Mat Johnson - Loving Day

I don’t leave the art trailer. I don’t use the lights. I don’t want Roslyn to know I’m here, or any of her followers. I only go out to use the porta-potty after I’ve checked to make sure there’s no one around. I pull the blinds closed so the dim light of my computer screen isn’t visible to anyone wandering through the camp. I see the others, the rest of the resident staff, out there walking around. I go to the window and watch them pass. So many couples; with school out they stroll the grounds, holding hands. I hear their music, their laughter. Then late Sunday afternoon, I hear someone try to open up my door. I manage to kick the blankets I’ve been sleeping on under the lectern before the keys unlock it the whole way.

Spider’s standing there.

“I knew he was in here. I knew it. I’m like fucking psychic. This is some telekinesis-level shit.”

“What are you doing here?” Sunita Habersham, trailing behind him, thinks to ask me. I don’t look at her. I’m tired of looking at her. I’m disgusted with my lusts and desires. Testing this theory, I steal a glance. Yes, Sunita Habersham’s so beautiful. But so what? There have to be other attractive women of similar interest to me on the surface of this planet. There have to be other women with whom Tal could form a maternal bond. This reoccurring notion, this desperate belief that Sun is my sole avenue to secure romantic love, is obviously absurd.

“I’m squatting,” I tell her, and give up all pretense. I pull the blankets back out from under the podium, put them back into the shape of a bed, lie down.

“You know, my couch folds out, if you need someplace,” Spider says, but I’m fine. I like being alone. And that’s what I tell him.

I look up again, because they’re still here, making noise.

“Why are you here?” I reverse on them. “Why are you bothering me?”

“I’m going to need you to stop making sounds with your mouth hole, Warren,” Sunita insists. It’s a tone I’ve never heard her use before, both unusually firm and utterly informal. “I see the way you’re looking at me. Let’s establish something between us. Before we take this conversation any further.”

“Okay,” and behind that word comes a flood of anger. I wasn’t even looking at her, for once. I wasn’t even thinking about her.

“Good. Now listen: yes, we are really, really high right now.”

“Totally high,” Spider chimes in. “Yet not like, ‘Danger, danger, Will Robinson’ high.”

“But still, very, very high,” Sunita Habersham clarifies. “So I’m going to need you to talk slowly. And quieter. And I’m going to need you to not make any sudden movements.”

“We want your snacks. We just need to get your snacks. I know you have them. Give us your snacks and nobody gets hurt. We’ll share. Your snacks.”

“I don’t think he’s hungry.” Sun swings around, arms out like she can feel the wind ripple. Walks away yet again. This is how she’s flirting with me, now I am certain. By showing me she doesn’t even have to face me to get to me. Sun’s wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt that drapes so far down you can barely see her shorts. And underneath that, hiking boots. Heavy, worn gray, mud-covered hiking boots.

“Can we ask you something?” she asks. “Did you really Tase her?”

“Yeah, did you do it? Tase Roslyn? Tase her with a Taser?” Spider wants to know, but I can see from the way both look at me that they already do. Roslyn told them. So I give them my version. Tell them the circumstances of said electrifying and its retribution, and finish with “I’m pretty sure she shocked me for longer than I did her.”

“Is that why you’re hiding? She scare you that bad?” Sun wants to know. Spider’s nodding at me slowly, still smiling, permitting me to say yes, to succumb to her patronizing conjecture.

“No. I saw a ghost,” I say to shut them up. To let them know I’m crazy, that they’re high, and to leave me alone. I even tell them what I saw, in detail. Not just Friday night, waking up in the car, but the time by the garage, and the first night I moved in there. Into their blank silence I add, “These crackheads, they’ve gotten into my head. They’ve got me seeing things. They got super crackhead powers.”

“But Warren,” Sun says. “You didn’t say, ‘I saw a crackhead.’ You said, ‘I saw a ghost.’ ”

“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Change the subject. I’m too stoned for this.” Spider goes to my desk, grabs some Tastykakes and starts walking toward the door. “I don’t mess with spirits. I draw the line at ghosts. Also, I’m against denigrating victims of substance abuse.”

Sunita Habersham’s not leaving. Even as Spider calls for her.

“Show me them. The ghosts,” Sun whispers, as if one might hear us.

—

Sunita Habersham’s got her window open, and her hand out. Her fingers are flat together, angled off her wrist and bent from her arm like the head of a swan. As I speed up, she tilts her hand forward, lets the weight of the wind push it up and back again. Slowly, Sun repeats, only pausing when I hit a light as we drive down Wissahickon Avenue.

“Spider says this street used to be a toll road. Two hundred years ago. Some old lady would sit on the side with a gun, make people pay to use it. That sounds like a great job.”

“That’s your dream career? Sitting on a road and shooting people who don’t pay you?”

Sunita turns, looks at me, seems to realize for the first time that I’m really there. That I’m not some animated character from her THC haze. She sits up and shakes her head a bit like this will make her lucid.

“Yes. Yes, that would be my dream job. It’s very simple, isn’t it? No politics. No people, really. Just, guardian . Plus, you get to work outdoors. I wouldn’t use a gun, though. I’d get something harmless, like your Taser.” She picks it up from where Roslyn left it. I forgot it was even there, between the seats. Sun aims it out the windshield. She’s turning it around to aim it at me.

“No.” I knock her hand so it’s pointing at the window again. Sun laughs at me. She puts the weapon down, but she’s still laughing.

“Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

I stare straight ahead. “That old lady Tased me.”

“Come on. I’m sure there was a larger, holistic reason. She doesn’t just do things like that for no reason.”

“She had a reason, she wanted revenge. She did that shit in cold blood.”

“No. Roslyn’s not like that. She’s like our…Professor X. And we’re her school of runaway mutants, training for the new world.”

I let that stoner logic soak in. “How do you know she’s not Magneto, taking those same runaways and warping them into The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?”

“Come on, Warren, they didn’t call themselves that, only the X-Men did. They called themselves just ‘Brotherhood of Mutants.’ ”

“That’s my point.”

“You’re just mad because Roslyn zapped you back. You ever wonder if the state of not being in pain, if that is the true deviation?” Sunita asks me. “That the pain is how life really feels, and moments of trauma, they just make it so you can’t ignore the fact? That that’s…” Sun pauses, and she’s lost in the labyrinth of her own philosophy.

I pull onto Greene Street, past Manheim. I lived here with my mother until she passed. It hasn’t changed much. The same two-story homes, now further along in their decay. All the little semidetached row houses huddling together, covered in all the paint that’s failed to chip. Many of the solid wood pillars on the porches have been replaced with cheaper metal pylons. The streetlights have become stop signs because the city’s broke, and there’s another layer of trash, but basically it’s as miserable as it’s always been.