“Sir,” the receptionist said, “would you like to have a seat?”
“No. I’d like the boxes,” he replied sharply.
This is the bitch, he thought, who’d fucked with Sylvia.
“I can’t give them to you,” she snapped. “Sylvia has to get them herself, because she has to sign.”
“Sign what?”
“A form saying it’s all hers and that nothing’s damaged.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does to the company.”
Don’t get upset, Diego. Set an example for Sylvia. He bit his lip and went to the elevator.
Sylvia sat up when she saw him without the boxes. “What’s the matter?”
He tried to sound relaxed. “You need to sign something to say that it’s yours and there’s no damage.”
“Okay, I’m ready,” she said as she jumped out onto the sidewalk.
Diego didn’t like the look in her eye, and he told her that.
“I’m cool,” she said, reassuringly. “I just want my stuff. I don’t care about their bullshit.”
No one else who’d been fired had gone through this, she thought. Former employees were usually allowed the courtesy of collecting their things in the company of someone senior.
She started off quickly and he jogged next to her.
“Who’s going to stay with the van if you go with me?” she snapped. “One of us has to stay put.”
“Don’t start any shit, Sylvia,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “I’m trusting you. They’re a bunch of dunces. You’re a genius. Think about it: in the grand scheme, do they really count? Letting them get to you is like an elephant being bothered by a mosquito. They are little black insects, Sylvia, that’s all they are. One smack and they’re done. Fuckem.”
She said she’d be calm. He leaned against the van and let her go.
She was caught off guard by the hiccups in her heartbeat as the elevator opened.
“Let me have the form,” she said when she got to the front desk.
She signed it quickly and handed it back. Fuck, she’d left the hand truck. The oversight pissed her off.
“How’d it go?” Diego asked when she arrived outside.
“I need the hand truck for the boxes.”
He patted her on the back.
“Now that everything is signed,” he said, “stay here and let me get them.”
She let him go.
Just as he was about to lift the first box, however, the receptionist said, “Keys first.”
“What keys?”
“Office keys. Sylvia still has office keys.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“She shoulda told you.”
“So I can’t get the boxes now is what you’re saying.”
“Exactly.”
He couldn’t hold it anymore. “You’re such a stupid fucking bitch,” he muttered.
She heard him. “Sir, do not call me outta my name. I’m not having it.”
He took a deep breath and began to walk away. Fuck, man, he thought, why’d you have to do that? He was about to turn around and apologize when he was startled by three words: “Fucking Puerto Rican.”
“Listen you fucking nigger bitch,” he said as he charged toward her, “I’ll break your fucking face.”
She screamed for help over the intercom as he slammed his palms against her desk and scattered her papers on the floor. She hit him in the head with a pencil sharpener as he stormed toward the elevator. Out of nowhere, it seemed, anxious employees were filling the reception area.
“They want the fucking keys. They want the fucking keys.” This was all he could manage to say when he got back to the van.
“What keys?” Sylvia asked.
“The office keys.”
She threw up her hands in disbelief. “Virgil said I didn’t have to worry about keys because they were going to change the locks. They’re getting on my fucking nerves now!” She kicked the side of the van.
“And that big fat pig of a receptionist called me a ‘fucking Puerto Rican’! Does she know who I fucking am? But you know what? She doesn’t need to respect me, because I’m Hispanic. Niggers talk all this unity shit and then they fuck you over!”
“I apologize,” Sylvia said as she marched toward the building. “But I’ve had enough of their shit for one day.”
They stepped out of the elevator together, anger raking their brows, to find the reception area jammed with employees. They loaded the hand truck methodically, trying to keep their anger under control by focusing on their task. They could feel the eyes on them. But they didn’t look. They just wanted to get out of there. There’d been a clamor of voices when they entered. Now there was a hush. The silence of an office. The silence of ringing phones and cooling systems and humming computer printers. Then there was a new quality to the silence. At first they couldn’t place it. Then they realized they were at the center of one of those collective hushes that descend on black people whenever the police appear.
“What’s the problem? We have a report of an assault and trespassing and disturbing the peace.”
There were two them. One was undoing his holster clip. You couldn’t take a chance with so many niggers.
Sylvia explained the situation as calmly as she could while the colored people faded through the walls, it seemed, to the safety of their cubicles.
“Who was assaulted?” the other officer asked. The receptionist said she was—by Diego, who began to cry. This wasn’t right. How could Staten Island trash make him feel this way? Him, an award-winning filmmaker. This wasn’t right, man. It wasn’t right at all. And with her hero broken, Sylvia began to cry as well.
“Do you work here?” the officer asked her.
“Not anymore.”
“Are you authorized to be here?”
“I’m just here to pick up my stuff,” she said, looking around her for support. There was none.
“Lock them up,” the receptionist yelled. “She’s trespassing. And he tried to choke me.”
The cops moved toward them. Then Boogie Boo came out.
“Y’all have gots to fire me,” she said to the others before addressing the police. “It’s all been blown out of proportion,” she said to the policemen. “If they just take the boxes and go everything will be okay. It’s all a misunderstanding. And there’s no need to have your hands on your guns. This is a place of business, not the streets. Sylvia, I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart for all these punk-ass negroes who work here.”
Sylvia hugged her.
“It’s okay, girl,” Boogie Boo said. “After this I might as well just come with you.”
The police escorted Sylvia and Diego out of the building with the boxes. The van, however, was gone. A homeless man said the same cops had given it a ticket and called to have it towed.
It was Diego who began to laugh at first. Sylvia held back—but she broke down completely when it began to rain. The situation was so absurd.
“You cried like a little girl,” she said, punching Diego’s arm. “You almost shit in your pants, didn’t you?”
“And you actually did,” he said.
“Can you imagine … after all that … the damn truck got towed?”
“And now it’s raining!” he added.
“What next?” she asked, gasping for air in the downpour. “We’re gonna get hit by lightning?”
“Don’t push it.”
They leaned against the boxes and laughed until they were tired, amusing the skittering passersby, who stole glances from beneath their umbrellas and shook their heads at the two maniacs getting soaked to the skin and loving it.
“Is there anything here that you really need?” Diego asked her.
She thought for a second. “No,” she said.
“Good. Let’s get coffee.”
They left the boxes in the hand truck and went downtown to an Irish dive near Times Square and settled into a musty b
ooth and ordered two scotch and waters from a waitress whose eyes told them she’d seen patrons at their worst. The scotch warmed Sylvia’s belly, and the dim light put her in a sober mood.
“I was just thinking of how many things have happened to me in the last couple of days,” she said, checking off events in her head.
“Hmmm-hm.” She wanted to talk, he realized. And he wanted to listen.
“I feel like such an idiot, Diego. Blind … phony. I should’ve left Umbra a long time ago, because I wasn’t happy. But I guess a lot of times when people aren’t genuinely happy, they try to destroy their beliefs. It’s hard to face your soul every day and not like what you see. It’s easier to face something so destroyed that you can say it is not really you … it makes it easier to remain in denial. Do you understand what I’m saying, Diego? You go from standing for something to standing for nothing in particular; you make everything relative, when you damn well know in your heart what is wrong and what is right.”
She leaned back in her chair.
“D’you know what you should do,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Take a vacation. Go somewhere quiet and spend a couple of weeks. Relax. Think. And come back.”
“I would love to,” she said, “but I’ve got to be careful with money … I’ve got to think about the future.”
He placed his hand on hers.
“The future, mi hija, is gonna happen whether you think about it or not. It doesn’t need your thoughts. You need thinking about. Go to vacation and think about yourself and see how you gonna prepare you to meet the future.”
She tossed back the balance of the scotch and found herself agreeing with him.
“Are you gonna come with me?”
“No, mi hija. You need to walk this path alone so that when the time comes you can lead someone.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon planning her trip. They would see about the van later.
Using one of Fire’s credit cards, Ian took a room in a small hotel on the cliffs of Negril. He barely ate any of the food that he ordered, and the maid complained to the manager about shit stains in the sheets. Two weeks after checking in, the six quarts of rum and pound of weed he’d brought with him were nearly done. He was hungry but he didn’t eat. No one cared about him. But care they would, he thought, when they saw his emaciation. He’d lost fifteen pounds and was down to a hundred and five. His skin was dry and it sagged around his joints. And he smelled. He hadn’t changed his underwear, taken a bath, or brushed his teeth in all that time.
Margaret. She shadowed his mind as it wandered to the edge of delusion. Sometimes she was with him in bed, mopping his brow and crying. Other times she was calling him on the phone from New York to tell him she was leaving Phil, and was on her way to save him.
Why, he was asking himself this morning, couldn’t he just ask her to leave Phil? He knew why. She’d remind him of her ultimatum, and he wouldn’t be able to meet it, because … he just couldn’t accept her past. The fact that she could accept his was irrelevant. They called this a double standard, but so what? Fuck them. Whoever they were. That was how he felt and he was too old to change. This was the crux of his problem, this knowledge that he was being unfair. A less intelligent or a more evolved man would not have been as troubled. A less intelligent man would not have recognized the incongruity in his argument; a more evolved man would have simply gotten over it or not have made it into an issue in the first place. But Ian was in the middle. And he just couldn’t cope. If he didn’t love her, then he wouldn’t have had a problem. But he did.
This morning, though, he was seized by an overwhelming feeling that he would die soon—from a gunshot. Phil had taken out a contract on him. He lit his second spliff of the day. Fuck, he thought, those seagulls were really eavesdroppers. He closed the sliding door, pulled the blinds. Margaret was the only one who could save him, he thought as he pissed on the carpet. Phil would listen to her if she begged him. He couldn’t die right now. He had to live to see his mother so he could spit in her face.
He sat on the bed and dialed Margaret’s number.
The telephone entered Margaret’s consciousness slowly. She was lying on the carpet in her living room with a throw pillow under her hips and Phil had his wood inside her moving at the right speed, at the right angle, with the right amount of force.
It was uncanny, she was thinking to herself, how much he’d begun to feel like Ian. She tightened her glam to savor the sweetness.
“Get it,” Phil said gruffly. She’d let him play dominator at times.
“Why?” she asked meekly.
“Because I say so,” he growled. He smacked her lightly on the hip.
“No, I won’t,” she said, inviting him to smack her a little harder. He did. She told him no again. He bit her shoulder and pinned her wrists behind her head.
“Get the phone,” he said again, ramming her deep for punctuation.
She felt a crackling in her bones now. She wanted to roll onto her belly so she could feel him deeper. But he held her down.
“Get the fucking phone or I’ll stop,” he said.
Desperation shook her. “No. Don’t stop fucking me. Pleeease! I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything,”
“So get it then.”
He raised his weight and she lowered her legs and slithered to the phone, using the opportunity to turn over and cock up on her knees with the pillow beneath her belly.
A heat sliced through her body when he entered her again. He gripped her by the waist.
“Tell whoever it is that you’re getting fucked.”
She picked up the receiver. “Hello,” she said, out of breath now. “I’m getting fucked. And I’m loving it and I don’t want it to stop and—”
“No one ever fucked you like this,” Phil dictated.
“No one ever fucked me like this,” she said.
“Ever has, does, or will.”
“Ever has, does, or will. Oh fuck, Phil … I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m comiiiinng!”
She collapsed on the floor.
Phil replaced the receiver and lay down beside her. She licked the sweat off his forehead. She was glad she had him, she thought. He was wonderful.
The phone rang again and they both began to laugh.
“Will you please get that, luv?” Phil asked, falling out of character now.
“I’m too embarrassed,” she said. “It might be the same person calling back.”
“If they ask, tell them they must’ve called a wrong number.”
Giggling, she picked up the receiver. “Hello,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.
It was Ian. She felt her heart leaning against her ribs. He was disoriented. Slurring his words. She had to be strong, though, she thought. She couldn’t let him mash up her peace. She made up her mind to be very sharp if she had to.
“Margaret, I going dead. Phil … Phil … him is there with you? You was making love to him when I called, Margaret? Tell me no. Tell me that white pale dog wasn’t fucking me woman. Margaret, Phil hire a man fe kill me. Call de police. Send them quick. Margaret, you sleeping with a murderer.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“Because I want to love you, Margaret. Lawd. Do. Don’t make him kill me.”
“Where are you?” she heard herself asking. Fuck, she thought, why can’t I be cold? Why can’t I just hang up? “Where are you?” she asked again.
“Hell.”
The word bounced hard in her head like a marble. She fought her instinct to help him. But before she knew it she was asking him how she could help.
“Leave Phil,” he replied. “Kill him before him kill me!”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said.
“You won’t kill him?” he asked.
“No,” she snapped, exasperated not just by this mad request but the whole fucking situation.
“Then I will kill him when I come,” he said. His voice had gathered the conviction of a pledge. “And when I kill him, I coming
for you, you fucking whore. Is you send de white boy fe kill me. I going cut off you titty-dem and stuff dem up you big pussy hole.”
She slammed down the receiver and screamed. Phil held her and tried to console her. But her pain ran too deep for him to truly understand.
Ian swallowed a mouthful of rum and passed out. He came to about three hours later, then lapsed in and out of consciousness until he fell off the bed and hit his head, which woke him up.
He didn’t know how much time had passed since speaking to Margaret, and could only remember the gist of the phone call. He knew he’d upset her though. What about, he wasn’t sure. He needed her. That was the most important thing. He felt sick. He leaned over and retched and retched but nothing came up but stinking air.
He called her a few hours later, sober but hungover. As the phone rang, he thought of what he would say, but she picked up before his thoughts had cohered.
“Hello,” he said, searching for a suitable entrée, “aah … aaah …”
“Is this Ian?”
“Yes … aah …”
“Haven’t you hurt me enough? Why don’t you just leave me alone? I hate you, you fucking bastard. I hate you for the way you try to manipulate me. I can’t have you in my life anymore. You’ve gone too far this time. Don’t ever speak to me again. Do you hear me? Ever!”
He tried to remember what he’d said before, but he couldn’t. He needed to know to apologize. Having no alternative, he asked her.
Stunned, she didn’t answer.
“Answer me,” he asked quietly. “Please. I’m having a rough time.”
She didn’t respond.
“Margaret, please talk to me. I want to love you, Margaret,” he said, exhaling the words like they were his last breath.
She still didn’t answer and he became very afraid.
“Please … Margaret … talk to me. I need you. I’m so down … don’t hurt me when I’m down. I don’t want to lose you, Margaret … I want you in my life …”
He paused for a moment, thinking he had heard her begin to speak. As he listened keenly, desperation gripped his body. “I going kill myself.”
When he heard the dial tone, he began to consider it seriously. He was adrift with no one to look after him. Fire was gone and Margaret too. And he didn’t feel the strength to go it alone. He wanted to lose the ability to feel because his senses seemed tuned only to pain. He lay in a wreck on the floor with the phone to his ear and whimpered like a mangy dog.
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