The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

  “They brought you from the shelter four days ago.”

  “Am I going to die?” I whispered.

  “That’s why we want to know if you’re insured or if there’s someone who can help.”

  When I wasn’t moving or blinking too fast, I felt very warm and secure.

  “Can I stay here?” I asked.

  “For a week,” she said. “After that we have to move you to a state facility.”

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the Indian doctor was gone.

  I felt warm and swaddled. In that bed there were no desires, not even much discomfort. There were beds around me, but I didn’t know who was in them. I didn’t have to eat or get up to go to the bathroom. All I had to do was sleep and awaken now and again. Each period of sleep seemed to have a longer arc. It was as if my consciousness was a skipping stone over placid water that built up speed and power as it went. I was completely satisfied knowing that I’d sleep, open my eyes, and sleep again, until finally one day the sleep would go on, leaving me behind.

  “Dad?”

  I’d heard the word before in my death-sleep. It was a single note but also a word, a class of men . . . me.

  Mercury was sitting in a pine folding chair next to my bed. His butter-brown face was drawn.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  I looked around and noticed that I was no longer in the crowded infirmary. It was a single room—just for me.

  “How do you feel?” my son asked.

  I took in a long, deep breath, realizing how shallow my breathing had been.

  “Good,” I said. “Better. Where’s your mother?”

  “I want you to come home, Dad.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I took a leave to come back and find you. I’ve been going all over the city to hospitals and shelters, the police and city social workers.”

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked again.

  “She thought, she thought you might not want to see her.”

  There was a lot of information in that stuttered sentence. But it didn’t matter. Mercury my son had done for me what I was unable to do for Mercury my father.

  “If I live,” I said.

  “What, Dad?”

  “If I live, I’ll come home.”

  Haunted

  Iwas sitting at the dining room table surrounded by stacks of books and old newspapers, dirty dishes, bills, and first, second, and third drafts of handwritten letters to editors of various literary reviews. My laptop computer screen was open to a staff-page photograph from the Black Rook Review’s website. The BRR was a small literary quarterly out of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was looking at the picture of young, milk-soppy Clark Heinemann, holding in my hand his rejection of my one-thousandth story, “Shootout on the Wild Westside.” Mira, my girlfriend of the last sixteen years, was leaving to sleep at her mother’s house in Hoboken because, she said, and I quote, “your continual vituperation is too much for me to bear.”

  “Call me when you’re human again, Paul,” she said, before rolling her black-and-pink-polka-dotted roller bag out the door of our fifth-floor walk-up apartment.

  I remember it all so clearly: Heinemann’s rejection letter was in my hand, and his smug, slack face was on the screen; I could hear the thump and slide, thump and slide, thump and slide of Mira’s bag as she lowered it step-by-step.

  . . . while the concept is interesting the execution leaves me with more questions than answers. I think you might have greater success sending this story to a genre magazine where the readers have more sympathy for the ambiance and tone . . .

  Heinemann’s words were in my head while his doughy face smirked at me. Mira’s bag’s bump and slide down the stairs was fading when my hand, seemingly of its own volition, crushed the letter. This minor act of anger was exacerbated by a pain in my middle finger. It felt as if a bone had broken. Before I could react, the sharp ache jumped from my hand to my shoulder, and my breath got short. I was convinced that these were psychosomatic manifestations of the rage I felt about Heinemann and his condescending, typewritten, type-signed letter.

  Here he used a typewriter on watermarked paper not as a sign of respect but because of his supercilious conceit.

  There was no personal intention to that letter; I was sure of this even as I tumbled from the dining room chair to the bare oak floor. My left ankle got tangled in the power cord, and the laptop fell with me. It didn’t break. Lying there sideways on the floor, Clark Heinemann sneered at my diminution, my impotence.

  I hated him so much.

  As I reached over to pick up the computer, intent on smashing his image, I realized that it was not my spiritual heart but the physical one that was causing the numbness in my left forearm and the fire in my chest.

  I managed to take in half the breath I needed, exhaled with a very audible wheeze, and then inhaled with half the capacity of the breath before.

  Clark Heinemann sneered. My breathing became mere puffs. Mira was right about me, but Mira was gone. I had stormed around the apartment for three days cursing the editor and drinking expensive red wine that we could not afford.

  My thousandth story, and I was dying, and Clark Heinemann would probably make some snide remark when he heard I was gone.

  Just like they used to say in the old movies, everything was going dark. I was dying, and the only witness, the only light left to me, was Clark Heinemann and his sidelong smug indifference.

  After a short while that nevertheless felt interminable, darkness overwhelmed the light. I had died hating a man twenty years my junior, a man I had never met or spoken to. I was, for all intents and purposes, dead and gone, but somehow my hatred cohered. The details of my final humiliation floated on a deep well of spite that did not, would not drain away.

  Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly—but most of all, Clark Heinemann.

  “Paul Henry is dead,” a young woman’s voice said from somewhere in the void.

  I was suddenly back in proximity to the living; aware, seeing the world from a set of eyes that were a bit stronger than mine had been.

  “Who?” The man’s voice seemed to reverberate.

  “That guy who has sent us a story every six weeks for the past twenty years.”

  “You mean Mr. Again and Again?”

  “That’s him.”

  “What happened? Did some editor finally shoot him?”

  “Sixty-eight and overweight. He only lived three blocks from here. He had this younger girlfriend who left him, and so they didn’t find his body for five weeks.”

  I was floating over the head of a man in his late forties who looked somewhat like Clark Heinemann. He wore a herringbone jacket, a dark blue shirt, and a yellow and blue bow tie.

  “The poor fuck,” Clark said. “I must have rejected hundreds of his bad stories.”

  A thousand, I thought.

  “What did you say, Carrie-Anne?”

  “What?”

  “Did you say something?”

  “No.”

  “Oh well,” said the human stalk to which my hateful consciousness clung. “He wrote all that genre stuff and tried to pretend it was literary. At least I won’t have to make our interns read any more of his ghastly prose.”

  You didn’t even read it yourself?

  “What?” Clark said.

  “Are you hearing things?” the copper-haired young woman asked. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and grass-green lipstick.

  “Too much to drink at the PEN Gala last night, I guess,” h
e said. “Did I tell you? I sat three tables away from Rushdie and Paul Auster. My head’s been buzzing all morning.”

  After that Carrie-Anne left the small office. Clark gazed at her posterior as she went, and so I did too. Clark had a desk and a bookshelf, an old IBM Selectric typewriter, and an almost as old Apple Macintosh computer. His windows were open, and there was a breeze; you could see it wafting in the partially drawn window shade.

  Alone Clark Heinemann studied the computer screen, perusing a story submission to the magazine. I tried to read the words, but they didn’t make sense. The world was fading again as it had when I died weeks before.

  Finally I was once more merely the memory of hatred for anyone having to do with publishing.

  The acrid smell of urine, dead skin, and sour breath assailed a nose close to me. I came to consciousness, again attached to Clark Heinemann. This time we were in an old folks’ home sitting before an ancient woman in a wheelchair. She was listing to the side, and her eyes darted around aimlessly, as if searching for something worth seeing. Looking at her, I perceived a memory that must have belonged to Heinemann. It was his mother when she was younger and he was a child. She’d been a handsome woman. Now her once fair skin had darkened and was creased with a thousand wrinkles. Her white hair stood away from her tiny head like dead grass rising up from the weight of the first snow at the onset of winter. The only glimmer of life, even beauty, was in her blue eyes, which looked out from under a creased brow. She peered closely at the space above Clark’s head.

  “How are you, Mom?” he asked, and I wondered what I was doing there.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Clark, Ma, your son.”

  “Who’s that on your head?”

  “My . . . my head?”

  “Yeah. That fat Negro on top a’ your head. Isn’t he heavy?”

  Heinemann waved his hand over his head; it passed right through me.

  “Nothing there, Mom. See?”

  “I see a Negro on top a’ your head.”

  Clark turned away from his mother and looked into a mirror above a sink anchored into the wall of the nursing-home cell. I saw what he saw—him, as pasty-faced and weak-jawed as ever, and my dark countenance hovering just above for only a second and then fading. I was still there, but Clark soon lost sight of me.

  “What was that?” he said.

  “He’s gone,” Mrs. Heinemann said. “Now, who are you?”

  For the next hour or so, Clark sat with his mother, fed her, and told her over and over again that he was her son and that he loved her.

  “Will you take me with you to your house?” she asked, emotional craft combined with the eternal despair of an orphaned child.

  “You’re happier here,” he said.

  “I hate it here. They don’t feed me.”

  “I’ll talk to the nursing staff.”

  “Will the Negro take me home with him?”

  The smell was horrible; the feeling of mortality unbearable. I could sense death descending all around. This reminded me of my own expiration, and I moaned.

  “Did you hear something, Mom?”

  “It was him,” she said, gesturing at me with an arthritic claw.

  It was then that I understood what was happening. I existed only through my hatred of Clark, and then I was called into existence through my name being mentioned or when someone like that old dying woman could see me.

  I wanted to get away from Clark and his mother and that building full of people whose souls were crying out as mine was.

  Six or seven times during the torture, Clark turned to look in the mirror, but I wasn’t there—or at least he could no longer see me.

  When he left the nursing home, I faded again, hoping that this would be the last conjuring, that I would pass over into oblivion.

  For a long time I floated in hateful darkness. My feelings about Clark Heinemann had become a physical thing, or maybe metaphysical; they, those angry emotions, had turned into instincts that I could not eschew.

  “Miss Stern to see you, Mr. Heinemann,” a voice through an intercom announced.

  “Send her in.”

  I was aware again, sharing the eyes, ears, and nostrils of Clark Heinemann.

  He looked up, and I did too. Mira walked in, wearing her job-hunting medium-gray dress suit.

  She was thirty years younger than I. We met when I was teaching a class on fiction at the uptown Y. She still had a great figure. And that outfit really showed it off.

  Clark noticed what I did, and I wondered if somehow my awareness informed his.

  He stood up and said, “Nice to meet you, Miss Stern. I was so sorry to hear about your husband.”

  “We weren’t married. Paul didn’t believe in marriage.” It sounded like an indictment.

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “Um, please have a seat.”

  Mira took the chair and crossed her legs, showing her lovely knees.

  “How can I help?” Clark asked, looking at her legs with me.

  “I wanted to ask you if there was some way that you might publish something of Paul’s. He left me the stories in his will. And it’s the only thing I can imagine that would be a fitting remembrance. His body was cremated. He was an only child, and his parents are both dead. The only things he left in the world were one thousand stories and seven suitcases filled with rejection letters.”

  I caught a whiff of rose oil, the perfume I preferred on her.

  “You don’t have children?” Clark asked.

  “I was with Paul most of my adult life,” she said. “But he didn’t want kids. He said he needed the time to write.”

  Clark gazed at Mira’s café au lait complexion. Her father was Jewish of Russian descent and her mother a rare Christian from Mali. She was a beautiful woman. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d told her so.

  I’m so sorry, honey, I said reflexively.

  “Did you hear something?” Clark asked.

  “Just the traffic from the street,” she said.

  She uncrossed her legs and then recrossed them in the opposite direction. Then she tilted forward in a movement both innocent and suggestive.

  I was happy that she was trying so hard to get me into that magazine.

  “You know, Miss Stern, Paul’s work was not the kind of fiction we publish. The writing was passable, but he always threw in some genre aspect that made the work, um, what can I say . . . neither here nor there.”

  “But,” she said. “I don’t know . . . I was thinking that maybe you could publish it with an introduction. You know, an article saying that the story was an example of how Paul took his own path in spite of expectations.”

  That’s my girl, I said.

  “I like that,” Clark agreed.

  “I know Paul was stubborn, but he worked so hard at it that it would be a shame if he was never published.”

  Mira stared directly into my nemesis’s eyes, and I was aware of a quickening in his pulse.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we have dinner tonight, and you can tell me what stories best fit your idea. I mean, I can’t make any promises but . . . I don’t know; we’ll see.”

  “Thank you so much,” she said, with real happiness in her voice.

  They made plans to meet at an Italian restaurant that night. He gave her the name, D’Oro. She said that she knew the place.

  She stood, and he did too. He walked her to the door and then kissed her cheek. I could smell the rose attar rising from her breast and feel the touch of her fingers on the back of Clark Heinemann’s hand.

  After she left, Clark sat there for a while looking at the door she’d gone through. Then he picked up a manuscript, and my mind slipped back into the brackish bile pond where it festered and throve.

  In that vile darkness my mind was onl
y partially aware. I realized that even though I was a ghost, I was the one being haunted by the animosity I’d worn like a badge through my life. I never made anything of myself, and I held Mira back. I wrote stories that I knew would never be published, and I hated freely.

  I was my own private hell.

  Knowing this, I tried to let go of my feelings, hoping that this release would let me find oblivion, if not actual peace.

  There in the darkness I strained to let my hatred of the arrogant editor fade. For a moment there I felt that I had succeeded, and then . . .

  “To Paul Henry,” Clark Heinemann saluted.

  He and Mira clinked wine goblets over two plates of half-eaten pasta. They drained their glasses, and a waiter came up to refill them.

  “The wine is kind of going to my head,” she said.

  He reached over and took her hand.

  “Come home with me,” he said, and I tried to remember the last time Mira and I had made love.

  The sex went on and on, all night long. Riding on Clark’s undulating body, I cried out in the pain of loss and betrayal. He experienced my cries as some kind of inner ecstasy, while Mira urged him on, whispering that she had not felt this much and this good in many years. She told him how beautiful he was and how caring and gentle.

  In the early morning they went into the hallway outside of his apartment after a series of half-drunken dares. There they giggled and fucked until someone opened a door down the hall, forcing them to laugh and run for the refuge of his apartment again.

  After that they fell asleep, and I eased back into my grotto of spite. But before I could sink into blissful unconsciousness . . .

  “What are you thinking?” Clark asked my girlfriend of sixteen years. He was nuzzling her nipple with his pudgy nose.

  “About Paul,” she said wistfully.

  “Are you feeling bad?”

  “No,” she said, and I felt like I was a balloon filled past capacity, about to burst with rage instead of helium. “The reason he was left in the apartment for so long was because I had decided never to come back. I couldn’t. I’m thirty-seven, and nothing had changed between us since the day we met. We were in the same apartment, sleeping on the same mattress on the floor. He made scrambled eggs with lox and onions in the same skillet five thousand mornings in a row. And he kept writing stories that I knew would never be published. I think he knew it too.”