by Mat Johnson
During my booking, I am unable to provide adequate fingerprints, due to the fact that my tips have blisters on them. After much discussion about this, I am given a pen and paper to provide a handwriting sample in the meantime. My mug shot, however, goes over like gangbusters, and is viewed by not just George, who is clearly already enjoying himself immensely, but by several of his colleagues, whom he calls in to check out my portrait on the screen so that their day may be brightened. On being returned to my prison hospital bed, George, his jaw clearly swollen from where I popped him, takes me aside so that I can view the masterpiece myself.
Looking at the photo, I don’t recognize this man. He has no eyebrows. His skin is red and shining from the ointment applied by the nurse that afternoon. His eyes are dulled by painkillers. He is trying to smile his cracked lips, but his cheeks hurt so much that his grin comes off as a grimace. Gone too is the hair on my head, and I reach one gauze-covered hand to feel that my hairline has been burnt back past my ears.
“You look like the Red Skull,” George tells me.
“Come on, man. I’m sorry. You gotta let me go.”
“Actions have consequences,” George tells me, smiling, pausing enough for me to take in the message privately even though there are two others in the room. Then, “This is how it works. You assaulted an officer.”
I didn’t assault an officer, intentionally. I assaulted a George. I explain this to Sirleaf Day, via his answering machine, which tells me in response that he is “out of the country pursuing investments, leave a message and I’ll be sure to get back to you.” After three days, I’m not so sure, so I then explain this to the public defender before my arraignment and urge her to bring up this backstory to the judge, but she is not really interested in hashing it out at this time. My assigned attorney is more focused in setting bail, aiming for a reasonable $20,000. I question her strategy when the bail comes in at $100,000 instead, due to the seriousness of my crime and the fact that I’m a flight risk. I also get a trial date. In a month.
The last time I see George is when he stops by my table after the judgment to say, “I’m taking Tosha to Sandals Jamaica tomorrow, so don’t expect any visits. You enjoy your vacation too.”
Sunita Habersham is not going to rescue me. I know this. And I know why. And I understand, too, although I desperately want her to, although I fantasize about it, although once a nurse comes by in flipflops and I think it’s Sun for enough seconds to be crushed by the truth. When Tal doesn’t appear, I know why as well. Because she knows what Sun knows now. That I tried to burn her beloved house down. And Tal might even know why I tried to do it, that it was for her as much as anything, but I know she doesn’t forgive me. Forgiveness comes later in life, after you’ve created enough disasters of your own. The biggest revelation, I’m surprised, is how many other Mulattopians join in the silence. No Roslyn with her army of lawyers, not even to gloat. No Spider. Because they all know. That much is clear by the third day, when they release me to the general prison population and no one comes to bail me out. They all know. About my intentions. About the house. I know that they all know.
But I know more than this. Because when the charges are listed—Assaulting an Officer, Resisting Arrest, Burning without a Permit—that not one of them told my story. Because for days I wait for the real charges to hit: First Degree Arson, Attempted Arson, Destruction of Historically Protected Property, and so on. But they never come. The mulattoes never snitch on me. They protect their own.
—
My cellmate, Héctor, doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. He doesn’t talk too much, which is a good thing, because the cell is too small to navigate through awkward conversation. His is the top bunk, and there he cries every night, which really frees me up to start doing the same if I’m so moved. Besides the one morning he says “La vida es triste,” and shrugs, we don’t talk about it. I like it in the cell better than in the lounge, which is much too communal for my tastes. The scary black dudes, the scary white dudes, and the scary Latino dudes all hang in their own sections of the hall, surrounding a loose collection of just plain scared unaffiliated dudes who sit in the middle waiting to see which tribe is going to victimize them. I try to hang over by the black dudes, but get the look that tells me I’m a racial suspect, so go sit on the edge of the Latino section a noncommittal distance from Héctor. In the great American mulatto tradition, I pass myself off as a Puerto Rican. By the end of the first day, this proves to be a wise decision, and the only cost is the sacrilege of lying about both my dead parents’ entire ancestral lines. Which is not a small cost, and hurts every time I repeat it in my pathetic high school Spanish. It hurts more than later, when one of the guys calls me the “Crimson Coconut,” a name which sticks in the ward across cultural lines, even though the burning redness on my face is already starting to fade away. But it’s worth the humiliation to be allowed into even the outskirts of a tribe.
My first visitor comes two days later. It feels like much longer, so much so that when I get called up, I tell them my name again, because I think they have the wrong guy.
“Someone, they love you,” Héctor says from the bulge of the top bunk. He sounds slightly surprised.
Sunita Habersham sits in a crowded cafeteria-style room at a round table, and doesn’t look up at me even when I sit down across from her. In front of her, a stack of comic books sits in a perfectly organized pile, but even still she adjusts the corners of it with her hands, identifying some invisible lack of symmetry. When I say hi, she says, “I got you this week’s pull list, and last week’s; I don’t think you read them. I could have brought in more but Spider chickened out. He’s scared of prisons. He’s waiting in the car.” Sun’s voice trails off at the end, and then she finally looks up. And then she stares straight at me. And we’re not talking.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and in doing so realize while I truly need to express these words, and am completely and eagerly willing to say them, they are also utterly inadequate.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Sunita asks me too loud, but nobody else in the place turns around, because that is not just an appropriate question in this room, it is the whole theme. It should be painted in ornate gilded letters on the wall. But Sun knows what I was thinking. And the only addition I could add would be offensive: that I thought I could pull it off.
“Tal wants to come, to see you. I told her not to—I don’t want her to see you like this, Warren.”
“Me either. But please tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll talk to her when I get out.”
“We can try to get the cash for the bond, but that amount…Jesus. I know Roslyn has it, but she’s been bugging since Loving Day. The protesters are still there, you know that right? The white protesters—the black ones left, I think they had to go to work. Somebody got the city to serve eviction papers this morning, now they’re saying all the propane tanks constitute a fire hazard. Roslyn’s told everyone to kill their cell phone service, instituted a ‘media blackout.’ She’s even telling people you tried to destroy the ‘sacred house.’ ”
“To be fair, I did try to destroy it.” I have to admit.
“Yeah, but she’s acting like that shit hole is the Temple Mount. All this while the construction crew has started chopping it up.” Sunita starts laughing, covers her mouth when she can’t stop. I smile but am silent. I want to laugh too but am in jail and that isn’t funny. “I can’t deal with all this. Your court date isn’t for weeks, but I think I have to get out of there. Tal’s fine, has everyone around her. But I need a break. Spider’s going down to work a zydeco festival in Louisiana next week. I’m thinking of going, but I don’t want you—”
“Go.”
“I went on your computer, emailed your friend Tosha. She said she thinks she can get her husband to drop the charges but I don’t know how soon—”
“Go on the trip, get a breather,” I tell her. “I’ll wait here till you get back.” And Sunita Habersham starts to smile a bit at that too, as I inten
ded, but looks at me again and stops.
“Wow. You really fucked up.”
“Yeah. I do that sometimes.”
“Yeah, me too,” Sunita Habersham tells me, then pushes the comics across the table.
It won’t be for another hour, when I’m be back in my cell on my mattress, that I’ll open the first comic on the pile, The Manhattan Projects 12. It will take until then for me to see the note that I’d forgotten I’d even written to Sun, as it falls out onto my coarse blanket.
Thanks for leaving this. Love you too, it now says at the bottom in Sunita Habersham’s handwriting.
—
I finally manage a successful career in comics, both as a merchant and an artist. The comic books I read to the point of memorization, I sell. Their market value in cigarettes and stick deodorant proves to be so high that I use that boon to trade for pencil and paper to start drawing daily comics of my own to cash in on the boom. The result is really some of my best work; it’s like printing money. Thursday’s full-page spread of our local representatives from the Latin Kings portrayed as superpowered mutants goes to the highest bidder for three breakfast muffins and a mini-tube of Aquafresh. Some of the black crew are so impressed by it that they’re even talking of claiming me now.
Ten days later, the guard comes to my cell and gives me three minutes to gather my things and get out.
“Holy shit, the mutts bailed me,” I say when he leaves. Héctor hears me.
“ ‘Mutts.’ This gang you say you hang with, what’s up with that?” Héctor hits me with this as I’m rushing around, gathering my remaining illustrations in a pile.
“They’re just a bunch of mixed people. Half-black and -white folks. African and European. A little Indian. They got a kinda club.”
“So, they like Dominicans or Puerto Ricans or something?” Héctor rolls to a sitting position on his mattress, and from my bed I get a good view of his hairy beige feet.
“No. They’re American. Just black and white. And Indian, sometimes.”
“But yo, how is that different?” Héctor bends over, so I see the tips of his little dreads and his eyes staring at me, confused.
“I don’t know. They speak English,” is all I can think to offer.
“I speak English too, bro,” Héctor says, lying back on his bunk, finished with the discussion.
The mutts didn’t bail me out. There is no bail. There is no bail because there are no more charges. There is no one waiting for me but a clerk from my public defender’s office, who delivers this news and no more. As I walk back on the street, though, I decide to read my release as a silent gift. From Tosha. And I silently thank her as I rush toward Suburban Station and the way toward home.
24
THERE ARE THREE TRAINS that are supposed to stop at Wayne Junction, which is just two blocks below the mansion. Hardly anyone gets off there, though, because the train costs $1.50 more than the bus and is mostly for middle-class people and there aren’t a lot of those living on the border between North Philadelphia and Germantown. The conductor seems surprised when I ask him to make the stop, which I have to do or they’ll just crawl right by the platform as if the driver is covering his eyes the whole time.
I trudge up the hill of Germantown Avenue bringing flowers. For Tal. Roses. White for my little big girl. It’s trite and feeble and they’re a little brown around the edges because I got them at a kiosk in the station, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know, but know I have to do something, start somewhere. And if anyone else sees me—and everyone will, everyone will see me coming in—I want them to know that no matter what they think of me, this is what I think of her.
But no one in Mulattopia will see the gesture. Because when I get to the gate, I see that no one is there.
I stop walking. Look to the other side of the street. Try to figure out how I could get lost. In my own hood. I’m next to a park now. The fence looks the same, but nothing else. I look across the street, and the row houses look the same. But nothing else.
The trailers are gone. All the trailers are gone. Halfie Heights is barren. Mixed Mews is no more. I can see the earthen marks of worn ground, the dead brown patches in the grass, but all the other trailers are gone.
I look up the hill. I look up the hill, and at all the grass, and at the walkway. I keep looking because I can’t believe it. I walk closer, looking for someone to explain this. For something that will make sense to me. I don’t see that thing. Everyone’s gone. Everything’s gone. The garage is there. I keep walking along the fence, in the gate left unlocked and open. I keep walking. I walk up the hill. Don’t see her. Tal is gone. I keep walking.
The house is gone.
I stand on the top of the hill, by where the mansion’s front steps are supposed to be, and circle around, looking around. Looking and looking. There’s nothing to see. An exposed and barren basement squints at the daylight, its cover having run away. A brick-lined hole in the ground. Inside an old water heater. Pipes connecting to nothing. Spools of wiring like dead vines. Scraps of wood and snow of sawdust.
I sit down because I can’t stand for this. I sit on the lip of the hole and look inside, then again around.
Tal is gone. The house has gone. The house has absconded.
I’ve lost Tal.
The house is gone.
The door to the garage opens, and Tal comes out. My daughter. The garage door slams shut behind her before she realizes that it’s me, that I’ve come for her. Before I realize, it’s her, that she’s stayed for me.
My daughter starts to run my way, so fast at first, then slows, then stops halfway. Her arms drop, hang still, and she takes a slow step back even. Staring as if I am the unnatural aberration.
“You didn’t break out, did you? Because that would be really stupid, Pops,” Tal asks.
“No, honey. The charges were dropped,” I tell her. And I don’t get up. And I don’t mind that it takes her a moment to come closer, because as she’s standing still like that I can just look at her, see her again. When Tal reaches me, she reaches down. She hugs me while she’s still standing up, and doesn’t let go as she bends her knees and sits on the cellar edge beside me.
“Honey?” I ask over her shoulder. “Where’s the house?”
“Roslyn bought it.”
“Okay. But where is it?”
“I had to sell it. I thought I had to get you out,” Tal tells me, then grows quiet after I audibly thank the Lord a few times and adds, “Not the land, though. They just bought the house. They just took the house part.”
I pull back from Tal, hold her arms in my hands, look at her face. Wait for her to crack a smile, to tell me she’s joking. Instead she says, “They wanted to keep it safe,” and I have no response to that.
—
My daughter says Sun and Spider are supposed to be arriving back today as well, but I don’t want to go into the garage, where Tal has moved the rest of our things, and wait for them. I don’t want to go inside at all. I’ve been inside for sixteen straight days. I don’t want anything in between me and the sky until it’s necessary.
When it gets dark, it’s not cold, but the mosquitoes come, so we gather the scraps of wood the house shed in its departure, make a pyre on the packed dirt floor of the hole, close enough to the wall that we can keep sitting on it. Tal wants to use the art projects my students left behind as a fire starter, but I gather some newspaper from the recycling instead.
“Where did they go?” I ask when Tal’s finally gotten the bigger pieces of wood siding ignited. She pulls herself up to the wall, sits down next to me.
“Malaga.”
“Malaga,” I say, and I lose it. I can’t help myself.
“They bought the island. It was the big surprise. Roslyn told everyone at the last minute then three days later, they were off. What’s so funny?”
“Maine. One Drop’s in Maine. He finally found a place he can feel black enough.”
Tal’s quiet for a bit, staring at the fire
with me. Waving the smoke out of the way in the moments when the wind blows it back. After a while, after the wood cracks and sparks and the structure we built falls in on itself, Tal says, “Pops?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“You know part of why you hate that guy is because you’re projecting your own racial insecurities onto him, right?”
“I do, honey,” I say, but I didn’t before.
—
Tal falls asleep on my shoulder before the embers die. There’s a light mist of rain, but not enough that it matters. Leaning my head on hers, I almost fall asleep as well, but then I worry she’ll fall forward into the basement, so I scoot back and lay her head and shoulders in my arms. She’s heavy, I’m tired, but it’s no burden. Because even though she just turned eighteen, asleep like this I can still see the last moment of childhood on her. The last fleeting sparkle. Tal’s eyes are closed, her mouth is open, her chest rises and falls, and in the firelight I catch a glimmer of the baby she was. I see it there and I rock her lightly in my arms, I rock her, and I can feel it right on her when I lift up one hand and wipe the dew off her forehead.
It’s just a Wednesday in Germantown, but the streets are quiet and the lawn is empty and I look around at what is left after the house is gone. And I see a savannah.
I also see them.
Off at the far end. Only two, but they come up from the slopping bank at the back of the property.
I watch them as they walk up the hill. Disappear behind three oak trees, reemerge on the other side.
They stop there. Looking at me.
They’re so far away. They can come closer. The drizzle, it starts hitting a little harder. I don’t care, we’re not running. I want them to come closer. There’s plenty of room around the fire. But still, they’ve stopped there.
I see, even from here. One is a man. One is a woman. He, black. She, white.
Standing together. Staring, across the tall ghetto grass. But I’m not scared. I hold on to Tal, who breathes in more life and future. I have everything but nothing that can be taken from me.