Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “No, we’re definitely being evicted.” Sun says it so casually the statement is clearly beyond debate.

  “She doesn’t mean this year,” I assure Tal, based on no other information than an imaginary document found in my brain in a folder marked ESSENTIALS.

  “Oh no, I mean right now. The cops are at the compound with a dispersal order. I don’t think they’re going to leave this time. All my stuff’s packed in the car, it’s horrible.”

  I forget Tal is a teenager. Sometimes, I think of her as a child, look at her and see all the younger ages I missed. Often, because of her wit and feigned worldly manner, I also see Tal the young adult she is moments away from being. But when she lets out a scream at the top of her lungs, only breathing in to yell “No,” in one elongated syllable, I see a teenager. “This cannot happen, are you kidding? Are you messing with me? Pops!”

  “You’re not kidding?” And when Sun’s head shakes, the last of my composure dissolves. “How could you not say this as soon as you got here?”

  “I didn’t want to ruin the meal,” Sunita offers quietly. Before I can respond, Tal continues screaming, louder.

  “Pops! You have to do something!”

  “Just stop! There’s nothing I can do!” My volume, as unexpected as it is for both of us, calms Tal. Or at least the shock shuts her up for a bit.

  “Actually, you can.” Sun looks at me. Tal looks at Sun. Sun keeps talking. I start bracing. “The community needs someplace to go. Temporarily.”

  “Come here! They can all come here! This house is so big! And the land! Everyone could fit here!”

  “Enough!” I try to match Tal’s volume again, but can’t.

  “There’s more than enough space on the lawn for all the trailers!” Tal continues, giving away everything before Sun can even bring herself to ask.

  “It’s not that simple,” I tell her.

  “Yes it fucking is.”

  “Go to your room!” I fall back on.

  “My room is a tent, in the dining room,” Tal points out. Literally pointing out, over to it.

  “Then go upstairs and take a shower before bed.”

  “I already got a shower,” Tal says, but she gets up and heads for the steps before I get the chance to tell her to take another one.

  I make Sun come with me into the kitchen. I don’t even do it with words. I just walk to the sink, turn and lean against it, and wait there silently until she gets up from the table and joins me.

  “You knew.” I want to whisper, I want to scream, I manage to do both. “That’s why you’re here tonight. Not for us. Not for me. Roslyn sent you here, didn’t she? It’s about the land. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? How long? That’s all I want to know. How long has she been planning this?”

  “Warren? Listen to yourself. You’re upset, I understand. So I’m going to choose to not get offended. But you’re having a paranoid episode right now.”

  “I saw her—or heard her, at least. Roslyn. Here, in this house, scoping out the property. Creeping around in the dark, going into the rooms upstairs, oh yeah I heard her and I get it now. She wants this place, doesn’t she?”

  “Wait, why the hell was Roslyn in your house at night, upstairs?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” I tell her. “Listen, I’m not planning on keeping this property, okay? They can’t come here. I have other plans.” I don’t tell her, Because it’s burning down. Because I can make more on the insurance than any sane person would ever pay me. Because I have the know-how to burn this wreck down, having done the research at the library, by looking it up on YouTube.

  “I never said anything about them coming here. Tal is the one—”

  Tal screams. From upstairs. Sun doesn’t hear it. Sun is still talking. But I hear Tal. And though I haven’t been there for her most of her life, I’ve been here these months, so I know my girl’s screams. And this one might mean something, if I heard it right. So I wait. Look up. Like I can see through the exposed and rotting drywall on the ceiling. Sun’s still making mouth noises, but my ears are aimed up. A second later Tal screams again and I start running. And at the steps I know Sun has heard it too because she runs with me.

  We hit the second floor so fast I slide into the wall. The bathroom. There is nothing being screamed now, but I know. The crisp echo off the porcelain: the bathroom. I have nothing in my hand, my spear is lost, Taser in the car, baseball bats downstairs. I don’t care. My weapon is my body. I swing open its door. White subway tile predating subways. White claw-foot tub. White sink. Not-white girl.

  Tal’s standing there, hands over her mouth. I look on her for blood, then in the sink, then on the floor. A gust blows in through the halfopen window, cold, still winter. I go to the tub. I reach for the shower curtain, thinking someone might be on the far side behind it. Nothing.

  “What?” I ask my daughter. “What is it?”

  “Outside,” Tal whispers. So light I don’t understand. Not till she’s pointing again. Then I look. It’s dark. It’s the night, the frozen night. I can’t see. But then I do.

  There’s two people fucking outside my window.

  That’s not right. That can’t be right. So, specifics: there’s a naked black man. Fucking a naked white woman. From behind. Outside my bathroom window.

  Both upright. In the dark.

  I squint. Yes. It’s dark, but that is what I’m seeing.

  “Get the hell out of here!” I yell. All the anger there. All.

  Sun shoots her hand to my mouth. Very slow, low, as if not to interrupt them, she says, “We’re on the second floor.”

  We are on the second floor.

  Those fuckers out there are floating twenty feet off the ground.

  Another scream. I think it’s Tal again, but when I turn around, no, it’s Sun. Tal’s hand is up, holding her phone at them as if it were an exorcist’s bible.

  I turn around. There’s nothing outside the window but night again. I lift the window up higher, put my head out, look around. Nothing. No one on the lawn. No one on the street beyond. I grab the window frame, slam it down and lock it.

  Reflection. I think, Reflection, it must’ve been a reflection. There is a mirror over the sink and one by the door. There are no ghosts.

  I start to run for the hall but Sun grips my arm, yanks me back.

  Tal puts the phone down, says, “We can’t spend another night in this place alone, Pops. Not just us. Not without more people here.”

  I need to search the lawn. But Sun won’t let go of me. And Tal hugs me too. Their arms are woven. Sun’s head is up. It keeps staring at the window.

  My daughter’s face is lit by her phone. She starts poking at it, trying to replay what just happened.

  “Who were they?” Sun whispers aloud.

  “The first interracial couple,” Tal says. I look at her. She’s smiling at the screen. “The first couple,” she repeats, like this is an historical moment she’s captured.

  17

  THE VIDEO IS in color. But barely. Faint pale tones only margins from gray. It takes a second—even having been there, it takes a second—to know that you’re looking down a narrow bathroom. Mostly because the camera is aimed up at the window. It’s only in a brief jostle of the lens, presumably as Tal balanced herself, that we get a flash of the sink, dislocated a good inch from the exposed plaster of the wall, or the permanently stained toilet that takes two pulls of its hanging chain to flush. The focus quickly resets on the window. First it’s framed by the crumbling wood of the windowsill, then as it zooms outside the image is engulfed by the darkness of that night. But not all dark. There is something. I will grant my daughter that. I am not beyond reason. I am not so divorced from the facts before me that I can’t say, “Yes, there is an image of vibrating figures.” I saw it the first time. In fact, I am so intricately connected to reason that I must both acknowledge that I, too, did see something, something reminiscent of two figures fornicating, but also that I would have to be delusional to
think it was a ghost. Or two ghosts. Or that they were the ghosts of the first black and white couple in America. Fucking.

  The crackheads were in the house. Again. I know I am right, I have faith in my original estimation. The outdoor cams caught nothing. The vision was a reflection, no doubt. They were behind us. They were down the hall, their image refracted off the broken glass on the bathroom door. I can show you how they did it. I can draw diagrams. The eerie lighting that still sparks from that fuse box probably helped, I’m sure. I don’t know how they keep getting in and the fact that I haven’t found them doesn’t mean that some other mad explanation must be true. We’re talking angles and reflection here, simple physics.

  “Ghosts of the First Interracial Couple” Tal titles it when she puts the clip online, because she’s sticking to her faith. She creates an account called “Mélanged.” It gets ninety-four hits in two weeks. The only other video uploaded to the account is one of Spider awkwardly yanking on one of his Creole accordions, which garners only thirty-seven views, presumably from the man himself. When pressed how she made the leap toward this context for the title, Tal says, “I can feel it. I just have this sense. They are it. They are, like, our Adam and Eve.” I laugh every time she says it. Tal never does.

  —

  “Great ancestors of dark and light, through time and the veil of life, we beseech you! Your children of Africa and Europe! Show us your love!” Tal exclaims. She’s in the dining room. She’s broken down her tent for this, packed all her things neatly in the hall, out of the way of the stairs because that would be a fire hazard. “Reveal to us once more your glory, give us a sign to guide us toward your truth.”

  I’ve got fifteen teenage mulattoes all up in my living room. Tal, Kimet, their little mixie-pixie friends. Crammed in there, all sitting on the floor. All those zits and such. Lot of bumpy beige flesh. Sitting in the damn near dark. Nobody else saying a word. One Drop is the only one over twenty-one in the group, sitting on crossed legs, massive thighs protruding into the space of the crowded room. The kids I recognize as sunflowers, they hang around him, like always. He’s got his eyes closed, along with a few of the others as they start to chant “Om.” I keep looking at him. I wait for him to open his eyes, because I’m fairly sure he’s just here because he still wants to screw my girlfriend. I catch him, every once in a while, checking out Sunita Habersham. I’m watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it’s an optical monologue.

  “Your primal pain has blossomed generations of love. Let us praise you for your sacrifice.” Tal’s got the incense going, which I thought was a bit much at first but I appreciate later when several of the older ones show up smelling like weed. The rest of the community must be sane, because although Tal hung fliers all over my lawn, they’re not here. “This is your home. This is your land. We are your people. Blended by love, in your image!”

  “I got potato skins with cheddar and bacon!” I answer. “Who wants some?” It’s hard to step through them, all sitting on the floor like this. Especially holding a tray in my hand. “It’s very dark in here,” I point out. “But I guess you need that for a standard séance. I haven’t been to one before, but it’d be odd with all the lights on, probably. Not really the same mood-builder.”

  “Reveal yourselves once more! Let us praise you with our belief, bathe in your miracle!” my daughter begs the universe.

  “These’re T.G.I. Friday’s. Not the take-out, but the frozen kind. I swear to God though, you can’t tell the difference. They’re delicious.”

  “Pops, shut up!” The crowded room, already hushed, becomes quieter. I leave the hors d’oeuvres on a sawhorse and walk back to the kitchen again.

  “Get it out of your system! You can’t have séances at Whitman!” I say back to her, because I’m so happy.

  Whitman College. It’s got a lovely theater and dance program, a cute little town, and sure the whole area was founded on the massacre of the Indians but where in America wasn’t? It’s in Washington State. Not in Seattle either—out in the boonies, far, far from Germantown. They’ve even offered Tal a little scholarship money; the insurance payment from the house fire should cover the rest. Good things come to those who wait, to burn down their homes.

  They all leave, eventually. Even One Drop, who hovers, surely waiting for Sun to appear. “It’s all cool, brother. Just being a supportive community and all. You should come out, hang with us sometimes. We got a domino game going every Thursday,” he offers.

  “Yeah, sure. Maybe, sometime,” I brush him off. “Sorry there were no ghosts!” I yell at the last of them, as I see them off at the door, anxious to have it closed once more. A few laugh it off, wave goodnight. They’re not bad kids, they’re just all up in my house.

  I walk out with the last of them, onto my porch. “Goodbye,” I tell them, which is fancy talk for It’s midnight Friday, school is out, go the hell home. The accordion, it goes now in the distance, having politely waited until Tal was finished. I go back in, grab my coat and hat. Go out to find Spider.

  Mélange is on my goddamn lawn. With their RVs, their single-wide trailers, their rows of those little house-looking things. It turns out the latter are called “park models,” which makes sense because they are parking their asses on my lawn. They’ve put them in rows, and grass alleys already show the wear of foot travel. It’s dark, but the windows light my path. I’ve heard the Mulattopians living here call this stretch Biracial Boulevard. They call the residential area they’ve formed on the east lawn hosting the RVs class A through C, Mixed Mews, although I’m partial to the name Halfie Heights and use this moniker exclusively when mentioning it. Some of the biggest Oreos have parked there, possibly because it’s the end of the property closest to the whiteness of Chestnut Hill. The sunflowers made the southern, North Philly end of the lawn their homestead, in a place they call Little Halfrica. Nobody uses the word segregation, though.

  They’ve all been here for months. Swarming in the day after the “sighting” and acting like someone died and left them the place, instead of me. Roslyn offered to pay rent, most likely on Sun’s urgings, though we don’t talk about it. And it’s acceptable, the little sum that Roslyn pays me for the circus she brought to my Germantown. I’d have had a better bargaining position if I wasn’t leveraged by my concern for my daughter and Sunita Habersham, but it’s okay for now. Not a fortune but enough to erase the last of my hesitation.

  The grounds of Loudin Mansion have become a village to vagabonds. The long trailers resting behind the garage, used as classrooms during the daytime, comprise the commercial district. Over a hundred people during school hours, reducing to around forty-five at night. People who pee and shit. I pass the porta-potties, hold my breath till I’m on the other side. People who leave piles of trash every day. We have one dumpster by the gate. It’s nearly full. I know from being woken up by the process that it was just cleared at five this morning. People who listen to music and even play music of their own and who sit around and laugh and get drunk sometimes and sing out loud.

  “Big dubs!” One of the sunflowers yells to me. One of the fine young mixed men of the new generation. His homeboys, they all wave, go back to shooting craps before the heat of a drum of burning scrap wood. From the paint on the planks, I recognize them as loose pieces that were resting by the garage. They’re burning my father’s house, incrementally. The wood’s moist; it smokes and smells of the chemicals it’s covered in, but it’s old and porous and breathes life into the flames. I notice the propane tanks, just ten feet past the barrel, and all the other ones for many yards in all directions.

  In order for a propane tank to explode, it has to be surrounded by fire, and then have its container punctured with a big enough hole that the fuel and oxygen can circulate and properly ignite. If the hole isn’t big enough, the gas will ignite, but only in a sustained blow of flames. If you want a boom, if you want to see the full tank burst in an inferno about the size of an elephant—not too big, not too small—you nee
d at least a two-inch hole for complete exposure. A shotgun blast seems to work pretty well, according to the latest videos I’ve searched. Not on my phone, lest the record incriminate, but on Spider’s.

  He sits in front of his Airstream, on the porch he’s made out of cinder blocks, fingerless gloves on to play his button accordion in the late spring chill. Spider keeps getting into his song, going a few notes, then getting lost, starting over again. Either his hands are stiff or he lacks the skill, or some combination.

  “It’s the rhythm. I can hit the notes; that’s not the issue. It’s the beat. It’s polyrhythmic, tricky. But that’s the African. Here, this is what it sounds like it without.” Spider tries again. This time he’s slow, full of clarity, and boredom. It’s every uninspired elementary school recital.

  “It’s polka. Without that beat, it’s polka. It’s just European. But you bring in the African rhythm, and you get zydeco. Check it.” Spider concentrates. He stares forward, up. His jaw slack. His ink-stained arms clench, and the music comes, and I hear it. The riffs, the excited, flourishing moments. Spider still messes up, but he gets further this time. Enough that I can hear what he’s going for.

  “ ‘Eunice Two-Step.’ Total mulatto music. You know, if we, like, called ourselves ‘bi-ethnic’ instead of biracial, that would clarify a lot of this. I tried to get Roslyn to go for that but she wasn’t hearing it. But that’s what it’s about: culture, ethnicity. It’s not about race. Race doesn’t exist. Race is a false paradigm created by Kant to—”

  “Your phone,” I stop him, because he’s high. It has a zebra-print case, and zonkey as the lock screen image. “Listen—can I ask you, if I started taking in all the used propane tanks and got them refilled for a fee, do think anyone would buy them?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he says, opening up his phone’s gallery, browsing through the photos. “You didn’t take any pictures, man! How’d the séance go? No shaky tables? No lights going out or strange voices?”

  “Only thing strange is that anyone actually believes that shit.”