Drop

by Mat Johnson

  Fionna came down about an hour after she turned the TV off. I heard her opening the door. My back to her, I could feel her placing her hand upon my neck, and then her lips there. I remained as I had been for hours. On the floor, Fionna crawled under the desk, awkwardly unzipped my pants, and took me with cold hands into the warm wetness of her mouth. When I finally got erect, Fionna rose and led me by the hand to the bedroom. For a second there was only flesh in this house, no worries. Sweating, naked, I wasn’t even cold any more. Alive for the moment inside her.

  The next morning, at eight o’clock, I went to get the paper, but since I didn’t have any money I just circled the park and came back. When I got home, Fi’s cuz Dio was carrying the last of her suitcases into his car. She was already in the front seat, waiting for him. Rolling down the window Fionna said, ‘I’ll call you.’ Dio was trying to shut the trunk, making sure to fit everything so they didn’t have to come back for more.

  Reality

  When I heard her keys in the door it all seemed silly: the crying, the whole not-going-out-for-days thing, the feelings of despair and destitution, the hopelessness, the eating of dry cereal and cheese because cooking just seemed too much the bother. A click in the door and that whole period was just comedic absurdity. Pointless drama. Now the reality that fostered it was gone and my Fi had come back to rescue me. When the doorknob turned, there was even this insane moment when I regretted her reappearance, where relief was replaced by indignant fury, a flash of self-respect and optimism where I knew she was a cancer best removed. The door swung open and I saw Margaret standing before me.

  ‘Oh, Christopher, I’m sorry. I thought no one was home. I rang the bell, didn’t you hear?’

  ‘I thought it was the Witnesses.’ Margaret was different: wrinkle lines had fallen smooth and her long bangs had been trimmed above her ears. She wore a jumpsuit that was baggy and white, and when I fell to my knees before her, grabbing her legs in my arms, I could feel how soft the material was against my unshaven face. On the ground, hugging Margaret’s calves, the material ate my tears as I cried, ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ into them.

  ‘Chris. Up. Get up. You’re being silly. This is too much.’ After she pulled away and past me, I rose, followed her inside, wiped the snot and tears on my sleeve as we entered the kitchen.

  ‘How about I make some tea?’ Margaret asked nervously, refusing to face me, instead charging to the cabinet.

  ‘Yeah. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Stop. You don’t have anything to be sorry for Chris. Really.’ She closed the cupboard and quickly grabbed my wrist, nodding each word into my face. ‘You don’t. Nothing at all.’ She was a merciful liar.

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ I asked. Margaret let me go.

  ‘No, because you don’t smoke. And I don’t either any more. Have a seat. Milk?’

  As we talked, Margaret was surprised about all the wrong things: the news of Fi’s leaving caused little more than a side-of-the-mouth, eye-rise shrug, but the fact that the loss of David also meant the loss of my career credibility seemed a surprise.

  ‘Don’t overestimate David’s weight. He was an odd one in that world. Did he ever tell you on what grounds he was dismissed from the Patterson Group?’ I nodded no. ‘Embezzlement, right? The senior partners said they were investigating David for stealing over thirty thousand pounds.’

  ‘David wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘That’s what he said, of course. That it was just an excuse to “kick the nig-nog off the job”. Their last chance to keep him away from senior management. I almost wish he had stolen it now. At least we wouldn’t have gone so deep in debt to start Urgent. We wouldn’t have had to get so many loans. The bank wouldn’t have seized the house. I wouldn’t be in this situation now.’

  ‘What do you mean, they seized the house?’

  ‘Not much of a coup, the state it’s in now, but they’re taking all of our holdings until I can cover the back payments. I’m working a double shift just to get myself out from the hole I seemed to have been left in. I won’t even have David’s old flat at the end of the month. The bank’s taking control of that, too.’

  ‘My flat? The one I live in?’

  ‘I know, Chris. Really, I do. I wish I could do something about that. Four weeks, then they’ll have it.’ My house. Margaret looked at the table, at the nicks and grooves it held. She was waiting for me to say something but I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Chris, you know what you’re going to have to do.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You’re going to have to back to America.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll just go to New York, get a job on Madison Avenue for a year, and then come back again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about coming back, just go home. And move on. If you go back you’re going to have a life there.’ Margaret reached for my hand. ‘You’ll find new loves, you’ll get a lease, obligations. Life will go forward. Don’t fight that. You’ll never be fulfilled that way. You just have to accept it.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘It’s the way of life, Chris. My father came here to work for one year, and after that he planned to go back to St. Kitts. He was adamant about it. Thirty years later he’s still in Camberwell. And I know he was miserable till he accepted that reality.’

  I nodded yes because she was someone whom I respected and cared about, but I wasn’t accepting shit. This was the place where my life was supposed to happen. I wasn’t losing that. If I had to leave, I’d just go someplace where I knew I could never get comfortable. Someplace I knew I could never stay.

  Down at her Fiat, Margaret gave me a kiss, a hug, and twenty fifty-quid notes for my furniture. I tried to tell her she could take it, use it to replace her own, but she folded the paper into my hand, saying, ‘It’ll get you back, get you settled. I was going to give it too you anyway. Do what you need to do.’ Margaret got into her car and closed the door; I kept standing there, trying to think of something that would prolong her stay. After she fastened her seat belt, she rolled down the window but didn’t say anything. She just stared at me long, as if she wanted to remember what I looked like.

  I followed her taillights down the street, and after she turned I kept walking. End of this block, end of this pavement, end of this world. Looking around, just a bunch of row houses on a wet street of a dark city, but to me everything I’d ever hungered for. A place without guns, where most violence was limited to the arm’s reach, where it took them a year to murder what Philly could disposed of in an up week. My home. A city in the world as opposed to hidden from it, a land whose intersections led to every continent floating. Success was defined by how far I’d run from the place I’d been born to. And that’s what I would lose by going back there. But it was pointless: I could already feel the other place pulling on me, the familiar tug of a gravity I’d thought I’d conquered. Rubber band delusions, all it was, because now the tether had reached its limit and was tugging vengefully back at me. You go up, you go down, boy. Dogs shouldn’t forget their chains. Fighting to remain on this London curb, I stared down and could already see the terrain of pain that awaited me. It said, Did you think you had unfastened me? No, I answered. Then I began falling.

  II

  Fall

  Visibility was clear. I knew exactly where I was going.

  50,000 feet. Nothing but a slab of asphalt embedded with diamonds, rivers of tin wires leading into a sea of melted mirror glass. Highways were faint white hairs, barely visible at all. A white slate of cloud hung between us, too weak to catch me. Planes seemed nearly still as they floated above the ground, each at a different altitude. Slow targets as I plummeted to the earth between them.

  20,000 feet. Gray stalagmite skyscrapers rose out of its earth to meet me. Miniature versions of buildings gave me orientation, reminded me where I was, like falling into a living map. A city of roofs: the long, linked tops of row houses, the bri
ck boxes of schools, the swimming pools on Center City penthouses. The small green and tans of baseball fields linked together by deliberate straight roads. Toothpick bridges stitched Pennsylvania to New Jersey, trying to close the wound of the Delaware. The Schuylkill, a snake laying on trees. The forest of Valley Green was just a head of broccoli.

  5,000 feet. Falling, I touched ground at City Hall, bouncing off the metal hat of William Penn and shooting further west, leaving him nodding in my wake, a colossal novelty doll. Skinned a knee clearing the lightning pole of Liberty One, swish swish swish, its point shaking like a car antenna after my impact. Flying west, past office windows as people with jobs glanced up and then continued working. Falling down, meteor boy, returning.

  Smack. On the ground. Ripping a body-wide groove in the middle of Spruce Street, right along the yellow lines. Heavy chunks of concrete cracked and flaked as I smashed through them, a finger stroke through a pan of brownies. Face forward, arms at my sides, I would have been screaming if the asphalt wasn’t filling my mouth, a solid stream threatening to push back teeth from gums, giving me Dizzy cheeks as it forced its way down. Hard spaghetti spirals pressing their way into my nostrils, spinning pigtails to my brain. Black road digging under my fingernails as if they, too, were entries, trying to leave my palms heavy with its indigestible burden. The sound of an army of drums being broken, beaten until their canvases became the battered victims of percussion. Even through my road-stuffed ears I could hear that, hear the echoes of it as skidded from 49th to 52nd Streets.

  Landing ended, I rose from my hole, my clothes raining dust. In West Philly, life kept moving. As I stood between them, men drove cars both ways down the road. Nobody even honked at me, not even glancing in their rearview mirrors as they sped by. On the pavement, old ladies still walked slow and scared, hobbling from one leg to the other like windup soldiers with gray wigs on, pacing a triangle between the supermarket, the check-cashing place, and home. Drug dealers still sat on corners, waiting for their business to come to them. Nobody to notice me but the rats who paused from their hunt to stand on hind legs and bob their noses in my direction, the cockroaches and the yam-skinned man. Smiling at me from the curb as I stood in the traffic wanting to climb back into the hole I had made there.

  How long had he been waiting? Sitting with his ass stuck in the metal mesh of a garbage can, his legs hanging over the edge and kicking loosely like a child in a shopping cart. How long had he been waiting, staring skyward, hoping for the streak in the sky that would be me, tumbling down, back into his jurisdiction? Oh, and wasn’t he laughing now? You never heard a joke that funny, the way he was carrying on. Whiplashing his head as he filled the street with his joy. I could smell the rot of his breath between the passing cars. A smile of randomly missing teeth made even more horrific by the fact that his face was actually handsome, that beauty could be wasted on an existence like his. Pointing at me, the fallen, with both dirty hands. Ha-ha, ha-ha, Philly boy come home. He would feed for weeks on this moment, smiling at me from his putrid garbage throne. Letting his cackles bark me down the road and blocks beyond, keeping rhythm even as I banged on Alex’s door. Silencing only after I collapsed into her unexpecting arms and lost awareness there.

  Home

  ‘So what the hell happened?’ Alex asked me the next morning. I’d woken up to the sounds of her getting dressed, of cabinets being opened and closed. Her apartment was so small she’d banged the couch nearly as many times as she passed it.

  ‘It broke.’ The couch was narrow, too, and not long. My feet had been hanging over the edge the whole night and now they were bloodless and numb.

  ‘I didn’t even get my chance to visit. Was it any good?’ Alex’s hair was a bit shorter, her banana peel skin almost brown. It was October, but the summer clung to her flesh as always, giving her a moment of negritude before returning her to her octoroon pale.

  ‘No, it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect,’ I told her.

  ‘Then why are you here? Why didn’t it last?’

  ‘Shit, it was better than this place.’

  ‘ “Philadelphia Freedom”,’ a women with a voice that cursed learns to sing lightly. ‘“I luv-uv-uv-you. Yes, I do!” ’ Alex screeched.

  ‘I should smother you. Nobody knows I’m home. You ain’t got no windows, monkey-love. I could get away with it.’ Alex hit me on the head and walked into the bathroom, leaving the door open as she stared at herself. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘To work. To earn some money.’

  ‘You have a shoot?’

  ‘No. I got a part-time job.’

  ‘What, you prop styling? You doing some assisting for another photographer?’

  ‘Green’s Nursing Home. The one up Germantown, on Schoolhouse.’ Alex rolled her eyes when I let out a sigh.

  ‘You got a gift,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Don’t start bugging; I know what I got. I got bills. I can’t eat off photos right now, so that’s just the way it is. It’s not that bad. Some of the residents are cool. They have good stories. So, what’s your plan, Chris? You’re home.’

  ‘I get my shit together. I get out.’

  ‘So, you’re going to look for an ad gig. The Sunday paper’s in the trash at the bottom. Don’t make a mess pulling it out.’

  ‘I’m not getting into advertising around here. Two, three months tops, then I’m gone. I don’t exist here any more.’

  ‘So, you going to try to poke around and get some freelance work? I’ll look out for you, see what pops up. I know about one gig, should be coming around next six months or so, a buddy from Temple’s working at the Philly tourist board. They got grants, I know they’re going to be looking for stuff.’

  Pumping up Philly to the ignorant. Not going to happen.

  Alex’s apartment only had one room, and she barely fit in that one. She couldn’t manage me there and I knew she shouldn’t. Momentum I was having, I might rip a hole through her floor and drag her down with me. So I started making calls. The first agency I contacted let me see their place that afternoon. The listing said: Sunny studio, 275+. Cheap enough that I could take it and still pay off the lease when I was done. It was only a few blocks away. I met the landlord in front, a small man with too much hair on his body to be human. His clothes were dirty and so was the apartment; the hallway leading up was dark with grease, the living room windows streaked and crusted. In the kitchen, hollow brown cockroach shells lay on their backs across the counters and floor like beachcombers. ‘I been fumigating, y’know?’ the landlord told me. The place was shaped like a lollipop, the circle being the room and the stem the kitchen with the bathroom at the end. I could hold out my arms and reach from the wall behind the stove to the window on the other side, and did so, and then wiped the black grime from my knuckle. It was a hole I could climb into. The offer of a cash payment meant that by night it was mine.

  I walked back from the realty place with a contract in my pocket and keys in my hand. At the bank my pounds were replaced with green play money, all the same size; everything could be obtained with just a few folds from my roll. I passed a yard sale that had a futon; a Penn student gave it to me for thirty bucks and smiled as if she was an humanitarian. Did I look that raggedy? Bobbing and swaying, I thanked her. I didn’t say, I went to college, too. That I was a man once that walked upright, clean shaven. Thirty bucks was a good deal, and she could think what she wanted. Huge as it was, I folded it over my head and I walked back home. It tried to swallow me with every bounce. I saw where I was going by staring at the ground, hating that I knew this place so well that the pavement was all I needed for orientation.

  I got as far as Clark Park before I had to lay it down. It sat getting dirty on a public bench as I waited for my strength to return. I noticed the other men sitting around me, a parliament of the powerless.

  ‘Yo cuz, you hook me up?’

  ‘Brother, brother’ – shrug, shrug, hand held out – ‘got a little something you can spare?’

/>   ‘Give me some money, get some eats, cool?’

  ‘Yo nig, you want some smoke?’

  ‘How much?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m the man. How much you want?’ asked the dealer-bum, eyes skipping from Baltimore to Chester Avenue to see if anyone was coming, sitting down next to my futon on the unbroken end of the park bench. Connecting my thumbs and forefingers before me, I made the largest circle I could with two hands. ‘Like that,’ I told him, trading another green note for a green-filled sandwich bag.

  I kept walking home, the futon on my head massive and white as a corpse, up the hill towards 46th and Baltimore, to my new house. Moving guilty, scoping for cops with the limited vision that the mattress offered. Trying to remember what an innocent man walked like so I could imitate him. Outside of my vision, I imagined my succubus Fionna and her parasitic cousins lining the streets and staring my way, laughing and pointing and feeding off my misery as they once did off my hospitality and ignorance.

  In the crib, I flopped the futon down, dirt shooting out from underneath it in angry brown gusts. It took up most of the floor. I kicked it against the wall, made enough room to walk around on the kitchen side. It was a bloated carpet: no matter where you stood in the room, if you fell it would be there for you. If my head was stronger, I would have gotten more. Tied them to the walls with cable cord, nailed them to the ceiling and in the bathroom and kitchen, too. I would make a suit of futon, wrap it around my legs, arms and torso, sewing it down with fishing cord. Then I would feel good. I would be safe and happy once more. Outside, gunshot ghosts thundered off in the distance, reminding me again that storms got closer – that’s what they did you see. Eventually the pop-pop would catch up to me.