Mat Johnson - Loving Day

—

We are driving to the emergency room. It is twenty-seven minutes before sunset. We can drop her off in eleven minutes, then get on the Wissahickon entrance to the Roosevelt Boulevard to make it downtown on I-76 in sixteen minutes and still not break Talmudic law. The whole Karp family is supposed to be there. It’s too late to cancel. They’re already predisposed to hate me. For what I did. For what I didn’t do, even though I didn’t know Cindy Karp was telling the truth. This has to happen. We have to make it happen.

“We’re not going to make it. Let me call Irv now,” Tal tells me from the passenger side. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Roslyn, who’s laid out in the back of the car on the sofa seat in a fetal position. More than five decades since her birth but she forms the pose as if she was born yesterday.

“We’re going to Irv’s Shabbat. That’s not an option, you can’t miss — you have to talk to him, clear things up. She’s okay. You’re okay, right?”

“Shabbat shalom,” I hear behind me.

“Dear God, she’s speaking in tongues.”

“No, Pops. Miss Roslyn? I’m sorry, I know we’re all in the middle of a little crisis here, but do you already have plans for dinner?”

I don’t hear a response. I look through the mirror again and see Roslyn’s eyes have closed. Her lips are moving, and I can just make out a slurred chant of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo so I know she hasn’t passed out completely.

“She’s fine,” I tell Tal, who won’t even look at me. As we sit at a red light, I reflect on the fact that I’m pretty sure I’m getting sued at the end of this. I’m pretty sure all this, the Tasing, this drive, it’s all going to be used in a deposition of some kind. Sirleaf will confirm this, I’m sure. I can already see Roslyn on the stand, the blessed earth mother, and the whole of Mulattopia in the gallery staring at me. When the light goes green, I ask Roslyn again if she wants to go to the hospital.

“Like every cell…yodeling,” she says. And then it goes quiet. Really quiet. Until the car behind me honks for me to move.

I haven’t been to the emergency room at Germantown Hospital since I was five and stuck a cherry pit up my nose. I actually visited the hospital twice that day, for the same ailment — albiet for different cherry pits — due to the fact that I suffered from a combination of stupidity and poor fatherly supervision. My mother would never take me to Germantown Hospital, choosing instead to hire a cab to drive me to Chestnut Hill, where the hospital served a predominantly wealthy white clientele, and according to her reasoning, was therefore less likely to kill you. I pull up to the entrance, jump out of the car and open the back door. There’s a wheelchair on the curb with G-TOWN spray-painted on the back of it like a scarlet letter. I pull it over, the wheels worse than a shopping cart, and I see Tal getting out too.

“What are you doing? We don’t have time for you to take her in,” I tell my daughter.

“We’re not going to just leave her here.”

“She’s a grown woman,” I explain, as Roslyn, almost as if in response to this, groans. At least, that’s how she responds when I start pulling on her leg.

“No…Western…medicine,” Roslyn manages. It takes a minute. She says all this without opening her eyes, channeling it from whatever dark pit to which her consciousness has been repelled.

“You’ve taken quite shock,” I tell her. I try to make my voice as soothing as possible, while still yelling it at her. “It’s probably for the best you get it looked at.”

“No,” Roslyn says again. At least that’s what I think she says. It’s hard to hear when the ambulance pulls in behind us with its lights on, and starts honking. When the driver gets out of the cab, there’s some yelling too. By then Roslyn, eyes closed, has apparently drifted off again. I put my hand back on her leg and start to pull on it. She kicks me.

“Miss Director, we have a previous invitation to a Shabbat dinner at my grandfather’s, would you like to come with us?” Tal asks, shoving herself next to me.

“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” Roslyn keeps going, and we take that as a yes, throw the wheelchair in the trunk and peel out of there.

—

I am at Irv’s doorstep with his granddaughter after being absent from her life for seventeen years. I have this other woman with me who’s Irv’s age and in a sweat suit and a wheelchair. I’m holding her back by one shoulder to keep her from falling over.

“Irv, this is Roslyn Kornbluth,” Tal begins. She motions to Irv, then motions to Roslyn, who flutters her eyes in recognition. “Roslyn runs my school and Warren just almost killed her with one of those electrocution guns, so we thought it might be nice if she joined us for dinner. She’s black and Jewish, so consider her a peace offering.”

“Must look…a mess,” Roslyn whispers, but not really to anyone, almost like she’s talking to the strands of her curls.

“Nonsense, such a beautiful woman needs no embellishment.” Irv smiles and bends over to her, and I get a whiff of his cologne, which is whiskey. Jovially, he picks up Roslyn’s hand, and first I think he’s going to check her pulse, but he kisses it.

“She’s had a long day,” I tell him.

And Irv just smiles and says, “I’m sure she has, I’m sure she has,” and that’s when I get that he thinks she’s always in this wheelchair, this beat-up fraying thing, not just in it because I almost electrocuted her.

Inside, it’s the same apartment. It’s the same apartment I made Tal in. I remember it as soon as we get inside. The rest, the doorman, the lobby, all these prewar Walnut Street high-rises look identical to me but this apartment, this is it. The place I’ve been avoiding for eighteen years. My memories, my guilt, they were in here, waiting for me. The last time I was in this place, the less successful sperm from Tal’s batch were seeping into my underwear. I’m pretty sure the apartment knows that, remembers my teenage trespass. There will be a sign, I know. Words forming on refrigerator magnets or something, something more than my heavy breathing. Ghosts are real; I can totally see that in this moment. And I really start wheezing, being in this place, being caught back here. We go in the kitchen and apparently there is a toilet handle at the back of my neck, and I can feel it now, I can feel it being pushed, and all the blood rushing from my brain, down, congealing in my jawbone, pulling my mouth slack and open. I know what’s happening. I am fainting. I look at Tal. I look at her so beautiful and think, How bad can my sins be? I scream this in my head, How bad can my sins be? But my body isn’t listening. I lean on the wheelchair to keep from falling over. I lean on Roslyn’s shoulder. Roslyn says, “Ow!” with surprising clarity.

“Here, I’ll take her,” and Irv yanks Roslyn away, and is moving down the hall offering “We’ll get you a nice seat at the table” before I can stop him. Somehow, I didn’t imagine Roslyn coming to the table. I imagined we would just wheel her into a dark and calming room and drape a sheet over her head till it was time to leave. I start to feel dizzy again and Tal takes my hand.

“You can’t lose your shit, okay? Warren? Pops?”

“No,” I tell her. I can’t. I straighten up. Tal grips my hand harder.

“No nervous breakdowns until after the kiddush.”

The rest of the Karp family turns out to be just three people, which is a bit of a relief. I can handle three. That’s just: this, that, and the other. This and that are an elderly couple who look like they’re in their sixties or seventies, or white-people fifties. They are introduced as Dot and Art.