Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  “And we’re ready,” the reporter announced with a megawatt smile.

  Phoenix opened her eyes, alertness seeping in. Manny and Kai were leaning toward Phoenix like lifeguards waiting to rescue a swimmer.

  Carlos didn’t know the reporter, a tall, sharp-jawed sister with memorable lips, dressed in a white jogging suit and a B-boy style baseball cap. She was too attractive and talented for this job and she knew it, her eyes said—someone should be interviewing her—but her voice quivered with cheer: “I’m here with Phoenix Smalls, an R&B newcomer who’s already burning up the airwaves with her first single, ‘Party Patrol.’ She’s here for Friday’s Hip-Hop R&B MegaJam, which promises to be the H-O-T, hottest party of the summer, if ya’ll ain’t heard.”

  Phoenix wasn’t smiling for the camera yet, listening impassively. Carlos knew what was in her mind, the only thing that had been on her mind since the plane landed: She wanted to go back to her notepad. She wanted to go back to Joplin.

  “So, Phoenix, we gotta cut to the chase—your relationship with G-Ronn. First we hear you hooked up, then there’s a tabloid story about you and another man on the down-low, and now rumors say you’re through. What’s the 4-1-1?”

  That question had come up in every interview Carlos had heard all week, but usually the reporters were savvy enough to save it until last. At the mention of G-Ronn’s name, Kai shot Carlos a look, hot disapproval. It was just a shift of his eyes, but it hit Carlos like a blow. Carlos fidgeted in the entryway, wondering what he’d done to piss off G-Ronn’s personal bodyguard, except maybe sleeping with his boss’s ex. Was that it? Life with Phoenix was a gauntlet. Carlos had never been so self-conscious in a woman’s presence, bracing for disapproval everywhere. God, he hoped Phoenix wouldn’t mention him in her interview.

  Phoenix didn’t blink, gazing at the reporter. “Next question,” she said in a monotone.

  “Is that a ‘No comment’?” the reporter said.

  “G-Ronn is one of the best people there is, but my personal life is my own business. So, like I said, next question,” Phoenix said. That was good. If Phoenix could manage this much diplomacy, maybe she had been plucked away from the ghost music in her head. Carlos hoped so.

  “Phoenix, tell me: Are any of the Three Strikes artists like you, Bing Boyz or Kamikaze worried about getting caught in the vendetta between G-Ronn and DJ Train? Since DJ Train is based right outta Brooklyn, some people might say you’re in enemy territory.”

  “Those people would be ignorant,” Phoenix said. “I’m here for a concert. I leave all that hype to the media.”

  Carlos glanced at Kai from the corner of his eye. The man’s face was vacant, and Carlos didn’t dare let himself get caught looking. Carlos’s friends in the Brooklyn club scene thought Kai positively had killed DJ Train’s cousin and bodyguard last month, a man named Gerard Houston. There were allegedly at least six witnesses, even though none had come forward to police. Come on, Carlito, he’s hard to miss, his ex-girlfriend, who tended bar at Clubhouse, said. Just like in the Tupac and Jam Master Jay shootings, the people who knew weren’t talking. Carlos did not feel safer with Kai near Phoenix. The rumors could be wrong, but they could be right.

  “I see you’re a tough cookie,” the reporter said, her smile turning icy.

  “I’m just keepin’ it real,” Phoenix said.

  “Were you keeping it real on ‘Live at Night’?” the reporter said. “You got cut from a recent show after you sang a song you said you channeled from Janis Joplin.”

  Phoenix’s eyes flashed. “Scott Joplin. The Pulitzer Prize–winning composer.”

  The reporter pursed her lips, unfazed. “O-kay, then…Scott Joplin. What was that about? Were you looking for a little extra publicity for your single?”

  Phoenix hesitated, and Carlos saw her glance toward Manny before she answered. “That was just a onetime thing. At the concert, I’m singing ‘Party Patrol.’” She couldn’t have sounded more rehearsed if she’d been reading from cue cards.

  “You believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes,” Phoenix said, just when Carlos was hoping she would lie.

  “And…you believe a ghost is sending you music?”

  “Yes, as we speak,” Phoenix said. “I’ve been meeting with a musicologist who specializes in Scott’s music. We’re salvaging the music I channel, and I’m going to record an instrumental CD so I can share Scott with the world. Death is not the end. My real hope is that Scott Joplin can have another day, through me. I’d love to create something like the Scott Joplin revival in the seventies, after The Sting.” For the first time, she sounded wide-awake.

  The reporter looked confused, her plastic smile fading. “You mean…as we speak, you can hear Scott Joplin music? In your mind, you mean?”

  “Yes,” Phoenix said, and Carlos groaned inwardly. Gloria was right; Phoenix sounded like a nut. Until now, Phoenix had trained herself to avoid the question of her Live at Night performance as well as she dodged questions about G-Ronn, but she was talkative today. That’s enough, Phee. Let it go.

  “And will you record that Scott Joplin CD for Three Strikes Records?” the reporter said, wheedling. Manny mouthed the words FUCK no, mostly to himself.

  “I’ll record Scott’s CD myself, on my own,” Phoenix said. “After Rising.”

  The reporter leaned forward, forgetting the camera. “Wait…For real, you think a ghost—”

  Manny clapped his hands. “We’re out of time,” he said. “Phoenix has a busy schedule.”

  As if Manny had flipped an on-off switch, Phoenix’s eyes glazed again, half closed.

  The reporter pursed her lips. “But I wasn’t…”

  “Sorry,” Kai said, his voice an octave lower than Manny’s. “No time, yo.”

  That was the end of the conversation.

  While the video crew packed up, Kai gave Carlos an unmistakable look again—WHAT, nigga? Carlos remembered that look from black boys on the basketball court when his family moved from San Juan to Atlanta when he was ten. Carlos had always been fluent in English because of Dad, but his accent must not have been quite right, and the sound of his voice provoked the kids he’d hoped to befriend. What you lookin’ at, nigga? In San Juan, Carlos had never heard that word, except in music. Carlos’s mother was as brown as a Zulu princess, but she said she’d never thought about her skin color until her parents filled out U.S. Census forms and no one knew which boxes to check for race. We just thought we were Puerto Ricans, Mami said. Things were different on the mainland, with its categories, so Carlos had fucked up on sight.

  Kai hovered over Phoenix, so big that he blocked the light from the lamp on the end table. “Lil’ mama, you did great. You a’ight? You need anything? If you do, you know I’m here to drop the philosophy on you,” Kai said, his eyes unarmed. He offered a meaty, thoroughly tattooed arm so Phoenix could shake his hand. He must genuinely like her, Carlos thought. Kai didn’t look like anybody’s kiss-ass flunkie.

  Phoenix nodded, grasping Kai’s hand. “Yeah, I know that, Krispy Kreme. It’s all good. I’ll lay off the ghost stuff. I’m sorry.”

  Phoenix sounded more like herself than ever, suddenly. For the sake of Phoenix’s friendship with Kai, Carlos hoped the rumors about this man were wrong. If the rumors were right, Kai was a hit man, and he’d killed for G-Ronn before. According to lore, back when G-Ronn was a rising entrepreneur in the crack cocaine business, G-Ronn had told Kai to gun down a courier who’d cheated him, and that courier had turned out to be DJ Train’s brother. Or something like that. Carlos felt torn about what to say to Phoenix, since Kai was her friend.

  And we know rumors are never wrong, are they, Carlos? Of course not.

  The room’s gentle doorbell sounded. Since Carlos was closest to the door, he turned to answer it. Probably another reporter, he thought.

  “Yo, hold up, fool,” Kai said, and brushed past him, deliberate contact. “I’ll get that.”

  “Who are you, the Secret Service?” Carlos said before
he could stop himself. Kai turned to give him a slow gaze that shot ice into Carlos’s spine. Carlos mustered a smile to show he was kidding—ha ha, get it, dawg?—and Kai walked on. Silently, Carlos cursed his own stupidity. He had to remember who the hell he might be talking to.

  After the door opened, Kai bellowed, “What WHAT? Hey, O. G., where you been?”

  Sarge’s voice came next. “Here and there, man. Everywhere but in trouble. Listen, this is my wife, Leah Rosen-Smalls…”

  There was a party outside Phoenix’s door. Sarge entered hand in hand with a thickset white woman with active eyes and silver-streaked dark hair. She was carrying a bouquet of shiny helium balloons. Phoenix had her mother’s nose and jawline, Carlos realized. Leah Smalls wore a purple batik tunic, loose matching pants and earthy, open-toed sandals. An artistic soul, Carlos could see. Behind her came a lanky black man who looked vaguely familiar, and a white couple with a man who was Carlos’s height but portly, his hair windblown, and a blond woman with an athlete’s build she had preserved into middle age. Gloria’s mother.

  Sarge saw Carlos, but shifted his gaze and walked right past him, and Leah Rosen-Smalls nodded cordially, not knowing who he was. The tall black guy, whose slightly receding hairline made him look a little older than Carlos, was dressed in a bright cobalt suit, black T-shirt and a large gold medallion. He gave Carlos a soul shake as he passed. “Hey, man, how you doin’? I’m Malcolm Smalls.” He said his name like he knew it meant something, and didn’t wait for Carlos to respond before he moved on, introducing himself to Kai the same way as if he had a deadline to meet everyone. One of Phoenix’s brothers, Carlos figured. That was why he looked familiar: He was a less bulky, smoother-faced version of Sarge.

  When the group reached the living room, Phoenix shrieked and laughed in a way he had never heard. “Oh my Goooooddddddd, I didn’t know you guys were coming today! Mommmeeeeeeeeee.” She sounded more like a child at that moment than she had when he’d met her.

  Serena and Gloria came out to join them, and the room was laughter and exclamations, surprise and delight, love and history. Voices babbled as they exchanged stories, commented on endless details of personal appearance—hair, clothes, and physique—and then agreed on how happy they were to see each other. They reminded Carlos of his family on Mami’s side, all abandon.

  “Phoenix, do you eat on the road? This size doesn’t look healthy for you,” Leah Smalls said after their dancing hug. She and Phoenix draped their arms across each other’s shoulders, touching noses.

  “Oh, Mom, please,” Phoenix said, although Carlos thought she did look too thin.

  “…This is sooooo perfect,” Gloria’s mother told Gloria, “because we stopped by the box-office on the way, and we lucked into orchestra seats for Avenue Q for eight tonight…”

  Malcolm Smalls hung near the edge of the circle, talking to Manny: “Yeah, my dad’s been sayin’ we need to put our heads together…”

  Manny nodded, reaching for a business card. “Yeah, man, yeah. Sarge has told me you’ve got great contacts, and we need promotion help in the Southeast. Maybe you, me and my boss Katrice can sit down…”

  A family reunion and networking session all in one, Carlos thought.

  Everyone belonged here but him.

  Carlos tried to catch Phoenix’s eye, but she was at the center of the circle, and as soon as one person was finished with her, someone else wanted to give her a hug. He would leave her to her family, he decided. He could use some lunch. He would write a note and slip out.

  Carlos was just returning from the bedroom, where he’d gone to retrieve the leather satchel with his Palm Pilot and notebooks when he almost walked into Sarge, just beyond the bedroom doorway. Sarge had been waiting for him. Sarge nodded back toward the bedroom. “Talk to you?” Sarge said.

  Carlos couldn’t think of anything good that would be waiting for him behind a closed door with Sarge. “I’m just on my way out.”

  “Then don’t let me stop you.”

  Carlos walked past Sarge, careful not to violate his personal space. He hoped to catch Phoenix’s eye as he passed her, but she was in the middle of what seemed like a tentative embrace with her brother, almost at arm’s length, both of them eager to separate.

  Carlos sensed Sarge following him by two paces.

  “Can I help you?” Carlos said, not looking back.

  “Wouldn’t want you to get lost,” Sarge said, still trailing.

  “I know my way, Mr. Smalls. I live in this room.”

  In the long foyer, when Carlos tried to open the front door, he couldn’t. Sarge had reached above him to brace it closed, and the space between them was now very narrow. Carlos wished he had kept his mouth shut instead of announcing to a man who didn’t like him that he was screwing his daughter, but Carlos had passed his tolerance for harassment today. In the living room, a round of laughter made Carlos feel unalterably lonesome.

  “Young man,” Sarge said quietly, “you must want to get hurt.”

  “No, sir, I don’t,” Carlos said, turning to face Sarge’s gaze. Carlos was the giant of his family at five-ten, but Sarge made him feel short. “Mr. Smalls, I get where you’re coming from. I made a mistake. I’ve apologized to you for the past, from my heart. But Phoenix and I are two adults. If you put your hands on me, don’t expect me to let it go again.”

  “Did it feel good to get that out, son?” Sarge said. “I got one for you, too: My daughter is gonna pee in a cup for me today, and if I find out she’s been acting funny because she’s doing coke or H, and you’re somehow involved in that, you better have me arrested. You should call the cops right now.”

  Sarge still expected him to be a monster, Carlos thought sadly. But what else was the man supposed to believe? “Phoenix isn’t doped up. I think you know that.”

  “I don’t know shit,” Sarge said, and backed away.

  Carlos took his chance to escape. When the door slammed behind him, his loneliness sharpened. Phoenix’s suite was at the end of the hall, and the paisley carpeting of the empty hallway seemed to stretch halfway to Harlem.

  What had happened to him? Here he was amid the thumping heart of his beautiful city, and he wasn’t eager to go outside to vanish into the streams of humanity on Broadway; into the army of Yellow cabs, or to feel grand beneath towering billboards fit for ancient gods in their spectacle of lights and movement. He wasn’t eager to see acrobatic boys casually defying gravity for tips, Senegalese street vendors with third-rate trinkets from the Motherland and knockoff designer sunglasses, struggling musicians forced to play in daylight, Puerto Rican women selling pasteles fresh from their steamy kitchens, or black Muslims pushing bean pies and earnestness. His nostrils weren’t hungry for dank gutter steam, exhaust, sauerkraut and gyros.

  Instead, Carlos wanted to go back into his room to be with Phoenix. Life is hard enough without complications. Which wise man had said that?

  Carlos had walked within fifteen yards of the elevators when one made its polite ding, and he heard the doors slide open. A black man in a white suit stepped out, walking toward him. His heels snapped hard on the marble floor, but went silent where the floor met the carpeting. The man’s diamond necklace flickered in Carlos’s eyes.

  Carlos wouldn’t have noticed another thing about the man if he hadn’t been striding directly in Carlos’s path. The way the man’s shoulders leaned forward, if he’d been running instead of walking Carlos would have thought the man was charging him. Carlos would move aside to make room for an old man, or someone with a cane, but this man’s dogged pace irked Carlos. Why was everybody fucking with him today?

  “Hey, man, what—” Carlos began, and in that instant the man’s face was upon him.

  The dark-skinned man was two inches shorter, his shoulders slight, his face a series of round features: round cheeks, round lips, round nose, round ears. He was Scott Joplin.

  Carlos realized who he was as the man reached him, and he felt his mind drain clean. Instinct made Carlos bra
ce, expecting a collision, but there was none.

  Instead, he looked down wide-eyed as the back of the man’s leg and his white coattail faded to nothing, passing through him, beyond his shining belt buckle. The impossible sight froze Carlos in place, until he felt his body quiver, gelatin. Carlos rocked with dizziness, his knees buckling. His breath was gone, as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  Carlos fell against the wall, hard, and his shoulder roared with pain, the only thing he could feel across the length of his body for three seconds. Carlos gasped, and his lungs labored. Had the walking phantom somehow been swallowed inside of him? As sensation crept back to his limbs, Carlos untangled himself and turned to see if the man had emerged on the other side.

  To his relief, Carlos saw the figure walking away. The visage in the white suit hadn’t slowed, hadn’t changed his bearing, as if Carlos hadn’t been there. Three steps, four steps, five steps. The man reached the door at the end of the hall on the sixth step and did not pause.

  Scott Joplin passed straight through Phoenix’s closed hotel room door.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  You know this is completely pointless, right?” Phoenix said, flushing the toilet behind her bathroom’s partition of marble and smoky beveled glass while Sarge stood in the doorway, her sentry. Phoenix had half filled the plastic cup from Sarge’s drugstore testing kit, a ritual he had insisted was the only thing that could make him stay.

  “We’ll see, Peanut. Give me the sample.”

  “Don’t stand there in the doorway like she’s a criminal, Marcus,” Mom called, from where she lay across Phoenix’s hotel bed. “Why are you hovering? Give her some privacy.”

  Where had the day gone wrong? First, Carlos had vanished without saying anything, leaving a one-line note about getting lunch—Gee, thanks. Now, this. Phoenix ground her teeth, gazing at her specimen cup, which she’d accidentally spattered in her stream. Too bad. Let Sarge wipe it off. She couldn’t believe she was putting up with this. Through the bedroom door, Phoenix heard George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” playing on the hotel room’s sound system at party volume. She was missing her own celebration.