by Mat Johnson
He will not starve, but he has only rice to eat for months, and no seasonings of any kind. He will not freeze, but he is never truly warm, either. He is completely free to roam, but he must remain primarily in a closet. He even finds company in a sensitive native he meets by tracing the road out of the camp for six miles, but he quickly offends the other man and is chased off the hermit's property by gunshots (thereby learning the derogatory nature of the "Eskimo" descriptor). There are the man-eating bears the size of fuel-efficient cars, but (not to ruin it) he never sees one, so in the end they are no more than every other monstrous looming fear that haunts everyone, everywhere. Going neither up nor down, unassisted by plot or question, the prose is forced to crawl forward word by word, digging deliberately for purchase. No matter how quickly one reads The Great Work, the process never feels a moment less than seven months.
The genius is the balance of it all, in spite of such harsh surroundings a medium is found. Civilized man stripped forcibly of wants and left only with essentials. What at first appears a horrific circumstance reveals itself not only to be sustaining, but to offer the greatest freedom of all. Nirvana via situation. Stunning. Absolutely.
All this was Piper Goines's interpretation. And she should be qualified to review literature: She wrote for a newspaper.
"That chapter where he learned how to cook the rice by sitting it overnight in the coffee tin with a handful of snow, the whole thing about how many centimeters it should sit in relation to the heater, that was just gorgeous. I loved that," Piper admitted, blushing.
Surprisingly, the new-found intimates spent very little time actually discussing The Great Work. Perhaps because it was so precisely written, so thoroughly read, it mooted any questions or possible debate. Bobby certainly had no inquiries into the source or merit of Piper's interpretation. He found absolutely nothing questionable about it. It was exactly like his own.
They spent the evening talking about Piper Goines's life, Piper Goines's passions, Piper Goines's artistic ambitions. Throughout the night's procession they huddled at the back of their table in whispers, mostly hers, both their plates ignored despite the Dogon who acted pissed off every time he came back to reclaim another untouched course.
Enamored. By the time guests were asked to rise, grab their coats, and climb to the top of nearby Mount Morris for a final champagne toast, Piper had had enough to drink and not nearly enough food to absorb it. Bobby felt the same way and hadn't had a sip since sitting down. They lined up with the others for the door, snickered at the group's annoyance at the forced march up a mountain that was only half a block over and only half a block from base to summit. At the stairs, Bobby offered his arm for balance despite the fact that he was far too slight to ever stop her from falling. Piper kept her hand there after they were down.
"Do you remember that Mount Morris Park was where the main character did the eulogy in Invisible Man?" Bobby was never more in his element than he was at the moment. Piper stared forward, squeezed his arm. It hurt a little, but not nearly as much as he enjoyed it.
"The hill itself is an outshoot of bedrock, glacial. The Dutch called it Slang Berg. It means 'Snake Hill.' You can imagine why the brownstones' original realtors renamed it." In the park, there were no more snakes, that went without saying. All other predators had been discreetly removed by the Fruit of Islam security force hours earlier, after which the Mount Morris Historical Society lit and laid out handmade earthen oil lamps from Mali along the path.
The view from the top - they might have been only up five or six stories but there were no tall buildings around them and Bobby and Piper stood with a fresh glass of champagne along with the rest of the crowd, admiring the lights of upper Manhattan.
Piper said, "You know what? I have to admit, I never thought this place could be this beautiful. Maybe I hoped, but I never thought."
"That was built to look for fires, since this is one of the highest vantage points in Manhattan," Bobby said pointing to the iron crow's nest that towered fifty feet above them. "Some guy, it was his job to sit up there all day — rain, cold, it didn't matter — and look for smoke to tell the firemen."
Bobby leaned in so she could follow his line of vision perfectly, used this as an excuse to place his cheek against hers. Needing to hold it there, Bobby went on to aim her vision uptown to the building past Sugar Hill where Hughes himself had once lived, along with Du Bois, Locke, Hurston, and many of the others. Piper said, "Cool," and then Bobby tried to kiss her. Piper kissed him back. Then she hugged him tighter than it was cold and said, "This has been so much fun. I'm drunk. Are you drunk?"
Bobby Finley, Robert M. Finley himself, was so high his feet were dangling. Bobby Finley was looking at the night continue as it was planned, a final speech, a final toast, the fireworks rigged to go off above them as a last nod to celebration, and he knew he was floating. One of the rockets shot up, and unlike its exploding mates, it kept going. That was Bobby. His hand locked into place at the shallow of Piper's back, he felt like he really was flying, and with his hand on her Piper was flying with him. Bobby Finley was so high he'd forgotten what the ground looked like. He stayed that way too until Piper said, "You know what, I'm sorry, I better get going. Snowden's not here and we're supposed to be leaving together."
The crowd was leaving too, going back down again. Piper moved with them, walking the fastest, leaving him to watch until she was a little person far, far on the street below. Bobby suddenly remembered what the ground looked like again. Brown, hard, inescapable. He was filled with its growing image as he came crashing back down.
BOBBY FINLEY, THE FURY
BOBBY WOKE UP and thought, I got lucky! Bobby blinked into being and he didn't recognize where he was and he was naked and he could feel the crusted remnants of the party in his skull and in that instant before his lids stopped their flutter Bobby Finley thought, I got lucky with a girl and now I'm at her strange apartment! and then realized he had, in fact, passed out on his bathroom floor again, just this time with his head toward the door instead of toward the Irving Howe.
There was a phone ringing. Just to shut it up, Bobby went to it. Her voice said, "Oh my God, did I wake you up? I woke you up."
There was that bliss again. Unadulterated, immeasurable. The moments of the night before feeding him joy, almost worth the moment later when Bobby was gutted once more with the memory that she was Snowden's whore, and all the joy poured painfully out of him.
"I was there, at your place, this morning. I didn't hit the bell, it was like seven. I couldn't sleep last night, I was so charged. Robert, I had such a good time. I left you a package, though, outside your door. I got your name on the directory, someone was walking out so I just, you know, came up. Don't think I'm a freak, OK? I wanted to thank you for the book before I forgot. When I put something off for a minute, it can be months, a year before I get around to it. Right?"
Listening to Piper's voice over the receiver brought visions to Bobby's mind. Although he'd never actually read the Kama Sutra, suddenly Bobby could imagine what the poses looked like, imagine them very easily with Snowden and Piper as the sweating, heaving partners. Positions as absurd as a world that would do this to him.
"So did you and your lover Snowden have an exciting evening last night? He's not there now, is he?" There was a halfhearted intention at lightness, at carefree flirtation, it was just that the amount of sugar needed to make his voice not sound bitter was beyond Bobby's means for the moment.
"What? No. I just crashed. I was so tired. I just . . . I had such a good time talking to you, I was pretty much exhausted. From the whole night. I didn't see him; I don't know where he is. He's probably off working on his Special Project, right?" There was derisiveness there. Bobby liked that, in theory, but he didn't know what she meant so asked for clarification.
"You know, that's what he calls the overtime work he does for Horizon, cleaning out the apartments and stuff. It's what they have him doing for extra credit in that little competition yo
u've got going there. It's just grunt work. I'm sure whatever extracurricular assignment they have you doing is far more interesting."
"Oh yes," Bobby said, but Oh no was what he was thinking. Snowden had soiled his soul mate, now he was secretly slipping past him in the Horizon game as well. What kind of world was this where genius meant so little, where mediocrity was so often the champion? What was the worth of a species that recoiled from the brilliant and rejoiced in the dull? Another question: Was it the hangover that was hurting his head like that, or the force of the overwhelming dread that had besieged him?
Outside Bobby's door was a cardboard cylinder. Bobby told Piper this on his phone and she sighed back through hers. She told him to wait and open it until after she hung up, which wasn't much of a request since she hung up right after saying that.
Bobby put down the phone. Piper's package sat on the floor leaning against the hall wall, and soon he was as well. He knew what was inside it. It was one of the paintings she had talked about the night before, she wanted him to see one. Bobby wondered if it would be any good. Bobby began to pray it wouldn't be any good. Bobby began to believe, in those few seconds, that the unseen painting would reveal itself to be very bad, hackish, an arts and crafts reject, hence proving that he'd been right the second time, that Piper really wasn't his destined companion. There was no way his soul mate could be a hack. This painting, Bobby realized, could be the one piece of evidence that would turn this whole series of events from a tragedy into a funny sidebar. It was his emotional out.
The one relationship that Bobby had been able to maintain for more than a year had been with a mentally ill administrative assistant (Borderline Personality Disorder - DSM IV) who had believed with all her crazy little heart that she was put on earth to be a singer. She took classes, she sang in studios, she sang in bands. The thing is, she never sang in key, and there lay the problem. She was so tone deaf she didn't even know she was, and it meant so much to her that nobody had the heart to tell her otherwise. The longer the charade went on, the more impossible it became to end it. She was attractive enough and had a British accent so bands kept asking her to sing with them, and even though each pairing never lasted more than two practices after she first opened her mouth, it encouraged her to keep at it. At times, at those deluded times when Bobby feared she was it, she was the one, he would imagine with great horror that he would spend his whole life this way, contributing to the conspiracy. Lying to her. Lying to himself until he went mad and actually believed that her shrieks were beautiful. When she'd dumped him to go on tour with a ska band who'd only heard her (computer-enhanced) audition tape, Bobby had actually laughed. It still hurt pretty bad, getting dumped, but while she was still midsentence in the dumping he'd burst out laughing.
Praying for ugliness, Bobby yanked the canvas from its container, unrolled it, and looked for liberation. The work was a mess. There were colors everywhere. All primary. A bunch of cartoons traced onto the background. None of them seemed to bleed into each other, yet just by sitting so close together in space they seemed to blend in the eye and create the illusion of tertiary colors everywhere. The illustrations were originals, not tracings, done in one unlifting pencil stroke, freehand. It was making Bobby's heart race, just looking at the energy of it. It was so vivid you could almost hear it talking to you, almost smell things that weren't there. It was brilliant. It was the greatest work Bobby'd ever held in his hands. Bobby rolled it up, shoved it back in its tube, and then really got down to the wailing portion of his morning.
Bobby got himself to stop by saying, "That's it, I'm done playing. I accept the rules of this world, and I vow to win by them. As I owe this world nothing, I hereby free myself artistically and morally to do whatever I have to. I will use all of my intelligence, my creativity, my passion to capture everything I want. I will reclaim the love that is rightly mine and forge a life for us together. I will write the book that makes the world bow before me. In this Horizon contest I will burn brightly, high above the others."
Bobby was in his suit when he went down to the storefront. Walking by Nina, he went straight into Lester's office, closed the door behind him. Lester was sitting behind his desk eating a corn beef special on rye, the juice from the coleslaw streaming down the man's fingers and into a pool on the wax paper. The sight made Bobby want to vomit, but he stayed focused, began the speech he'd spent the last hour rehearsing.
"My name is Robert M. Finley."
"I know that, Bobby. Good afternoon. Did you have a good time last night? I had a ball. No pun intended."
"Yes, but listen, sir, my name is Robert M. Finley, and I know you have an idea of who I am, but I don't think you understand who I really am, or what I'm fully capable of. That is my fault, because while I feel I've outperformed my contemporaries, I know I haven't really pushed myself to realize my potential. May I continue, sir?"
"Continue."
"I am by far the smartest, most dedicated participant in the Second Chance Program. No one believes as much in the goals of Horizon Realty, Harlem, or in the African-American community as a whole than me, sir. I, Robert M. Finley, dedicate myself with all my heart and by any means necessary to the uplifting of all three, and I live to prove that to you. Now, I have been made aware that Mr. Snowden has been involved in a special project for the cause, and I am here to ask for an extracurricular opportunity as well."
Lester took another bite, a big one, before licking the juice off his fingers, careful to taste every drop. After wrapping the remains of his lunch back up again, Lester fished in his drawers for napkins, used several. Dried, the man folded his hands before him, gave a sigh with a smile chaser.
"I can't tell you how pleased - strike that - ecstatic I am that you've come to me today with such passion, Robert M. Finley. Your talents, your experience, are what make you such an important addition to this community. Particularly during these times, when the Department of Corrections would see fit to build a halfway house in the middle of our historic community, despite our considerable protest." Lester removed a folder from the stack on the side of his desk, slid it over. Bobby picked it up, opened it. There were photocopies of blueprints inside.
"The convicts are expected to pour into the Mumia building this Friday, barring a miracle. These are not hand-picked Horizon men I don't have to tell you what type of men these are. I'm sure you've seen it: corner lot on 121st, sleeps thirty-eight. Those new buildings have such shoddy construction, just drywall and plywood. Like a four-story box of matches, if you ask me. But of course, they're just not built to last, are they?"
Just two guys sitting at the Lenox Lounge, nothing to see here. One beaming, one bowed. One saying hi to a seemingly endless parade of old friends and acquaintances, one wishing the other would just shut the hell up and get drunk so he would give up on murdering for the evening. This was Snowden's plan A: He would get Lester so drunk that nothing more could be done with the night except put it to bed. He would do this before every one of Lester's planned exercises, for a lifetime if need be. It would be like one of those fables, and if that didn't work, plan B was that he would get himself so drunk that he would be incapable of complying. Even though one plan was marked A and the other B, those letters in no way represented a hierarchical order of feasibility or allotted effort.
Snowden's wallet was padded with six twenties to make this happen, and he'd insisted repeatedly that the night was on him, but plan A clearly wasn't working. Lester didn't just baby-sit his drink, he'd adopted it. The contrast grew as the night progressed. Snowden's once broad shoulders evaporated, his neck slumping straight to his elbows in defeat. Lester would have been glowing even if he wasn't wearing neon. "Lester, you ain't changed in twenty years," they said as they passed their table. "Black don't crack, baby," they declared loudly at the sight of him. "Life looks good on you, brother. Good to see you out, back on top again." Lester sparkled - literally, the metallic threads sewn throughout his suit. Snowden's dreary presence beside him just added to the shim
mer.
Everyone at the bar either seemed to know who Lester was or pretend they did. He even called their waitress by her first name and she wasn't wearing a tag, either. She smiled and said, "Knob Creek, right?" and Lester said, "Thanks, Maisy," and that's it, not a word to the fact that though she couldn't have been much older than thirty she had teeth missing on the top and bottom of her left side. Not one mention that, despite the clear complexion provided by pancake makeup, parts of her face were so swollen it looked as if there were plums in utero under its surface. Lester took the fact that Snowden was looking up at all to once again try to engage him in conversation.
"Not trying to pry or anything, but your file says your father was a Panther in the early days."
"Oh, OK, so I have a file. And that's in it."
"Yes it is. Well, I've been thinking about that the last couple weeks, about your father, your apprehensions. You know, his involvement in the Black Liberation Army after the Panthers crumpled means your father was one of the few who held on. That's amazing that he was still in the BLA up till his last arrest in the early eighties, hardly anyone was. That's a true believer, you see what I'm getting at? A warrior for the people. That was part of why we selected you: It's in your genes. You really should take pride in that, use it as inspiration. This is your chance for redemption, renewal. You get to make up to the world what it lost when he passed away."
Snowden liked that idea. If the world needed another bitter, drunken Cedric Snowden to sit around and complain about how it and its inhabitants had betrayed him, Snowden felt very capable of taking his father's place.
