by Mat Johnson
“That’s my thing. I haul my camper to all the festivals, tattoo conventions, you know, make my money. North April to July, south and out west till fall, hole up in Santa Fe the off months. Dude, I came to Mélange thinking I’d stay two weeks. And here I am, still. First time I’ve been still for a lunar cycle since 9/11. No lie.”
“So you’re one of the people who were here from the beginning?” I like Spider. He’s a little guy, in height and weight, and I like little guys that don’t immediately point out that I am a big guy. If he never mentions this, I could grow to love him. Surely I could.
“Yup. You know Marie Bella? The folk slash fusion singer? She’s got a song that goes—” Spider sings a few bars I’ve never heard but I nod to get him to stop. “Well anyway, that’s one of Roslyn’s exes, she got bank; she funded it to start. A lot of her friends gave money. You wouldn’t believe how many biracial cats get rich in the entertainment industry. It’s like the family business for zebras.”
“Yeah, but why squat in a park, in Philly?”
“We were already here.” Spider shrugs. “Mutts take what we can get. I mean, it’s a little crazy, right? This whole mulatto thing. But I say, enjoy it while it lasts, and keep a full tank of gas just in case.”
I toast to him on that, and we both drink all the way down for good measure. A portion of his beer ends up on his T-shirt, but Spider doesn’t seem to care. Without comment he takes it off and pitches it into the bonfire. It’s a beautiful sight, the crackling flame, the way the glow reflects off his nipple rings.
I’m ready to leave, but my body isn’t. I am allowed to drink one serving of alcohol every hour and still drive home. I can’t mess up the ratio, not with the bike. Bad math is the single biggest killer of motorcycle riders. Based on my six drinks over the last two, I estimate I’ll be drunk for four more hours, so I turn to head back to the art room. There’s a pile of packing blankets in its closet, left over from the tables just brought in, and I plan to make a hobo cot with them. But then Roslyn walks by and squeezes my arm, pulls me around again.
“Don’t go, sugar. Fun’s about to begin.” The words come in a hum of matriarchal authority strong enough to make my muscles stop and obey before I’ve even processed the words. I don’t take it personally, the mothering is clearly for everyone, and as she releases me she’s already hushing another attendee.
Roslyn stands before the fire and lifts her arms and we all fall silent and start forming a crowd around her. Immediately I am bored, and there’s nothing to do with my hands but grab another beer. I drink that and think, You know what, I can get even drunker if I sleep behind my desk till dawn. Be fine and go back for a shower before Tal even wakes up. Then I remember the crackheads. Crackheads are a major responsibility. But there haven’t been any more break-ins, and Tal has her cell anyway, so I grab another beer and lose count of how many I’ve drunk because it doesn’t matter anymore.
Roslyn definitely gets her style from the black side of the family: the endless acknowledgments and appreciations. I get my introduction, which commends me for creating “the greatest biracial graphic novel of his generation,” which could probably be qualified by “and the only,” but I don’t interrupt her, or bring up the fact that I just drew what some faceless dude instructed. I am tired. She keeps talking. I don’t want a speech. I want a lullaby. I look at Roslyn, trying to think of a scenario where somehow, somehow it would be prudent of me to lay my head on her lap and take a nap as she kept humming.
“Congrats on completing your balance training. Sorry I made you cry.”
Sunita Habersham is standing next to me.
“I made me cry,” I tell her. I really did make myself. Not that I faked the tears, but I forced myself to feel the things I knew would bring them. I made a decision in the moment. I can do that without losing too much face because as guys go, I’m butch; tears are counterintuitive coming from a man like me. They make me interesting. And how upset can I be with losing control when I controlled the act?
“I cried, my first week. Everybody cries, everyone who gets it. Change hurts. You have to make the decision to undergo it, or it rips you apart. That’s why Spider’s tattoo is so cool. It’s a reminder. To roll with it.”
I want to make a joke about choosing change by marking yourself indelibly, but ask, “You get one?”
Sun hands me her wine cooler. I really look at it hard, because I didn’t know they still made wine coolers. When she turns around, I think she’s just going to walk away from me once again, but she lifts the white cotton of her shirttail and shows me the skin at the base of her spine. And there it is: a Sesa the size of my fist with an Anglo star right in the middle of it, beaming.
“Yeah. I went for the Kundalini chakra.”
It’s lovely. I say that out loud too, because the skirt she is wearing is long and heavy and the weight of the fabric has pulled it low, and my eyes are on her ink for a moment before the crack of her ass pulls them down. Everything there is so plushable. It’s so plushable, it creates the word. Now the light of the bonfire flickers in that crack and makes it look deeper and living and I look away because it’s wrong of me to even notice.
“I already had a tattoo there, since I was sixteen. It was Cutter from ElfQuest.”
“Cutter the Wolfrider.” I don’t say this, I gasp it. She spins her head back, smiling at me.
“Nobody got the reference. They just thought it was a really shitty Hello Kitty. I was sixteen. My dad’s girlfriend ratted me out when she saw it. Pissed him off, so it served its purpose. Spider did my Sesa over the top. Check out the woven design. It stands for the interconnectivity of—” what I will never know, because even if Sun finishes her sentence, I don’t hear words. I just hear a pop and then the world goes mute and I’m on the ground because One Drop has gone Viking and punched me in my cheekbone.
—
I don’t black out. I want to, want to just give the fuck up and fade to black and let someone else carry my body as my head fills with enough blood to completely reverse my center of gravity. But I keep my eyes open. And when hands come at me, I grab them, get back into a standing position. And I smile. I smile as big as I can without moving my jaw because I don’t know yet that it isn’t broken. I get that smile out though. I remember to do that, because it’s the only way to fight the humiliation of getting dropped by a sucker punch, at least until you find out who’s hit you.
I’m seated in the backseat of a minivan, its door slid open, and have already been given water and the repeated instruction not to go to sleep tonight in case of concussion. I can barely stay awake as it is. I don’t even know why he did it, until Roslyn walks over with One Drop, their hands clasped together, and tells me that he has something to say to me.
“I’m sorry, bro. I shouldn’t have punched you in your head.” That’s it. I wait for more to come, but he just buries his chin in his chest, not even meeting eyes with me. Roslyn looks up at the giant, and he sees this. He holds out his hand to me. I stare at it for a moment, realize everyone gathering is staring at me, so take it.
“Sorry I beat you down, Holmes. It’s not you, it’s me. I got issues. That was not copacetic. My bad. We cool now?” He reeks of Phillie Blunts and Pink lotion. And maybe the words work or maybe it’s just that I want him to free me from the prison of his Icelandic death grip but I tell him, “We cool.”
“You can be such an asshole,” Sunita Habersham yells, and I know I can be, but she’s talking to One Drop. Me, she’s pulling away, across the parking lot to a station wagon, which is another thing I didn’t know they made anymore.
Spider’s laid out in the backseat with his legs hanging out the door. The whole cab smells like weed.
“I want, like, my own zonkey, man.”
“A what?”
“Zonkey…half zebra, half donkey”—Spider’s eyes are closed, even though his mouth is open—“like the most gangsta mulatto beast of all time…” but then he drifts off. I roll the windows down. The wind is l
oud as Sunita drives back down through Mt. Airy into Germantown and that’s fine because aside from my directions nobody says anything, not until Spider wakes momentarily to offer “Woah. You live in the straight up hood, man. That’s so cool,” before rolling over, presumably drifting off into the zonkey dream from which we interrupted him.
In front of Loudin, nobody’s out on the street, and the lights are off in the mansion, which means Tal had enough sense to go to sleep without me. When the car stops, Sun still doesn’t say anything. Her hands are on the wheel, and the bracelets that line her arms jingle for seconds after she brakes. She looks ahead, as if she doesn’t want the next thing to happen, whatever it is, that she’d rather the night keep going, even though it’s been going badly for a while now. The tension of the moment seems to be making her angry.
My face is throbbing. I can count my heartbeat with the pulses of pain, and now that the adrenaline has worn off and taken most of the alcohol with it, my face hurts, and I think I deserve some understanding with the suffering.
“Are you sleeping with that WASPafarian nutjob?”
“Don’t slut shame me. It’s none of your business.” Sun spins her head to stare me down and seems relieved to find a target for her anger. I whip my head right back at her, pointing at the side of it where the bastard hit me. I don’t know what it looks like; I can’t bring myself to look at it in the rearview mirror, but it feels like it has attained the size and texture of pumpkin. It must look bad, because Sun pauses a moment.
“Look, I’m real sorry about what happened. So yeah, we used to have a casual thing, is that what you needed to hear? It’s really none of your business. Can you go to bed now or do you need to hear more? He’s hung like a tree, does that help? Really, a big brown tree—in fact, it’s actually the darkest part of his body. Is that good enough?”
“Great. I was punched by Thor Odin-Cock.”
Sun’s about to say something, but it trips over her getting the joke. “I just saw that, as drawn by Jack Kirby, in my head. Stan Lee Presents: The Adventures of Thor Odin-Cock,” she says then is lost in laughter and I go with her because I want the sound to keep coming. The sound, it takes a while to work out of our systems, and then finally it does. And there are sighs. And then quiet. Then Spider starts snoring in the back and we lose it again.
“Yeah. Not exactly a great shining moment in my life. It’s been a long year up there. One Drop’s not bad. Just damaged. Grew up on army bases, looking like he does with a mom everyone always thought was his nanny. All his siblings came out darker than him. A Dutch dad who’s married four other black women since. How could he not be a little crazy? Mélange started as a retreat. You can’t retreat unless there’s something to run from.”
“So what are you running from?” I ask her. Sunita thinks about it, and for a few seconds, it looks like she’s going to tell me. That there’s a story to tell, something shapely enough to be packaged into a synopsis.
“Guys who ask too many questions.” And then all the humor is gone. Like it was never there. So I get out of the car.
On the street, I watch Sun pull around, prepared to drive back the other way. There’s still no one out here, but I want to make sure she gets a least as far as my line of vision unmolested. She doesn’t care that she’s in the hood. She’s comfortable. She’s comfortable in the hood, she’s comfortable in the woods. I’m jealous of that but it still makes me nervous, so I yell for her to roll up her windows till she’s out of Germantown. When Sun’s grille is pointed in the right direction, she stops her car on the other side of the street and yells back at me.
“You said your dad, he never threw out anything, right?”
“Right,” I yell back. I’m waiting for her to give me my platitudes now. Something like, And he never threw you out either.
“So what the hell happened to it?” she asks. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I keep listening, waiting for her to make sense.
“Your dad’s car? You said he never threw anything away.”
When she drives off, I get the gate open, but it takes a minute because my hands are shaking. Instead of heading straight for the mansion, I follow the dirt path that goes alongside the property to the garage. Its windows are broken and boarded; dirt sticks to the surface of the doors as if they haven’t been opened in decades; but I still can’t believe I hadn’t thought to do this before. There’s a lock, a padlock. I have my father’s keychain looped into my own. I take it out and try a few of the keys on it and start to consider the possibility that I’ll have to kick the glass out of a windowpane to get in, but then a key fits and turns. I pull off the lock and the garage door opens out. I can feel the dust filling my nostrils but through it I can already smell my daddy’s car. I can feel what it was like to ride on the cobblestones of Germantown Avenue with its spring suspension, what it was like when I fell asleep in there and he would pick me up and carry me to bed inside.
I get the garage door up all the way and there it is. The 1968 black Volkswagen Beetle. And there are the two crackheads, sitting inside. Their eyes ghostly and wide and frozen as they stare at me from its front seats.
My eyes are even wider.
—
I slam the garage door down hard, fast, quick, like the scream that shoots out of my mouth. I slam it down like the force will fuse it shut again, lock it and the vision away from me. I slam it so hard I fall backward to the ground, but I don’t care about that because I can crawl away without taking my eyes off the door if they come for me. I get a good fifteen feet away, and the wood’s still shaking. I should get up, but if I do I won’t be able to stare as hard at that garage door and part of me is certain that’s the only thing sealing the barrier. And then the wood stops. It’s stopped shaking. And it’s silent. And maybe this whole thing is a mistake, the vision a weird reflection of my own face. That when I stop breathing like this, it will return to normal. But the door springs up again before that can happen.
My dad’s black Beetle flies toward me.
I roll over. I roll and roll. Everything is spinning. I can feel the air, the wind of it as it passes. The Beetle’s still going. The Beetle shoots down the hill. That’s my father’s car. They’re taking my father’s goddamn car. I push to my knees and then to my feet to chase after it before they can get the gate open, before they take him away from me. But they don’t stop at the gate. They’re going to ram into it.
The gate’s iron clasp is rusted shut. The thick chain lock sealing it just adds to the message of closure. The Beetle’s got a good speed going by the time it gets to the entryway, aiming for the middle. I hear the crash, see broken glass powder out in the streetlight. The whole length of the fence surrounding the property shakes in response, angry at moving after a century of reliable immobility.
I stop running toward them, because I’m pretty sure I am now the owner of a his and her set of dead crackheads. I keep standing where I am. I keep waiting for the door to open. Now I just want to see them. I want to see their faces. I want them to see my face. I want them to know I’m standing now. I stare at those car doors. Just keep staring. Then I see a man standing fifty yards away, but over to my right, past the house on the other end of the lawn, who stares back at me.
I stand, his mirror, across the expanse of lawn. How he got all the way over there, I don’t know, I have no idea, none. But I stare back at him. I insist to myself that I’m not scared anymore. I have my cell in my hand now, gripped hard enough to break the glass, and it has magical powers that transmit sounds and visions into space. I stand and I don’t move because Tal is in the house, and I have something to stand for. I see the white woman. She also stands, twenty yards to his side. Just as still. Just as silent. If she was there before I don’t know because she’s just a dirty rumor in my peripheral vision. But he keeps standing there, staring at me. It’s too dark to see his face, to see much of anything but his dark bare chest and pants. He’s standing there, arms at his sides, chest out. So still. Standing there l
ike he is waiting for me to state my intent. To tell him why I’m on his land. Tell him what kind of decent man disturbs the peace at this hour. Frozen in that inquiry.
“What the fuck?”
Tal’s voice. I jump. I put my fists out at the sound of her voice, almost as startling as the car crashing. When I finally see her face, dimly through the screened door on the porch, both my fists are aimed in her direction.
“What the hell was that?” Tal asks.
“Do you see people?” I have to know. But she doesn’t look at the lawn. She looks at me.
“You are so wasted,” Tal responds, then shuts the window back on me. It thunders on impact and I hear it echo, off the rotting porch, down the hill, bouncing to the row houses across the street, then coming back again.
I look back at the guy. I look back at the woman. Both gone. Both nothing.
9
AT THE ENTRANCE, the Bug sits crumpled and indignant. One of my keys goes to the chain sealing the driveway’s padlock, and I take the chains off so I can yank the twisted metal off its grille. I’m not even scared anymore. Just tired. If I wasn’t, I would take Tal and we would leave this house right now. Run. That’s what we should be doing. Running. This is what I really have to teach her. You can even run away from yourself—eventually, yourself catches up to you, but then you just run once more.
This house is going to burn because I refuse to be trapped inside its crumbling walls. I’m not going to wait years for this place to sell. I’m not going to rent it, and be haunted by tenant complaints every time something breaks, be indebted to it for life. I am not my past. I am not my hometown. I don’t want any crackheads in my future. I’m not going to be stuck back in Philly for the rest of my life, back in Germantown, dragged down by everything I’ve worked so hard to be free from. More important: Tal is not either. It simply cannot happen. There will be fire.
