by Mat Johnson
“So let me just ask you something: Are you fucking my wife? Or is she once again fucking with me?”
I think about it. I think about what to say. I think of nothing. So I hang up the phone.
I walk. I don’t feel good. The text that follows from George, You are dead, doesn’t make me feel better. Nor even does the one after: Metaphorically. The previous text should not be misconstrued as a literal threat of grievous bodily harm. Shit head.
—
I sit in the middle of the school bus, in the center of all the empty rows, as Roslyn drives me back home again. I don’t say anything. I don’t look at anything; my head stays in my hands, holding the weight of my skull. When the bus stops at my father’s house, I don’t even notice at first, think it’s just another red light until the engine dies.
I look up. There’s an outline in the dark. Roslyn stands before the exit steps.
“Rise up, fallen fighter. Rise and take your stance again,” she says, not joking. I do get up, so I don’t have to hear any more of that crap. “Don’t fall to despair. You’ll never win her heart like that.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know women,” I say this time to Roslyn, for the more feminine perspective.
“Women are just people, honey. You don’t know people. That’s worse.”
I walk toward the bus’s front door. Roslyn doesn’t move out of my way.
“Come here. Come.” One. Two. Three steps closer. I’m too close to her now. And she’s still standing there, blocking me. I stop with one foot almost between hers. Roslyn grabs my hand, pulls me closer.
“Ask yourself, what do you want?” She squeezes my palm in hers, then takes my other hand as well. If she pulls, I will fall forward, into her. She does. I do.
She doesn’t hug me, she envelops me.
“I’ve got you,” Roslyn tells me. She has me. It’s absurd; I’m pulled so far into her my chin is on her shoulder blade. Her body is warm and soft and her poncho feels woolly to my touch.
“I have you, baby. Let go. Same thing I tell Sunita: you can let go. Let me carry the load.”
I feel her lift me. Just for a second. Just enough that I marvel at this woman’s strength, will. Just long enough that I can feel my ankles lose their burden, lifting slightly from the ground.
“You just need a little mothering, that’s all,” Roslyn says. And then I really do let it go.
I cry. Without filter this time. First the damn tears and all their blurring and then I’m barking ragged sobs. I don’t even know why. I just want to go home. I just want to be alone, even though that’s the last thing I need now and it feels good not to be solitary in this moment. I miss my real mother. I miss her so much. These are her tears, not mine. Just that they’ve been stored in me, and now that I’m drunk they’re escaping.
After Roslyn gets me in and upstairs, after I get my pants off, Roslyn tucks me into bed. She throws my blanket over my fetal pose. My dignity is gone. It’s okay, life feels light without it. It feels even better when she tucks the blanket under my body, then kisses me on my forehead. And with the lightest “Sleep tight,” leaves the room.
Nothing has changed but my mood. Roslyn is a good person. I get her now. And I am not a bad person either. I have my innocence, my vulnerability; that needs to be protected. I was wrong about Sunita Habersham, but I was wrong about Roslyn too. I haven’t been tucked into bed since puberty. It’s beautiful. It’s a good, simple thing. I find it literally sobering.
I keep waiting to hear Roslyn walk down the steps afterward—my digestive system is out of its element with the Ethiopian food, and it’s about to get loud under my duvet—but she goes into the bathroom. It’s horrid in there, tiles ripped up on the floor, calcium stains in the cracked tub; Roslyn deserves better. She must have decided she does too, because I hear her leave it without flushing.
From the creaking doors and floorboards, my ears follow Roslyn going into the next room. There’s nothing in there, just building materials, ladders, my father’s debris. But I hear her. Pausing at the entry. Then walking in steady, deliberate footsteps into the room. Then walking back out. I hear her in the hall again, and just when I think she’s finally going to leave, I hear her do the same thing at the next bedroom. Walk inside in even, rhythmic footsteps. Then walk out again. Then the next room. She’s measuring, I realize. With her steps. Like my father used to do when he forgot his tape ruler. I don’t know why. I don’t know what she wants or what she’s after. But I hear as she stands still, in the last doorway, taking it in. Pausing long enough to really inspect the space, then closing that last door lightly behind her and heading back to the stairs finally.
16
OFF THE COAST of Maine, about an hour north of Portland, on an island resting on the mouth of the New Meadows River, among those last spatters of New England where North America blends into the Atlantic, there lived a community of mulattoes. For real. There were about forty of them, and most shared a common black ancestor, a sailor who settled in the area a century earlier. The island, Malaga, as well as the town of Phippsburg just across the narrow strip of water from it, once had a stable economy, when shipbuilding and the commerce of the sea made the area a prime location. But the movement toward steam-powered boats at the end of the nineteenth century left these communities poor and isolated, like many coastal Maine towns. Still, impoverished as Malaga was, it did have some wealthy benefactors, and by 1910 a new school was built and the island showed signs of long-term improvement. The community might still be there today, the sole black neighborhood of rural Maine. But at the same time some were seeking to help this group, a plan was hatched to save the local economy by turning that part of the river into a tourist destination for wealthy urban vacationers. This plan lacked room for a bunch of poor Negroes sitting in the middle of the scenic landscape. Newspapers soon raged with headlines like STRANGE COMMUNITY ON MALAGO [sic] ISLAND and told stories of the “peculiar people” and their “romantic tales.” Twisted by yellow journalism, the community became cast as a miscegenated Gomorrah. The public was presented with a living representation of the hybrid splicing H. G. Wells had just written a novel about, only this time, it was The Isle of Doctor Mulatto. This distorted and warped story provided cover for the state to seize control of Malaga and evict its residents, destroying the entire community. Eight of the Malagans, people too old or young to take care of themselves, were sent to The Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, where all but two would die. The state even dug up Malaga’s cemetery, dumping the bodies in the sanitarium’s potter’s field, lest their blackness taint the island soil like lime.
It is a powerful, heartbreaking tale, even interpreted in comic-book form by an eleven-year-old. An eleven-year-old whose multiple stick figures look like a caveman’s interpretation of a spider orgy. Cory Kurtz has no talent. Sure, he’s eleven, but I have more faith in his absence of talent than Constantine had faith in God. Every time I look at his attempts at art I think, He’s going to make a great accountant someday, the kind who never tries any funny stuff because he has no imagination. That last judgment I may have to reassess because the illustrations he has mounted on poster board before the class show an abandoning of realism so bold that if I didn’t know the source I’d assume it was intentional. In an effort to negotiate his lack of skill, I’ve allowed him to create his images using collage instead, and little Cory Kurtz has seized the opportunity to populate the entire island of Malaga with images of mixie action superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Lots of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons. Many different images of his head, from many different photos, all cut and pasted and put on coat hanger bodies. Some with long penciled hair and circle breasts, as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson transgenders for the role. In this dystopian vision, our hero has been cloned and trapped on the nineteenth-century New England island, where he roams among mansions which, due to lack of perspective, seem smaller than him.
“I wanted to make sure that you could see they were all related,” Cory respond
s on inquiry.
“Okay. So, the houses—” I begin, and really what I want to talk about is the word perspective and remind him what I’ve been trying to tell him for months, but Spider takes over.
“The houses, they’re a bit grand. I’m pretty sure this one here is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. On Malaga, there were more traditional, solid homes, but many of the people lived in poorly insulated shacks. Because they were broke.”
“I wanted them to be living large. That was important to me,” Cory shoots back.
“Well, that’s understandable. But it misses the point. If they could afford grand mansions like this, they would have never been wiped off the face of the map.”
“Come on, anything can be wiped off the map,” I have to jump in. “There are tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, wars. And that’s just the physical; the emotional is worse. You can be in love with someone—or at least have deep, heavily weighted feelings for them—then, poof, it’s all gone. Nothing left. Everything can be erased in an instant and you will never even see it coming.”
The class just stares at me. A bunch of kids, they don’t understand me, my ennui. They’re still at the beginning, they don’t know it all ends in excrement. The teens, you’d think, would at least suspect this outcome, but they’re silent as well. Kimet doesn’t say a word. I would think he’d be able to relate given his parents’ divorce, but restraint keeps me from saying this out loud. They all want to leave, I see. They’re even packing their bags—have we pushed through another hour of class? But I was just getting started.
In my hand is an envelope, in that a card, and on that a bunch of writing. It was delivered to me by my daughter, just before class, with enough time to open it if I could have brought myself to do so in front of everyone. The writing on it is not my daughter’s, but Sunita Habersham’s. Sunita Habersham, who has not talked to me in five days, since the night of our group date. Sunita Habersham, who responded to a text two days after the event with, Sorry, been busy, and nothing more. Just those three words. It’s not that I haven’t seen her—I do nearly every school day, when she walks by me nodding hello like I am just another virtual stranger on a world covered with them. Not that I don’t hear how she’s doing nearly every day from Tal, because she’s doing wonderfully. She’s a wonderful mentor. She’s Tal’s favorite dance teacher ever, favorite adult, favorite human being in every way. Sun is in Tal’s school-day life, completely. She has left mine, equally so.
“Look at the Malagans!” I implore the room, yelling it. Some of them, they startle. I don’t care. “Look at them! Can you see them? No, you can’t. Because they’re gone. That’s life, kids. It’s all destined for nothingness, eventually.”
Spider waits till everyone’s left the classroom to talk to me. “You’re off your game, man. Your head’s in your heart. You either go work this out with Sun, or you got to shut up. Like, forever, and never say another word. I don’t know, we’ll tell the kids you’ve gone mute or something. You’re too horrible like this,” is pretty much the gist of it and it’s not particularly helpful or insightful given how little Spider knows. That I cried like a pathetic wreck on the suspect shoulders of Director of Services Roslyn Kornbluth, for instance. He doesn’t know that. Possibly, Sunita Habersham does. I don’t care at this point, or I’m willing to believe I don’t. Tal is sitting on the steps when I open the art trailer’s door. Her dance gear is still on, not the clothes she was wearing when I drove her to school.
“Did you read the note?” my daughter asks me. I didn’t. I just saw the handwriting on the front of it.
“Why are you serving as UPS on this thing?”
“But did you read it?” I didn’t, so I finally open it up. There’s no detailed explanation of Sun’s behavior. But also, no formalized rejection either. Just a few lines in the middle of an otherwise blank card, and boxes to check off.
I’m sorry I’ve been distant, but I needed to think. And I would really like it if we could talk. When is good?
Tonight
Saturday
Sunday
In Hell
“So what are you going to say, Pops?” Tal asks.
“This was private. Why did you read it?”
“Because you’re miserable at home, and she’s miserable at school. So now I’m getting two kinds of miserable. And I like her. I told you.” Her eagerness, at bringing Sunita closer into our lives, is both annoying and a strong motivation to continue trying. I make a point of dramatically removing a pen from my back pocket and showing it to my daughter. Then I mark off the appropriate box and, with increasing flourish, place the note back in its envelope before I hand it to Tal.
“She’s not your new mother, you know?” I say this mostly to myself, but it sounds like a dig at Tal. “She’s just your teacher, and a friend of your father’s,” I add, softening my tone to the point, I fear, of being patronizing.
“This is why you’re alone,” Tal tells me. Then adds, “Besides me.”
—
I get some pasta, use a lot of olive oil, throw in some grated parmesan, chives, all so that when you stick the entrée next to a decent bourbon, it looks like I’ve spent the appropriate amount of time for someone who only kinda gives a shit. I am serving my ambivalence. It’s absent my libido, which has retreated from frustration. I am cured. Or if not cured, in remission, overcome by the other demons that plague me. I have digested this, the idea that Sun is connected to another man, and I find myself at ease with the concept. Racially even—I push my finger into my lizard brain and say, What about a white guy? and to my surprise find little extra resistance. After the idea of sexual ownership is stripped from my expectations, after the begrudging agreement that I truly don’t want to own her, I’m left with a new, theoretic openness. But this man, Elijah. This horrid, coveting, appropriating, ball of self-love shaped like a man. How could she love such a man? How could she even be who I think she is, and have chosen such a despicable partner?
“It’s over.” Sunita Habersham stands outside my open front door, and this is the first thing she says to me. Tal is upstairs, showering in expectation of the arrival of her favorite adult.
“It’s over?” I ask, and I can’t believe she set this up, made a formality of it, involving Tal, just to dispose of me.
“Elijah, not you. We’re officially done. That segment of my life is over. Two years. Two years of going nowhere, on purpose, over.”
“Over,” I tell myself. I don’t seem to believe it yet.
“But I don’t want to talk about it. After I come in this door, I don’t want to talk about it. Not tonight. Not ever. I’m not carrying the past with me. So you want to ask anything, do it now.”
“Did you love him?” I want to know. Not to torture either one of us. But if she did love him, and she just dumped him like that after two years, that scares me even more.
“No. I don’t think so. That was kind of the point,” Sunita Habersham says, and before I can ask her about the man who came before Elijah she pushes past me and walks in the door.
—
“The first boy I kissed was Lawrence Levy. You don’t understand; he was so hot,” Tal insists. We don’t challenge her. “It was on a school trip to the Smithsonian.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I tell her.
“It was on the way back to Philly, back of the bus, in the dark. I sat by the window. He was pretty popular and the whole time I was kissing him I was totally flattered, you know? That he even chose to sit next to me? That he waited the whole school year for this moment? And then, when he acted like a jerk afterward, I remembered, ‘Oh yeah, it was assigned seating.’ ”
“He told everyone about it, didn’t he? Spread rumors, told everyone it was more, didn’t he? That little bastard Larry Levy.” I’m furious with this kid. The meal’s evaporated, but the bourbon has sustained a position on the table for an hour. I take a sip and I want to hear more about this faceless Lawrence Levy. It’s only been a few years, I’m sure.
I could still call his parents.
“That happened to, like, two other girls that trip. But not me. This was worse: he told no one. Not a soul.”
“No!” Sun gasps. Her bare feet are on my lap, and she leans over now all the way so that she can hug Tal’s shoulders, tickling her in the process. We are one squirming, warm snake on kitchen chairs.
“It’s serious! He told no one. Not one person. I couldn’t either, because people would have thought I made it up. He never spoke to me again, and didn’t brag on me at all. Not one dirty rumor. I was totally scandal-worthy! I am total brag material.”
“Kimet brags about you.” Sun releases her with a pat and a wink for me. “He’s always, ‘My girlfriend Tal says,’ and ‘My girlfriend Tal was.’ ”
“No he isn’t.” This is what my daughter looks like blushing. I love that. I love love. I don’t even get scared that Tal’s found it. I don’t even say, Don’t get pregnant. Instead, I offer, “Well, he’s a talented kid. And I certainly enjoy his company more than his dad’s.”
“Oh, his dad’s a bastard,” Sunita Habersham announces. I try to give her a look to tone down the language, but Tal chimes in with “Total bastard” before I can.
“How do you know?” I can’t imagine Sunita Habersham perusing the halls of the Umoja School on her own.
“That jerk formed a group that’s been trying to get the Mélange Center shut down for months. He’s called parents, congressmen, municipal offices. The city might have stopped trying to evict us if he hadn’t been pushing on them.”
“Spider says we’re not getting evicted,” I tell Tal. She has four months of high school left now. We should be getting acceptance letters soon; the possibilities will unfold. Just a little time, and then she’s gone. Long term, Roslyn can take her tribe to the promised land, if need be. I just need a few months of stability, because that’s what Tal needs.
