She sighed. You know what . . . She paused. You don’t think I’ve had crises too? Your dark semesters of the soul? Where were you, huh? In that dark abyss you said I can’t possibly understand? I’m supposed to drop my drawers for you because you finally realize I exist? Why don’t you go to the Adjunct, or to a swarm of fruit flies or something?
They don’t have what you have, Christine. You know, that thing—and here I grabbed her hand, threaded her slender brown fingers with my own, brushed my fingertips along her red polished nails—where you close your eyes and touch my forehead and make my pain lift from me and you fly it away into the sky?
You think when I do that the pain just flies off to the sky? That’s pretty cute, Reg.
Christine stood, carrying our youngest child to his room. After a while when she didn’t return, I went searching for her. I found her in our bedroom changing into her nightclothes. She turned herself from me, covered her body as if I were a stranger to her.
Could you knock?
Knock?
Yes, knock. Damn.
I wandered from the room mourning our lost intimacy; I didn’t even know when it had left us to rot beneath the earth. I slumped onto the couch in the warm divot her body had made. Submerge me in water and envelope me in darkness and this must be exactly how a womb feels. I touched my forehead, hoping somehow to do that thing that Christine can do. I felt no lighter.
She returned and sat on the opposite end of the couch from me, her body stiffened, an elbow on the couch’s arm propping up her cheek. Christine stared for a while into our darkened TV, and when she turned her eyes to me she watched me as if I were an indelible stain on her heart.
Her face, the disdain of her cute-even-when-disdainful face, reminded me of the first time Christine put her hand to my forehead and removed my pain.
This was late in college, and loneliness felt to me like wading into the deepest and longest tunnel. Loneliness had been my oldest companion, but this strain of loneliness felt new, for some reason. I was twenty-one then. An adult. My loneliness had reached maturity alongside me. My old friend could drink now, and entertaining him felt like entertaining an abusive drunk. This crime of slowly killing me was an adult felony now.
Christine was new and I liked having her newness by my side. I sat in her dorm room with my head in my hands. She remained quiet as I tried to explain to her this emptiness inside me. Close your eyes, she whispered. And I did, preparing to receive her body, but instead she placed her hand at the spot right between my eyes.
I jerked my head from side to side. Why you touching my face? I chuckled a bit. There was a laugh in my voice, but my fight-or-flight reactions had been triggered. Relax, Reg. She spoke softly. Calm your ass down. Stop. I stopped. Looked up at her. She said: You trust me, right? You trust me? I wanted to nod, but I didn’t. I just watched the brown pools of her eyes. Trust me, Reg.§ She eased her hand onto my forehead. Close your eyes. I did, and the black at my eyes became tinged in blue. I felt a heaviness lift from my limbs, my muscles. I opened my eyes and it looked like soot rising from me and swirling away in a cyclone.
How do you feel? she asked, taking wobbly steps to slump herself into the chair at her desk. I noticed she limped a bit and I wondered whether she had limped that way before. I couldn’t remember.
What’s wrong? I asked.
I’m good, she said. How do you feel?
I’m good, now. ’Cause of you, I’m good.
I didn’t feel happy, not exactly, but I felt fine. I felt that me and Christine were one and me and the desk were one and everyone else, even the stray cats who wandered campus, they and I were one. I felt this matter-of-factly. Everything’s beautiful, Christine, I said.
And everything was. Objectively beautiful, and that was all fine.
How did you learn to do that? I asked.
Remember that house I showed you over on the Northside, the one over in Hilltop?
Beautiful House?
Yep, that’s what I used to call it when I was a little girl. Beautiful House. Twenty-one September Lane. Loved living there. Beautiful House. My parents even had a sign out front made after I named it Beautiful House. Man, Reg, that made me feel special. Beautiful. I never ever felt lonely until when my father told me he was leaving. His apartment wasn’t beautiful. Not in the least. And when I was at Beautiful House it was just me and my mother, her sad eyes and her mouth that opened only to tell me, Go out back and play, Christie. Go play. Enjoy this place. This not gonna be our place much longer.
So I went out to play all by myself all day long sometimes. Only so much you can play alone before you go inward. I don’t know how to explain this, Reg, but there is this blue river in there, and— You know what? I sound crazy, never mind.
No, Christine. You’re fine. I’m the crazy one.¶ Go ahead.
Somehow I knew I could touch my mother’s forehead and free her a little bit. It wouldn’t last, but I could do it, and I did. Took three years before the sheriffs came to drag us out of Beautiful House. I hate that day, Reg. I don’t need Beautiful House anymore, though.
No?
She rested her head on my chest. You’re my Beautiful House now. My mansion with many rooms. I’m never leaving my Beautiful House.
I blinked back into the present, still feeling the weight of college Christine on my breastplate, but when I looked over at her face—she appeared forlorn and old, nearly distraught, a haze beneath a blankness—the feeling began to fade.
In this dark, a blue wall and many oceans lay between us; I rubbed my forehead by reflex, thinking of Christine’s hand there.
Stop touching your forehead, she said. It’s like you’re playing with yourself.
This elicited a chuckle from both of us.
Lean back, she said. Close your eyes.
Lines and fields of blue. Pure blue. Electric. It came at me fast in beams and balls of bluelight. I shorted out in all that blue, and when I opened my eyes, Christine limped from me, hunched nearly into a ball.
Good night, she rasped.
It’s too early, I said. Don’t go.
I have to work in the morning, she said. One of us has to work.
I nodded, watching my wife limp away and dissolve into the darkness of our home.#
• • •
I’m not sure how to explain the feeling I got reading the final lines of Chambers’s email. Perhaps it was just a shudder I felt throughout my body, but it sure did feel like some sort of living spirit passing through me. Perhaps it was simply a moment of recognition, of seeing myself in Chambers’s words. His words on the screen swirled again, this time forming, briefly, my own face.
I remembered coming back one night from an evening class. As the bell tolled I could’ve sworn I felt eyes burrowing into me from above, and I looked up at the library tower and saw a twinkling blue light. I looked away, and when I peered again, I wasn’t sure, but I think I saw a hint of Chambers’s face, skeletal, looking down upon me. At first I stood paralyzed, unable to even conceive of moving. But the blue light! That skeletal outline. I dashed back toward the tower and snatched open the library door. I ran past the late-night scholars, past the lovers attempting discretion in a shadowy corner. I ran up the stairs. Up. Up. Up. Up until I reached the top. When I arrived, winded and pained in the chest, light-headed, I looked around at the nesting birds cooing gently. The scattered tobacco guts dumped from split cigars. A faint hint of reefer smoke. Other than that, there was nothing but darkness as if I entered a dimension made of just blueblackness. I looked out on the campus and saw the blue expanse of it as I had never seen it before. I became dislocated standing there, and for several moments I felt myself hover, spectral and blue.
Reading Chambers’s email now, I wondered, could this be the same night, the same time? He closed his final message to Freedman’s University with this:
After Christine left, I felt light, but tired. I closed my eyes for a second, and without warning I became disassociated from myself. I floated
above my body, a blue ghost, a puppet dangling from the rafters. I watched myself as one observes another person.
He put earbuds into his ears and milled about as if unsure what to do next. I wondered what he was listening to, but I could only hear a tinny tinkling. Soon he walked through the front door and into the night’s darkness. And before long he became enveloped in the evening and I could no longer see any trace of him.
* Ha! I couldn’t believe Chambers would take a shot at me, but then again, it made all the sense in the world. When I saw security escort him off campus—some months after he disappeared into the light on the hatemyprofessor stage—our eyes locked and he saw my smile. Perhaps he thought I smiled out of cruelty. It wasn’t that, at least not mostly. My only thought: It’s on. I smiled not at his misfortune, but at all the dreams of our shadow university growing right here in the shell of Freedman’s decaying husk. Everything was now coming to fruition, I thought. Maybe in that moment he realized it was I who sent his essay to the entire campus. Chambers is, after all, a smart guy
† Of course Chambers would prefer this version, it is perhaps the blandest and most milquetoast. The version collected and published in the book The Vexations: Fables, by seminal Cross Riverian folklorists the River Brothers (a team consisting of three women, none of them siblings), features Freddy killing his cousins, becoming drunk off their blood, and serving their wings, torsos, legs, and bulging fly eyes to the forest creatures of Cross River in a nice stew. Later versions of this and other River Brothers fables were sanitized for the capitalist machine (cartoons, movies, comic strips, and books), thus manufacturing generation after generation of weak and feebleminded Cross Riverian children.
‡ This is similar to how I find refuge in Idra. I spend most of my nights with my head to her breast listening to her heartbeat. She says I am mentally ill and she will nurse me back to health, but I don’t see where I’m more ill than anyone else. Idra wants to possess me physically, mentally, spiritually, and temporally. If she could lock me in a room with her and keep me there until the sky cracks you’d never see or hear from me again. This, she says, would be for my own good, but I am skeptical, so I escape to the morgue. Idra’s breast is a refuge from the morgue and the morgue is a refuge from Idra’s breast.
§ The playfulness! The tenderness! So endearing, the way Chambers would like us to see him as nothing if not fully human.
¶ Indeed.
# Choosing the proper email sign-off is an art, and for this message Chambers selected an excerpt from an unpublished and unfinished Roland Hudson poem I had never heard of titled “Hail Marys on the Bridge.” (Some sources list the title as “I’m Going to Tell You What My Water-Woman Told Me” Others list it as “The Negro Speaks of the Cross River,” but that’s just a refrain in the poem. The story of how Langston Hughes came to lift the line for the title of his famous poem, thus angering the people of Cross River and earning a lifetime ban from the town [enforced by Cross River’s three major crime families] is an interesting one, but perhaps one for a different time.)
The river has faces
The river has arms
The river knows laughter
The river knows harm
Is this what you want?
For me to jump?
Acknowledgments
The world certainly doesn’t require me, but my world has required so many who have offered a love and kindness that has been unimaginable. Far too many to name here.
First, I would like to thank the people of Cross River, Maryland, for tolerating my presence in their lives.
Thank you to Katie Adams, Gina Iaquinta, and Robert Weil, and everyone at W. W. Norton/Liveright for believing in my stories and for taking such great care with the work.
My gratitude to the editors who published previous versions of many of these stories in their literary journals and anthologies. Special thank you to Lauren O’Neal for reanimating David Sherman with your brilliant editing. Thanks to PEN America, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Kimbilio, Bowie State University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for providing support.
Much love and respect to Kima Jones, Allison Conner, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Words are too weak to express my gratitude.
To my agent, Monika Woods, thank you for getting me.
Thank you to friends and colleagues who have shared their time, jokes, and hearts with me over the years. Thank you to Eugenia Tsutsumi for the sentence. You know which one. Ricki, thank you for reading my drafts and for your encouragement. Special thanks to Andrea Cauthen for designing the Freedman’s University logo, but also for the years of friendship.
Rest in peace to my cat friend Isis, who passed while I was completing this book.
Thanks to Leroy for constantly showing me the true meaning of friendship.
The Yasiin Bey quote that opens Dr. Chambers’s essay in Special Topics in Loneliness Studies (p. 192) was said during a concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on December 31, 2016.
Most of all, my world requires my family, the one that made me (Mom, Pop, Duane, Omar, RIP Granny) and the one that I made. My mother, Monica Scott, passed away while production of this book was in its final stages. I’ll never forget that her encouragement started this writing thing for me and sustained me along the way. Rest in love, Ma. Samaadi and Madiba, Daddy loves you. Love you, Sufiya, my everything.
The Cross River Saga continues . . .
Also by Rion Amilcar Scott
Insurrections
The World Doesn’t Require You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Rion Amilcar Scott
All rights reserved
First Edition
Some of these stories were previously published in different forms: “David Sherman, the Last Son of God,” Midnight Breakfast; “The Nigger Knockers,” Uptown Mosaic and NY Tyrant; “The Electric Joy of Service,” Gigantic Worlds; “A Rare and Powerful Employee,” Bartleby Snopes; “Numbers,” Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History; “A Loudness of Screechers,” Barrelhouse and The Literary Review; “On the Occasion of the Death of Freddie Lee” was exhibited at Call + Response V; “Rolling in my Six-Fo’—Daa Daa Daa—with All My Niggas Saying: Swing Down Sweet Chariot Stop and Let Me Riiiide. Hell Yeah.,” Bosporus Art Project Quarterly.
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ISBN 978-1-63149-538-0
ISBN 978-1-63149-539-7 (ebk.)
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