Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“So you knew. You kinda thought you knew, but now you really know. It’s not too bad, right? It’s no biggie. You’re still you,” I tell her, and I try to say it with joy. I’m hoping that if I say it laughing, if I laugh lightly at her reaction, then Tal’ll start laughing too. But Tal just keeps crying. It’s getting lighter though, her body still now. And then it gets quiet, but for the heaviness of her breathing. Until Tal says:

“I told all my friends that you were an Israeli soldier.”

“Okay.”

“Missing in action,” she follows with, and then I do laugh for real. I can’t help it. I hear myself and try to stop, but I can’t. And then it’s okay, because Tal joins me. And thus the dark spell is broken. “Just let it go,” I tell her. I look down and she’s got snot on me, my daughter, and snot all over her psychedelic cat print. But at least she’s still laughing. Still with the tears, but mostly laughing now. Laughter I can deal with. Laughter I know.

“I knew,” Tal says, quieter. She calms down. Calmer but the tears keep coming, as if something’s broken in her and they’re just pouring through the crack. “I knew,” Tal says again, which makes no sense. Because my daughter doesn’t know anything. Tal has no idea. Because I have no clue, and she has even less of one than me.

THERE’S SCREAMING AND whooping and noise itself breaking and then it starts again. The world has hit its wall, we all die in explosion and rage. I shoot up in my bed and see the broken plaster of the ceiling and know I’m in a crack den and the cops are outside and I don’t know what to do and I’ve never even done cocaine and now they’re going to shoot me. And then I realize I’m in my father’s burnt-out room, on a mattress, and that my burglar alarm has caught something.

I own a Taser. I know I have a Taser, and I search around the side of the bed for it and there is nothing and they’re coming for me, but then I find it. It’s not night, it was just an afternoon nap, but the newspaper tapped over the windows dims the light. I hold the Taser out to the dim. No one’s there. The alarm is still whining. My head hurts from it and I remember Tal and push off my sleeping bag and jump to my feet and head downstairs.

Tal’s tent door is open, Tal’s not in it. Tal’s gone. She’s lost. No, she’s at my laptop at the kitchen table, images from the cams up on screen, and she’s screaming “Make it stop! Turn it off! What the fuck?!” back at me.

The control panel. It’s on the wall. Tal points at it and yells, “Shut it down,” like I need the suggestion. I open the plastic flap hiding the keypad and keep entering the code but it doesn’t work and the whole thing is flashing with buttons on the side that say: DISABLE. ALERT POLICE. ALERT. FIRE DEPARTMENT. RESET. PANIC. I am panicked, so I hit the panic button. Strobe lights start flashing out of the alarms to the rhythm of the horrible sound. This is the worst nightclub ever. I make a panic sound too; it’s kind of a moan, kind of a whine; it’s a whole new tone in misery. Tal reaches past me and hits the code again and then DISABLE and everything stops.

We have silence. It’s a gift that just arrived in the mail from someplace on the other side of the world. After a second, I hear Tal sigh and watch as her shoulders slump down with the weight of her exhaust. I can even hear the hum of the laptop now. When the footsteps hammer on the front porch, I can’t confuse it for yet another sound effect of structural decay. Tal hears it too, starts for the door until I catch her arm. I wait for the doorbell to ring. We wait.

The doorbell doesn’t ring.

There is pacing on the porch, a story told in slow thumps.

We wait for there to be a knock; there is no knock. We wait for someone to call out; no one says anything. Someone is on our porch. The footsteps are solid, hard. They are angry. Slow, boom, boom. Deliberate. They go from one side of the porch to the other.

It’s dark in here but the sun is still shining on the other side of our walls. When the footsteps get closer to our window again, I can see movement through the blind cracks, past the distorted, blown glass. I see a dark hood float by and I look at Tal and she’s seen it too, and that’s when I remember the Taser in my left hand. I look at the computer again, at the camera feeds I have set up. There are none aiming at the porch. It is behind the lines. It is out there.

“Call the cops,” Tal whispers to me.

“We. Are. Black,” I remind her.

“Call that guy George, then,” she says.

“No. Hell no.” This guy is on the front porch right now, pacing back and forth in madness. The cops are for after. The cops are for notepads and “Can you describe the suspect?” and then once they leave nothing changes and you never see the cops again. Also, they are good at shooting unarmed black people. We are still black people by police standards. I power the Taser, and listen. The walking stops.

I get close enough to the window this time to look around. From the angle, I can see only empty porch. They’re gone. It’s okay, now. They’re gone. Then the knocking comes. One bump. Then two. Not light. Not like a polite request. Hard thuds. Slamming their palms on the wood. I look at Tal. I can see her breathing, short heavy gasps as big as her eyes have grown. And then a third banging demand, shaking the door with its force.

There’s no peephole to look through. There was no peephole needed in the eighteenth century, when this door was put here. If you wanted to stop by, you sent a letter. Servants would greet you in this foyer and take your calling card to the master. I have to open the whole damn door to find out who’s on the other side. Tal, she gets it now, she feels it, she tries to stop me, puts her hand over my arm, but frantically I wag her away and she obeys me, and I don’t start unlocking again till she’s over by the kitchen, holding a knife forward like a beast is about to come charging. I turn the knob and slowly pull back the door. I have the Taser in my right hand, but no plans to use it.

They’re there. Waiting on the far side of the door for me, silently.

I just fucking zap them.

There is a rational part of my brain and it says, Don’t zap them, Warren. Ask questions first, find out who they are and why they’re here, on your doorstep, lurking, banging. Find out their hopes and dreams. Offer them a glass of water. And that part of my brain has control of my left hand, which is holding the doorknob. The right hand fucking zaps the crackhead.

Two little twisty wires briefly connect me to the form of fear incarnate. And that right hand, it does a great job, aims for the stomach area to avoid giving it a heart attack and I hold the trigger for a good four seconds, which is much less than the twenty the instructions recommended but enough time for me to perform the even more recommended act of catching the body to avoid head injury and/or lawsuit.

I lay the crackhead on the ground. Its flesh is soft, not just because of the plush material of the jumpsuit. It’s soft because it’s a woman, I can see from the hips before the face. I got her. I got the intruder. I really got her. I turn her around to see her face.

“You killed my principal!” Tal says, over me.

I got Roslyn.

Tal drops the knife to the floor, and it bounces loudly in a way that I find judgmental and overly dramatic.

“I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought you were a crackhead,” I tell my employer.

“Intensation,” Roslyn utters, which is not even a word. Her eyes are shooting around, looking for pixies. Her gray hair screams out from under her hoodie. Tal squats down beside Roslyn, and the older woman’s eyes actually manage to land on her for a few seconds before going off fairy-hunting again.