“Well,” Morgan replied, giving her a shrug, “here I am in prison, and there you are free in the sunlight. So I guess I must be wrong.”
The Fourteenth Day of
the Month of Morgan, 3042
“Where am I?” Morgan Milton Morgan III thought.
A flood of information poured into the fragile consciousness contained in a small corner of a memory system the size of Earth’s moon. This download contained his history: he was downloaded and lost, stored in a Macromime mini-system, and buried with his body by Carly Matthews in a final gesture of fealty. The world was growing, and humanity had been mostly replaced by biologically based synth-systems. There was a war being waged, but Morgan wasn’t clear on the nature of the enemy.
“Is this like heaven?” he asked with thought alone.
“And you, Morgan Morgan,” a deep and disembodied voice rejoined, “are our God.”
An Unlikely Series of Conversations
1.
Laertes Jackson showed up at the human-resources office of Martin, Martin, and Moll at 10:37 on a Tuesday in March. The midsize investment firm was located on Maiden Lane in the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan. There was no ostentatious sign outside, and only the initials MMM appeared on the legend next to the elevator. Even there just one floor, the fourteenth, was identified as housing MMM, when the firm actually occupied seven floors.
In the past two years MMM had been sued by various individuals and government agencies for multiple civil rights and sexual harassment violations. The CEO and several VPs had been relieved of their positions, and the corporation itself had been fined millions of dollars in restitution and reparations.
The new CEO, Miss Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz, had made a public statement vowing that the investment firm, which oversaw more than a dozen multibillion-dollar retirement funds that, either fully or in part, served public-employee unions, would make a supreme effort to right the listing ship of our intentions.
Taking this intelligence to heart, Laertes decided to apply for an entry-level job at MMM.
Arriving at the fourteenth floor, Laertes encountered B. Chang, a young Asian woman sitting within a semiopaque, azure circular desk.
“HR is on the twentieth floor, Mr. Jackson,” she said with a lovely red-stained smile. “Take the elevator to the right.”
On the twentieth floor Clarissa Watson, a woman whose skin was even darker than Laertes’s, gave him a confused, turquoise-tinted grin, saying, “But your appointment isn’t until one forty, Mr. Jackson.”
“I’m usually early,” Laertes said, cocking his head and smiling softly. “My father always told me to get there before your competitor, because you can never tell what will be left over later on.”
Young Miss Watson smiled and nodded. She said, “We have magazines and bottled water. You can sit in the waiting area, and I’ll try to get you in early. Ms. Rodriguez is interviewing applicants for the trainee broker position all day, but sometimes the interviews take less time.”
Laertes picked up the Wall Street Journal, turning pages until his eyes fell upon the phrase trying to define the first stock transaction. It seemed that there was a great deal of disagreement among economic scholars about the age of the idea of stocks, investments, and interest.
“Mr. Jackson?” a woman said, so softly that Laertes wondered if indeed he had actually heard the utterance.
He looked up and saw a roundish woman with pale skin, dark locks, and eyes that seemed to see past him into some other realm beyond his comprehension—and maybe hers.
“I’m Jackson,” he said.
“My name is Rahlina Rodriguez. I’m supposed to interview you.”
“OK,” Laertes said. “I took the day off from work, so I have as much time as you need.”
“Where do you work?” Rahlina Rodriguez asked as Laertes rose to his feet, clutching a pint-size plastic bottle of water in his left hand.
“Maritime Merchants Bank over on Twenty-Third.”
“Savings and loan,” she stated.
“It’s pretty much mom and pop,” he said. “Mostly residential mortgages. I’ve been a teller there for more than twenty years.”
“Have you worked with investments?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?” The expression on Rodriguez’s wary face was a leftover from childhood, when she was too cute for her parents to punish; at least that’s what Laertes surmised.
“I’m supposed to ask new clients opening savings and checking accounts if they want to connect their money to an investment account, and if they do, I check that box on their online form. But whatever it is, I don’t understand it or have anything to do with where the money goes.”
Something about what Laertes said seemed to bother Rahlina.
“We should go to my office,” the bank officer suggested.
“OK,” Laertes replied, with a forced smile. He followed her down a gray-tiled hallway toward a bright yellow door. Rahlina moved through the doorway like a dancer, swaying from side to side, creating an aesthetic out of mere walking. Laertes followed her the only way he knew, with a dogged, straight-ahead gait.
The yellow door led to a room that was drained of any hue. The white floor, walls, and ceiling contained an ivory-colored desk and a whitewashed pine chair where the candidate who was to be interrogated had to sit.
“Have a seat, Mr. Jackson.”
He knew where to go. In his mind, because he didn’t need to ask where, he’d answered the first question correctly.
Rahlina Rodriguez settled in the seat behind the smallish pale desk. She placed the fingers of both hands on the ledge before her, giving him a wan smile.
“Before we begin,” she said, “do you have any questions?”
“Are you Mexican?”
“Um,” Rodriguez said, maybe as a criticism.
“I said, are you Mexican?” Laertes repeated.
“We don’t ask questions like that here at Triple-M.”
“If not, then how do you plan to right the listing ship of your intentions?”
“That is a corporate-wide initiative unattached to any individual’s nationality, race, age, or gender.”
“But still you have a black man named Laertes meeting a maybe Hispanic woman named Rodriguez during a hiring period where the cultural tendencies of the company in question are not serving the makeup of the unions that that company represents.”
Rahlina Rodriguez was not happy with the direction of the interview. Laertes’s little paragraph sat his interlocutor up straight in her chair.
“The facts that you are African-American,” she countered, “and that my name has roots in the Spanish language have no direct bearing on your application for the entry position of trainee investment advisor.”
“The letter I got from human resources said that this interview might be recorded,” Laertes said. “Is it?”
“It might be.”
“Is that the answer you’re supposed to give me if the cameras and tape recorders are turned on?”
The flesh around Rahlina’s dark eyes darkened. The locks of her raven hair took on the appearance of razor wire.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We have both signed away our right to privacy in this conversation, and so we may or may not be recorded.”
They gazed across the white expanse of the desk, under the pallid ceiling.
“That’s the other thing,” Laertes said, after a minute of this white-walled silence.
“What is?”
“You called me African-American, and I don’t answer to that description. People who come from another country to this one use the hyphenate name. You know, Italians who came over a generation or two back calling themselves Italian-Americans. Maybe they kept up contact with home or followed cultural norms that are particularly Italian. But a man li
ke me, a man whose ancestors were kidnapped, chained, and dragged over here centuries ago is not, cannot be, a hyphenate. At least not the kind of hyphenate that you say. You might call me an Abductee-American, an originally Unwilling-American. You might say that I’m a partly Disenfranchised American. But African-American? I mean, even if my mama was from Guinea, you’d do better to call me a Guinean rather than an African-American. Africa is a continent, not a country, not even one race. You don’t use the term White-American because that has no cultural basis; even saying Euro-Americans makes very little sense.”
“We say African-American because that is the parlance,” Rahlina interjected.
“Used to be the parlance was colored, Negro, Afro, nigger, coon, jigaboo. Parlance don’t make a word right. And I refuse to be called after a continent that no one in my line remembers.”
“Well, Mr. Jackson, if you say that you are not African-American, I suppose this interview is over.”
“Why is that?”
“The commitment of this firm is to hire and promote peoples from various ethnic backgrounds, including African-Americans.” With that Rahlina Rodriguez stood up and waited.
After a moment or two Laertes realized that he was being asked to leave.
He stood also, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “If this conversation has been recorded, I want a copy of it delivered either to the address on my application form or to the e-mail address thereupon.”
After that he exited the white room on the twentieth floor of the offices of Martin, Martin, and Moll.
2.
Three Thursday afternoons after Laertes’s failed interview, he was offered what turned out to be $112.37 in change from Madeline Chan—a seven-year-old child. Her mother, Angelique, had presented the child’s canvas bag of coins while little Maddie pulled her head up over the ledge where the money was being passed from mother to teller.
“You know, Ms. Chan,” Laertes said. “We aren’t supposed to take loose change in these amounts.”
“But that’s my money,” little Maddie called over the banker’s counter.
“I know your rules, Mr. Jackson,” Maddie’s mom said. “But you and I both know that one day, when she has money of her own, Maddie will remember the bank that made an exception for her Christmas savings.”
Laertes noticed a short man in a black suit standing at the front of the line for the next free teller. The window belonging to Ms. Becky Blondell opened up, and the short man offered his place to the bulbous woman behind him. She smiled and moved ahead.
“So will you take my money?” Little Maddie asked, hoisting herself up once more.
“Of course,” Laertes told the medium-brown child. “Leave it here, and we’ll count it in the machine overnight.”
“Yaaaaaa!” Maddie cried.
“Thank you,” said her mother.
“You’re from Jamaica, Ms. Chan?” the teller asked.
“Yes, I am. How did you know?”
“Your r’s.”
The next visitor to his window was the short man in the black suit who had let the woman behind him go to Becky Blondell’s window.
“How can I help you, sir?” Laertes asked.
“Howard Sansome,” he replied. “I started a regular checking account at your Fort Greene branch a short while ago, but now I wish to upgrade it to investment-plus.”
The man calling himself Sansome handed Laertes a plastic card designed in metallic gold, red, and blue colors. His name was superimposed in lowercase black lettering across the middle of the card.
“I’ll need to see some ID,” Laertes told him.
“Of course.”
Laertes checked the New York State driver’s license and entered the bank number on his computer.
“Changing your account would be easy enough,” the fifty-something teller advised. “But the order has to be OK’d by the manager of the branch where you started the account.”
“I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan since then,” Howard Sansome said, with something approximating an apology on his wide face. “Can’t you just make a note on my file or something like that? It would be inconvenient for me to try to get out to Fort Greene at the hours the branch is open.”
“You could make the change by mail,” Laertes suggested.
“I don’t trust the post.” Sansome’s eyes were searching the teller’s face.
“I’d be happy to make the update . . .” Laertes said.
A canny look came over the bank customer’s face.
“. . . if you just talk to the manager here and have her call your branch,” the cashier continued.
“Can’t you call him?”
“No phones at the windows.”
“I could let you use mine,” the customer offered. There was the hint of a smile on his face.
“Also against the rules.” Laertes shrugged to underscore the apology.
“Well,” Howard Sansome said with a sigh, “I guess there’s a trip to Brooklyn in my future.”
With that he turned and walked away.
Friday was much like Thursday. Eighty-six customers with 216 transactions, a zero balance, and a trip to the vault to install his cashbox.
On Saturday Laertes had lunch with his ex-wife, Bonita, and their eleven-year-old daughter, Medea. Bonita and Laertes had met at the Twenty-Third Street branch of Maritime Merchants Bank when they were both tellers. Now she was a senior vice president at National Trust Investments and Loan. They divorced because she claimed, and he agreed, that he had little ambition in his banking career.
“How’s history coming?” the father asked his daughter after the first few awkward moments amongst the three at Jammy’s Diner on Eighteenth Street.
“It’s great,” the child said. She was a deep brown color and had big eyes and an infectious smile. “I just read everything three times like you told me to, and then I know it without thinking.”
“You always have to think,” Bonita corrected.
Fifteen years younger than Laertes, Bonita was slender, tall, and strong. He was still attracted to her, even though she’d married Hero Martin, a German-American from Pittsburgh. He had nothing against Martin except for the fact that Medea called him Daddy.
“There’s nature, second nature, and thought,” Laertes said, in response to his ex-wife’s criticism. “The first is physical, the last of the mind, and the middle is something you know so well that it’s just there, like a sleeping fish in calm waters.”
Medea’s big eyes seemed to be fixed on her father’s words. At moments like this he liked to think that she saw something worthy in him.
“Are we going to order?” Bonita asked. “Medea promised her father that they’d go to the Met together this afternoon.”
On Sunday, Laertes went to the All Saints Rest Home in Nyack to visit Helena Havelock-Jackson, his mother.
“Pompey!” the ninety-one-year-old matriarch exclaimed. For the past five months or so, Helena had seen Laertes’s father’s face when looking at him; another kind of fish in a different depth of water, Laertes thought.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You look so tired, honey. I’ll make us some marrow soup, and we’ll go to bed early.” She placed four fingers on her son’s left hand, and a sigh came unbidden from way down in his throat.
“How are you, Mom?”
“You know nothing’s wrong with me,” was her rote reply. “Are you having trouble at work?”
“No.”
“Are you gonna get that promotion soon?”
“They went with somebody else.”
Helena’s skin was dark like her son’s and similar to long-deceased Pompey’s. Her eyes were both assertive and vulnerable.
“What do you mean?” she asked, pain tucked in with the words.
Holding her hands, Laertes explained to her ab
out his harebrained scheme to get a job at MMM. And though she thought she was talking to her late husband, Laertes knew that she heard and mostly understood his words.
“That’s always been your problem,” Helena Havelock-Jackson said to her son through the medium of her husband. “You think bigger than the people believe they already big. That’s why you called our children by them Greeks and why your daddy named you for a general to freedom.”
On Monday afternoon at 4:21 p.m., Laertes Jackson departed Maritime Merchants Bank. He left behind a zero balance and a cashbox containing $6,627.14. He had executed in excess of four hundred transactions that day.
“Excuse me, sir,” someone called. “Mr. Jackson.”
Laertes turned and saw a short man in a muted maroon suit trundling toward him. There was something familiar about the man, but because he saw people all day long, Laertes had learned to disregard faces, features, and names.
But now he was shaking hands with someone who at least knew his name.
“Uh?” Laertes said.
“Howard Sansome,” the small but powerful man said.
“Um?”
“Last Thursday. You told me that I had to go to Fort Greene to update my account.”
“Either that,” the teller said, “or send it by mail.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” the man with the wide face asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I know,” Sansome said, with an air of confidentiality. “It seems kind of odd for someone who just knows you from a single encounter through a window of bulletproof glass to act like we’re friends.”
“Yeah.”
“But we have a lot more in common than that.”
“And what is it we have in common?” Laertes asked. In spite of himself, he was intrigued by Sansome.
“Martin, Martin, and Moll,” the man said, a glimmer of conspiracy in his eye.
“What?” Laertes said. “What do they have to do with you?”
“My title is VP in charge of investigations at Triple-M.”
“Investigating what?”
“Right now, you.”
“Me, for what?”
“Can we get a drink? There’s a bar down the street called The Dutchy. They serve a great Manhattan all afternoon for half price.”
The Awkward Black Man Page 27