Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “Yo! You got to be careful with that.” I scoot away from her in my seat as if three inches will change anything.

  “It’s a beautiful thing, Warren, to actually feel a physical representation of power,” Roslyn says. “In your hands,” she adds, and then shoots me.

  —

  I wake up and it’s still dark and I’m still buckled into the driver’s seat and every cell in my body has been individually extracted, beaten with a ball-peen hammer, then set afire before being shoved back to its original form. I ache in spaces between crevices I could have gone a lifetime without feeling. I’m wet all over, from sweat mostly, but in some areas probably from urine. My testicles have retreated so far into my body cavity I very well might not ever see them again. I turn to the street. Her car is gone now. It isn’t until this moment that I think, Wait, why did Roslyn come to my house in the first place?

  I look over at the passenger seat to ask her. But Roslyn’s gone. There’s someone there though.

  In her place, sitting next to me, is a crackhead dude. A naked one. In the seat, in the dark, in Germantown, at 2:37 in the morning, next to me, is a naked crackhead man.

  The hair on his chest is thick and blacker than the brown of his skin and it runs from his nipples to his thighs. His cock is shriveled and deflated and lies in a crevice of dark wool. His chest shakes, the upward head snaps repeatedly back, violent shudders, and it’s this that forces me to look at the face.

  The mouth is open as he shakes his head. He’s crying but the only sounds are gasps. There is no hole blacker than the space between his lips, and it grows wider. It swallows his words. It must. Because I hear nothing before losing consciousness once more.

  12

  WHEN I WAKE back up, I stay in the car, immediately start it up, and begin backing out again. It’s daytime. It’s possible I’ve just dreamt the vision. But I’m not going in the house. Not alone. Never alone. I don’t even like being alone on the lawn.

  Something happened in the car at my father’s house after my boss electrocuted me, but I don’t think about it. I drive the same car to the store, back, but don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Won’t let myself. Instead, I spend Saturday prepping the classroom for the rest of the term, go to sleep in my office studio that night and don’t open my eyes until I’m sure the sun has retaken the sky once more.

  I don’t leave the art trailer. I don’t use the lights. I don’t want Roslyn to know I’m here, or any of her followers. I only go out to use the porta-potty after I’ve checked to make sure there’s no one around. I pull the blinds closed so the dim light of my computer screen isn’t visible to anyone wandering through the camp. I see the others, the rest of the resident staff, out there walking around. I go to the window and watch them pass. So many couples; with school out they stroll the grounds, holding hands. I hear their music, their laughter. Then late Sunday afternoon, I hear someone try to open up my door. I manage to kick the blankets I’ve been sleeping on under the lectern before the keys unlock it the whole way.

  Spider’s standing there.

  “I knew he was in here. I knew it. I’m like fucking psychic. This is some telekinesis-level shit.”

  “What are you doing here?” Sunita Habersham, trailing behind him, thinks to ask me. I don’t look at her. I’m tired of looking at her. I’m disgusted with my lusts and desires. Testing this theory, I steal a glance. Yes, Sunita Habersham’s so beautiful. But so what? There have to be other attractive women of similar interest to me on the surface of this planet. There have to be other women with whom Tal could form a maternal bond. This reoccurring notion, this desperate belief that Sun is my sole avenue to secure romantic love, is obviously absurd.

  “I’m squatting,” I tell her, and give up all pretense. I pull the blankets back out from under the podium, put them back into the shape of a bed, lie down.

  “You know, my couch folds out, if you need someplace,” Spider says, but I’m fine. I like being alone. And that’s what I tell him.

  I look up again, because they’re still here, making noise.

  “Why are you here?” I reverse on them. “Why are you bothering me?”

  “I’m going to need you to stop making sounds with your mouth hole, Warren,” Sunita insists. It’s a tone I’ve never heard her use before, both unusually firm and utterly informal. “I see the way you’re looking at me. Let’s establish something between us. Before we take this conversation any further.”

  “Okay,” and behind that word comes a flood of anger. I wasn’t even looking at her, for once. I wasn’t even thinking about her.

  “Good. Now listen: yes, we are really, really high right now.”

  “Totally high,” Spider chimes in. “Yet not like, ‘Danger, danger, Will Robinson’ high.”

  “But still, very, very high,” Sunita Habersham clarifies. “So I’m going to need you to talk slowly. And quieter. And I’m going to need you to not make any sudden movements.”

  “We want your snacks. We just need to get your snacks. I know you have them. Give us your snacks and nobody gets hurt. We’ll share. Your snacks.”

  “I don’t think he’s hungry.” Sun swings around, arms out like she can feel the wind ripple. Walks away yet again. This is how she’s flirting with me, now I am certain. By showing me she doesn’t even have to face me to get to me. Sun’s wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt that drapes so far down you can barely see her shorts. And underneath that, hiking boots. Heavy, worn gray, mud-covered hiking boots.

  “Can we ask you something?” she asks. “Did you really Tase her?”

  “Yeah, did you do it? Tase Roslyn? Tase her with a Taser?” Spider wants to know, but I can see from the way both look at me that they already do. Roslyn told them. So I give them my version. Tell them the circumstances of said electrifying and its retribution, and finish with “I’m pretty sure she shocked me for longer than I did her.”

  “Is that why you’re hiding? She scare you that bad?” Sun wants to know. Spider’s nodding at me slowly, still smiling, permitting me to say yes, to succumb to her patronizing conjecture.

  “No. I saw a ghost,” I say to shut them up. To let them know I’m crazy, that they’re high, and to leave me alone. I even tell them what I saw, in detail. Not just Friday night, waking up in the car, but the time by the garage, and the first night I moved in there. Into their blank silence I add, “These crackheads, they’ve gotten into my head. They’ve got me seeing things. They got super crackhead powers.”

  “But Warren,” Sun says. “You didn’t say, ‘I saw a crackhead.’ You said, ‘I saw a ghost.’ ”

  “Okay, I’ve heard enough. Change the subject. I’m too stoned for this.” Spider goes to my desk, grabs some Tastykakes and starts walking toward the door. “I don’t mess with spirits. I draw the line at ghosts. Also, I’m against denigrating victims of substance abuse.”

  Sunita Habersham’s not leaving. Even as Spider calls for her.

  “Show me them. The ghosts,” Sun whispers, as if one might hear us.

  —

  Sunita Habersham’s got her window open, and her hand out. Her fingers are flat together, angled off her wrist and bent from her arm like the head of a swan. As I speed up, she tilts her hand forward, lets the weight of the wind push it up and back again. Slowly, Sun repeats, only pausing when I hit a light as we drive down Wissahickon Avenue.

  “Spider says this street used to be a toll road. Two hundred years ago. Some old lady would sit on the side with a gun, make people pay to use it. That sounds like a great job.”

  “That’s your dream career? Sitting on a road and shooting people who don’t pay you?”

  Sunita turns, looks at me, seems to realize for the first time that I’m really there. That I’m not some animated character from her THC haze. She sits up and shakes her head a bit like this will make her lucid.

  “Yes. Yes, that would be my dream job. It’s very simple, isn’t it? No politics. No people, really. Just, guardian. Plus, you get to
work outdoors. I wouldn’t use a gun, though. I’d get something harmless, like your Taser.” She picks it up from where Roslyn left it. I forgot it was even there, between the seats. Sun aims it out the windshield. She’s turning it around to aim it at me.

  “No.” I knock her hand so it’s pointing at the window again. Sun laughs at me. She puts the weapon down, but she’s still laughing.

  “Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  I stare straight ahead. “That old lady Tased me.”

  “Come on. I’m sure there was a larger, holistic reason. She doesn’t just do things like that for no reason.”

  “She had a reason, she wanted revenge. She did that shit in cold blood.”

  “No. Roslyn’s not like that. She’s like our…Professor X. And we’re her school of runaway mutants, training for the new world.”

  I let that stoner logic soak in. “How do you know she’s not Magneto, taking those same runaways and warping them into The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?”

  “Come on, Warren, they didn’t call themselves that, only the X-Men did. They called themselves just ‘Brotherhood of Mutants.’ ”

  “That’s my point.”

  “You’re just mad because Roslyn zapped you back. You ever wonder if the state of not being in pain, if that is the true deviation?” Sunita asks me. “That the pain is how life really feels, and moments of trauma, they just make it so you can’t ignore the fact? That that’s…” Sun pauses, and she’s lost in the labyrinth of her own philosophy.

  I pull onto Greene Street, past Manheim. I lived here with my mother until she passed. It hasn’t changed much. The same two-story homes, now further along in their decay. All the little semidetached row houses huddling together, covered in all the paint that’s failed to chip. Many of the solid wood pillars on the porches have been replaced with cheaper metal pylons. The streetlights have become stop signs because the city’s broke, and there’s another layer of trash, but basically it’s as miserable as it’s always been.

  At my gate, I get out, undo the padlock then pull the twisted metal rails back. When I get back in the car, Sun says, “That’s why you feel so alive in those moments of suffering?”

  “You’re stoned.”

  “I think we established that fact. Take me ghost hunting.”

  I should not be here. I’ve brought my crush to my house, at night, but I have no immediate plans for seduction. I have the desire, the pragmatic reasons too—they haven’t gone away—yet still I lack adequate motivation to risk getting out of this car and going in that damned house. I don’t even want to shut the engine off. I just wanted to be around her. Sunita Habersham. All this is because I must have wanted an excuse to be in her presence.

  “Are we going to go in?”

  “Look, you asked me where I saw the intruders. There. I saw them right there. Coming out of the garage. And right here, next to the car. We done, yo. We don’t have to go inside.”

  Sun gets out of the car anyway. I don’t. I think she’s going to go look in the garage window, which is fine by me, but she comes to the driver’s-side door. I roll the window down.

  “You’ve got cameras out here. All over.”

  “Security.”

  “It looks like you’re running a meth lab. Where do the recordings go?”

  “I’ve got a hard drive set up with my laptop, in the house.”

  “Then we have to see what’s on the tape.” Sun skips off into the darkness toward the front porch. I don’t even unlock my door. I look at the garage. For a second, I think I see movement in the window. I do see movement. It’s the reflection of a bus’s window as it pauses to let off a passenger on the street behind me.

  Sun yells, “Come on, you can’t just burn the whole place down because you had one crazy vision.” And there it is, out loud. Exactly what I’m thinking. And that scares me. But Sun comes back to the car, reaches in for the handle then pulls my door open. Grabs my hand and pulls me out. She keeps holding my hand, even when I’m standing outside.

  “Take me into your House of Mystery.” And that was one of my favorite comics when I was a kid, but still, I don’t want to go. “Look, my life is hard and boring too, just like everyone else’s. Entertain me, Warren. You want to get me in your house, this is your chance,” she says, and I believe her. And I remember how Sunita was, dancing in the air with my daughter, and how Tal talks about her. Like she needs her. So this time, I answer the call. Then we’re walking into an empty mansion at night while holding hands.

  “In third grade, I watched every season of Scooby-Doo! Finally, my paranormal investigative training is coming in handy. Knew I’d grow up to be Velma.”

  “Who in their right mind aspires to be dumpy Velma?” I ask her.

  “I was pudgy, had thick glasses, wore a short bob cut. Velma isn’t a mantle you attain. Velma is thrust upon you. I just embraced it, wore matching clothes. It wasn’t called cosplay, then. It was just called, ‘That Fat Girl Is a Loser.’ ”

  As the computer boots up, I give Sunita Habersham a tour of my father’s house. This is the old tent I make my daughter sleep in, it’s conveniently located in the dining hall. This is the part of the ceiling that hangs down from water damage, despite repairs. That flash is from the fuse box outside. This is the dining-room table; it’s made from a door. The chairs are empty buckets of primer paint. There’s a couch over there: it’s from the thrift shop. All the furniture is from thrift shops except the mattresses, which were new when I had them delivered. Tal won’t use hers, which is upstairs, because she prefers the tent. Even though my father died in it.

  “This place is huge. It’s like an abandoned bus station. Don’t you get lonely here? Just you and Tal?” Sun asks. “I mean, I think of these old houses as being small, built for small people. But these ceilings must be fourteen feet high. And the rooms are wide, too. Even bigger than they look from outside. You could fit a small army.”

  “The British Army, during the Battle of Germantown, actually. The upstairs, those rooms are smaller. I’m in the master bedroom and it’s tiny. Let me show you,” I say, and I genuinely mean that. Still, I hear how it sounds, even before I see Sun turn her head at my directness. Just the tiniest of reactions, but I see it, and I want to say, That was not an attempt to get you up to my room so that I can have sex with you. Why would I need to do that? People have sex in living rooms, and we’re standing right next to one.

  Then there’s the sound.

  It comes from upstairs.

  Sun looks at me. “Did you hear that…?” she begins, but answers her own question. “Yeah, let’s go upstairs. Adventure time.”

  I shake my head. “No.” I am perfectly fine not to go upstairs. I am perfectly fine never to go upstairs again in the history of all that is everything. In fact, I’m okay to seal off the entrance to the upstairs altogether, keep it like that from now till the moment it all goes up in char and red ember. But Sunita Habersham starts walking. She walks up. Why walk up? But she walks up. Toward it. We are supposed to be going in the opposite direction. It’s time to run. I follow behind her.

  “Hey, hey, remember that joke? About black people, that they’d run away in haunted-house scenarios? I think it was Eddie Murphy. Or maybe it was Paul Mooney, one or the—” I stop when Sun flings her arm back at me. We’re at the top of the steps. The plaster from the ceiling hangs down into the hall in shreds. The walls, murals of water stains. Five doors. All closed. Each one hiding something. One’s to the bathroom. One my room. Three, bedrooms I don’t go in, I never go in them. There’s been no reason to, there’s no reason to now either. Sun stares, at the doors, then at me. She wants me to shut up so she can see which room the sound came from. So she can swing a door open and whoever’s in there can be, I don’t know, surprised. I don’t want them to be surprised. I want them to be gone. No, I want us to be gone.

  “Well, you know that joke? That black people would just leave at the first creepy sound? I’ve been thinking about t
hat. Escaping? That’s actually normative behavior. Staying, when you know there’s a ghost, that’s what makes no damned sense. So when you think about it, that’s really the pretense of all ghost stories: white people are so confident of their omnipotence that they’ve lost their goddamn minds.”

  “Sunflower bullshit,” is Sun’s muttered response, but she’s barely paying attention.

  When the next sound hits, she grips me. My palm is mush and hers a solid object contracting.

  It’s coming from behind my bedroom door.

  “Don’t,” I say, so light, just the idea of a word, but Sun hears it. She looks back at me, even. She keeps walking, but she looks back. Her face pulls away but her eyes are on me.

  Sun looks away when her fingers reach the knob. She just turns it, no fanfare, no pause. It’s so loud, the metal mechanism doing the same job it has for the last two hundred years. My room, it’s how I left it so many days ago, when the alarm went off. The blankets still on the floor. The box spring and the mattress not much higher above it. The window’s open. Did I leave the window open? I don’t remember.

  Sun walks on toward the open window. I come in behind her. I don’t look around, because I don’t want to look around. I just want to look at her. And it’s so easy to just look at her. Sunita Habersham leans her head out the window, bends down to do so. Her shirt goes up, her shorts stay level, and the result is a view of her Sesa tattoo once more. The bottom of her back, that soft place.

  I reach for her. Just to say, Don’t go any further. To say, Don’t go out the window. But I reach for her flesh. And then I’m holding her, by her hips, and the previous logic is eclipsed by the reality of the intimate position I’ve placed myself in. I don’t know what’s come over me.

  I literally don’t know what comes over me, I just see something dark floating right above my head and out the window, leaving behind only a physical chill I can feel even under my arms.