by Mat Johnson
“That’s it. When you realize that, you realize you have nothing to lose,” she tells me, and starts walking away again.
“Would you like to come with us? To Shabbat, with Tal and I? I could use the hand.” She stops, turns, and is still smiling when she asks me, “You mean like a date?” I nod the positive. My head bounces. It says, devoid of cool, “Oh yes, yes, yup.”
“Oh hell no. Not a good idea. I don’t date students. Sorry.” She’s still smiling when she starts walking off again.
“I’m not your student anymore. Whiteness class is over. I’m fully bleached,” I call after her. I want it to sound like a joke instead of a desperate, marinated whine.
“Still,” Sun offers, but keeps walking.
“You know that’s a bullshit excuse. That’s like, ‘I have a boyfriend in Canada.’ Or, ‘I have TB.’ ” To that, Sun looks over her shoulder at my body, my clothes. Then up at my eyes. Sun holds there.
“How about, ‘I have a boyfriend, and while it’s an open relationship, no.’ Does that work? Or we could try, ‘You’re not unattractive, but you’re also a mess and my life is complicated enough without someone else’s mud?’ ” Sunita waits for a response this time. I have nothing. Those are pretty good reasons. I shrug, she nods; we’re doing so well without words these days.
She gets me, I think, watching her ass as she walks off. And she really does get me, because then her head swings back over her turning shoulders enough to catch me; then she pulls down her shirt to cover her rear without even looking back.
—
I spend the ten-minute drive to Germantown feeling guilty about getting caught staring at Sunita Habersham’s buttocks, pausing only to drop Tal off at the thrift store on Chelten Avenue. I used to come to this corner with my mom, when the Woolworth’s was still open. On any Saturday, the streets were crowded with shoppers, the place was alive. This was when Allen’s department store was still open. Before Asher’s Chocolates closed its store and moved their factory away. When the Bell Telephone building actually had Bell Telephone inside. Before the industrial jobs left for overseas. Before the last monuments to a stable economy were eroded through numerous recessions. Before desegregation encouraged the flight of the black middle class. Before the crack epidemic raged through the weakened community like an opportunistic infection. That’s over and it seems to be getting better—I can admit that: it’s better than when I left. But I see it against the images of before and it’s still devastating. What’s left are the businesses that can stay afloat even after economic collapse. Now, it’s a great place to buy overpriced sneakers. Or prepaid cell phones. It’s a great place to search sidewalk kiosks for brand names printed on generic sweatshop clothes. There’s African braiding if you have the money, the entire day, and a high pain threshold. “Go to Value Village. Rich people from Chestnut Hill donate clothes there. And be careful out here,” I tell Tal as I pull up the Beetle to let her out. It’s tuned up, its tickets paid off, headlights replaced and the dents pulled out. Everything is making a comeback.
“Germantown’s not that bad. There’s fancy parts of Germantown too. I know tons of rich kids who live here, in really nice houses, on really nice blocks. You act like it’s some hellhole,” she tells me, and I look around, and sure the street’s basically clean, and it’s mostly just a bunch of working people waiting for the bus, and she’s right. But three miles up Germantown Avenue the white people have Chestnut Hill, and it’s thriving, with microbrewers and Zagat-rated restaurants and a functional retail ecosystem and why can’t we have it like that?
At the house, the security cams install easily because they’re meant to go up quickly, discreetly, possibly before the owner comes home. I’m done with the hardware and finishing the install of the software by the time Tal walks in the door with bags and a look on her face as light as her load is heavy.
“Wow. There’s like no white people at all at night on Chelten Avenue. I didn’t see one!” she tells me as she closes the door.
“I hope you didn’t feel uncomfortable.” And I really mean that. Not as an apology, but because I hope I don’t have a daughter who feels uncomfortable if there are no white people around.
“Why should I? I mean, I’m not, like, white anymore. It’s very liberating. Totally.” And she’s off to the upstairs bathroom to change before I can question her line of thinking.
When she comes down the steps, Tal’s wearing solid cork platform pumps tall enough that the top of her head threatens to brush the paint-chipped doorway she walks through. Her feet are held there, perpetually in sprinting position, by a band of what appears to be cheetah fur, if cheetahs were pink. No cheetah is pink. Then there’s nothing but bare leg for a good eight inches going north, till a matching strip of print, presumably skinned from the same mutant feline, cuffs the bottom of her tight capri jeans. This feral pink fabric is on the collar of the jean jacket she’s wearing too, and it’s a good thing Tal’s wearing a jacket because the T-shirt she’s got on doesn’t even bother to cover her navel. Above, Tal’s hair is out. Out and screaming its inner Africa. Furious at years of bondage, and celebrating its nappy roots.
“I like your hair,” I tell her, because there are about 413 things I can think to say, and that’s the nicest one. Number two is: What’s the name of your twerk team? I open up my mouth, but nothing more constructive occurs to me, so I just keep looking at Tal, slack-jawed.
“What about the rest? That thrift shop went out of business, apparently. It’s a day care now. So I walked up Chelten and found this place called City Blue? Very urban. Very authentic. Don’t you think?” Tal opens up her jacket and points to the label on the chest of her tattoopattern shirt. It says APPLE BOTTOMS.
“It’s the name of the brand, Pops. Not a reference to my actual butt,” she says. When that doesn’t give her the desired response, Tal follows with, “It’s a very popular black brand.”
“You can’t think I would actually approve of this. You’re not going to your grandfather’s like that.”
“Yes, I am. I am so not worried about Irv and the whole Karp clan. If Irv can’t accept my blackness, then that’s his problem.”
“No, you’re not. Tal, those clothes have nothing to do with your ethnicity.”
“I’m supposed to be ‘transcending my assumed racial notions.’ That’s what the school you—you—sent me to, is telling me.”
“Tal, there’s no way they meant dress like that. Don’t conflate ghetto culture with blackness.”
Her mood, the smile, gone. She starts taking one of her hollow gold earrings out of her lobe and I think I’ve gotten through to her until it’s thrown at me. It’s a childish response. Possibly genetic, since I come back with:
“For the record, as your father I should let you know that dressing like a hoochie mamma is a bad life choice in general.”
“Fuck you!” The other earring actually hits me. On my forehead. It feels like it cuts deep but it’s only bleeding a little when I take my hand off it.
“You’re right. That was harsh. Fuck me. I’m sorry.” Sunita Habersham would know how to handle this. That’s who Tal needs right now.
“That’s right, eff you. I tried. You can’t say I didn’t try, okay? I’m trying.”
“Try what? What’s this about? Explain it to me, okay?” I pause for an answer. I wait for a few seconds, unsure if I should be breaking the silence.
“I knew,” is all Tal finally tells me. I see her shoulders shake, think she’s laughing, but then she lets out a wail and goes at it harder and I know she’s crying. Tal’s really crying; there is a sound long and hollow like it’s being pulled out of her, ripping flesh as it goes. I reach out, pull her into me, but her arms are just limp under my own.
“I knew. I always did.” Her voice cracks; her body shakes. I hold her firmer like I can stop this.
“Knew what?”
“I knew you were black. What I am. Nobody, like, had the decency to say something to my face, but I knew,” T
al says after her breathing slows.
“So you knew. You kinda thought you knew, but now you really know. It’s not too bad, right? It’s no biggie. You’re still you,” I tell her, and I try to say it with joy. I’m hoping that if I say it laughing, if I laugh lightly at her reaction, then Tal’ll start laughing too. But Tal just keeps crying. It’s getting lighter though, her body still now. And then it gets quiet, but for the heaviness of her breathing. Until Tal says:
“I told all my friends that you were an Israeli soldier.”
“Okay.”
“Missing in action,” she follows with, and then I do laugh for real. I can’t help it. I hear myself and try to stop, but I can’t. And then it’s okay, because Tal joins me. And thus the dark spell is broken. “Just let it go,” I tell her. I look down and she’s got snot on me, my daughter, and snot all over her psychedelic cat print. But at least she’s still laughing. Still with the tears, but mostly laughing now. Laughter I can deal with. Laughter I know.
“I knew,” Tal says, quieter. She calms down. Calmer but the tears keep coming, as if something’s broken in her and they’re just pouring through the crack. “I knew,” Tal says again, which makes no sense. Because my daughter doesn’t know anything. Tal has no idea. Because I have no clue, and she has even less of one than me.
11
THERE’S SCREAMING AND whooping and noise itself breaking and then it starts again. The world has hit its wall, we all die in explosion and rage. I shoot up in my bed and see the broken plaster of the ceiling and know I’m in a crack den and the cops are outside and I don’t know what to do and I’ve never even done cocaine and now they’re going to shoot me. And then I realize I’m in my father’s burnt-out room, on a mattress, and that my burglar alarm has caught something.
I own a Taser. I know I have a Taser, and I search around the side of the bed for it and there is nothing and they’re coming for me, but then I find it. It’s not night, it was just an afternoon nap, but the newspaper tapped over the windows dims the light. I hold the Taser out to the dim. No one’s there. The alarm is still whining. My head hurts from it and I remember Tal and push off my sleeping bag and jump to my feet and head downstairs.
Tal’s tent door is open, Tal’s not in it. Tal’s gone. She’s lost. No, she’s at my laptop at the kitchen table, images from the cams up on screen, and she’s screaming “Make it stop! Turn it off! What the fuck?!” back at me.
The control panel. It’s on the wall. Tal points at it and yells, “Shut it down,” like I need the suggestion. I open the plastic flap hiding the keypad and keep entering the code but it doesn’t work and the whole thing is flashing with buttons on the side that say: DISABLE. ALERT POLICE. ALERT. FIRE DEPARTMENT. RESET. PANIC. I am panicked, so I hit the panic button. Strobe lights start flashing out of the alarms to the rhythm of the horrible sound. This is the worst nightclub ever. I make a panic sound too; it’s kind of a moan, kind of a whine; it’s a whole new tone in misery. Tal reaches past me and hits the code again and then DISABLE and everything stops.
We have silence. It’s a gift that just arrived in the mail from someplace on the other side of the world. After a second, I hear Tal sigh and watch as her shoulders slump down with the weight of her exhaust. I can even hear the hum of the laptop now. When the footsteps hammer on the front porch, I can’t confuse it for yet another sound effect of structural decay. Tal hears it too, starts for the door until I catch her arm. I wait for the doorbell to ring. We wait.
The doorbell doesn’t ring.
There is pacing on the porch, a story told in slow thumps.
We wait for there to be a knock; there is no knock. We wait for someone to call out; no one says anything. Someone is on our porch. The footsteps are solid, hard. They are angry. Slow, boom, boom. Deliberate. They go from one side of the porch to the other.
It’s dark in here but the sun is still shining on the other side of our walls. When the footsteps get closer to our window again, I can see movement through the blind cracks, past the distorted, blown glass. I see a dark hood float by and I look at Tal and she’s seen it too, and that’s when I remember the Taser in my left hand. I look at the computer again, at the camera feeds I have set up. There are none aiming at the porch. It is behind the lines. It is out there.
“Call the cops,” Tal whispers to me.
“We. Are. Black,” I remind her.
“Call that guy George, then,” she says.
“No. Hell no.” This guy is on the front porch right now, pacing back and forth in madness. The cops are for after. The cops are for notepads and “Can you describe the suspect?” and then once they leave nothing changes and you never see the cops again. Also, they are good at shooting unarmed black people. We are still black people by police standards. I power the Taser, and listen. The walking stops.
I get close enough to the window this time to look around. From the angle, I can see only empty porch. They’re gone. It’s okay, now. They’re gone. Then the knocking comes. One bump. Then two. Not light. Not like a polite request. Hard thuds. Slamming their palms on the wood. I look at Tal. I can see her breathing, short heavy gasps as big as her eyes have grown. And then a third banging demand, shaking the door with its force.
There’s no peephole to look through. There was no peephole needed in the eighteenth century, when this door was put here. If you wanted to stop by, you sent a letter. Servants would greet you in this foyer and take your calling card to the master. I have to open the whole damn door to find out who’s on the other side. Tal, she gets it now, she feels it, she tries to stop me, puts her hand over my arm, but frantically I wag her away and she obeys me, and I don’t start unlocking again till she’s over by the kitchen, holding a knife forward like a beast is about to come charging. I turn the knob and slowly pull back the door. I have the Taser in my right hand, but no plans to use it.
They’re there. Waiting on the far side of the door for me, silently.
I just fucking zap them.
There is a rational part of my brain and it says, Don’t zap them, Warren. Ask questions first, find out who they are and why they’re here, on your doorstep, lurking, banging. Find out their hopes and dreams. Offer them a glass of water. And that part of my brain has control of my left hand, which is holding the doorknob. The right hand fucking zaps the crackhead.
Two little twisty wires briefly connect me to the form of fear incarnate. And that right hand, it does a great job, aims for the stomach area to avoid giving it a heart attack and I hold the trigger for a good four seconds, which is much less than the twenty the instructions recommended but enough time for me to perform the even more recommended act of catching the body to avoid head injury and/or lawsuit.
I lay the crackhead on the ground. Its flesh is soft, not just because of the plush material of the jumpsuit. It’s soft because it’s a woman, I can see from the hips before the face. I got her. I got the intruder. I really got her. I turn her around to see her face.
“You killed my principal!” Tal says, over me.
I got Roslyn.
Tal drops the knife to the floor, and it bounces loudly in a way that I find judgmental and overly dramatic.
“I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought you were a crackhead,” I tell my employer.
“Intensation,” Roslyn utters, which is not even a word. Her eyes are shooting around, looking for pixies. Her gray hair screams out from under her hoodie. Tal squats down beside Roslyn, and the older woman’s eyes actually manage to land on her for a few seconds before going off fairy-hunting again.
—
We are driving to the emergency room. It is twenty-seven minutes before sunset. We can drop her off in eleven minutes, then get on the Wissahickon entrance to the Roosevelt Boulevard to make it downtown on I-76 in sixteen minutes and still not break Talmudic law. The whole Karp family is supposed to be there. It’s too late to cancel. They’re already predisposed to hate me. For what I did. For what I didn’t do, even though I didn’t know Cindy K
arp was telling the truth. This has to happen. We have to make it happen.
“We’re not going to make it. Let me call Irv now,” Tal tells me from the passenger side. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Roslyn, who’s laid out in the back of the car on the sofa seat in a fetal position. More than five decades since her birth but she forms the pose as if she was born yesterday.
“We’re going to Irv’s Shabbat. That’s not an option, you can’t miss—you have to talk to him, clear things up. She’s okay. You’re okay, right?”
“Shabbat shalom,” I hear behind me.
“Dear God, she’s speaking in tongues.”
“No, Pops. Miss Roslyn? I’m sorry, I know we’re all in the middle of a little crisis here, but do you already have plans for dinner?”
I don’t hear a response. I look through the mirror again and see Roslyn’s eyes have closed. Her lips are moving, and I can just make out a slurred chant of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo so I know she hasn’t passed out completely.
“She’s fine,” I tell Tal, who won’t even look at me. As we sit at a red light, I reflect on the fact that I’m pretty sure I’m getting sued at the end of this. I’m pretty sure all this, the Tasing, this drive, it’s all going to be used in a deposition of some kind. Sirleaf will confirm this, I’m sure. I can already see Roslyn on the stand, the blessed earth mother, and the whole of Mulattopia in the gallery staring at me. When the light goes green, I ask Roslyn again if she wants to go to the hospital.
“Like every cell…yodeling,” she says. And then it goes quiet. Really quiet. Until the car behind me honks for me to move.
I haven’t been to the emergency room at Germantown Hospital since I was five and stuck a cherry pit up my nose. I actually visited the hospital twice that day, for the same ailment—albiet for different cherry pits—due to the fact that I suffered from a combination of stupidity and poor fatherly supervision. My mother would never take me to Germantown Hospital, choosing instead to hire a cab to drive me to Chestnut Hill, where the hospital served a predominantly wealthy white clientele, and according to her reasoning, was therefore less likely to kill you. I pull up to the entrance, jump out of the car and open the back door. There’s a wheelchair on the curb with G-TOWN spray-painted on the back of it like a scarlet letter. I pull it over, the wheels worse than a shopping cart, and I see Tal getting out too.
