Mat Johnson - Loving Day

Shooting down to a squat, I stay low till my legs begin to hurt. There’s no phone. I have no phone, not in this country. Not in this house. I cannot call anyone even if I wanted to. No Becks. My father is dead. I am alone. My breath, it’s so loud, and I try opening my mouth wider just to get the sound to stop taunting me.

I am a big guy, six four, weigh 225 naked, and I decide to act like I am a big man and I shoot upright, head for the room my father’s work materials are in, go to grab the biggest thing I can find. This turns out to be a long wooden spear, an extension for a foam paint roller. I hold it with two hands. I am an African warrior! Who looks like a Celtic one. I grip it so hard my hands become even more white, adrenaline having replaced my blood. And then I go to the window. And I want him to see me. I want him to see my size. My determination, my intent. My lance. I look out the window.

And he’s gone.

And for a second I’m even more scared. I want to be relieved, but now I’m incapable of it. Rod in hand, I check the other windows. I see nothing. I go upstairs for a better view, but no change. Germantown Avenue, past the fence, is without life. I stare out for minutes. Then more. Occasionally a car drives past along the chipped cobblestones, but otherwise it’s empty, too late to come home and too early to drive out, which puts the time around four A.M. I stand there, on the second floor, in the burnt-out room of my father’s. He chose it because it has the best view of the lawn, I realize. And when, many minutes later, I grow more tired than scared, I head back downstairs to lie down.

Tomorrow, which is today, I will go sit at a table in a large crowded room and smile at strangers, drawing pictures of their heads on muscle-bound bodies covered in leotards, and they will pay me cash. It is so absurd I laugh a little in my head, and I need that to get into my tent again, slide myself into the sleeping bag. Fear that , I remind myself. Fear social failure, you’re better at it. I saw a crackhead, in the night, in Germantown. This hardly qualifies as a supernatural experience. I chuckle a bit, and go to zip up the tent, and then I see a person standing by my door.

She’s a woman. She’s not looking at me; she’s looking up the stairs. My breath gets heavy again, but she keeps looking up there, not over at me. And she’s a ghost. Not the dead kind. She’s clothed in a dirty gown, the lingerie of a drug-addled seductress. She’s a white woman, gaunt cheeks like bones around the dark hollows of her eye sockets. If she looks at me I will pee myself, I will shit myself on this very floor, and I will scream too. I don’t care what she wants, I just don’t want her to turn her head and look at me. She coughs. It keeps going, phlegm rising from behind her toenails with each convulsion till it gets to the back of her throat and jumps to her hand. It echoes through the house. It is more here than I am. There’s a splatter and then she’s gone.

When I hear the front door click behind her, I pull myself frantically from my bag and out of my tent and grab my spear and head for her. I am rage. I am anger. All the fear has been recycled. But I am caution, too, and when I reach the door I think there might be a pack of them out on the porch, the monsters, the rags falling from the skin, prepared to ambush me. So I let go of the handle.

I. Am back. In Philly.

Landing in an airport doesn’t count. Sitting in a taxi can be done anywhere. This, this feeling, this, is Philly .

They want something from me. They must or they wouldn’t be here. Do they think I’m white? Out of my element? Vulnerable? They want something and I have nothing. I am a man who has nothing, all this time meandering through life yet all I have is wounds. I have no treasure, and I never want to know what they’d take from me instead.

There is a tattered curtain over the entryway’s left window and I pull it aside and the glass revealed is hand blown and old and distorted. But I see movement.

And I see them. I see the figures. A man and a woman. Staring at the house. Standing on the lawn. Walking. Walking backward. Staring at the house, walking backward. Away from me. Until they reach the fence to the street and float up, and over.

I keep staring and waiting for more, but there’s nothing there. I keep staring though, until my breathing calms down, but nothing happens out there. When I turn around, I look through the shadows at this home. I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again. I see Sisyphus’s boulder, just with doors and beams. I can’t take it so I look out the window once more, where nothing is coming to get me, because the neighborhood doesn’t need to, because it knows I’m trapped and it has all the time in the world. Then I look back into the house.

And that’s when I decide I’m going to burn the fucker down.

IF YOU’RE A professional illustrator, you can show up at a comic convention, rent a table, and then charge people cash to draw a picture of whatever they want. If you show up early, do this all day, you can make enough to last for a month, tax free. I am broke. So after barely sleeping, I get up. I get out of the tent. I don’t look around. I stomp and bang so I can’t get scared by any other noises from unknown sources. I gather my supplies and let them slap around too. I lock the door behind me. And I run away from Germantown before it can wake up and stop me.

I’m an inept comic-book artist. My work is too realistic, too sober. My superheroes look like grown men standing around with their underwear on the outside of their pants. Even as I draw, I’m embarrassed for them. There is a line between being a fan of something and actually being good at creating that thing. “A line” makes it sound like a narrow, slight thing, but the difference can be more like an untraversable wasteland of parched failure. At first, Becks took my lack of success as a comic-book artist as a sign that I was meant for a more sophisticated audience, the gallery instead of the newsstand. She liked that idea, that she’d be a successful solicitor and I her famous artist spouse. The reality of this never took hold, though. So she loaned me the money for a comic-book store instead, a gesture she clearly regretted almost immediately, for years telling people at parties “he sells comic books” as a passive punishment for not abandoning the whole venture and agreeing to become a stay-at-home dad.

Most of the illustration work I’ve gotten from comic publishers has been “fill-ins”: some guy is supposed to draw a standard twenty-two-page comic but only shows up with eleven pages by the deadline, and they need someone to finish the job. Or to do a self-contained issue of a series that will appear between longer story arcs, put out by the publisher just to give the regular penciller time to catch up on his or her monthly due dates. After a while, I accepted that I will never achieve more than this. The closest I came was a 144-page hardcover published three years before. A real book, with me as the sole illustrator, not somebody else’s backup. But this I only got because it was the story of a biracial detective who passes for white. The publisher wanted an authentic ambiguous Negro for political cover. With my days sitting in a comic-book store devoid of customers, and my nights with a wife disinterested in sex with me because of my own disinterest in procreation, I was free to commit the time needed for the project. So that worked out well. I still hated them, these anonymous people I was emailing in my pages to every day, for making this be my entrée into the larger comic world, but I took the job. My consolation was that finally the idea of race and identity, another aspect of my life that I’d failed to master, had actually paid dividends that weren’t fruit of sorrow. I drew that thing like it might be the last image anyone would ever see of me.