Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “Don’t be a spoilsport. Communities need a shared mythology. It brings them closer.”

  “Yeah, but come on. ‘The First Couple’?”

  “Everyone here’s already haunted by one interracial couple: their own parents. Real ghosts aren’t that big a jump.”

  The trailer next to his is a streamlined fiberglass teardrop, street-traffic orange. So tiny that you can only stand up in the small section you walk into through the door, an upright crawl space shared with a stove, oven, and bathroom shower. On the other side is a small table with space for a person to sit on each side, except when a cushion is laid on top to make a bed. It is a bed now. Sunita Habersham lies on it. It’s cold, but she’s still nude, on her back on top of the comforter, seemingly unable to endure the weight of anything holding her down.

  “So did Tal get any vibrations? Any ghosts take a bite?”

  “One of the kids had a Ouija board. He came up with the phrase ‘mon oil me damang.’ That almost spells, ‘My eye itches,’ in French. But Kimet got it to say, ‘First!’ So maybe he got trolled on a ghost message board. Whatever. It’s all silly.”

  “You can joke, but we saw something.” Sun rolls over to her side, grabs me by my jeans pocket, pulls me closer.

  I take off my socks. I believe firmly that sex should involve the removal of socks. “I saw something too. I never said I didn’t,” I tell her, but don’t go into the obvious junkie reality because I already know she’s not trying to hear that once more. “I don’t think if I was dead I’d be like, ‘Hey this afterlife thing is great, but let’s go over there and play with the cardboard square with the letters on it.’ It’s just my slant, but I think if there actually is an afterlife, it doesn’t involve games from Parker Brothers.”

  My pants are down and out, and I’m beside her. Lifting off my shirt, I hit the ceiling. There’s just enough room for both of us. For love. For sleeping though, Sun comes back up to the house. Sleeping doesn’t cause noise. Sleeping doesn’t lead to another incident where Tal yells, “You’re shaking the house” at the top of her voice directly from the floor below.

  “It was actually nice tonight, I guess. All those kids coming together. She’s really connecting. But it’s creepy.”

  “What if they were ‘the first’?” Sun puts to me. “This is an historic area, you never know.”

  “Then my daughter shot the mulatto equivalent of the Zapruder film.”

  Sunita pulls me to her. “I know. Exciting, right?”

  Sunita Habersham’s flesh, her hair covering my face, that excites me. Besides Tal, it’s all I live for. Even with this RV rocking, it’s still way bigger than the cab of the Beetle. There’s an added intimacy that comes from it not having a motor. But the best part is after, in the quieting of bodies after so much movement when, before either of us can drift off from consciousness, Sun rises, pulls her hair back into a bun, and pulls out the comic books. And we read. Together. The bliss of sharing a previously solitary act. We’ve upped our pull list to about thirty comics a month, and still go through everything new by the weekend. We’ve progressed in our relationship to reading graphic novels from our childhood, the ones that made us love the form in the first place. Books from the era when comics were for children. We don’t care. Or I don’t care and I’m amazed that she doesn’t seem to mind. My inner child has found a friend.

  After an hour of reading digital bootlegs of The Micronauts: They Came From Inner Space on her laptop, Sun grabs her shirt, and I look at her ass, at panties that say TUESDAY even though it’s Friday night. She puts jeans over them, and I watch as she tries to discover where her socks are hiding. All this because her bed’s too small for both of us, and because I don’t want Tal sleeping in the house alone. And because Sun wants to literally sleep with me. Because Sunita Habersham says she’s my lady now—although she still insists there’s no ownership involved, so I don’t really know if this means we’re exclusive. Or more specifically, if she is. But I know she chooses to lie down for the night with me. For that honor, I can motivate myself to rise from postcoital bliss, dress, and walk out of her camper and into the cold to my father’s house each night. Because she’s my lady now.

  “I’m not coming up,” Sun says. I’m standing with my hand on the door handle, now frozen. “I’ve got to make a social call tonight.”

  I say, “You’re going to love this: there’s a black comic-book exhibit at the African American Museum, they’ve got Jack Kirby’s first illustrations for Black Panther. I’m taking Tal tomorrow morning. Tosha is bringing her kids. You want to come? I was hoping you guys could meet.” I shoot this out quick, to stop myself from asking who her social call is, if it’s a man or a woman, if it’s friendship or some other kind of unbearable intimacy.

  “I can’t, sorry. What time are you coming back from the museum? You want to meet after?”

  I look at the time on my phone. I don’t want to, I don’t mean to, but I get so far into the gesture that aborting it would be even more awkward. It’s 11:42 P.M. She’s going to see someone she doesn’t bother to name at 11:42 P.M.

  “Are you leaving the grounds? Because if so, you really want to be careful,” I tell her, as if she specifically suggested walking the streets of Germantown at midnight and specifically intends to not be careful about it.

  “Don’t worry, I’m just staying in Mixed Mews. But it’s sweet of you to be concerned.” There’s a kiss there. There’s a kiss in it for me, for my diligence in not being possessive.

  “Who are you going to…?” I try to do it casually. Again, I am solely concerned with her safety, and protection is different from possession.

  “Text me tomorrow, when you’re done, okay?” Sunita tells me, and nothing more. Because I already told her I didn’t want to know about anything but us. I’m trying to be free of history too. And I don’t want to know. But I have to know. I have to and I’ve waited this long and that alone should stand as a testament to my enlightenment. I have to know so I give another quick peck then hurry out.

  My laptop’s on in the dining room, the screen is dimmed until I resuscitate it. I look over to the tent, wait to hear Tal stirring in response, but notice only the unchanged rhythm of her slow and unconscious exhalation. Even so, I tilt the monitor away from her side of the house. And then I pull up the feeds from the security cameras.

  I switch through the camera feeds until I find the one focused in the direction of Sun’s trailer, then I zoom in. But not so far as to try to peer straight into Sun’s windows. Because that would be wrong. That would be beyond security measures. I am not a stalker, I am just a cautious man sitting in the dark watching my lover through a spy cam as she leaves her trailer in the dead of night to possibly go to another person.

  Sun walks out. She stops. She looks up. She looks up at the camera. No, just at the night. She goes back inside again, comes back with a scarf this time, wraps it around her neck and then pulls a hat onto her head as if to cap the entire outfit. She has something with her. A bag. No, a box.

  I shouldn’t care where she goes. I’m not worried about breeding, about protecting her womb from alien sperm. I don’t believe she can use up any love that she could give me. So I must be doing this to protect her. That must be this horrid feeling, a will to ensure against harm. That’s believable.

  Sun walks toward the camera, up the hill, in the direction of my father’s house. She is coming to the house. It has all been a test. She’s coming to the house. I realize that I have to shut the equipment down and run upstairs before Sun actually gets to the house, but on the screen she turns in to a line of trailers and she’s gone.

  —

  “I’m not ready for college,” Tal says, all the materials her fat packet offers spread out on the table before us, my laptop open to a Walla Walla realtor’s page. “This is crazy. I’ve never left the east coast. I’ve never even been to California. And I just got here. I want to stay in this house. This house feels right. I mean, doesn’t this feel right? Like, thi
s is where we’re supposed to be?”

  “Hell no. Feels like it’s time to go. And I’m not going to leave you here with the ghouls.”

  “They’re not ghoulish. They just want to be known,” Tal tells me. And she’s not kidding.

  “That’s some crazy ish you’re talking, honey. Get your shoes on. We were supposed to leave for the museum ten minutes ago.”

  “Not yet. I want you to look at something.”

  “Honey, get your bag, get your phone, let’s go. If you want to get clothes from Irv’s first, we got to go.”

  “You’re rushing me and that makes me feel like you don’t respect me,” Tal recites, and makes no move except to fold her arms.

  “Fine. What?”

  “Before we go gawk at other people’s art, I want to show you something. My own art project. I’ve been working on it all week. I want you to see it. And I don’t want you to just say nice things. I want you to be frank, Pops. Like the kind of critiques you give Kimet.”

  I grab my coat but follow her to her tent, wait outside as she goes poking around behind the canvas. “I thought you were all about dance. You’re a painter now?”

  “Sculptor,” Tal says, and pushes it out in front me, resting it on the top of a stool. “I’m starting to believe that, like, ‘found object sculpture’ is my secondary medium, you know? I’m thinking, maybe not college? Maybe art school would be better for me? In Philly. Eventually.”

  It’s my Frederick Douglass action figure. I use it in class as a body model. I know where she found it: in my cabinet drawer. Since Mélange’s relocation, I’ve kept all my art materials in the house. She’s stripped the doll down to a naked body. And it’s truly a naked body, because Tal’s compensated for the natural neutering of male dolls by adding a prosthetic penis to his groin. Oh great. It’s not erect or anything, but she’s been fairly generous.

  Amazingly, Frederick Douglass’s cock is not the most startling aspect of Tal’s work. She’s painted him white. No, she’s painted half of him, right down the middle, pink. Pink and tan and white, the skin of a Viking in the dark winter months. The redness hints at those parts of his body where the blood runs closest to the epidermis. Oh, and his hair. It pains me to see it. Frederick Douglass is the Samson of African American history; his Afro basically freed the slaves. Here though, on what used to be my doll, half of that hair has been shaved off. Replaced with a flat blond mane just as voluminous.

  “I got it off an old Barbie doll,” Tal says when I go to touch it.

  “Yeah. Okay.” There’s my trepidation; Tal hears it. I’m holding the doll, looking all around it as if the answer for how I feel about this could be found there. Tal goes to take the sculpture out of my hands, then stops herself.

  “It’s suppose to offend, you know that, right? I mean, you’re supposed to look at it, and go, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then, after you do that, hopefully you ask yourself, ‘Why does this piss me off?’ Is it because black history types are considered, like, saints? Or is it the fact that this points out that he was half-white. Because he was, you know?”

  “Genetically. Half-European. Whiteness—that’s not really something you can be half of. That’s more of an all or nothing privilege, perspective thing.”

  “You know what I’m saying, Pops.” Tal yanks it out of my hand. I think the penis is going to fall off, but no, it’s really stuck on there. She lays it on the table, on a fleece blanket. Tenderly wrapping it up, it looks like she’s swaddling a baby. “You still haven’t said anything. And saying nothing is actually even more shitty than saying something you’ll regret later.”

  “I’m offended by it,” I tell Tal, calm. “And then I wonder why I’m offended by it. And it makes me think on that. And I know, I mean I am pretty damn sure, that my reasoning is probably a lot different from what you’re thinking about it, but it is making me think. So it’s working.”

  Tal stops packing it away, but when I finish talking, she starts up again. “Cool,” is all Tal says.

  I hug my daughter from behind, kiss her on her head. “Ice cold,” I say.

  She repeats what I say right after me. “Ice cold.” This makes me feel like I’m starting to do damn good as a daddy.

  “I mean, I know you’re a failed comic-book artist, but since you’re my parental unit I value your opinion,” Tal tells me.

  And this pisses me off the whole ride to Irv’s apartment. I already know I’m a failure. That doesn’t mean I want to be called a failure by any voice not in my head. Certainly not by my own daughter. The fact that, again, I know I’m a failure, just infuriates me further. I grip the wheel. I get to the turn for the highway but I take the long, beautiful way instead, and it’s a damn nice day and I should enjoy it. But I’m still pissed off. Winding down the Wissahickon’s stream, out onto the Schuylkill River. It gives me time to take in the green space and the water and reflect on just how pissed off I am.

  “It’s so funny. Last August you were basically a white girl. It was all, ‘the blacks’ then, remember? Not even a year later and you’re another Mulatta Militant,” is the first thing I say, after a while.

  “Jews aren’t really ‘white,’ in the racial sense,” Tal informs me, looking out the window so she doesn’t see the self-restraint it takes for me not to immediately respond.

  “I still can’t believe you never went to the African American Museum. The whole time you were growing up in Philly. I guess white people just don’t go to black museums.” I thought I was changing the subject. Even when I stop talking, I think, thank God I changed the goddamn subject.

  “Well, who’s fucking fault is it I grew up around only white people?”

  “Mine,” I say. Then, “Don’t say ‘fuck.’ To your father.”

  I don’t say any more till we hit the Parkway. Past the art museum, past Logan Circle. I was going to tell her a story, about how my dad’s family came to this part of the city from Ireland almost two hundred years ago, how they lived around this neighborhood until the 1950s, when the GI Bill allowed them to slip into the middle class. Driving past the natural history museum, I was going to tell the story of how my dad would take me to see the dinosaur bones, because I liked the idea of a world without humans and because he liked that it was free on Saturdays. I don’t say anything, though. As we’re stopped at a red light, our eyes meet for a second when Tal realizes I’m looking at her, then I have a green so I turn and sigh.

  “You hated my sculpture,” Tal tells me. The damn two-toned cock monster is still sitting on her lap.

  “I didn’t hate your piece, honey. It’s just, when you create art about race, about blackness, you have to deal with the historical weight of the images that came before. You have to understand the ways art was used to diminish us, to dehumanize us. To negotiate all that, you have be informed, not just artistically, but also culturally. You can’t just bludgeon the concept with heavy-handed imagery.”

  “Sun loved it. Sun said it was, ‘as brutal as it was insightful.’ ” Tal pauses for effect, nods her head a few seconds after she finishes to make sure it’s sunk into my head. “I hate to say this, Father, but I think you’re responding this way because of me saying that you’re an ex-comic-book artist—”

  “You said, ‘failed.’ ”

  “I meant ex—”

  “Daughter, I’m not an ‘ex-’ anything. I’m an artist. An illustrator. And I do comics. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve been kind of busy of late. Mostly with you.”

  “Which I only said because I haven’t really seen you do any work the whole time I’ve known you.”

  “You’ve only known me for a few months.” I say it. Instantly, I hate that I say it. The guy that says that, he’s a huge asshole. Three more blocks. Then I park the car. Illegally, in the tow-away zone. We’re at Irv’s corner anyway. Once the Bug is shut off, I turn to apologize to her, but Tal’s already got the door open. “Tal! I told Tosha we’d be there now. Hurry!”

  Tal slams the door as hard
as an angry teenager can. I feel a flash of rage with the sound because I’m in annoyed-dad mode. I yell after her, “That’s inappropriate behavior,” and I can’t help myself.

  I sit in the car, waiting. I sit there, disliking myself, wanting to apologize to Tal, to restart, go back to the moment I was coming down the steps and she was brushing her teeth yet still managed a sudsy “Yo, Pops.” Spitting the paste out in her cup then giving me a sloppy, green-foamed smiled. Yes, let’s go back to that moment. I could win it from there if given a second chance.

  Tal takes way too long. I stick the key back in the ignition, turn it just enough to give power to the clock I installed in the dash. 9:48 A.M. I know it’s been at least twenty minutes, probably twenty-five, probably thirty. The anger is there within me, but I refuse to recognize it. I say to it, Go sit down. Wait for ten o’clock. Because that’s when I can get mad and be fully justified.

  At ten A.M. exactly, I leave the car and don’t even slam the door.

  I know where the elevators are and I’m halfway toward them when a brown hand reaches out from behind the desk and pushes on my chest. He must’ve said something first. I didn’t hear him. What I hear are the words in my head—I put them there—that I’m preparing to say to my daughter without losing my temper: I thought we agreed that you would come in and out.

  “I said, ‘I’m going to need you to sign in.’ ” They got this brother dressed up like a general in the Protect White People Army. He’s got the trimmed police hat, he’s got the matching military formal wear, top and bottom. It’s dark blue with a flippant sky-blue trim, a nice silly color to remind you that while the bearer of these clothes has authority, he is also subservient and nonthreatening.

  I go to the desk, ask for a pen.

  “You ain’t got one?” he asks. It’s then that I realize we’re enemies. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s just that he thought I was ignoring him initially. I look at his face. It’s more than that. The suit says, Welcome to Disney World, but the face and eyes shoved in it? They hate me. Does he think I’m white? No, a black man his age, and his position, would instinctively know not to show such disdain for a Caucasian. So he knows I’m black. When I remove a pen from my pocket and sign my name in, he says, “I knew you was holding out.” No way he would talk to a white boy like that. When I’m done filling out the time, he even says, “You going to let me see some ID or what?” I want to argue. But what I don’t want to know is what it must be like to be a black man working up in here in this monkey suit for decades for these wealthy white folks. I never want to know that, and this man has intimate knowledge of all that must entail. So I show my ID. He looks at it, intently, then says, “So you the one that turned out to be Ms. Karp’s father, huh?” When I don’t say anything, he adds, “I remember her mom. Sweet girl. It’s a damn shame what happened to her.”