Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“Daddy. Daddy, are you listening to me?”

“Sure I am, Fifi.”

“You drifted off there a minute.”

“I did?” the professor said. “Oh.”

“Daddy, I don’t want you going up to that park anymore.”

“I must have been thinking about Maitland,” Leon mused.

“Who’s Maitland, Daddy?”

“Frederic William Maitland. He wrote a history, the history of English law. Ideas can have a history, you see. People are too complex, their motivations too capricious to be documented accurately.” It was a fragment of a lecture he’d given thirty years earlier, but he experienced it as a new idea.

“So, Daddy, you’ll stay away from the park?”

“Whatever you say, honey.” Leon was reconsidering the notion of ideas having history separate from the people who had those ideas. Language can have a documentable history where the orator may not, he was thinking as he broke off the vid connection to Congresswoman Jones.

“Hi, mister,” the little girl said in the park three days later.

It had rained on Tuesday. Wednesday he started reading Marc Bloch’s book on feudal society. He had long admired the Frenchman’s patriotism but never read deeply of the man’s work. That afternoon he considered writing a history of his block of One twenty-fifth Street. He thought that maybe if he could keep it down to that, or maybe just a history of the businesses there... Maybe, he thought, the nature of the businesses would express the changing nature of the population, its makeup and income. Finally he fell asleep.

But on Thursday he made a pilgrimage to Morningside Park. He had forgotten the rain, his urban narrative, and any promises made to his daughter.

“What’s your name?” he asked the child.

“Tracie.”

“Do you come to the park every day, Tracie?”

“Not every day.”

“But many days?”

The child nodded vigorously and climbed up on the bench to sit next to her friend.

She told him all about a test she’d taken in which she misspelled the word merry-go-round.

“I thought it was marry go round,” she said and giggled. The love Leon felt for that child frightened him. He noticed that she had on the same cranberry-colored dress that she’d worn on Monday and supposed that it was either her favorite or that her parents were poor.

“Would you like some ice cream?” he asked Tracie.

“No thanks. But I would like to go swimming.”

“You would?”

“Yes please,” she said.

“But there’s no place to swim around here. And even if there was, it’s December.”

“Uh-huh. Yes there is. There’s a big lake, and it’s warm there.”

“You must mean the pond down in Central Park.”

“Nuh-uh. It’s a pond right here. Come on, I’ll show you.” She pointed up the path where her mother had been talking to the man named Bill.

“You go on,” he said, thinking that her mother would be angry at him for walking with her.

“But I can’t go swimming by myself. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Isn’t your mother up there?”

A frown knitted itself in the young face. Tracie concentrated on the words Leon spoke. He imagined them running through her mind again and again: Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’tyourmotherupthere. Isntyourmotherupthere, until it was just a fast jumble of meaningless sounds.

“Talking to Bill,” Leon added.

“Yeah.” Tracie grinned widely and jumped off the bench. “You wanna go swimmin’, mister?”

“No,” he said. “You go on.”

The gurgling cry of her mother’s call came just after Tracie rounded the bend.

Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie’s mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.

“Good afternoon, Leon,” the short chocolate brown young man said.

“Pell.” Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.

And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera’s full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager — after Leon had succumbed to the symptoms of Pulse use — and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn’t read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the classic novels, and he preferred listening to the East Coast Times to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell’s psychological motivation.

“How have you been, Leon?” Pell asked in the small two man elevator.

“Slow.”

“Fera said that you’ve been taking long walks.”

The elevator doors slid open on eight.

Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she’d been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken — Leon was never sure which.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews.”

“Mr. Jones,” she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. “This your son?”

“No. My daughter’s boyfriend.”

“You a boxer too, boy?” She spoke with a slight Korean accent.

“No, ma’am. I’m a congressional aide.”

Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.

“It’s all I got. The gin is good. The tea’s good for you.”

“No thanks. You been drinkin’ a lotta gin?” Pell asked, almost nonchalant.

“Fera’s worried, huh?” Leon said. He sat down in the reclining bamboo chair that his first wife had bought when they were just married.

Pell lit on an emerald hassock that came from Amherst with Leon and his second wife, Fera’s mother, Nosa.

“Yes she is, sir,” Pell admitted. He wore a soft gray andro-suit that was open at the collar, revealing a pendant of twigs bound together in the form of a falling man. “She said that your mind was wandering, that you were talking to children you didn’t know in the park. She called Dr. Bel-Nan. He assured her that it’s all a part of the healing process. Me coming up here is just to keep Fera from worrying. You know she’s drafted her first bill: the Chromosome Pattern Security Act. If it’s passed it will be the first law enacted that will encompass the planetary colonies.”

“You speak so well, Pell.” Leon said. “I remember when ‘nig’ and ‘motherfuckin’ chuckhead’ were in almost every sentence you spoke.”

Pell had a wide face and an equally broad grin. His eyes lit up and the corners of his mouth raised to form the shallow bowl of his delight.

“It’s only senators that can talk like that in Washington, sir.”

“But do you understand what you’re saying?” Leon asked.