by Mat Johnson
“What the hell is a ‘sunflower’?”
“It means you don’t know who you are.”
“Well, who are you?” She rolls her eyes, pulls back her hair on the other side, and it smells like cedar and oak leaves and a place you could lie and die content. I want to tell her, you got nice pheromones. I think, Why should I not just tell her this? She may be pleasantly surprised by the news, uplifted even.
“Someone who can’t be bothered.”
“Come on, I’ll buy you lunch and I’ll let you spend the time trying to convert me.” Her response is a backhanded raised finger, pumping in the air as a parting farewell. It’s an obscene display. Fist pumping high, middle finger pointing to the ceiling, bracelets and baubles jingling.
What makes you see a stranger, just that flash of image of their outer persona, and decide instantly that they can save you? I fall in love every day like this. I’m a functional moron.
Back at my foldout table, I now have a waiting queue. My performance has earned me an audience. I do a horrible job on the sketches, rushed, uneven lines, but they don’t care. I do a horrible job because my hands are shaking and I feel nauseous, but I’m making cash money so I smile and try to ignore the sensation of falling because I know I am solidly sitting down. I look for the biracial militant walking around the room but don’t see her. I am now certain that she could have rescued me. I don’t know what from, but that could be part of the danger. I look for her again and tell myself if I see her I will apologize once more, but better. I will tell her I’m sorry and renounce my negritude and carry the biracial banner if she will absolve me. By absolve, I mean hold me. Just hold me. I haven’t been held, not since Becks, not since the one when her things were already in the lorry. She will do this and then when she lets go I will be whole again. This makes sense in my head, the transcendent potential of me hugging the crazy lady. But I don’t see her. Or I’ve already forgotten what she actually looks like. About an hour in though, I do look down my line and see that teenage girl is there again, with her copy of my book. When she finally gets to the front of the line, I have my Sharpie ready to giver her an autograph blessing.
“Saw you reading my stuff, you must have read the whole thing since you got here,” I tell her. Good, non-flirtatious chatter. Her grandfather has his wrinkled hand tightly on her shoulder, forcing her forward. “Whom do I make it out to?” I ask her.
“No one. Do you remember Cindy Karp?” she asks me.
“Do you spell that with a c or a k? I never know,” I tell her, and take her copy, looking for the title page.
“No. Do you remember, eighteen years ago, a girl named Cindy Karp? Did you ever date a girl by that name?” she asks me again, and yanks my pen right out of my hand before it hits the page. I don’t know who she’s talking about, but I no longer feel like I’m falling. I feel like I’m landing, on something hard. The crackhead in my father’s foyer last night, staring up the stairs, flashes in my memory for no reason. Only when I look back up at the old man’s face over the teenager’s shoulder do things once again become lucid.
“Do you remember Cindy Karp. Who you slept with?” comes out of the young woman’s mouth. I look at her, and I do remember Cindy, oh God I do, and it’s like this girl is one of Cindy’s classmates, not a year accumulated, frozen, waiting in Philly to damn me. But the girl’s tone is not accusatory. It is scared. Desperation vibrates her vocal cords.
I grab the hand with the pen, and I look up at her. I look in her face, I really look in it. I do not see Cindy Karp, except in the little pimples around her hairline that all teens must have. I don’t see Cindy Karp, but I am no expert, because I don’t even remember what Cindy Karp looked like. What I do see, though, I recognize. I see my dad. I keep looking at her face. She lets me, connects her eyes with mine this time and lets me hold the gaze. And then I see my mom. I really see her, for the first time in twenty-four years. And then I start to cry. Just a little teary in the eye, it happens before I can put words to why. And I grip the girl’s hand firmer. I see my mother, and her mother, Gramma Jones, and Aunt Katie. Faces I thought were gone from existence, they are right in front of me. Jumbled all together in this tan Jewish girl in dirty jean shorts ripped at the thighs. A whole collage of high-yellow matriarch is staring back at me like the aged photos at the bottom of my dresser drawer.
3
I HAD POISON in my cock and I had to get it out. From age eleven until about seventeen, I could feel it in there, threatening to burst my testicles, pulsing my vas deferens. I tried to take care of this on my own, to remove the compound manually, nightly draining the malignant fluid under my blanket in my bed. And this did provide relief, but only for a few minutes, maybe an hour.
And over time the procedure became less effective. After a month, I could no longer go to sleep without performing the exorcism at least twice. It wasn’t long until mornings became the same way. And if I didn’t, the consequences were horrific. Not only would urges plague my mind throughout the school day, but uncontrollable erections, brazen and adamantium, would haunt me as well. Not even the fear of social humiliation could deflate my phallus.
Returning home meant a race to the bedroom to release the mental succubi eight hours in the School District of Philadelphia provided. Once every ninety minutes, for the rest of the night, the act was repeated. But it was release without liberation. Self-pleasure was a meager panacea in lieu of the exorcism of true intercourse. I knew what I needed. A girl. Any girl; I didn’t care about the specifics. Someone else to take my burden. I was desperate for the cure.
I didn’t care who removed the poison. I didn’t understand love or consequences. The only feelings I was concerned with emanated from my groin. I found a drunk girl at a house party in West Philly who was willing, after a twenty-minute introduction, to partner in intercourse in an upstairs study, but my strenuous masturbatory exercises left me numb to the real act, the latex condom I wore for her protection only making matters worse. Two weeks later, a casual encounter with a white girl at a hotel party downtown led to a week of phone conversations and then a meet up at a sweet sixteen at Society Hill Country Club. Intercourse was achieved, again drunkenly, in the laundry room, on a foldout table. One of the women working there, an older teen, maybe college-age, walked in on us and I leaped off, my shame hanging before me. The girl I’d found was amazed I’d disengaged so quickly, but in my fear and drunken stupor, my flaccid penis was no miracle.
The girl was Cindy, the last name was Jewish; that’s all I retained of her. Of her face I remember a field of small pink pimples on her chin and along the line of her brown hair, the talcum smell of pancake makeup. I don’t know when I found out she was fourteen, that she was just in eighth grade at a private elementary school. I was sixteen and in tenth grade, high school, and it was shameful and wrong. But I had been under this penile burden for years.
She said she was sick with a sore throat, home from school. I played hooky and came over. Her parents had money, a high-rise condo downtown, even if they only lived on the third floor. I don’t remember any conversation when I arrived. There must have been one; there must have been a pause. What I do remember: a car caught fire on the street below, not far from her bedroom window. I watched the smoke build on the hood until you could see the building inferno blacken its paint. The windows, rolled up, burst from the heat mounting inside the car. There was no explosion, just casual ruin. The car parked in front of it was charred all the way to the driver’s door. The car past that was still close enough that its wheels melted like in a Dalí painting. Even a parked car can be a disaster. From where we were, you couldn’t even touch the windowpanes we looked through. So we must of talked.
But I just remember lying on the mattress on the floor of her room. She took my penis in her mouth and when she lifted her head back up a line of saliva as thick as glue connected us, and I realized she really did have a cold. And then I was on top of her, feeling nothing once more but pumping away to find the pleasure I kn
ew eluded me. The chance of an orgasm was an act of faith, until her wetness suddenly surrounded me, and I could feel my objective within reach. It was as if I was wandering blindly up a hill then stumbled upon its blissful peak. I arrived at the greatest three seconds of my young existence. And there was elation, until I rolled over and saw that my increased pleasure was caused by the fact that the condom had broken and rolled back over my cock like a rubber wedding ring.
Past the fire trucks that now surrounded the building, I pushed forth into the traffic of Walnut Street, pumping my skateboard toward something I couldn’t imagine. I had heard that there was a foam? That you could buy, that could kill sperm? But that was all I knew. No one else had heard of it though, at 7-Eleven or Wawa. I didn’t calm down until an hour later, when I decided that if she did get pregnant, I would call up Trojan and get them to pay for the abortion. My groan, though, was silent. I did feel the release. I was unburdened.
In the days after, she began calling me. And we talked. And it was okay at first, even though we had nothing to talk about. But she kept calling, several times a night. I would come back to Germantown, walk into my father’s latest renovation, and the phone would already be ringing and it would be her. After fifteen minutes of forced pleasantries, to get her off the line I told her I needed to get settled in, but if I didn’t call her back by dinnertime she would call again. My father, annoyed, would get rid of her this time for me. If I didn’t call her before I went to sleep, she would call late at night and I would pay the price for this piercing of my father’s solitude. She wanted something, something besides sex. It scared me, how badly she desired this unknown thing from me. I was too young to realize it was just friendship. It ended as childishly as it started: she wanted to get together on a Saturday; I said I was staying home. An hour later, two of her girlfriends saw me on a bus heading downtown to Love Park with my skateboard. A crying call from her that night let me be single again by Sunday. The phone rang when I came in the door from school until Wednesday, but when I didn’t answer it eventually I was rewarded with it going silent.
Sunday night, a week later, she called to tell me she was late. I didn’t know the meaning of the euphemism. The calls started back up again from there, surging past their original frequency. Her narrative started with the conflict that she might be pregnant, and every phone call was to discuss the possible repercussions. After two weeks she told me that she had taken a pregnancy test and it was positive. This revelation brought me a mortal fear I had never conceived of and bought her several extra minutes on the phone. Now that the pregnancy was real, she told me she needed an abortion, that she needed $340.
Petrified that my father would find out, I offered to pay half, stopped eating lunches, and started pocketing the twenty dollars a week my dad gave me for food. Then she told me there was a complication, that she needed a special abortion. That the cost would triple. That her mother demanded I pay half before she authorized the procedure. I told her I would send it. I stopped eating regularly altogether. I lost weight. I did even worse in school. The stress cured my sexual desire, but I still couldn’t sleep at night.
I could hear the phone ring even when it didn’t. I would be upstairs in my room at night, and there would be a call and my dad would pick up, and I would stand at the door listening to the pause after his “Hello” knowing that my ruin was upon me. That he was being informed of my sins, of the fact that my life was wasted. Eventually he would begin to talk and the call would be revealed as something totally unrelated but I knew my demise had only been delayed.
She phoned three months in, wanted to know where the money was. She called less often now and when she called she was just mad and didn’t try to keep me on the line like she used to. I had scrounged together 380 bucks doing some messenger work for Sirleaf Day, kept the cash in a shoe box that once held yellow and blue Air Jordans. But I had started to doubt, by this time. I had asked around at her school, had received the word that while the rumor was that she was pregnant, nobody noticed her actually getting bigger. Chubbier, baggier clothes, but not belly bigger. I decided I would offer her a check. If she told me I could make it out to her mother, I would send her the cash I saved. If she refused, told me to make the check out to her, then I would send her nothing.
When we finally talked, she said, “No, make the check out to me. That’s what my mother wants.” I said okay, and hung up. It really was okay. No mother wants the check made out to you. I didn’t send it. I didn’t spend it either. I was too chickenshit scared to. Her next call three weeks later began, “Where the fuck is the money?” It was the last sentence she said to me. In response I said, “I didn’t send it. And I’m not going to send it either.” And then there was nothing but silence.
So much silence. I could hear the radio on in the background, Hot Hits 98! WCAU FM. I knew she was still on the line. It was open audio territory, meant for me to step in and defend myself, to uphold my position. But I stayed mute. I was not going to say anything else. I was not going to call her a liar. I was going to let the silence hold, because I knew that if I could endure it, this silence, this final call, then she would disappear. Because I disappeared. Right there, I was holding the phone, but in my head, I was gone.
In the silence, I first understood you could do this fully, that you could just vanish. Or rather: I could do this. I could do this my whole life, and would, because the only thing it took was not being a good person. Now I knew: I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t going to grow up to be strong. I was going to be a weak man who could do something horrible, unspeakable, shameful, and just vanish. Disappearing, like when my mom was in the hospital after her stroke and I stopped visiting because it hurt less not being there, seeing her there, unable to do more than witness. So I vanished. And then Mom was gone and I never had to go back anymore. After three minutes, three of the longest minutes of my life, three minutes of hearing ads for Krass Bros. menswear and Robbins Eighth and Walnut at her end of the phone, of hearing her breathing, hours in feeling but minutes counted on the red digital numbers of my father’s alarm clock, she finally hung up. Cindy was gone. It was over. The conflict was erased, and now I had the money, and the only price was my delusion that I was worth loving. I spent the money on the next Air Jordans. All white and lizard skinned. And pizza, I think. And forties of Red Bull.
—
“You knew my daughter,” Irv Karp says to me, eighteen years later. He’s Jewish and I can hear in his question the Torah’s sense of “to know.”
“I barely knew her. I don’t know her,” I tell him, and I look frantically around the diner we’re in, at the people in the other booths and tables, searching for Cindy’s face staring at me. Preparing for the hate on that face. The anger from the last phone call undiminished.
That’s how I’ll recognize Cindy today: the accusation in her expression.
“You’re right, you didn’t really know her. And you never will. She’s dead.” He takes a sip of his coffee, then lets me carry the weight of the statement. I fumble my condolences but he still takes them. Outside, standing on the sidewalk, the girl smokes a cigarette. “She’s dead. Seven years now. Stop apologizing, that part wasn’t your fault.
“She had her demons. She fought them for a while. Sometimes she beat them. Mostly though, she followed them to hell. And seven years she’s been gone. She was my angel, but I’m under no illusions that she was an angel to the world. A man’s daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world. A guy I went to grad school with, he said that. He turned out to be a gay, didn’t matter: for him and his little girl it was the same way. You’ll find that out now. This one, she takes after you anyway.”
“You don’t know me.”
“But I know me. I know my wife, may she rest. And I knew my daughter better than she did herself. And this one, she’s not like my people. It was clear when she was little; it’s clearer now. You get a seed, doesn’t matter what kind of soil or light or water it gets, it’s going to grow
into what it is,” Mr. Karp tells me. I want to know what this old white man means by “my people,” but it’s the way he says the word seed that hits me. She’s looking through the window at us. At me. She holds one arm around her waist, the other leans its elbow on her hand as she bends the cigarette to her mouth, the way my mother used to do when she was thinking.
“Look at her. She’s like three feet taller than me. She’s like a giraffe. A cute one, I love her, but you get me. You wouldn’t believe how much the girl eats. That hair: don’t let it fool you. It’s straightened now. But usually, it’s like lamb’s wool.” He points up at my own hair, smiling. Then looks closer at my straight strands, and sobers. “Still my bubi’s was the same way, so who knows which side that came from. But Tal’s yours. She’s very artistic. Not academic, this one. Always about the art, the dancing, the whole tortured artist thing. You’ll get it. I been Googling you. Almost two years now, I been following you.”
“So why today? Why didn’t anybody tell me before? All this time, if you had my name, why not contact me?” I don’t want to sound mad. I don’t want him to get up from the table, for the girl outside, now on the cell phone, to fade away from me.
“My daughter.” Irv Karp shrugs. “Promises were made. And I was particular about who I would let in my granddaughter’s life, no offense. But I researched you, I saw who you became. And I saw on the Internet you’d be in town, at this little cartoon thing.
“This girl, I can’t handle her anymore. And Tal’s like you. She’s your people.”
—
This girl looks more like my mother’s daughter than mine. She’s even darker than I am. I’m proud: I knew I had more black in me than my own appearance implies. I’m jealous: that melanin should have been mine. The genes that gave me the palest of tans on her looks like a two-week Caribbean vacation. The African kink of her hair is chemically treated and combed straight enough to be European curly. She’s been passing for white and not even knowing it.
