by Mat Johnson
Mr. Cole was impossible to shame and that was his most impressive attribute; his claim to fame was that he had run 342 continuous "Special Report" front-page editorials, 176 of which contained the exact same headline: IMPEACH GIULIANI. The columns were always in a darker, bolted shade than the rest of the edition and sometimes covered nearly half the front page. The majority of sentences ending in exclamation points gave the impression that Mr. Cole was constantly screaming at the reader with incredulity! This was accurate! The column was the only thing he cared about. Piper had seen him in the office receiving the first printing of the new issues and he rarely cracked it open unless his own editorial was continued inside. As long as his regularly occurring "Special Report" was uncut and errorless, Mr. Cole was unmoved. Mr. Cole looked liked an aged orangutan, was old, belligerent, and eccentric in equal measure. When Piper was hired she was pulled aside by several people and told that at times he acted committable insane, and on such occasions she should just nod at everything he said and, if he got violent, go home.
So Piper arrived early with notes and wrote out and printed the articles she'd researched and outlined the day before, then spent the rest of the day preparing articles for the following morning. It wasn't that anyone else would need to get on the computer later, just that it was in the executive editor's office and, although he was pleasant, the space was simply not big enough for two people. The executive editor shared Mr. Cole's name plus a Jr. to go with it, was hired for the position for his inability to stand up to Mr. Cole Sr. and to provide a front to allow his father to say whatever the chemicals in his head dictated and pass it off as a "letter to the editor" when the paper was inevitably sued for libel in response. Whole days went by when the executive editor kept his door closed, which was appreciated by his staff because watching the graying thirty-five-year-old Junior get yelled at was nearly as uncomfortable as when Mr. Cole chose one of them for belittlement.
In addition to Piper, the New Holland Herald had three full-time employees, Segun Diop, Bill Sims, and Gil Manly, two other part-timers, Carleen Wilson and Shandy Gomes, and a rotating legion of freelancers willing to pump out four-hundred to eight-hundred word stories for thirty-two dollars a pop. Piper was the only staff writer under forty, the only one more accustomed to a monitor's windy hum than the insect percussion of the manual typewriter. Carleen and Shandy spent their moments in the office slumped nearly level to their desks, in turn harassing and being harassed by the writers who wrote their sections. Aside from Mr. Cole, the fact that the writers were paid so little was enjoyed by no one. The writers, obviously, found this an annoyance, particularly when much of their work was printed with far too many errors to be used as clips to entice other, better-paying publications. (The New Holland Herald was not a premiere African-American periodical, such as its fierce competitor the Amsterdam News, the Philadelphia Tribune, or Washington, D.C.'s renowned News Dimensions) For the editors it was extremely difficult as well, since the freelancers invariably tried to compensate for the low wage by hacking out the fastest pieces they could manage. This technique the writers would employ with greater and greater desperation until they were submitting paragraphs of disjointed gibberish. When asked to rewrite the piece and read it at least once before handing it back, the freelancers would do so but then quit, refusing to invest any more time in their submissions in the future.
Charlie Awuyah and Gil Manly were two of the main reasons the entire paper wasn't trash. Charlie Awuyah ate red pistachios all day and had been at the same desk for twenty-five years, before Mr. Cole even bought the place. In each issue he filled the last three pages of the paper with some of the most intelligent sports writing done anywhere. Gil Manly was barely in the office, was sixty, and dressed like reporters did when he was a boy, always kept a yellow pencil in his mouth in the building and a cigarette in it outside. Gil got to cover every single news event that didn't involve a press release. Piper wanted his job. She thought he was good, but each week the first thing she did was pore over his work and tell herself that she was better, or at least she would be some day soon. That was what Piper would do: stare at his desk, calculate how long it would be till he retired. Two years - there was no way he could hold out more than that; Piper'd caught him resting halfway up the long straight stairs that went from the ground to the third floor. Then, really, how long would it be until Mr. Cole Sr. would follow? His rage, his hatred, his obesity. If the man lived another five years it would be due only to his other bad habit, his stubbornness.
In particularly optimistic moments Piper imagined one day taking the helm, gathering investors, maybe Dumbass and his friends, restoring the paper to its former glory. Or maybe she would just follow the pattern and get a dumbass of her own for security, be his artistic wife, a trophy to hold up, breed with, and eventually cheat on. Conquering conformity by complying with it completely. Piper was surprised at her lack of discomfort with the notion, until she thought of the look of smug affirmation etched in the wrinkles that had grown to accentuate her mother's expressions. Piper knew just the face she would make, too, the one that always formed when some event unfolded as she had contradicted it would, positive or negative. It was such a jarring image, her mother sitting in the front pew at some Episcopalian church in her wedding lace, the hat and everything, that face that said, "See, I told you, is it so bad really?" and Piper would realize that it was, but it would be too late not to say "I do."
The image was so clear, so alarming, that Piper left the copy room with it floating behind her, and when she happened to notice the cute guy who'd helped her move into her place months before she went right up to him and asked him over for dinner. Her boldness, which intoxicated her on the long ride to the ribbon cutting at the new CVS in BedStuy, started haunting her with remembrances of sentences like "get to know you better," which seemed absurd without that guy before her, not quite looking at her in the face like he was alternately threatened by and ignoring her, both of which made the attraction stronger. His hands felt so thick with calluses that Piper was sure he could juggle live coals, the arms swollen and rounded from repeated use, making her giggle aloud at the irrationality of her desire to be lifted by him. If they never kissed that would be fine, but not if she never got to feel what it was like to be lifted from the earth in those hands, held in those arms from it.
Piper's idea of housekeeping was to keep all her papers on raised surfaces like the counter, dining room table, and lid on the toilet basin, and all her clothes in piles on the floor, organized by the place she was standing when she took them off. There were no dishes to wash because she used paper plates and plastic forks, and couldn't cook. She walked to the take-out counter at Bamboo and they said, "Piper, you should really get the greens with that, you're not eating enough vegetables." She dialed their number from memory. There was a place on her tongue that was lobbying heavily for Thai, but what Piper wanted even more was a dish she could pour into her own cold pots and claim credit for. While Piper was quick to brag that she couldn't cook, she was equally willing to passively pretend she had. Not cooking Creole food was her specialty.
When Snowden arrived, Piper was laid out on the sofa, the effort of removing half her debris from sight rendering her unconscious. It was after nightfall and the light coming through the glass door to the outer hall pushed her toward waking, but it was the sound of Dee knocking on the door as she pushed through it (a fascist trait inherited from the mother, Abigail Goines) that brought Piper completely to reality. From a quick glance at her sister, the ever astute Piper could tell several things: that the food had arrived, that Dee had paid for it but not brought it up till now, that in the short walk up the stairs Dee had found time to ask Piper's guest his occupation (because she would surely not recognize random help) and he had told her, because she was wearing that face (one their mother created as well). It seemed that on 122nd Street, for all intents and purposes Dee was Abigail Goines.
Snowden was gracious, smiling and nodding to Dee until she clos
ed the door behind her. His pacing of the room before seating himself was polite, complimentary. The curiosity Snowden displayed was in the acceptable manner of casually walking over to Piper's paintings along the back wall, smiling with polite befuddlement before heading over to the bookshelf to see what tides were in the mind of the person he was dealing with. Piper encouraged this by drawing out the process of microwaving the dinners because that's what that bookcase was for. All the junk that would give him any real insight, the seedy true crime stories and painfully embarrassing personal growth memoirs, were carefully hidden in the bedroom within a trunk, beneath several sedimentary levels of dirty laundry, exactly where they belonged.
His politeness and respect were not a total facade either, because when Snowden went to the bathroom Piper listened and she didn't hear the crashing sound that would have erupted if he'd attempted to peek in the medicine cabinet. A legion of pill bottles had been placed there specifically to fall out if the door was opened, revealing a handwritten note that said YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOU'RE MESSING WITH, a homemade novelty item for friends and a warning to dates that her heart had its own security system.
The meal disappeared rather quickly, the bottle of red also, but Piper's mouth kept running. She started with a capsule version of her life story, a set background piece she used with new friends to get it out of the way and provide context, which she followed by more in-depth studies into the more prominent themes and incidents: Abigail Goines's failed attempt at breeding the uber-Afncanus woman, Piper's exchange year in Portugal, the buying of this condo within her sibling's home, and the anecdote that displayed that her brother-in-law's credit wasn't as clean as he liked to pretend it was. The complete New Holland Herald breakdown, including employee profiles and her desire to overtake the office and seize control, if possible by armed struggle, the latter confession telling her she was officially tipsy and that she was talking entirely too much. Despite polite (if not overly enthusiastic) efforts to draw her guest out, the only thing Piper'd learned was that he was from Philadelphia and had attended Temple University, a fact that he himself admitted was probably true of nearly half the city's population.
"So you're how old? Can I ask you that, or will you blush and get coy on me?" A slight teasing. This was a major component in Piper's arsenal of seduction. It always worked, and when it didn't it was probably for the best anyway.
"I'm thirty-one. And I'm too dark for blushing," Snowden bantered.
"And so where have you been? What have you been doing since you graduated?" Snowden removed his napkin from his lap in response to the question, accepted that he liked her enough that he would definitely be back and therefore was unable to give his usual lies as an answer.
"I didn't graduate," Snowden said flatly. It was meant as a deterrent, offering a statement of failure as emotional libation while defining a border clearly marked against further trespass. Piper respected no such boundaries.
"College is expensive, half the time it's useless. But that doesn't explain where you've been, what you've been doing, does it?" Piper was smiling. She wasn't pretty, but she was cute and she used this sometimes to excuse her rudeness. She did it so well that Snowden noticed only when he was about to begin confessing, annoyed at the manipulation.
"I was in jail."
Piper didn't even pause before following with the mandatory response, "What for?"
There was the word, manslaughter. It was the proper one to use because it was literally the action he'd been found guilty of and sentenced for. It was also the best word there was to say that you killed someone. At Holmesburg State Penitentiary, it meant that this was not to be your permanent residence, and that you'd been smart enough to get a lawyer who arranged a lesser sentence. In this world it implied that there were ulterior circumstances, that the murder might even have been justified in everyday morality but legalities forced this minimum judgment. Its vagaries were one of the reasons Snowden hated saying it, it was a word that demanded questions. Worse, every time he said it, Snowden could clearly hear both words it was made of. When Snowden said it, Piper didn't bother to ask for more, just waited quietly for him to offer.
"My father - I mean there were problems for a long time, I was in foster care mostly growing up, he was in jail. He was a Panther, then in the BLA, that's the Black Liberation Army; he was nuts. I came home from college winter break, we got in a fight, I just hit him wrong. That's it." That was. There was more Snowden could say, but that was enough.
"Oh shit, I'm sorry, I always push things too far, I'm always screwing up doing that."
"Look, I'm sorry. I'm not used to talking about it. I should be. I mean, it's not like I don't think about it, or don't regret it, it's something on top of everything I do. It's just, you know, something I've been working myself away from. So I got out almost two years ago and I've been struggling to get a good job, but now I do. I got hooked up by my PO in this program with Horizon, you know. Got the chance to make some money, do some good, right?"
"They have some kind of community program?"
"No. I mean, that's what it is, exactly what it is, community work. That's what Horizon is doing, trying to create another era of thriving black Harlem. Things been rough since the black middle class ran off to integration and took the money with them, right? So we're trying to bring them all that back."
"So how is that good?" Piper asked. "Helping the fortunate take Harlem away from the poor people who've been living here all this time?"
"No, that's not it, that's not what I'm saying. What Horizon has planned is better than that. They don't want to displace everybody, they just want to bring enough people back here to make the place healthy again. People to spend their money, create some vibrant retail life like back in the day, create jobs. Straight up, also to have some folks as role models walking around, to show that you can do it."
"Believe me, just because they make money it doesn't make them any kind of role model. Come on, it's just the same old story, isn't it? Gentrification." Piper bugged her eyes out and chuckled bitterly.
"Gentrification? No, no," Snowden shook his head in near confusion. "It's not gentrification when it's black folks moving back into the black community. It's . . . it's housecleaning."
"Great. So you got it all planned out, then."
Apparently Snowden did. Snowden had never really had a plan for anything, one that required sturdy bridges of faith to keep it connected. Rinsed by euphoria, Snowden kept going. Piper looked at him like he was glowing. It just encouraged him to burn brighter. He sounded like Lester himself, worse, like Bobby at his fevered best, but he wasn't channeling. Freed from the role of reluctant skeptic only to find himself a true believer. A dream was a drug. In a world without meaning, belief was an aphrodisiac. Snowden could feel it working on him, working on the woman across from him. So being a dreamer felt like this, having a belief brought this out in others. It made sense that so many dreamers were whores.
"Thing is, it has to be now. We don't have time to fool around anymore. The white people are coming. The island is full, they got nowhere else to go. They're scared to death of us, but that's how bad they need a place to live. If we don't start buying up this area, moving into its apartment buildings and staying there, in twenty years our Harlem will be lost. There's already a Starbucks on 125th Street. . . and it sure as hell ain't for us."
"I'd love to do a story on you guys."
"You should." Snowden smiled, pointed at her. "You met the other guys, Bobby obviously, Horus is the other one. Like I said, not that bad, really, once you know them, like most folks really. Whoever performs best this year is going to be promoted to oversee the whole thing, too, even get a house out the deal. I'm in the lead, I'm pretty sure. My boss has me doing a special project the others aren't even in on, things are going good."
"What kind of project?" Piper asked.
"Well, it's a little morbid, but when people die and nobody claims their stuff, I go in with him and we clean it all up. Mostly it's acc
idents, and it's just in this little area of Harlem around historic Mount Morris, up to Adam Clayton Powell, rarely above 128th or below 117th."
"That doesn't sound bad. You can't have to do more than one a month, right?"
"No, you'd be surprised. It's a rough city. You got to be careful in this place. Drugs, disease, stupidity. Old age. Mostly accidents."
"So come on, you can tell me," Piper leaned forward smiling, rubbing her hands together. "How often do people around here, y'know, drop off?"
"I don't know. I guess we're doing people almost once a week," Snowden said.
Piper pulled back, stopped smiling. "You mean that in this little area - what, a square mile, maybe two - there is at least one death a week, accidental?"