by Mat Johnson
A small group of Mulattopians drifts back behind the house as I’m finishing, and it doesn’t even matter. When they light a joint, I point to the containers and say, “You really don’t want to be smoking around here.”
—
I watch most of the day from the front window, drinking. I am drinking to access the courage. Or I am drinking to get drunk enough to not be able to do anything at all. It changes between swigs. Once the whiskey loosens my mind, I start imagining the scene again, but can only see it darkly. I see an explosion, all the tanks lighting at once in a blaze of glory, but with me accidentally in the middle of it. If I die, I realize, Sunita Habersham will think I committed suicide, and will be destroyed by it. Maybe not destroyed, but it wouldn’t help her general spiritual growth to have another boyfriend croak, I’m sure. So I write her a note on some copy paper. It says, If something happened to me, it’s because I’m an idiot, but not because of any self-destructive impulse. I would never do that to you, because I still love you. Which has the balance of focused and vague I was going for. I sign it and with that productive task out of the way, I go on to check and recheck the security cameras, make sure the back one is aimed high enough to miss the show. I take the box of pictures and Tal’s things to the garage where they’ll be safe.
Then after that, I’m ready.
There’s a cake in the fridge. It’s homemade. It’s either a yin yang symbol, or patterned after a New York black-and-white cookie, I can’t tell, but it looks delicious, and in a fire it would be destroyed anyway. So I eat it. I eat the whole cake over two hours. When more than half of it’s gone, it just seems like a shame to waste the rest of it, which is the same logic I apply to the flask.
They’re out there. Everyone on the lawn, swirling in their mass. Black and white balloons are pulled by children, tied to trailers, and line the property like they’re trying to lift us all to the half-breed promised land. And everyone past the gate, they’re just as festive. The white folks stay across the street, angry, wanting something back: their country, their dominance, their youth. Petrified of a world where they don’t make all the rules. They chant for a bit, something about this being America. I think everyone here knows that, though. I don’t think this could be happening anywhere else. Across the street from them, on our side—of the sidewalk at least—the red, black, and green balloons wave in the wind, strong. I’m pretty sure those balloons weren’t here this morning. Somebody must have been sent to get them. Someone must have thought the Loving Day balloons demanded a helium response. I can’t see the kids out there, the stone base of the fence is too high, but I see Kamau. It’s hard not to, he’s got his horn going. “Umoja!” is his favorite call. None of the white folks across the street speak Swahili, I would wager. They probably think it’s Zulu for “Sharia Law.” I see Natasha and George as well. They march together, south on Germantown Avenue, reach the end of the property, then they march north again. Repeating in an endless loop with all of the rest of the protesters, chanting whatever they can to stop the spell being cast by the larger Loving Day crowd on the grounds.
Cast with live bands. Cast with a bouncy house. Cast with lemonade and funnel cakes and white-looking people dressed in Ashanti throws and black-looking people dressed like Sally Hemings’s in-laws. There’s even a couple dressed as zombie colonists. No, they’re dressed like ghosts. Like the ghosts, I imagine, or they do. A white woman and a black man. The costumed couple even comes to the door of my father’s house, shaking the doorknob in shock when it doesn’t open for them. They find a more receptive audience in the news crew that shows up hours later; I watch the duo venture outside and to the front of the queue for an interview. Everyone is eager to share their thoughts about how other people should categorize themselves. The cake is long gone and in my stomach it discovers the liquor and the horror of being inside me, but I don’t leave the building till the news van does, heading to the main stage when I see Tal standing with all the other would-be Miss Cegenation queens.
It’s not a beauty contest. It’s not a talent contest. I don’t know what the hell it is, but a large crowd has formed around the stage so I slip in and discover more as everyone else does. Tal is wearing a dress that I didn’t buy for her, presumably given to her by Sunita, from the slightly baggy way it’s fitting. The bustier top is wired to carry the weight of significant mammary heft, and on Tal it just catches air and the idea of breasts as an intellectual concept. I don’t catch the question asked of her, but the answer Tal gives is “I believe that we are the living embodiment of our ancestors, and to deny them, any of them, is, like, to deny ourselves, and disconnect ourselves from the very essence of Gaia.”
Oh so she’s referencing Gaia now, wonderful. Tal doesn’t even have any Greek in her, but the crowd loves it. They applaud. The zombie couple, they’re there, they applaud. I assumed I would recognize them from the camp on closer inspection, but even under the white face paint I can tell I’ve never seen them before. Yet they still have Sesas. On his arm, and then, when she turns, I see one on her shoulder. Looking around, new faces are the majority. It’s spreading. And all clapping for my daughter like they know her better than I do.
There’s a white lady up there in the competitors’ row—at least she looks like a Caucasian, and female—wearing a traditional Nordic bunad dress and a bone through her nose. It’s definitely a bone. I keep looking at her, waiting to discover if I should be either offended, or—what? I have no idea. I’m mystified. This petrifies me too; perhaps I should go stand across the street with the terrified ofay crew.
George looks through the bars, smoking. He looks at my daughter. The nicotine mist pours out of his jaw-dropped mouth. And then he looks at me. It’s far, but I know he’s looking at me. I know before he shakes his head, and joins the circling rage once more.
“Biracialism buys into racism!” I can hear the black side chanting now. “Segregation is wrong!” is yelled from the white side, without any hint of irony.
“She did great!” One Drop says, walking over to me. “Of course, she’s got home-court advantage, man. She’s one of us now,” he says, and then goes and joins in with all the other us-es in drowning out the world beyond the gate with cheers of their own.
“A donkey, without stripes, is not a horse!” the Mulattopians chant. “A donkey, without stripes, is not a horse!”
Tal is not one of them. Tal is not even one of me. Tal is whoever the hell she finds out she is eventually and even that must change with time. So I go to Sunita’s empty trailer and push the non-suicide note under the door where she can see it and no one else can. Then I go to burn the house down.
—
There’s an invisible line in the grass. If I cross it, this thing is going to happen. I want to step over it casually, but instead I just push into it. Invisible, but I can see it in my head, yellow and rubbery and I pull it when I go past, all the way around to the back of the house. I lean against my father’s car and the line is wrapped around me, waiting to pull me back to sanity, insisting I haven’t crossed it yet.
I pause for a second. Because I can’t do this. I can’t really do this. I will turn back. Give this up. This is crazy. This is not the proper course. Then, from beyond, I hear the saccharine stylings of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” echoing across Germantown via loudspeaker. I get the lighter out of my pocket and the invisible yellow line snaps in two retreating strips when I test the flame.
The tank on top is the only one I need. I lift it up, so it’s sitting upright on the pile. I breathe. I don’t think. I unscrew it. I smell…nothing. I but I can hear the gas spilling. There is still time to turn back. This is still my window of sanity. I think again. There are other ways of doing this. Less literal. Less dangerous. Requiring more bravery. More patience. More time. So much more time, and I have it but I don’t know if Tal does. I look at the back wall of my father’s house. It’s not a bad house. It’s just a house. It is history given form. It is Europeans trying t
o build a dynasty. But where are they? Their descendants? They’re across the street, red-faced, yelling like babies for a bottle. Here, it’s just me. The Afro-Celt. Not even half of the right kind of honky. But it’s mine now. My inheritance. Tal’s too. And then, while I’m looking, I see a whole new foundation crack in the façade. Unknown of before because I never bothered standing here, looking at it, for so long. I reach my finger out, poke my pinky’s tip right inside it. This is the house they think they can just cut up, and move twenty yards? While I still own it. While Tal actually still owns it. I put two fingers into the crack, concrete crumbling down around them as they wiggle. It’s a trap. It’s always been a trap, since first construction.
I light the fire.
I actually see it. The air becoming flame. It doesn’t come to me in a moving image, but instead in three comic-book panels. The first is of a line of orange fire, one as long and seemingly solid as my own arm. It shoots out past my lighter like a ray of sun late to get somewhere. The second image is of a cloud, one that must have always been there invisibly, but now blares into light, connecting each billowing segment, taking over the space all around me I thought was reserved for oxygen. The third image is the simplest. Just flame. The last thing I see before I close my eyes. Before sound is the only sense I can handle. Before even the pain which, as I lie now on the ground, I know will come, because my face has been bathed in the fury. Unless I die, in which case I’ll be spared.
That sound, it doesn’t make a bang. It’s a pop. The sucking of air inward, into whatever portal in the universe I’ve opened. My hand starts to hurt, and I realize I’m gripping the grass. I am blind. No, I just haven’t opened my eyes. I do, and they even work, somewhat. The tears make it hard to see, but I do. And I look to the house. There is a black scorch above the space where the tank once rested. It looks like it hurts. My face hurts so much, surely the house must too. But there is no inferno. I can hear the flames, smell the burning now, but looking at the house, I see no fire before me. Not even inside the window. And I see no top tank. I have exploded the tank. I look at my body. For the pieces of it. For the unfelt shrapnel. The evidence that I am actually going to die now. I see none of it. But I hear the fire. I think to turn to look to the sound of the fire.
There’s an inferno coming out of my father’s Bug.
Such a big flame, such a tiny car.
—
When they find me, I’m still trying to pull the propane out from where it’s lodged under the rear bumper. The heat is so strong, I try to kick the tank, but only manage to stick it farther in there. My hands are already burnt, and even though the flames are reaching up to twice my height over the back engine I am certain I can just reach in there, on the bottom, and pull the metal cylinder loose. I feel someone pulling at my feet so I just kick back and keep crawling. As I get closer to the car I am entering a reality where every molecule of my body wants to dance fast enough to become a gas. There is pain but life is pain so I reach out for the tank and get just enough that I send it rolling out and away as my hands fuse to the metal. But they don’t because I’m pulled back again before the torch shooting from the tank’s now whirling spout can bless me. At my legs, there is still normal feeling, and I know from uneven grips that a different person is pulling on each leg. I feel the grass under my chest, and the roughness of the soil as I scrape along it. And then there is air again, and the relative coolness of a late spring day, and the clouds are so thick and beautiful. I just look at them. Like when my dad was driving the Bug and I would lie down on the backseat and stare up through the window. In the blissful era before mandatory seat belts.
My eyes still blur, but I can see who saved me. I knew it would be One Drop, from the strength of the grip. The monstrous One Drop, who is reaching out to my face, and then seeing the shape I’m in, he pulls back like this might do more damage. I get the sense from this that I don’t look too good. And the other ankle puller. It’s Sun. It’s Sunita Habersham.
Sunita Habersham. She squats down. She puts a hand to my face, where it stings. She has the sense to ask, “Baby, are you okay?” and I lack the sense to say anything but, “Oh yeah. I’m fine. I’m chilling.” To prove this, I go to get up, which turns out is a hard thing to do after your hands have been barbecued. But I rise, still. And Sun hugs me, and I realize she called me baby, which was very nice, yes. I’m in a lot of pain. And there are all the other people. They are all around us, the whole camp, everyone. Tal is there, Spider is there, almost everyone I know now and all the faces I know who have names attached I’ve never bothered to remember. But look at them. They look so concerned. And not about the blessed car, because that’s gone now, I can accept that. And not the house, because the house has not altered its trajectory in the slightest. They look at me. They care about me. My unintentional community. They stand at a distance, sure, crowding together and leaving us in the epicenter of their circle, but I think this is a gesture of respect for the emotions of the moment. And also, yeah, because of the car being on fire.
Still embracing Sunita Habersham, I turn her gently, so I can look back at the ruining of my father’s car. This accidentally aims her gaze toward the mansion. Sun just saw the house, I realize, when she pushes me away. She saw the house, and what I did to it.
“Baby,” I start to try back at her, but the slap she hits me with, it really hurts. Emotionally. But largely, physically. It’s very sobering.
“How could you do this to us!” is screamed at me. Sun is pointing. I follow her finger, to the damned house façade. The fuse box, it pops. Too late. The sparks not even remotely close to the blackened mark of the first flames climbing up the wall. Jumping to the conclusion of arson would makes no sense, out of context. But Sun has context.
“Which us?” I ask, and my general confusion at the moment, my blurry vision, the growing distraction of the intense biting pain emitting from large portions of my epidermis, would seem to add to my clueless innocence. But not to Sunita Habersham, who slaps me again. Who then takes me with two hands by the front of my shirt.
“I can’t believe you could actually be so stupid,” she whispers, her nose almost touching my own. But you burn pictures, I want to say, but don’t.
“I didn’t do anything.” I didn’t. The house is still there. The house will always be there. They can try to move it a couple feet; it doesn’t matter. The house will always be here. It’s not my inheritance, or Tal’s, or my father’s. It’s history itself. It is its own legacy.
“I know what you did. What you tried to do. You did this to us,” she says, before letting go of me and walking away.
“This was my releasing ceremony,” I yell. I start to stomp after her until George makes my momentum halt.
“What the hell is going on?” he wants to know. I don’t know why he’s here, on the other side of the wall. I turn to look at him and see the massive black smoke cloud still coming out of my father’s dying car, so yeah I kind of know. The sirens, I can hear them coming too, getting closer, and that makes more sense, so I push George’s hand off my shoulder. And I start running toward Sun before she can get to the crowd and this is all over.
“I asked you a question. Don’t just walk away,” he demands in full cop voice.
“No. I’m running,” and I take off full speed for Sunita Habersham.
George is running too. He tackles me from behind, and I go down. I’m on the grass once more. On my face first, and then on my back when he flips me over.
“You need to calm your ass down.” George’s hands hold my wrists, his body’s weight seals my pelvis to the earth. I try to lift them, to get him off me, but his move is practiced, time-tested, without counter.
“Sun!” I yell. I lean my head back, try to see her. I do see her, the back of her once more, walking beyond where the crowd has spread for her. “Sunita Habersham!” again, but nothing.
Then, into the gap in the crowd, strolls a vision. A vision as exotic and out of place as all of us. An animal. A zonke
y. A real life zonkey. Stripes in the front and the back all white ass. It strolls up, into the gap in the crowd. And it looks at me. Confused. Then gives up, bends over, and starts chewing the grass in front of Roslyn’s feet. The older woman stares past the beast to the house, looking genuinely pained when she looks back in my direction. She pulls on the zonkey’s rope and walks him off as if she’s protecting his innocence.
“You reek. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Is there nothing you don’t screw up?” George leans in, seemingly waiting for me to give thoughtful answers. “I know about you and Natasha,” he whispers. “After all that time waiting for your chance, you even fucked that up.”
“That’s my father.” The voice is so calm, measured, that both George and I turn in surprise. Tal stands there, high above both of us. I can’t see her features because of the glare of the sun above. I can make out enough, though, to see that she reaches out and puts a hand on George’s arm. I feel a warm drop hit my face. It’s George’s sweat, and it’s disgusting, but for a second it creates the only place on my face not burning.
“Miss, you need to take your hands off me and step back.”
“You need to get the fuck off my pops,” my daughter says to him.
George takes his left hand off me to remove Tal’s grip from his arm.
That’s when I punch him in the mouth.
23
THE 14TH DISTRICT Police Department holding cell is actually not so bad compared to the City of Philadelphia Detention Center, which is where they take me when the alcohol wears off and the pain can occupy the vacated neurons and I really start feeling the fullness of my situation. I spend the first night handcuffed to a bed. There is metal on my wrists. Bonds. But I’m actually fine with this, because in exchange they handcuff the other eighty-seven guys in the room to their beds as well, and these men worry me more than slavery metaphors.