. I'm surprised, really. I've read your file. You've experienced the alternative: multiple foster families, chaos. Do you think these children have ever had more stability than they do with us?"

  The entire journ
ey seemed impossibly long, and yet somehow, when Snowden returned, Bobby was still talking.

  " — so while the popular theory among New Yorkers may be that the cause of the high price of apartment rentals is due to property owner greed . . . " Bobby squinting. Bobby tilting his head to the right and lifting his hand for emphasis. Snowden saw him doing the same thing the night before when they were drunk and aping the president on television. Bobby Finley looked more sincere doing the move than the man he stole it from. Practice is cheating. "The true reason is that owners are forced to compensate for income lost due to unrealistic price fixing."

  "We charge as much as we do." Like a Jamaican DJ, M. R. Linden liked to start it up only to stop and bring it back again, beginning anew once he was sure he had complete attention. "We charge as much as we do because we can. For every fifty people who won't pay twenty-four hundred for a four hundred-square-foot one-bedroom four-story walk up with no windows, there's some asshole with good credit who will, who'll smile when you drop the keys in his hand because 'it's only five blocks to the express subway.'" The last bit M. R. Linden offered in his own interpretation of a New York homosexual. Snowden's body tightened in response to the entire presentation. Horus began applauding. Bobby took notes. His handwriting was so small it was like he was hiding something even from himself.

  "M. R. Linden is a troglodyte," Lester said after the first lecturer had departed. "But he is very talented at what he does. Listen to what he says. Take his skills and apply them to your own agenda." Bobby wrote that down as well, Snowden watched him.

  It was always like this. Linden would lecture and then, ten minutes after disappearing into the Town Car waiting outside for him, Lester would take his place and spend the first minutes of his teaching time discrediting the other's opinions. The first day it was: "That is the difference, that is what Horizon is about and that's why you're here. Horizon is not about building profits, it's about building a community." It was the kind of thing that every company said, a hint of social agenda worn like perfume to make the business that much more enticing. Even McDonald's bragged about paper wrappers. Snowden found it disorienting to actually believe Lester meant it.

  Lester went with it, this theme he was pushing. The second segment of the day Lester called "context." Specifically, how power brokers like Alain Locke created the Harlem Renaissance out of almost nothing, contacting artists and intellectuals nationally and telling them to come here because there was a vibrant community. And because they came, there was.

  Lester in lime. Lester in a glowing lime suit, matching shoes and tie, socks and shirt in lemon. This was where he looked most comfortable, a book and lectern in front of him, a blackboard behind. Wendell entered the room and sat in the corner staring at him, panting to the rhythm, tongue hanging to the side in awe.

  To wrap up the first day of school, Lester pulled out an old record player on a wheeled cart in the corner. The voice within the scratches was that of Alain Locke himself, talking about the influence that period of old Harlem had on black America. An hour on, while the three waited for their pizza at Slice of Harlem, Bobby did an almost dead-on impersonation of Locke by sticking two fingers up his nose and humming the words out the top of his palate. His slices of sausage and mushroom gone before the others had managed three bites, Horus used the silence created by full mouths to share his sole commentary about the day's proceedings. "That Locke dude, the one he was playing? I bet you could tie both my wrists behind my back, and make a rule that there was no kicking, and I could whup his ass real good. Just with my head, no hands."

  What was stunning about this remark was not just that this was the one and only thing Horus would say about the six hours of intensive study, but that he would offer nearly the same solitary observation in the weeks that followed. From Lester's lecture on W E. B. Du Bois's identification of the educated middle class as the Talented Tenth and how their post-civil rights flight to the newly integrated suburbs sent Harlem into its ghetto tailspin: "Definitely. That Doobie brother. You could tie, like, my left hand to my right foot, and give the dude a large, wooden club, and I could whip his ass. Probably in less than a minute, if he got close enough."

  Even when Lester delivered his surprisingly moving sermon about Horus's own former stomping ground, the Cabrini Green projects, where the city gave half the apartments to working families as condos to break the culture of poverty, create an environment where people worked, invested in their homes. By the time Lester got to the end of it he was sweating so hard beneath his shirt that even his tie was soaked to his chest. He said, "Imagine what we could do for Harlem following that model," but his voice was hoarse, wasted. After putting the needle down on a old record of Langston Hughes reciting "Low to High," "High to Low," Lester collapsed on the pulpit, exhausted by his performance. Snowden could smell him from his seat, the scent stronger as the service went on, but he didn't care. Snowden was too moved to be bothered, too jealous of the passion. Even for a cynic, it was easy to get drunk on the dream of Horizon, to imagine one's life no longer without reason.

  Despite his earlier emotion, when the lesson was over and the three were waiting for their lunch to heat up in the ovens at Slice of Harlem, Snowden found himself playing the rational counter to Bobby's evangelism.

  Snowden: "I'm just saying, wait, see. It's always about money. If this ain't, that's great, but it's always about money."

  Bobby: "That's your problem. You don't know what to believe and when to do it. You've got to have fire."

  Snowden: "Even if Lester's for real, the way he talks about a new community in Harlem, what's going to happen to the people here who don't fit into that? We just going to kick them out on somebody else's streets every time we get a chance?"

  Bobby: "That's a shame for them but it's not about what's best for some individuals, it's about what's best for everybody. Malcolm X said, 'By any means necessary.' People like that drug dealer Parson Boone, you don't worry what happens to them. Morally, the purity of the goal is all that matters."

  Horus: "That Hughes dude, that's not even a challenge. It'd be like, two hands handcuffed behind my back, one set of cuffs linked through to my right ankle, and still, I whup him, no problem. On one leg. My left one. I still whup his ass in a minute twenty."

  It wasn't that Horus was dumb, nor was it that he hadn't been listening. It was that he simply had no questions. Aside from, "When we going to eat?" and "When we getting paid?" Horus never had questions. You just told him something and he moved forward with it in mind. It was a wonder no army besides the Black Stone Rangers had ever recruited him.

  After lunch, Snowden returned from work to find his door vibrating with the sound of the television on the other side. He got depressed. Jifar hadn't been over in days and he'd begun hoping his secret dream had come true, that God had taken the time to reach down and smite the boy's father.

  Inside, the television was still on, but Jifar was gone, probably to bed. After turning off the set, Snowden collapsed on the couch, almost immediately beginning the process of gathering the willpower to rise once more, accomplish that long list of things like take off his shoes and brush his teeth that suddenly seemed so monumental. The sound of his own labored panting lulling him to sleep, Snowden tried the motivational tool of holding his breath and refusing to let it go until he forced his body to at least get up and microwave something. It was the sound of heavy breathing continuing from behind the couch that shot him up and over. When Snowden's blind fist slammed into a cast-iron frying pan flying nearly as fast in its same direction, he was as awake as any narcotic stimulant could possibly manage.

  When Snowden experienced a sharp and sudden pain, it was his habit to hold the afflicted area and jump up and down. He wasn't sure if he did this because he had grown up watching Chuck Jones cartoons, or if Jones himself had just called attention to a innate quirk in human pain management. Either way, this is what Snowden did, and this is what he was doing now. Jifar, for his part, had dropped his culinary assault
weapon and was jumping up and down with Snowden, in time and sympathy, offering "You should have knocked!" over Snowden's primal "Ow."

  "What were you thinking, boy?" It was his own father's voice Snowden used. This he knew from the timbre - it came on first deep and argumentative then got even lower, turned to a rage-filled scream on the last word. This Snowden knew also because Jifar turned his head to the side, tensed his face to counter the expected blow. He didn't run away, he didn't raise his arms to guard himself because he had learned, like Snowden had at his age, that that just brought more blows, harder ones.

  "I'm sorry. You don't be sorry, I am. Just, what were you thinking, little man? Were you going to try and kill me?"

  "I didn't know it was you. Honest."

  "Who the hell else is going to put a key in the door and come in here? Huh?" Snowden could hear the anger start to build again in his voice, tried to extinguish it by talking slowly enough to give himself the chance to control the emotion in each word. 'You give my keys to anybody to make copies?"

  "No. I don't do like that. I'm a man."

  "You're a man. Great. Then who the hell else was I supposed to be, then?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you the Chupacabra or something," Jifar admitted.

  "The Chupacabra. That monster." Snowden looked at the boy and could see who that monster was. The one with the gray mustache stained brown at the bottom from smoking Dominican cigars, the one with the endless supply of novelty T-shirts, like the one that said JUST SAY NO TO CRACK with the illustration of a woman's anatomically impossible cartoon ass swallowing a helpless man. That monster. Snowden could see the monster's claw marks on Jifar, in a line along his biceps at the same place on both arms; they were the ones you get from being shaken really hard. Jifar's skin was the light brown of fall leaves, the dotted bruises a dull green. They looked like tattoos of olives.