Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  I take my ID back, but I can’t look at him. I’m feeling a little dizzy when I hit the elevator button to go up.

  The door to Irv’s apartment is open. Not just unlocked, open. My emotions are alive and shoved together, my heart is a crowded bus.

  “Irv? Tal?” I say from the building’s hallway. Nobody says anything back to me, so I walk inside, through the kitchen, to the entrance of the living room. It’s not quiet. There’s a television on. Sports, or someone yapping about sports. And there’s Tal, talking. She’s watching TV. She’s up here, watching TV, laughing, having a good time, laughing at me. Even if she’s laughing at something else, knowing that I’m sitting in the damn car waiting for her, Tal’s laughing at me.

  I walk in. Yeah, the TV’s on. On one of the sports channels, one of the ones where loud people talk about what’s happening on the other sports channels. Irv’s in his easy chair, feet sprawled out before him. His head’s back—he’s not even awake. The place reeks like dive-bar carpet.

  “What the hell is going on?” I don’t know. I don’t yell because I don’t want to yell, but also because of Irving Karp over there. Tal’s still laughing. Hands to her face, presumably one holding a phone.

  “When you say you can just be a minute, I don’t actually assume it’s only going to be a minute. I mean, I already give you leeway. As far as I’m concerned ‘a minute’ can be up to ten minutes. Maybe. Maybe fifteen. You got me down there waiting in the car for more than a half an hour for you.”

  Tal doesn’t say anything.

  “All this time, and where’s the clothes? Where’s your coat?”

  “You’re yelling at me and my grandfather just died!”

  Really, only the first six or seven of those words even make any sense. The word I really don’t get, even though she makes it out before the sentence transitions into a wail, is the died part. I look over at Irv.

  Irv’s head is tilted all the way back in the lounger, but his eyes are open and frozen and staring straight up above him. I actually look up there too, like there will be instructions on what to do next stapled to the ceiling.

  —

  Into the landline phone, I’m saying, “I’d like to report a death,” but I don’t like to. Not at all.

  I look at my daughter. I want to tell her that I’m here for her, and I do, but it doesn’t improve things because she can already see that I’m here, and the only reason I’m here in this apartment is for her.

  “This is it, Pops,” Tal says after I’ve hung up.

  “What is ‘it,’ honey?” and I put my arms around her.

  “This is what the ghosts were trying to tell me.”

  18

  OUR FATHERS ARE dead. Tal’s and mine. We are alone, together. Now we are completely in the present, the past having dissolved.

  Tal tells everyone in Mulattopia she can that she knew. That Irv was going to die. Not because he told her—she now claims he didn’t, she claims the words never actually came out of his mouth—that he was going to die. That the ghosts told her. Whether they believe her or not, the Mulattopians come to the house. In groups, mostly. Of at least three—one time, nine—and offer their condolences. But they also listen to her story. Not just politely, not just consolingly. They listen without moving their bodies. They listen for detail. Tal tells them, “I, like, knew.” She knew as soon as she entered Irv’s building. That she decoded the sign of the bathroom visitation en route. “I’m in the elevator, rising, right? And I’m thinking, This must be what dying is like, you know? And it totally hits me. What I saw upstairs, that night. What you have all seen, in my video. There’s life, and death, and all that, and they’re both happening at, like, the exact same moment.”

  “Yeah,” some say and they nod and nod and some may actually mean it. They finish by looking together at the clip on her laptop once more. They point out new evidence and theories from that night, and this seems to console Tal. I walk through the room after the first of these encounters, giving my daughter a casual sniff. She doesn’t smell like weed or booze. She could be high on something else, of course, but I doubt that’s it.

  The attention is fine, the concern is fine, but when I try to talk to Tal alone about the loss, about enduring it, I just get the same platitudes. The only ones Tal really talks to are the ones who believe in the ghosts of her imagination, and Sunita Habersham. The latter insists on cooking for my daughter, even if she only knows how to make coffee and tea and instant oatmeal and other recipes that primarily involve the boiling of water.

  “The First Couple told me,” Tal says to the others who come visiting, condolences in mouth. Parked in my living room, nibbling at the donuts they just brought as an offering. Nodding their heads solemnly. She means that as a joke, I want to say. But it isn’t funny. Nobody sees the humor in it.

  I am trying not to feel any sense of relief about the passing of Irving Karp—but there will be the inheritance, that condo alone should be enough to pay for Whitman College and all the books and fees that entails, and any life insurance settlement on top of that will be an extra blessing to Tal’s economic future. She will be left with more than a large, decaying house to depend on. I feel the relief of that like someone who has taken sharp stones out of their shoes. This feels so good, so buoyant even, that I have to force myself to think of Irv’s face before I become giddy. Of the way he swung his long neck to look at you, or that laugh that sounded like years of smoking had added to his morbid sense of humor. Of what Tal lost, and what he lost in Tal’s mother. And what the world has lost now that he’s no longer walking in it.

  We go to the funeral together. Sunita, Tal, me, all wearing matching outfits: black. We’re in the Bug. And I’m driving. And in the echo of my head, we are finally a family. As real as any family I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of since my own short-lived childhood unit. I even start humming as I drive the Beetle to the funeral home. A tune I realize is far too pleasant for the occasion when Sunita pinches my knee wordlessly.

  The service is depressing, but quick and efficient. The rules were set millennia ago. Soon we’re back in the car, on the highway, off to the cemetery. Only family are at the grave site, and there’s not even a headstone, which won’t come till a year later at its unveiling.

  “Everybody does burial differently. My dad didn’t even want a funeral. No memorial, nothing,” I say as I wait with Sun, down by the cars, for the family to say goodbye.

  “I’m going to die in New Orleans,” Sunita Habersham tells me.

  “No one knows where they’re going to die.”

  “I do. I’m going to go there, eventually. Definitely when I get older. Bask in the music, get fat on the food. But mostly, so I can die there. So I can get that jazz funeral, that’s what I want. A second line band, marching down the street. Just make it a celebration, right? All life ends in death—you can’t let it be framed in tragedy. That’s how I’m going out. Also, I want to be dressed as The Dark Phoenix. Just in case the zombie apocalypse kicks in.”

  “Do we do the pebble on the tombstone thing?” I say, looking over at them.

  “I think that’s next year. Every year after till there’s no one to remember. That’s beautiful too. Look at them.”

  I do. They’re over there. There’s Dot, and Art, and Dot’s daughter, Elissa, and others woven together with unseen bonds. Tal’s got her cousins. They stand together, watch. One lanky kid stands a few feet off, texting.

  “In the end, we just have our people, our tribe,” Sun says, and she grabs my hand, squeezes it. “Even when you’re gone, when your biological family’s gone, your tribe’s still there. Keeping your memory alive.”

  Dot is not very observant as a Jew. I know this because Dot says “I’m not very observant, as a Jew” to me when she gives me directions, and again when she answers the door at her house. Still, all the mirrors are covered, and she’s sitting shivah, although she’s not sure she’s sitting it properly, which she also confesses. Dot’s an excellent host, t
hough, and a damn good cook. Or her friends are. And many trays and delights are offered for consumption. I stand with Sun. Tal, she flutters by every few minutes so that I know that despite the fact that I recognize almost no one here, I’m in the right home. I poke her shoulder at one passing, ask how’s she’s doing, and she snaps, “Fine!” annoyed at the suggestion that she would be anything else. As if this whole occasion were merely a house party with old people.

  “She’s drifting apart. From me. Already. And we just met, really.”

  Tal has her phone out. It’s way too big for her. It’s nearly a tablet. The others, the teens, the twenty-somethings, they gather around Tal to look at what’s in her hands.

  “Oh God, she’s showing them her damn ghost movie.”

  I put down my little plastic plate on a breakfront and take a step toward Tal, when Sun’s hand falls on my arm and stops me.

  “It’s morbid,” I whisper to her.

  “It’s helping her cope,” she says back. “She needs to feel special. It helps with the loss. Like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man after he lost Uncle Ben. When I lost Zeke, for me it was helping to start Mélange.”

  Zeke. There, for the first time, is the name. The word that defines the wound of her heart. I reach out for Sun’s hand. It goes into mine, but absently. She doesn’t seem to realize that this is the first time she’s told me even that much about him.

  Others are starting to leave. Others are, so we should. Before I can start the process though, Art comes over. He gives me a hug like I’m the one who’s lost a brother.

  “Tal has you. This was a gift. You are here to be a father. There are no coincidences.”

  “God willing,” I say.

  “God is dead, but we still have Jung. Forgive me, I get very philosophical at events like these. The next, it’ll be mine—at least I hope so. You start, you’re the youngest one in the family. At the end, you’re the oldest. Then you go. But Tal has you, and I think that’s wonderful.”

  He gets a hug from Sun for this. Takes it, squeezes too hard, winks over her shoulder at me. Letting go, he starts to leave, then turns around again.

  “And you know there’s no money, right?” I assumed there would be no hat passed, so say yes. He sighs heavily, smiles, walks back to hug me again. Says in my ear, “Irv played the market like it was horses. Nobody wins at horses. Also, greyhounds: he lost on those too. Between that and the medical bills, nothing. But thank Jung, a young girl going to college soon has her real father to take care of her.”

  And then he lets me go.

  “What was that about?” Sunita Habersham asks me when Art has rejoined his sister in her hosting duties.

  “He’s drunk. And Irv was fucking broke,” I say, a little too loud for the room.

  —

  “It’s got, like, a thousand page views on YouTube,” Tal tells me. “Pops! Look,” she says, leaning over from the backseat and trying to push her phone into my face while I’m driving. I want to point this hazard out but see the image in a flash.

  “But it only says 907 hits, honey.” Sun’s hand on my knee starts pinching again, but I don’t bother looking over for the reproach I know is waiting in her eyes.

  “That’s like a thousand,” Tal corrects. “And it will be over that when my cousin Nate puts it on Channel Six News.”

  “It’s going on TV?” Sun turns to ask. She actually sounds happy about this.

  “No. On their YouTube channel. That’s bigger—way bigger. Because I don’t think anyone watches, you know, live TV anymore? Except for HBO?”

  “You’re up-speaking.” She’s up-speaking. Lifting the end of her sentences an octave higher. It’s a white-girl affectation, one Tal’d largely dropped over the last few months. A habit, most likely, reacquired in the hours with family before. Her other family.

  “Well you’re up your own ass,” Tal responds, then the headphones are on before she has to endure my admonishment. She gets out and slams the door as soon as we pull up back in our driveway.

  “You’re worried about money,” Sun states after the silence. “You were thinking Irv’s estate might have helped, and now you’re dealing with the disappointment of that. And that has you angry. The fear, it has you angry.”

  “And I’m angry that I’m angry. And I’m broke.”

  “You’re not broke. You’re cash poor. But you’re land rich.”

  “I really don’t feel like a member of the landed gentry at the moment. I’m thinking, maybe I should burn down the house, make it look like it was an accident or crackheads or something, and whatever’s left from the insurance payout after I cover Tal’s education we, you and me, and her eventually, should take it somewhere it can last. Like Belize,” I say out loud. I actually say it out loud. It’s made sense in my head for months, but when it hits the air there’s an oxidizing reaction and it sounds a like a joke. Sun just looks at me. Because she knows I’m not kidding.

  “You know that’s crazy talk, right? If you did that, you’d go to jail. And where would we go?” she asks and I know she means an entirely different we than us. “Roslyn’s got lots of leads for permanent settlements, but one of them is here. You need to go to her.”

  “I’m not going to her. She’s been sniffing around this place for months, even before I moved y’all in. Why was she here that day she Tased me?”

  “You Tased her first.”

  “Yeah, but still? Or when I caught her checking out my rooms? I know she wants it, but that old lady is sneaky. She’ll try and rob me, watch. I know you hate me saying it, but I don’t trust her. She’s got her own agenda.”

  “If she wants to buy the place, her agenda is the same as yours. Talk to Roslyn,” Sun says, as always ignoring my bias on the subject.

  —

  It’s later that afternoon when I wake from a nap to hear Tal’s voice talking to someone downstairs. I don’t give it further thought till I hear voices coming up the stairs. I hear Tal say, “It was up here,” and then multiple footfalls banging down my hallway.

  “What the hell are you doing?” There’s a guy with her. When he turns around, I see he’s one of the kids from the funeral, the one that was texting at the cemetery. Tal’s crouching at the bathroom door, like we were that night. She stands to yell at me.

  “Pops, put some pants on!”

  “He doesn’t need pants. We can just film him from the chest up.” And then there is a video camera in my face. It’s reaching up, and suddenly a light is shining in my eyes.

  “What the fuck are you doing,” is the appropriate response.

  “Pops, this is Nate? Did you guys meet? Nate Karp? My cousin?”

  I look down at my groin. I’m wearing boxer shorts. My reproductive organs are not showing. So I reach out to shake his hand. Tal says something about pants again, but to punish her for her tone I make no motion to go put mine on. These underwear could have passed as basketball shorts in the seventies. Doctor J went out on the court like this all the time.

  “So, some quick questions. Did you see the ghosts?”

  I can just make out Tal next to him through the glow. She wants me to say “Yes.” She’s nodding “Yes” in slow deliberate motions, like that will influence me, and it does. I don’t want to hurt her.

  “I saw something. Definitely,” I tell him. The last word I say with added gravitas to make up for the vagueness of the answer.

  “Okay, so you say you saw something, too. Do you think it was ghosts?”

  I look at Tal. She’s not moving her head anymore. She’s just staring at me, intently.

  “No,” and in response to her eye-rolling I add, “look, I’m not going to sit here and lie. Come on. You can’t expect me to do that.” Her cousin peers at me, lifting his gaze from the viewfinder, then turns to Tal for cues.

  “But you said you saw something. What do you think it was?”

  “Crackheads. I’m pretty sure I saw crackheads. But I don’t know.” I throw in the last bit to be generous, but Tal gives up
on me anyway and walks down the hall.

  “Well, could they have been ghosts, do you think?” he asks. Tal stops walking. Turns. Looks at me. I look at her. Then I turn to her cousin.

  “Sure, they were ghosts. Ghosts of who they once were. You could say that about half of the city of Philadelphia.”

  19

  I TRY FORMALITY, send an email. The header is Loudin Mansion Is for Sale. This is as straightforward with Roslyn as I can possibly be. The body of the message has bullet points and text in bold. The most important of these says the house has been appraised at $1.8 million if fully restored; another bullet offers the house for the generously discounted rate of $1.3 million, which is a steal based on the $310,000 in estimated repairs the property would need. My father bought the place for $800,000, but that was at auction, at risk, and he paid much more personally for the purchase later. I don’t reveal to her that the mortgage payments will drain the money from his cash accounts in months, a fact no one but Sirleaf and I know. Another sub-bullet point, under a category I term “Advantages of Buying Loudin,” it says, “$0 Moving Costs.” At the end of the email, back in sentence form, I state that I would like to discuss this further at her earliest convenience. I even provide a link to my calendar. I sign it with Sincerely, for I am nothing if I am not sincere in my urge to be rid of this place.