Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“You want me to help you? You got to help me. Just tell me what’s going on so I can fix it.”

“She thinks you might be fucking some white dude.”

“ ‘Some white dude?’ She thinks I’m gay? What the hell?”

“Hey, I don’t know what’s—”

“You don’t know because it’s none of your business. Man, just show me what you got to show me.”

I open the garage door. I bring him over to the corner to look at the cigarette ashes, but he’s sighing, barely paying attention. I stand on the perimeter of my imaginary crime scene and point to them, like on cop shows. I give him my theory: that the crackheads moved in when my dad was gone. Maybe they were here when he was sick, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “And they smoke too. By this old, wooden house. That’s really dangerous, you know? I don’t want there to be a fire,” I tell him, and say it louder to break him out of his distraction. I try to sound as somber as possible on the f -word. Fire . Glorious fire. All-changing fire, destroyer of worlds, lifeblood of the phoenix, god of renewal. All that.

“Of course they smoke. They’re crackheads. It’s not like they’re shoving rocks up their noses,” and with that, George pulls his own cigarette out, pads himself for a lighter. He turns, barely even looks at the evidence I have so generously provided.

“That’s some shit, that I’m gay. Man, I wish I was gay. I wish I got a pass like that. I’m the opposite of gay: I’m not happy. I’ve been unhappy for a lot of years now; she knows that. And I know — and trust me I know this — I got no no good reason to be unhappy. I got a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful house and all that, but I’m unhappy. That’s the fucked up thing. If I was gay, I could point to that and say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up. Turns out I’m gay,’ and no one would be mad at me. Instead I’m unhappy with the perfect life and everybody hates me.”

He’s right about this: I hate him right now. That could have been me in his house. Those could have been my kids, even the ugly one. He took that. George is a good cop, because he can read minds. He turns to me and says, “Don’t get no ideas. She ain’t single.”

I know she isn’t single. I knew when I went to Wales, got drunk every night, then eventually married a woman who would give me her own well-earned “I’m not happy” speech. He gave his wife kids and yet fared no better. You start with “I love you” and then you build everything on those three words, but then it only takes those three other words to strip it all down. “I’m not happy,” and then the misery goes from the speaker to the recipient. Speaking it wasn’t the end to unhappiness, it was the transfer of it.

“Look, man. That’s between you and her. I’m sorry this is happening, but you’re right, it’s none of my business. So…what do I do about the crackhead thing?”

“You move, nigga.”

“That’s not an option.”

“You know how to leave town. Just do it again.”

“I can’t fucking move, George. I’m broke. I got to spend all the money getting this place good enough to sell. I got a seventeen-year-old girl in here to protect and this place is infested with crackheads. So now what?”

“Warren, you’re on the border between Germantown and North Philly. You’re dealing with the side effects of centuries of economic and social disenfranchisement. So yeah, there are drug addicts here. You know this. It’s like complaining there are chipmunks in the woods. Don’t get a gun. You’ll miss and wound them and then they’ll sue you and then you’re really screwed. Just get a security system. Protect yourself, protect your daughter. Buy a Taser if you want — but don’t get a gun unless you’re willing to kill somebody, and trust me, you’re not. Head to a security store. Matter of fact, have Tosha help you, because that woman knows all about that shit. I know she knows all about that shit. You can tell her I told you, that I know, that she knows, all about that shit.”

“You know she loves you,” I tell him. It seems like the right thing to do. Not for him, but for me, because he’s starting to piss me off and Tosha is my true friend and I like the way he flinches when I say it. I know Tosha does, though. I’m sure no matter how bad he’s done her over the years, she still does, and would take him back. I say it also because I want someone to say that to Becks every time I come up in a conversation. I know he still loves you . And I want it to hurt when she hears it, too.

“I know she loves me. And I love her. But saying that shit is easy and doing it, working on it year in and out, keeping it alive when it feels like it’s slowly killing you, that’s fucking hard. I’m tired, bro.”

George sniffles that broad nose and walks off down the hill toward his car. He’s bald, but shaves it so you can’t tell, and there are enough brown men still doing that for style that he gets away with it. He puts his fedora back on, and between that and the raincoat he probably never has to pull the badge to prove he’s a detective. Still, it doesn’t look like a costume on him. It just looks like detectives must face some sorts of rainstorms they haven’t told the rest of the world about. When George turns around to stop and look at me, he’s got a dramatic strut going too. All he’s missing is a synthesizer soundtrack and he’d be a living embodiment of the investigators we watched on prime-time television in our childhoods.

“ ‘Are you gay?’ ” he repeats, yelling to me over his shoulder. And then he laughs again, pointing at me like he’s caught the playful prank I was setting. “Man, I’d suck a thousand dicks if I could get away with that excuse.”

—

With Tosha’s credit card, I buy sixteen closed-circuit video cameras with night-vision and thermal detection, all of which feed wirelessly to an external hard drive connected to my laptop. I get the cheapest cameras I can because I want low-quality images. I want blurry faces and dark shapes. I don’t want proof that any specific crackhead is haunting my house, I want proof of a general, unknowable infection, something to show the insurance company later without making some pathetic wretch’s life even worse. I buy Digital Night Vision Binocular Goggles, 1x24 zoom, with head straps and a carrying case. I buy a M26c Taser gun with laser targeting, and a baseball bat — Triton Senior League model SL12T aluminum composite — the only sporting equipment in the store. Then I buy two more bats, one for each door in the house, another for upstairs.

“So he says I know surveillance? Damn right I know surveillance. Glad he knows I know surveillance,” Tosha says a little too loud. She’s been talking too loud since she picked me up, arriving a few minutes after George drove away. Tosha laughs and the sound is red, bitter, dry. It scares the clerk behind the counter and he motions to go help another customer, but she won’t let him leave either.

“Can we get a GPS tracker? A little one. Real little. Hardly noticeable. Something like that.” Tosha points to the one she likes. It’s as small as a cigarette lighter. To me she says, “Oh I know all about George. I know all his secrets now.”

“You still think he’s screwing some dude?”

“Come on,” she tells me, brushing off her earlier theory. “The only man that bastard loves is himself. This isn’t about another man. It’s even worse. It’s a goddamn white woman.” The white guy on the other side of the counter pretends he didn’t hear that, keeps his expression passive and servile. We have truly arrived in a new age.

Already, the boxes of equipment are piled up as if we’re in the early stages of invading a rogue state. Already, we have twice what I’d budgeted.