Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “She got in your head, didn’t she?”

  I don’t know how well Spider knows Sun. I don’t know if they’re best friends, or lovers, or just two people who occasionally get high together.

  “Dude, it’s obvious. Since your ghost hunt, both you guys been walking around like you did see something.”

  “You guys ever hook up?” I just ask him. I would never ask anyone else this, but I ask Spider. He’s too open not to reach in. To not would almost be rude.

  “Oh no. I like my ladies tall. I mean real big. You know what I mean?” I have no idea what he means. Sun is at least five ten. “Statuesque,” Spider adds, and one hand goes up, and one hand goes out, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy’s barely five feet, almost all women must be tall to him. But he winks and there really is no possible negative response to a wink, so I say, “A’ight, a’ight,” which is a great Philly way of agreeing without saying anything.

  “Well, you need any advice on the woman thing, hit me up,” Spider tells me.

  “Okay. Well, thanks,” I say in a sincere yet apparently unconvincing way.

  “No really, dude. I know women. I used to be one, in a past life.”

  “In a past life?” I look over at Spider to see his joking smile. It ain’t there. This little guy, lined with muscles and little ball naps forming a beard across his jawbone, he’s definitely a man. Specifically, a madman. He berates the class playfully and they hurry. All these little mixie pixies, up and up, through the trees to Mulattopia. He’s so good with them, this carny. Spider even knows the kids’ names. He calls out to them like Santa addressing his reindeer. I can reliably recall one name, Kimet’s, and that’s solely because he’s dating my daughter. Still, I say his name when he walks by. He nods and smiles and is suitably nervous, befitting of a boy being investigated by a girl’s father for signs of normative teenage heterosexual male behavior.

  “Let me see your sketch.” It comes out sounding like I’m a soldier demanding documents. The boy stops walking, reaches for his satchel. It’s got a National Organization for Women patch on it. Just to throw me off.

  “Kinda needed more time, if you could—” he tries to tell me, but I interrupt him with a grunt. Kimet stares at my face. I stare back. So he starts pulling out the sketch. The other kids are passing us now. Some stop, want to see, I shoo them on. Kimet holds his image to his chest until we’re clear again.

  “I don’t think—” he protests, but I quickly get a hand on his paper and he releases it because he doesn’t want it to tear. I start hiking again as I inspect it, and he follows.

  It’s good. Structurally, anatomically, the sketch is informed, skillfully rendered. Even the perspective he’s chosen: from the side, completely imagined because we did not get a clear view of the statue from that vantage. And of course, our statue was kneeling, peering into the expanse, not leaning forward as he sat defecating on a large stone toilet, as Kimet depicts.

  But the subject is not the wrong-hatted Lenape. It’s me. He even has my jeans in a pile at the bottom of my hairy legs.

  I look up at Kimet. Teenagers, they feel everything so distinctly, desire, hatred, and right now I hope, fear. My laughter bursts; I don’t even mean to, it just erupts when I attempt to maintain severity. I find other people’s fears so amusing; I might even enjoy the absurdities of my own if they weren’t petrifying.

  “I’m really glad you captured the cut muscularity of my ass.”

  “Shit” comes out of Kimet’s mouth. It’s not directed to or at me though, but to the small crowd up by the Mélange Center’s front gate. The door is closed, the metal mesh sealed up, which it never is this time of day. In front of it now loiters our entire art class, two police cars, Roslyn, and Principal Kamau of the Umoja School. Kimet’s father.

  “You forget you had to leave early?” I ask, but when I look over Kimet’s already turned around, walking back down the trail again. I call to him, but he ignores me, and it takes a couple of quick hops to catch him.

  “Sorry, I can’t. I’m not going.” He tries to pull away, but I have too much of a lock on his elbow for him to do it politely.

  “You afraid of going to the dentist or something?”

  “My mom sent me here, not him. He’s not even supposed to be here. You know, the divorce.”

  Divorce. Yes, I’m familiar with the malady. I don’t even think of mine, but of my parents’. That’s the only reason I let him head around the perimeter, to wait in the woods at least for a little while.

  Cop cars aren’t that surprising in the park, they roll up and down the valley road most of the day, checking to see if the leaves are still there. The cops themselves are standing outside their vehicle. One with a phone to his ear, the other farther down the hill, smoking. Cops make me nervous even in casual mode. Kimet’s dad, he makes me nervous too. Here I am in the buttermilk, having chosen this Europeanized blackness when I was offered the full, undiluted glory of Africana. We still cool, right, my expression says, and I attempt to cut off all awkwardness by approaching him directly as he stands next to Roslyn.

  “What?” is all he says to me. Then he looks at my outstretched hand as if this is some curious custom the local vagrant population insists on. He takes it, limply, and lets it fall again with only the slightest of nods. I have not joined the Oreos, I want to tell him, but he doesn’t recognize me. No, he does, I see a faint glimmer in his eyes. He just doesn’t care. Somehow, the current status of my racial patriotism, while highly important to me, is of shockingly little concern to him at the moment. He stands with his arms folded and stares down Roslyn, while she types into her phone with her thumbs as if spell-casting. I wait for her to finish, but when she does, no conversation follows. Eye contact brings a flash of a grin my way, but it just says, This is the face I’m supposed to make when I’m happy, and then it’s gone as soon as she turns away again.

  “Let’s go for the second leg of the nature hike,” Spider yells over. I look at him, waving at me frantically, the students all huddled around him. But there’s no second leg. That hike was a one-leg beast and we hopped it.

  “Excuse me,” one of the officers comes through, breaking the silence. He’s got a roll of yellow tape in his hand. He walks past, heads to the sealed gate.

  “Really, do you have to? Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Roslyn purrs, but apparently he lacks the necessary mommy issues to be swayed by her. And then it says POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS as yellow tape decorates the entry.

  —

  “The cops are just doing the whole ‘You’re not supposed to be squatting on public property thing.’ It’s no biggie,” Spider tells me. We cut back and walk single file around the side of the perimeter after feigning like we were walking north toward the creek again.

  “What do you mean it’s ‘no biggie’? Why are they doing that?”

  “Because we’re not supposed to be squatting in a public park.”

  The kids trail behind us, Kimet, the oldest, picking up the rear. A few kids actually ask, “Are we there yet?” They just arrived on earth, so lack all consciousness of cliché.

  “It’s over there,” Spider yells and keeps hopping forward, short enough to avoid all the low-hanging branches that I have to push through.

  “What’s over where?” I can see the fence through the brush. We’re at the back of the camp.

  “The VIP entrance,” Spider tells me, then lifts up one end of a flap created by a cut in the mesh fence. I pull up the other end, make sure the kids don’t get snagged on the edges while crawling inside. I count them off. We still have eleven, and I’m pretty sure they’re the same kids we left with. The mixie pixies, they love this. They think it’s a joke. They think it’s an adventure. They laugh. I don’t laugh.

  “Come on, it’s fun!” Spider insists. He actually is having fun. Kimet is the last one through, and he’s out of earshot walking with the others back to the classroom when I say, “No, this is bullshit. So this place really could get evicted at any
minute?”

  “Roslyn’s got good lawyers, though. Like, the best ones. They get a judge to get an injunction, it’s a whole thing. Usually takes about four hours, tops.”

  “Usually? What do you mean, ‘usually’?”

  “Like a dozen times. Once a month since last year. First it was the neighbors fussing, but Roslyn finally won them over. Last couple times it’s been that guy from the Umoja School. He keeps calling the cops, I’m pretty sure. You know the type. Black folks like him are used to having the power to say who’s black and who’s not. It really pisses them off that some people just opt out.”

  “It pisses him off now because his son is here. Kimet.”

  “Oh. That makes even more sense. Oh well. It’s cool, though. The whole place is on wheels. If it hits the fan, we just roll.” Spider giggles at the vision. I see it too, and the only response I make is the clenching of my jaw.

  I look around at the buildings. I look around again at all the wheels. Even the fence is attached at its base to mere concrete blocks. I can see the grass beneath our feet and imagine this whole space empty again, with just those blades remaining. For a second, I am standing on a vacant lot. Gone are all the black-and-white harlequins.

  For her crucial final precollege year, the launchpad to a life of more promise and less struggle, the sole paternal gift I’m not too damn late to offer, I have enrolled my daughter in a school that can literally disappear overnight.

  —

  I’m Googling “prestigious GED programs” on my phone before I even get home. I’m searching for “Philadelphia Magnet Schools Late Enrollment.” I start thinking, if Mélange collapses maybe I can get Tal to stay with me and do over her senior year. Private school, even—I might be able to cash in on the house by then, possibly even sell it. I start hating myself for not plastering and painting before, not doing all I know how to do to repair this hermitage every moment of the day and faking what I don’t. We’ve already compiled the list of prospective colleges, schools with decent dance programs in California, Rhode Island, and Washington State, the latter being my favorite as it’s the farthest away. It seems an impossible goal, remote yet imminent when I think about how I have to pay for it.

  Irv’s car is in my driveway. I get the gate open, get back into my car then pull up slowly behind it like it might decide to suddenly lurch back and smash me. My headlights flash into its cab as I head up the hill. It’s empty inside. The lights inside the house are dark, upstairs and down. There’s someone lying on the porch. Not Irv. Not Tal, either. I can see Tal in the kitchen, through the window.

  The fear comes back but I don’t listen to it. I decide the fear itself is nothing of merit, a few little chemicals in my brain, dripping the wrong way. I walk right over and if I must I will walk right through.

  “Tal’s home,” Sunita Habersham tells me, pulling herself up off her back and onto her elbows. “She looks exhausted, needs the quiet. She came by Mélange looking for you, but it was locked up. She gave me a ride here in her grandfather’s car. I said I’d wait out here for you.”

  Sunita Habersham in the dimness of the one yellow lightbulb. Life can have a sepia tone.

  “And why’d you want to see me?” I ask, because the time to ask her is now, before it gets weighted.

  “It’s Wednesday. I brought the new batch of comic books. My whole pull list.”

  “You came to show me your comic books. You don’t talk to me for weeks, and now, comic books.”

  “I had to think, okay? And I decided I wanted to see more of you.”

  “You seemed finished when you left before.” My aim was to be jovial. The actual sounds that I emit are nothing like that. No humor can be found there, by either one of us.

  “I guess I wasn’t finished with you yet.” She shrugs, as if her own self was a mere acquaintance. “If that’s not okay, I can go. I need a ride, though. You can still borrow my comics. Except for this…one.” She flips through the comics, pulls out an issue of Locke & Key. “Haven’t read this one.”

  I roll my eyes, but take her hand. Sun lets me. Soft, sweating palm. I pull toward the door.

  “Not in the house.”

  “What? You just want to sit on the porch?”

  “Tal’s in there,” Sun tells me. “It’s too weird.” The only thing I find weird is that statement.

  We go, back to my dad’s little Volkswagen Beetle. We don’t read comics at first, optioning to begin our meeting with fondling instead. It’s almost roomy, with the seats pushed all the way down.

  As we progress toward fornication, I look at my father’s house when the angle permits it, waiting to stop if a curtain moves. One never does. Even as our sounds starts building.

  “Don’t yell ‘Shazam!’ this time.”

  “Right, this time you yell a catchphrase when you come.”

  “Which one?”

  “Surprise me!” We stop talking.

  I don’t come. And I don’t want her too either. I go as slowly as I can. Because when she comes, Sunita Habersham will leave me again. So I don’t let her. I break rhythm, keep pausing. I look out on the vacant lot of the lawn, the grass long and unkempt and dead from the winter’s first frost. It’s so bare. I focus on anything but the pleasure. But eventually the car windows are steamed and I can’t see out anymore.

  Afterwards, we do read comics, with the windows cracked. She only stays until the glass has gone transparent once more, and then, per her request, I drive her home.

  —

  The times Sun visits me following this one, she still won’t go in the house. So in my driveway we meet. She shows up every Wednesday evening, for new comic-book release day. Sometimes she even comes Thursdays as well, if we haven’t read all the issues, sitting in the car postcoital the day before. Sun never mentions the “boyfriend” again. I don’t ask about her “boyfriend.” I ask her to come in the house, I ask her to have dinner with me and my daughter, but I stop doing that eventually since she keeps saying “No.”

  14

  THE WOMAN WHO breaks into my house breaks into my dream. She sits at the end of the mattress, facing away, but I know it’s her. I know the bones popping through the back of that wet paper flesh could only be hers. And she’s crying. I hear her crying, want to tell her to stop. But if I do she’ll turn around and look at me, and I’ll remember her face and I don’t want that memory.

  I put all my energy into lifting one arm, nothing. I put all my energy into kicking one leg, get the same. She leans backward to look at me, like she will fall once more into the bed, and then we will all be doomed. Doesn’t turn around, just leans back. Arches her spine, throws her head far enough that I see her nose and know her eyes will be next. I try to close mine, my eyelids do work, but I can’t close my ears. I hear the whimpers. I hear the sniffs of mucus loosened by tears. I hear the whine.

  My eyes open, real eyes, and see the real waking room. Darker than the one of dream. Messier. Pants strewn on the floor, discarded comic books, sentinels of empty Diet Dr Pepper cans. My arms can move, and I gather the covers to me, giving myself another layer of fabric to protect against the universe. The loudest thing is my breathing, and I settle it down. Force it to slow, allow one heavy sigh before normalcy. The next sound is not from me. It’s from the side of my bed. I still hear the sobbing.

  I will scream. I’ve decided. If she’s in this house again, I will make a sound like no man has ever been proud to utter. It will be loud. It will be the entirety of my defense against the world. It will be all of me converted into vibration.

  She’s in the corner, the hair is over her face. It’s dark, full, hangs all the way past her neck. But it is curly, too. It ripples and bounces as she cries. It’s my daughter.

  “Tal? What’s wrong?” I ask, but specifics don’t yet matter so I swing my legs over and go to her, kneel and wrap her in both arms. Tal’s in the chair, my knees are on the floor. She’s been acting like everything is fine in the time since she got back from Irv’s, since his news,
and yet here she is, in the dark, undone. I hug her like she’s broken and I can squeeze her tight enough to mend.

  “I can’t breathe, Pops,” is the only thing that gets me to loosen.

  I try again, the whole list: what’s wrong, whatever it is we can talk about it, nothing can be that bad. Tal says nothing more. I’m still holding her. I try a little rocking motion, but she resists. After two minutes, it gets awkward.

  “Everyone I ever love will leave,” Tal says finally.

  “But new people come. Sometimes. Sometimes, when we make room for them.” I think this sounds deep. I was just thinking of her, in my life, but it sounds like something someone would put in nice font over a pretty stock photo, so I’m proud of it. Tal is less impressed, though.

  “Irv’s going to die. I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there, and I realized everyone I love disappears. They either die, or they leave. It’s that’s simple. I’m stupid, I only just figured it out.”

  “That’s not stupid. That’s the single hardest thing to accept in the world. That everything changes. Sometimes it changes for the better, though.” I try again, and again I’m thinking about her, the fact that she came into my life, and now it is better. No question. And after this moment in time, she’ll also go.

  “That’s the best advice you’ve ever given me,” Tal says with so little enthusiasm that it tells me competition was nominal.

  “That wasn’t advice.”

  “Whatever.” Tal pulls out of my arms. Standing, she snorts all the liquid she can with her nose, wipes the rest off with her forearm. “Disgusting,” she says to no one, then walks out of my room.

  I stay sitting on the floor long after she leaves. I will not go back to sleep. In the gloom, I can see the bed. I can see the foot of it. There’s an indentation in the fabric of the fitted sheet I want to believe I’m just imagining is in the shape of a boney ass.

  —

  “Mouths shut, pencils sharp, let’s get ready to scribble,” I say, because that’s what I’ve been saying to start for a while now and, perhaps because of its slogan-like nature, they tend to obey. Then I walk around and offer guidance and criticism one on one, which helps them to learn and me to avoid panicking that I don’t actually know how to be a teacher. This works, on average, for about thirty minutes. I stroll through the room, check on the status of their projects. After the first few days resulted only in pictures of superheroes punching each other, Spider made sure they had visual references for their tri-racial isolate projects.