by Mat Johnson
‘Right.’ She dropped the placard and her novel. ‘Is that the whole of your luggage?’
‘Yeah. Is David Crombie here?’
‘No, he’s not here. Couldn’t expect him to get dressed before noon, could you?’
‘Maybe he wanted to get ready,’ I said, already making excuses, and I hadn’t even really met the guy.
I had already decided I liked this woman, who was David’s wife. Maybe it was because I had lost my own mother but, while in the line (because it wouldn’t be a queue yet for me) to buy bottled water at the airport kiosk for the jet lag Margaret was sure I was destined to endure, when she turned back to me, stared at my face for a moment, then licked her thumbs and rubbed my eyebrows straight with her own saliva, I fell in love with her. I knew then that I would love her husband as well. All this slightly older (ten years maybe?) elegant, seemingly sophisticated black woman had to do was rub her spit into my face and my guard, whatever insignificant American perimeter I maintained, was decimated.
In the car, Margaret’s hands held wheel and stick, pulling and winding and yanking. Those hands were long and lanky, slightly wrinkled on the back where the thin skin was, every purposeful bone visible, thick river veins bulbous, soft and meandering. On a full speed right turn Margaret’s book slid across the dashboard and bounced off the glass, onto my lap. Without looking or slowing down, Margaret snatched it from its resting place and threw it in a high arc over her shoulder. I heard the sounds of a dry avalanche behind me and turned around. One paperback had been lost in a mountain of its brethren. Filling the space meant for legs, asses, torsos, the peak of the many hued heap reached all the way up to the back window. Books. Their spines broken, their covers permanently bursting, outstretched, trying desperately to vomit the pages held within.
‘I read mysteries,’ Margaret offered, so I stopped staring and turned around.
Zip-zip-zipping down roads in a tiny red car in a new land. Why would anyone buy a car so small? And why build streets to match it? And getting nervous every time we came to an intersection (Jesus, what fucking lane is she turning into?). My body was out of step, one minute awake and the next moment glazed. Outside everything looked familiar, then not. Like seeing someone you think you know on the street and realizing they’re a stranger when they get closer. So many black folk. Didn’t know I wasn’t expecting to see them till I did.
‘Welcome to Brixton.’ Margaret had been quiet except for her light cursing as she avoided automotive contact on one-lane roads with two-way traffic. So quick, these precise maneuvers, pulling into parking spaces to give room for oncoming cars to pass, pulling out with one hand while lighting her cigarette with the hot metal the auto provided for such purposes.
‘Do you work for Urgent?’ I asked.
‘Used to. Not any more. David and I actually started it together, when he resigned from the Patterson Group, but I’ve gone back to being a solicitor. I suspect that’s why you’re here.’
‘What’s David like?’ I asked, looking at the side of Margaret’s face as she laughed, having forgotten already what this woman looked like and needing to check again.
‘What an odd question. I don’t know if I’m the person to ask such a thing. Maybe you should ask someone a bit more impartial. Someone who isn’t married to him, for instance.’
David was: belly so big, so generous, soft like peat moss. A devious smile on a pudgy face making him look like a wicked baby. Hairline retreating and leaving flags of gray in its wake. Biceps bulbous with muscle, thighs thick with it. Looking like a French-horn sounds if the player is giddy and excitable. Arms in the air, smiling, like he might fall forth upon me right there, swallowing me with his flesh and consume all but the polished bones.
‘You look like a hole’ was the first thing he said to me, nodding, finishing the can of beer in his hand and then dropping it so he could squeeze me into him. ‘Margaret, that is the face of desire,’ David said over my shoulder as my ribs struggled for room to expand.
‘Darling you were supposed to be asleep.’ Margaret picked up the beer can and walked past us out the living room. These people had money. Everything in the house looked either extremely hard or unrealistically easy to break. The only things cheap in the place (besides me) were the paperbacks that filled the shelves that wrapped around the walls. Short, chubby fiction hugging the room.
‘You’re here!’ he said, releasing me. ‘The Sound of Philadelphia has arrived! I knew we could do it! I knew we could get you out of there!’ And he kept going on like that, as if he were Harriet Tubman and I had hay in my ’fro.
‘You are the secret weapon. Do you know that? How could you come all this way and not know that?’ David reached up and seized my neck. I once met Dizzy Gillespie coming out of a hotel off Walnut Street and shook his hand: this is how thick David’s palms were. ‘You’re a crazy bastard, Sir Christopher, my wife has brought home a crazy man. This is our time! Things are going to happen, mate! You can feel it, can’t you? Tell me! You can, can’t you?! It’s right, right?’
When you talk to a drunk man you must stand directly before him and stare straight into his eyes. When you look at him you must believe that yellow is the color that always serves as his pupil’s sea, that the smell on his tongue is the saliva of knowledge. You must walk his logic’s path beside him, comfort him that your feet are on the same ground and that you too can intuit the turns that lie ahead on this trail. You don’t grow up poor and not know this, learn this as a means to comfort or just to avoid a beat down. So this I did, to the best of my ability until, a half hour later, I was sent for more beer. The kitchen had white tile on the floor and a window over the sink where Margaret was leaning, cigarette held near her thigh, an arm around her waist, her eyes staring down at her feet or something near there. When she saw me Margaret said, ‘It’s over to the left. Pull them from the bottom drawer, those are the coldest,’ turning up to watch me move. ‘I should have warned you at the airport, sorry about that bit. He’s been so excited you were coming, he’s been up probably as long as you have.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I told her. Why would I? This was familiar, something I knew I could deal with. The house showed that he was good at what he did, but the drunk thing meant that he needed me. That’s why I was smiling. If he needed me, it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Job security.
‘You know, you did the right thing in coming. Give me those.’ Margaret reached for the beer. ‘I put your things in the guest room; you can rest here until David shows you to your flat. The door’s open upstairs, you’ll see it. Get settled. I’ll call you for dinner.’
I went back into the living room and straight to the steps. David was on the couch, lying down with his hand on his head. ‘Brother?’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ I stopped. Somehow David’s shirt had disappeared off of him. The belly, revealed, was larger than the fabric had hinted, seemingly growing in the room’s darkness. His exposed skin was the brown of old, polished wood, his hair black and soft as ash.
‘I’ll take care of you,’ David said to me, and rolled over.
After what seemed only minutes, I woke up and the room was shadows. There was music coming from out the hall. There were smells that followed it, sweet, thick, and salty. There was a big hand rocking my foot.
‘Chris, get up. Time to make the hole whole,’ David told me. ‘Here,’ he said, and he held a lit thing out to me. Rumpled paper pushed between my lips, sour smallness.
‘I don’t smoke weed.’
‘Flesh of my flesh, swallow.’ His hand pulled away, making me hold the thing myself and, fuck it, pull its breath in. ‘Welcome to the land of the green man,’ David said, as we walked down the stairs, my head lifting as my body moved down.
Feast, blessed consumption, laid out on the table like a trap. Ackie and saltfish, fried plantain, corned beef, yam, cabbage baked salty with shredded pork, curry goat and jerk chicken with coconut rice, chicken tikka, samosas, Margaret pouring me wine that wasn’t Mad Dog
or Boone’s – it even had a cork instead of a twist top. Music so loud (Curtis sang ‘Gimme your love, gimme your love, gimme your love’) and all amid verbal silence, a long and wordless prayer. The meal continued in that fashion, the room too intimate for words.
‘Thank you,’ I smiled, breathing heavy, reaching for more as they smiled with me, grabbing at the finger paints of food.
There came a point when we were not eating, when the dishes floated from the table in their hands. I was pregnant with gluttony. I was giggling.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I told the man that stood in shadow before me, silently investigating me now that I was slow and bloated, unable to flee and too at peace to protect myself, and feeling for once like I didn’t have to. Feeling for the first time like this was where I was supposed to be in the world.
‘Then what are you without hunger?’ A smiling David teetered in my vision, subject to a separate, rocking gravity. His face looked like a ritual mask, wooden and with an expression of timeless inscrutability.
‘Smooth’ was my answer.
‘Yes,’ David said, and we laughed. I knew already that I would always owe him. I didn’t mind that.
Grass a little too long, and wet, and us running through it. David was in front of me, flying like a hunter chasing gazelle, and I was bringing up the flank, not even running anymore: letting my weight fly forwards on its own, moving my feet so as not to insult my momentum.
‘Faster!’ he kept yelling, my head sobering with every pant. Wherever, man, I’m just following you. Over the metal fence even though it said Park Closed? No problem. Into a vacant field under orange skies someplace that is still nowhere to me? Fine. It seems to have worked so far.
‘There she is. The lido.’ And I saw brick walls, tall and thick, surrounding a space twice the size of a basketball court. David kept moving until he was at the structure, leaning on it, breathing hard, laughing. Breathing heavy enough for me to say, ‘Don’t die on me now, I just got here,’ and for him to bend back up and say, ‘Never, mate. I’m having too much fun. Here’s the entrance.’ He was grinning because there were no doors anywhere in sight.
‘How?’
‘How do you think, then? Right over the fucking top. Not a problem. My friend’s the director, so no worries. It’ll be okay.’ I looked up and all I saw was twelve feet of dark brick, not many grooves, just tall enough to fall and break something.
‘He couldn’t get you a key?’
‘Chris, it’s four o’clock in the morning. We could go banging on his door if you like, but his missus would kill me. The ground is the highest on this end, it’s the only side we can do this on. Come on, up and over. Be a lad.’
I stood on his shoulders. I was covering his jacket with mud and grass but it was obvious I cared about that more than he did. I hadn’t slept properly in two days, I was supposed to be here for a job, what the hell was I doing? Well, I was reaching for the top of a wall, trying to get a hand somewhere it could hold on to, and then I was swinging a leg (shit, did I hit your head?) and boom, I was sitting, looking out at a pool shimmering back light at my eyes, happy like a puppy to see me. And then I was laughing, too. We both were. Even when it was David’s turn to climb and he was using my leg like a rope and crushing my balls with his weight as I struggled to stay up there. Laughing when I jumped and could feel the sting in my ankles and had to skip it off like a schoolboy holding his pee, laughing when David came down and tripped his way forwards for a couple of feet before he gained his balance.
‘Right, then. Off with your knickers.’ David started undressing. It couldn’t be more than fifty degrees – how cold did that make the water? And it was August. What kind of people built an outdoor pool in a place that was fifty degrees in August? So why the hell was he taking his clothes off? I could dog paddle, but that had been at the YMCA on Green Street over twenty years ago. What were the boundaries? When could I say no? ‘Come on, Chris, I didn’t drag you all this way to bugger you.’
‘Niggers don’t do well in the cold, man. You Jamaica folk should know that. It’s not in our blood.’
‘Then go be a nigger over there by the wall. Because I plan on splashing.’ If I planned on being a nigger, I would have never left my block. If I drowned, at least I would have accomplished that final escape. The only thing more pathetic than a brother living like a nigger was a brother dying as one. I started undressing, real fast, throwing my shit away from me at random so I couldn’t change my mind when my bare ass hit the air.
‘All at once then, don’t do any toe-testing shite,’ David told me when I got down to my socks. ‘Don’t dive, though. It’s too shallow, you could break your neck in there.’
A flying cannonball to freedom. I was running, teeth gritting, and then for a moment I was in the air, the whole of my body wrapped in a ball. The ice water swallowed me, stealing my heat as I sunk to the bottom. I tried screaming but I was just making bubbles, so I forced myself to relax. Above me, through a rippled membrane, I could still see the color of the sky, an orange haze of clouds. Then my butt hit the ground and I let the rest of my body follow until I was lying down on the concrete bottom like I was tanning, water coming in my nose and me not caring. I thought I heard whales, but it was the echoes of nothing. I couldn’t hear anything because home was gone and I didn’t know how to listen to this place yet. I felt that, if I looked, I could see America, Philly, everything that was ever pain floating away, dissipating beyond me. Even my air, all my reserves, breathe out breathe out, so that finally, when I suddenly rose, hands flat and arms outstretched and face smiling stoned but happy, a whole new space was filling my lungs. My body stopped at the surface, but didn’t my spirit keep soaring?
Drop
I woke up in my clothes on the white canvas pelt of a bare futon. There was nothing else in the room but wood floors, windows and the sunlight screaming in from outside. When David took me back here the night before, both of us still dripping through our clothes, the place had been furnished by the undefined abundance of darkness. Now it was vacant, waiting to be filled.
I gathered myself and rose, my weight creaking on the boards and adding a more immediate sound than the disinterested swooshes of cars passing outside. There was a bathroom in the next room with no toilet paper, and then a glowing living room that contained only a television staring across the floor at a gaggle of beer cans laying empty by the opposite wall. Motivated by the bare cleanliness of the house, I gathered them up and took them downstairs, hunting for a place to put them. This apartment was weird. Not because of its alien additions, like the freakishly large three-prong electric sockets on every wall, but because of what wasn’t here. No pee-like water stain circles on the ceiling with exposed plaster and planks at their epicenter, no dirt shadows or scales of paint chipping off the wall. In the cabinets and drawers, no cockroaches, dead or alive. No half devoured mouse poison behind the refrigerator. No radios vibrating the windows as the cars that chauffeured them tore down the road. Outside, just the park we’d walked through to get here and the wind, blowing in cool and welcoming. Beyond, the small hills looked as if you could crawl out and snuggle into them, pull a fold of that grass over you like a comforter and rest.
I turned on the television. There was something wrong with it: no matter how many times I kept turning the dial, the same five channels kept appearing. Giving up, I took a nap, waking only when I heard the keys in the door. David yelled, ‘Oi, it’s half-past noon. You’re supposed to be earning.’
‘Earning what?’
‘My money. It’s time for work. How does Christopher like his new flat?’ David walked out into the hall. He had my luggage with him so he dropped it there.
‘This place, this is me?’ I asked, not prepared to believe it. Not wanting to look like a fool by investing in such an impossibility.
‘It’s yours. Or mine, but it’s yours to use if you choose. You’ll have to get some furniture, as you can see. Open the windows up. You should get some plants, I imagine. Nice
place, isn’t it? It used to be my flat, you know, back in the bachelor days. Been letting it out for years. The last tenants moved months ago, so I held it for you. Your rent’ll be the BT, lights, gas, the taxes. I’ll take it out from what I pay you so you won’t have to bother. So, do you like?’
I just shrugged. Too scared that if David heard my surprise, he would take it away from me, send me to a hovel more in line with the style with which I was accustomed.
The office was on the third floor of their house, a tall attic room with curved ceilings like the bottom of a boat. Urgent Agency had a separate entrance, a door along side the residential one.
‘This is your desk. This is it, where you will be working,’ David told me, pointing at a long wooden table with a computer covered in clear plastic like a ghetto couch. On the wall was a picture of Margaret dressed up like a gunslinger, smiling at a party, along with photos of random people I didn’t know. Piled next to the desk, in a mound that was nearly twice as tall, were more of Margaret’s mysteries, seemingly raked together into a pyre.
‘She was supposed to clear out her stuff from here. Especially the damn books. I told her, “Don’t bring another book in this house until you throw some away.” But we’ll take care of that. And I’ll be right over here.’ David pointed to the only other desk up there. Next to it was a tall glass bookshelf, the bottom stacked with oversized magazines and what I recognized as design texts, assembled in accordance to no particular order or respect for gravity. The top shelves were arranged with equal care, but different contents. Paperweights, some glass, some metal, some seemingly gold, in various designs but with multiple versions of some forms. Awards. There had to be over thirty of them. Piled carelessly on top of one another like a spoiled child’s toys. The rest of the office was just space. An acre of thin, gray carpeting, exposed wood rafter beams and freshly painted white walls. I coughed and the room echoed back at me. David’s ten-pound palm gripped my shoulder.
