by Mat Johnson
Clive agreed, it was a brilliant idea. Wagging his head saying, ‘You got something here, you truly do.’ All in all, he was very supportive. While we waited for them to retrieve our order, Clive asked me for a twenty-buck advance to hop around to the store. I slipped a crisp one into his ashen hand and didn’t even regret it until fifteen minutes later, when I was standing next to my new two-pound hammer, a box of long nails and these wood beams, and homeboy had yet to reappear. When my cab arrived I was thinking, The son of bitch jacked me up for twenty ones, he couldn’t even wait to juice me for the other 180, but here Clive comes through the entrance gate.
‘Yo cuz, long line,’ he said, strutting towards me. ‘That line, it was like … yo,’ He reached for the beam I had in my hand but then tripped forward, landed on his knees, and then jumped back up again. Watching the whole thing through glazed eyes, giggling it all away from him.
The smell of the dust falling back to the ground, the smell of the wood we had recently found, the smell of burnt plastic from the man who’d once abandoned it.
Everybody else was at the lot when we got there. As I untied the wood from the hood, I could hear them arguing behind me about who got what sandwich. When Cindy saw Clive stumble smiling out of the back of the cab, she paused from her denunciation of egg salad to walk over and give him the greatest left hook landed in Philly since the retirement of Joe Frazier. Clive made like a top, arms out, round and round, centrifugal force keeping him standing. Behind them, the others quietly reached for whatever hoagie was closest and sat down.
I could tell they’d been talking about me, most definitely using the word ‘crazy’ and reassuring themselves that they really had seen the money in my hand. They looked to Clive (who was somehow managing to eat between spits of blood) to see if he had discovered something in his extra moments with the suspect.
‘So, what you want us to do?’ Cindy was the first to ask, wiping the mayonnaise off her lips with the lightest dabs.
‘I want you to help me hold this picture up for a second. I need to show it to this lady. She has to see it,’ I told them.
‘That’s a lot to do for some ass’ was the only response I got, and after Clive said it, nobody laughed but him. Cindy started getting up and Reggie quickly scooted his butt away from Clive in case she came charging, but all she did was throw down her cigarette and start giving orders. Her audience was responsive.
A big task literally, but a simple one. It was the only job elementary school had prepared us for. The others were nearly as eager as I was, and they mixed their labors with conversations on which creditor they would pay first. On all accounts, it seemed the cable man would be very fortunate next week. Reggie laid out the billboard sheet by sheet upside down, reading off the numbers on their backs to see the order. Natalie hung behind him, stretching tape out to the proper size, ready to lay it down. I watched her take care that the sheets were properly aligned and there was no gaps between them. They were perfectly straight; Natalie was good at this, much better than she was at answering phones. Yes, she’d bought the wrong tape (the silver electric stuff instead of the clear kind), but since it was going on the back it didn’t matter.
‘Stop making so much fucking noise,’ Cindy yelled at Clive, but how else could he hammer? Besides, the real problem was that he only hit the nail every third time he swung. I should have taken it from him but the whole thing made me nervous, so as Cindy barked the others on, I skirted off around the corner.
Her car sat rusting on the side of the road. A light shone from the opaque glass of her bathroom window. Alex was there. Alex was real. Nothing had happened to her, none of my kidnapping or accident fears were true; she really had pushed me away from her. Wanting more, I walked closer, hearing my footsteps louder than my rubber soles could have been. Her door was flat, red. I laid my ear on its surface and it was cool also. Inside was movement, a television, further proof of her life in this world.
When I got back, it was done. The billboard’s huge white back was a paper blanket strapped to the haphazard wooden frame. Natalie paced around it, adding tape to the random parts she could reach at its edges, everyone else stood back, sucking Kools. There was nothing left to do but eat our food, and then, with the rumpling of paper, even that was completed. Reggie, making a jump-shot of his balled paper towards a disused trash bin, said, ‘I heard they’re hiring over at Comcast Direct: customer service agents, ten dollars an hour.’ He followed with, ‘It might even be twelve,’ and everyone nodded and raised eyebrows, hopeful.
‘You sure this thing is gonna work?’ Cindy asked, walking closer to our creation. Yes, it looked good. The tape should hold long enough for Alex to get a good look at it.
‘If you fucked up with me, I’d want roses. That’s what I’d want. Not them cheap ones you get at Wawa neither,’ Cindy continued.
‘She likes calla lilies.’
‘Them shits is good too,’ Clive offered, flinching when Cindy turned around.
They were ready to get moving before I was. It couldn’t be avoided. Reggie got on one end and I on the other, and we struggled to lift our flag into the air. Clive was having trouble walking straight, so he was put in the middle and Cindy stood on the other side in case he or the structure started to fall. It was a tricky rising. Initially, I thought the frame would be the first to break, but once it was up and I felt the weight of the paper, heard the sound of it in tension, I thought it would surely rip before we could get it around the corner. Any strong gust of wind and either that would happen, or the five us would be carried away like hang-gliders. Walking in small steps, stopping to readjust grips when necessary, neither disaster happened. Tiptoeing in front of Alex’s place, I thought that we would hold it in the street, but there was already a car behind me, honking. Reggie led us to the sidewalk across from her, and when I told him this was it, we were here, he brought his end closer to the apartment building wall and we leaned the rest of our structure there. In unison, ‘Whews’ and sore hands shook as we stepped away from it. Behind the image came a cry of complaint that we were ruining a tenant’s view, to which Reggie helpfully yelled back, ‘Pretend it’s night.’
I stood around with the rest of them looking up at it, trying to figure out if it was going to fall, until I realized everyone was waiting for me to do this. So I walked to Alex’s door and pushed the bell. The TV was on, I heard a commercial. Commercials ended, back to programming. I rang again, twice, then I started knocking, wanting to keep going till my fists hurt but knowing that might alienate her further. Stopped, feeling the impact on my knuckles subside, I heard no movement inside. Behind me my coworkers whispered; I could feel them looking at me. I waited for steps that wouldn’t come. It wasn’t until I walked away, resolved to find a pay phone and give her number yet another try, that I heard the creak of a hinge being pulled open. Alex stood, hands on hips. I prepared to explain, to apologize, but quickly she looked beyond me. She saw it. I knew this not only because of the focusing of the eyes, but also from the shock on the face that held them. I watched as she took in the spectacle of it, of odd Christopher and a group of strange negroes staring back at her, standing next to this displaced billboard image. And yes, by the narrowing of the eyes, the clearing of the throat, it was clear Alex was preparing to yell at me, to cast away my feeble attempt at a spell, but then came the savior of recognition, awkwardly muting her before a sound was made. Choking her by what this was, who must have done it, and what this act must say about where he had evolved to. Shutting her up long enough to crest with its climax. Fall with me. Drop into my baptismal. Look at his face, see the identity of that distinguished gentleman captured flat before you, and realize what that means about the nature of apology, growth and regret. That’s right, look, my lady, and when you look, please see. See what sign towers before you. And when you see, please hear this also. That Alex I love you. That Alex, I love this place, too, no matter where I go in this life, I will never run away from either one of you.
‘I see
Saul gave you some work’ were the first words she said to me, but when her voice cracked on the last syllable, I knew that I had her. I knew, that at some time in the future, I would tease her about the tears she was currently dropping and that she would punch my arm or roll her eyes in denial that this had ever happened.
‘I got it. The job I’m supposed to have,’ I said, stepping closer. Alex had no shoes on and her toes wiggled ‘hi’ to me through the holes in her socks. ‘I want you to do it, too. It should last a few weeks, be a lot of work. It’ll be great.’ Alex nodded, looked back from the billboard to me again.
‘And when it’s over, what happens? What happens after you’re done that?’
Chris Jones, stunningly prepared on this day, was so eager to give her the answer to the question that he nearly ripped her tickets while yanking them out of his pocket and slapping them into her hand. Alex knew what they were as soon as she saw the cardboard holder, but she opened and read them anyway.
‘Roundtrip,’ she said, nodding, inspecting them.
‘That’s right, lady. All there and paid for. Right there! You got to come with me.’
‘What about yours?’ she asked, motioning with her head to my still thick pocket.
‘What about it?’
‘You got roundtrip too?’ Alex asked me. I looked back at her relaxed, hands at my sides, smiling lightly into her eyes. It was clear to both of us that I didn’t. Alex sighed, but it was a sound neither of exasperation or exhaustion. I was her friend. I was who I was.
‘That doesn’t mean I won’t be buying a ticket back again.’ We both hung there for a moment, not saying anything, just knowing that.
When I pulled out the cash, everybody was happy. Nobody doesn’t like getting paid, but for these folks it was something special. Despite the shoving, I still made sure to pay Natalie first, and by the time I had counted out her $200 the rest were in a perfect line behind her. Clive offered weak protests when Cindy demanded I give her guardianship of his money, so I ignored him and obeyed her. The only other words muttered were divisions of twenty as they re-counted their booty.
Behind us, a gust of a passing SEPTA bus sent the billboard flapping in large bass-filled waves that made us all prepare to be crushed. Reggie ran to the other side of the street. ‘Yo Chris,’ he yelled, ‘what you want now?’
‘I don’t know. Take it down, maybe,’ I offered, looking back to Alex to see if she still needed to see it some more. Alex was hugging herself, talking to Natalie in a way that said that they already knew each other from some other, distant context. Such a small town.
In moments, what was a dream became a ball of paper the size of a snowman’s ass. Next to it sat bundles of barely used timbers with nails sticking out their ends. One vision discarded. Maybe the trashmen would take it when they came by. Maybe they wouldn’t. The future was a hard thing to know. I walked back to Alex as soon as Natalie, with smiles and waves goodbye, walked away from her.
‘Do you really like it?’ I asked Alex when Clive, the last of the group to leave, had finally gotten his cigarette lit and turned the corner and it was just us standing there.
‘I do,’ Alex told me. Behind her door I could see the news on her television. It would be dinnertime soon, and I would cook something for us. If she let me, I would.
‘What do you like about it?’ I prodded. Let me know this. Let this be a hard thing I could hold on to in nights to come.
Alex looked down, turned around slowly and started walking back, stopping at her entrance. When she leaned on her door, the hinges in the back creaked and snapped loudly, but that didn’t interrupt her concentration. It seemed more than a minute, her staring towards the ground, searching for what it was and the proper way to name it, before Alex finally raised her head again.
‘I like that you did it’ is what she told me.
Point
Knock-knocking on a tube through darkness, holding on so I don’t fall, mainlining back into this land down the blue vein of the Victoria Line. Too fast. This train should slow, this trip should be given weight, its wheels aching as it pulled further against the improbability of my return. If my hands were big enough, I would reach out and capture every moment of rock and roar as we sped forward, every half-note of hollow echo, every lean of the car back or forth, just take the lot of it, squeeze it hard and give it form so I could cut it as thin as deli ham. Wrap a slice of that shit around every moment past this one. Wake up and with first bite know that each day could be this good. Chris Jones coming back to London, standing as tall as the curved tube ceiling would allow him.
Alex could bitch all she wanted, but I never said we’d be flying over together. She could wait the week I needed to feel my arrival, reacquaint myself with every inch I’d been barred from, do a posh crawl down Neale Street to find the packaging that would best present the product that I would be selling in my interviews in the days to come. I’d let the flat in Clapham for a month, enough time to enact my rituals and still offer Alex a few weeks for touristy persuals. I wasn‘t getting stuck in a queue for Parliament as the real city called.
Past one more ‘Mind the gap’ and Stockwell was behind us. Soon we were slowing down again and this time would be the last stop. Immediately I seized my position in front of the doors, my nose perfectly aligned with the crack so that when they slid open, I stepped forth to Lambeth ground.
Escalator rise, rising. Me at the bottom, queuing to climb, looking on. It was worth telling Margaret I would meet her in Brixton, at the brasserie, as opposed to the sterility of Heathrow. This is how it was supposed to be. From the back of the tile valley, I watched as before me my heralds crowded in twos and glided upwards. I stepped onwards to moving stairs, not sure if it was elation or mechanics that raised me. Exits passed, I had two feet in this town once more.
Brixton! I flung out my arms, quickly poking the old guy on my right in his temple and having my left arm and suitcase swatted down by several passersby. Finding a safe place away from the traffic, hugging the urine-stained wall by the 7-Eleven, I looked up at that sky once more, my infinite duvet, as it drizzled back down on me. So polite it’s misting; I didn’t even have to squint my eyes as I kept walking on.
In the Iceland, tired people grabbed for one more frozen thing to go thunk at the bottom of their carts. Staring at pictures of airbrushed gourmet interpretations of the cardboard’s contents, they imagined the meal soon to come, as well as the one that would always be sitting on ice, waiting to exist for them. They knew that the real version would be much duller in color, muted in curves, and be served on less attractive chinaware, but as they stood in long lines it was those pictures they looked down on. They were thankful they could afford such overpriced illusions. Outside the market’s sliding doors, I walked slowly at irregular angles through the crowd of workers waiting to take buses further south than the tube line. They were so damn beautiful, so damn tired, necks elongated and to the side to see if the next red blur coming their way had their number in its eye. So damn fine because you knew the reason they were rushing home was that there was love somewhere waiting for them. Maybe love was just a bed or a dog or a list of responsibilities they would need decades of separation to romanticize, but they were still hustling towards it without question. Across the street, on the corner down from the bagel shop, were Brixton boys, stationary and proud of this. Leaning against the jaywalk fence with bomber jackets they had no business wearing in summer heat, sporting baseball hats touting professional teams for games for which they didn‘t even know the rules. Too cool to acknowledge the water falling down on them. It wasn‘t lost on me any more, the sense of familiarity, that of all the worlds within this city, I‘d chosen the one that mirrored the place I’d been running from.
In front of the brasserie, there was no red Fiat to be seen, a quick glance inside revealed that Margaret was not yet present, even in that backroom where he used to sit and rant at me. Nothing back there but an old drunk laid out with his body on one chair and his feet
on another, hat pulled over his sleeping face and trench pulled around him as if it were raining in here, too. I grabbed the remote control sitting on the table before moving far enough away to avoid conversation. After the barmaid took my order I clicked on the set hanging high in the corner.
That stink, that smell of whatever gelatin forms in carpets fed a daily diet of spilled beer, just like the one that used to ooze out of Café Society, back on Chelten, around the way. Like it all poured from one linked source. Like there was a certain amount you could drink, a certain darkness of shadow that you could pass through and end up at any other stank joint in the world. On the television, every unrecognized advertisement confirmed how long I‘d been gone, and I studied them for whatever new trends had manifested, planning on doing the same thing that night in my rented room, preparing myself for the first interview tomorrow. I would get the job, I knew this. My portfolio was strong, and so it seemed was their interest, just in writing me a continent away. Still, there was the question of money, and more important, what position would they throw my way?
On the TV, a fifteen-second spot for Golden Crowns pulled my attention. Someone had pitched the idea of actually making a tiara compiled of cereal kernels, and that mess of a concept had made it all the way through production and onto the screen. An airbrushed, latex-coated crown sparkled thanks to video illustration; obviously brand recognition seemed more important to them now than making the product look edible. You need me, I nearly said aloud. I was just getting a flash of their rented ex-sports figure’s smile when the box turned off suddenly. Snap, then dark, dead, and powerless. The remote, by my side just a moment before, had disappeared. I was looking underneath the table to find where when I saw the movement behind me. Not Margaret coming in the door, but the drunken corpse rising. Bent over in my chair, I could see his shoes and pant legs through my own, no doubt walking over in my direction to start a long and laborious conversation, one that he repeated on the hour with whoever sat in the room. This was England, homeland of social discomfort, so to avoid my own I pretended to finish tying my shoes, all the while fixing my sights on the bathroom I would soon be darting to. From there, after an appropriate pause, I would shoot back through, grab my pint and bag without stopping and take a seat at the bar, close to the exit door. When I heard him clearing his throat of whatever bacteria made its home there, my calves tensed, and I was almost up, when the sound of that voice hit me and I couldn’t even manage standing any more.
