Mat Johnson - Loving Day

At my gate, I get out, undo the padlock then pull the twisted metal rails back. When I get back in the car, Sun says, “That’s why you feel so alive in those moments of suffering?”

“You’re stoned.”

“I think we established that fact. Take me ghost hunting.”

I should not be here. I’ve brought my crush to my house, at night, but I have no immediate plans for seduction. I have the desire, the pragmatic reasons too — they haven’t gone away — yet still I lack adequate motivation to risk getting out of this car and going in that damned house. I don’t even want to shut the engine off. I just wanted to be around her. Sunita Habersham. All this is because I must have wanted an excuse to be in her presence.

“Are we going to go in?”

“Look, you asked me where I saw the intruders. There. I saw them right there. Coming out of the garage. And right here, next to the car. We done, yo. We don’t have to go inside.”

Sun gets out of the car anyway. I don’t. I think she’s going to go look in the garage window, which is fine by me, but she comes to the driver’s-side door. I roll the window down.

“You’ve got cameras out here. All over.”

“Security.”

“It looks like you’re running a meth lab. Where do the recordings go?”

“I’ve got a hard drive set up with my laptop, in the house.”

“Then we have to see what’s on the tape.” Sun skips off into the darkness toward the front porch. I don’t even unlock my door. I look at the garage. For a second, I think I see movement in the window. I do see movement. It’s the reflection of a bus’s window as it pauses to let off a passenger on the street behind me.

Sun yells, “Come on, you can’t just burn the whole place down because you had one crazy vision.” And there it is, out loud. Exactly what I’m thinking. And that scares me. But Sun comes back to the car, reaches in for the handle then pulls my door open. Grabs my hand and pulls me out. She keeps holding my hand, even when I’m standing outside.

“Take me into your House of Mystery .” And that was one of my favorite comics when I was a kid, but still, I don’t want to go. “Look, my life is hard and boring too, just like everyone else’s. Entertain me, Warren. You want to get me in your house, this is your chance,” she says, and I believe her. And I remember how Sunita was, dancing in the air with my daughter, and how Tal talks about her. Like she needs her. So this time, I answer the call. Then we’re walking into an empty mansion at night while holding hands.

“In third grade, I watched every season of Scooby-Doo! Finally, my paranormal investigative training is coming in handy. Knew I’d grow up to be Velma.”

“Who in their right mind aspires to be dumpy Velma?” I ask her.

“I was pudgy, had thick glasses, wore a short bob cut. Velma isn’t a mantle you attain. Velma is thrust upon you. I just embraced it, wore matching clothes. It wasn’t called cosplay, then. It was just called, ‘That Fat Girl Is a Loser.’ ”

As the computer boots up, I give Sunita Habersham a tour of my father’s house. This is the old tent I make my daughter sleep in, it’s conveniently located in the dining hall. This is the part of the ceiling that hangs down from water damage, despite repairs. That flash is from the fuse box outside. This is the dining-room table; it’s made from a door. The chairs are empty buckets of primer paint. There’s a couch over there: it’s from the thrift shop. All the furniture is from thrift shops except the mattresses, which were new when I had them delivered. Tal won’t use hers, which is upstairs, because she prefers the tent. Even though my father died in it.

“This place is huge. It’s like an abandoned bus station. Don’t you get lonely here? Just you and Tal?” Sun asks. “I mean, I think of these old houses as being small, built for small people. But these ceilings must be fourteen feet high. And the rooms are wide, too. Even bigger than they look from outside. You could fit a small army.”

“The British Army, during the Battle of Germantown, actually. The upstairs, those rooms are smaller. I’m in the master bedroom and it’s tiny. Let me show you,” I say, and I genuinely mean that. Still, I hear how it sounds, even before I see Sun turn her head at my directness. Just the tiniest of reactions, but I see it, and I want to say, That was not an attempt to get you up to my room so that I can have sex with you . Why would I need to do that? People have sex in living rooms, and we’re standing right next to one.

Then there’s the sound.

It comes from upstairs.

Sun looks at me. “Did you hear that…?” she begins, but answers her own question. “Yeah, let’s go upstairs. Adventure time.”

I shake my head. “No.” I am perfectly fine not to go upstairs. I am perfectly fine never to go upstairs again in the history of all that is everything. In fact, I’m okay to seal off the entrance to the upstairs altogether, keep it like that from now till the moment it all goes up in char and red ember. But Sunita Habersham starts walking. She walks up. Why walk up? But she walks up. Toward it. We are supposed to be going in the opposite direction. It’s time to run. I follow behind her.

“Hey, hey, remember that joke? About black people, that they’d run away in haunted-house scenarios? I think it was Eddie Murphy. Or maybe it was Paul Mooney, one or the—” I stop when Sun flings her arm back at me. We’re at the top of the steps. The plaster from the ceiling hangs down into the hall in shreds. The walls, murals of water stains. Five doors. All closed. Each one hiding something. One’s to the bathroom. One my room. Three, bedrooms I don’t go in, I never go in them. There’s been no reason to, there’s no reason to now either. Sun stares, at the doors, then at me. She wants me to shut up so she can see which room the sound came from. So she can swing a door open and whoever’s in there can be, I don’t know, surprised. I don’t want them to be surprised. I want them to be gone. No, I want us to be gone.

“Well, you know that joke? That black people would just leave at the first creepy sound? I’ve been thinking about that. Escaping? That’s actually normative behavior. Staying, when you know there’s a ghost, that’s what makes no damned sense. So when you think about it, that’s really the pretense of all ghost stories: white people are so confident of their omnipotence that they’ve lost their goddamn minds.”

“Sunflower bullshit,” is Sun’s muttered response, but she’s barely paying attention.

When the next sound hits, she grips me. My palm is mush and hers a solid object contracting.

It’s coming from behind my bedroom door.

“Don’t,” I say, so light, just the idea of a word, but Sun hears it. She looks back at me, even. She keeps walking, but she looks back. Her face pulls away but her eyes are on me.

Sun looks away when her fingers reach the knob. She just turns it, no fanfare, no pause. It’s so loud, the metal mechanism doing the same job it has for the last two hundred years. My room, it’s how I left it so many days ago, when the alarm went off. The blankets still on the floor. The box spring and the mattress not much higher above it. The window’s open. Did I leave the window open? I don’t remember.

Sun walks on toward the open window. I come in behind her. I don’t look around, because I don’t want to look around. I just want to look at her. And it’s so easy to just look at her. Sunita Habersham leans her head out the window, bends down to do so. Her shirt goes up, her shorts stay level, and the result is a view of her Sesa tattoo once more. The bottom of her back, that soft place.

I reach for her. Just to say, Don’t go any further . To say, Don’t go out the window . But I reach for her flesh. And then I’m holding her, by her hips, and the previous logic is eclipsed by the reality of the intimate position I’ve placed myself in. I don’t know what’s come over me.