Mat Johnson - Loving Day

In order for a propane tank to explode, it has to be surrounded by fire, and then have its container punctured with a big enough hole that the fuel and oxygen can circulate and properly ignite. If the hole isn’t big enough, the gas will ignite, but only in a sustained blow of flames. If you want a boom, if you want to see the full tank burst in an inferno about the size of an elephant — not too big, not too small — you need at least a two-inch hole for complete exposure. A shotgun blast seems to work pretty well, according to the latest videos I’ve searched. Not on my phone, lest the record incriminate, but on Spider’s.

He sits in front of his Airstream, on the porch he’s made out of cinder blocks, fingerless gloves on to play his button accordion in the late spring chill. Spider keeps getting into his song, going a few notes, then getting lost, starting over again. Either his hands are stiff or he lacks the skill, or some combination.

“It’s the rhythm. I can hit the notes; that’s not the issue. It’s the beat. It’s polyrhythmic, tricky. But that’s the African. Here, this is what it sounds like it without.” Spider tries again. This time he’s slow, full of clarity, and boredom. It’s every uninspired elementary school recital.

“It’s polka. Without that beat, it’s polka. It’s just European. But you bring in the African rhythm, and you get zydeco. Check it.” Spider concentrates. He stares forward, up. His jaw slack. His ink-stained arms clench, and the music comes, and I hear it. The riffs, the excited, flourishing moments. Spider still messes up, but he gets further this time. Enough that I can hear what he’s going for.

“ ‘Eunice Two-Step.’ Total mulatto music. You know, if we, like, called ourselves ‘bi-ethnic’ instead of biracial, that would clarify a lot of this. I tried to get Roslyn to go for that but she wasn’t hearing it. But that’s what it’s about: culture, ethnicity. It’s not about race. Race doesn’t exist. Race is a false paradigm created by Kant to—”

“Your phone,” I stop him, because he’s high. It has a zebra-print case, and zonkey as the lock screen image. “Listen — can I ask you, if I started taking in all the used propane tanks and got them refilled for a fee, do think anyone would buy them?”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says, opening up his phone’s gallery, browsing through the photos. “You didn’t take any pictures, man! How’d the séance go? No shaky tables? No lights going out or strange voices?”

“Only thing strange is that anyone actually believes that shit.”

“Don’t be a spoilsport. Communities need a shared mythology. It brings them closer.”

“Yeah, but come on. ‘The First Couple’?”

“Everyone here’s already haunted by one interracial couple: their own parents. Real ghosts aren’t that big a jump.”

The trailer next to his is a streamlined fiberglass teardrop, street-traffic orange. So tiny that you can only stand up in the small section you walk into through the door, an upright crawl space shared with a stove, oven, and bathroom shower. On the other side is a small table with space for a person to sit on each side, except when a cushion is laid on top to make a bed. It is a bed now. Sunita Habersham lies on it. It’s cold, but she’s still nude, on her back on top of the comforter, seemingly unable to endure the weight of anything holding her down.

“So did Tal get any vibrations? Any ghosts take a bite?”

“One of the kids had a Ouija board. He came up with the phrase ‘mon oil me damang.’ That almost spells, ‘My eye itches,’ in French. But Kimet got it to say, ‘First!’ So maybe he got trolled on a ghost message board. Whatever. It’s all silly.”

“You can joke, but we saw something.” Sun rolls over to her side, grabs me by my jeans pocket, pulls me closer.

I take off my socks. I believe firmly that sex should involve the removal of socks. “I saw something too. I never said I didn’t,” I tell her, but don’t go into the obvious junkie reality because I already know she’s not trying to hear that once more. “I don’t think if I was dead I’d be like, ‘Hey this afterlife thing is great, but let’s go over there and play with the cardboard square with the letters on it.’ It’s just my slant, but I think if there actually is an afterlife, it doesn’t involve games from Parker Brothers.”

My pants are down and out, and I’m beside her. Lifting off my shirt, I hit the ceiling. There’s just enough room for both of us. For love. For sleeping though, Sun comes back up to the house. Sleeping doesn’t cause noise. Sleeping doesn’t lead to another incident where Tal yells, “You’re shaking the house” at the top of her voice directly from the floor below.

“It was actually nice tonight, I guess. All those kids coming together. She’s really connecting. But it’s creepy.”

“What if they were ‘the first’?” Sun puts to me. “This is an historic area, you never know.”

“Then my daughter shot the mulatto equivalent of the Zapruder film.”

Sunita pulls me to her. “I know. Exciting, right?”

Sunita Habersham’s flesh, her hair covering my face, that excites me. Besides Tal, it’s all I live for. Even with this RV rocking, it’s still way bigger than the cab of the Beetle. There’s an added intimacy that comes from it not having a motor. But the best part is after, in the quieting of bodies after so much movement when, before either of us can drift off from consciousness, Sun rises, pulls her hair back into a bun, and pulls out the comic books. And we read. Together. The bliss of sharing a previously solitary act. We’ve upped our pull list to about thirty comics a month, and still go through everything new by the weekend. We’ve progressed in our relationship to reading graphic novels from our childhood, the ones that made us love the form in the first place. Books from the era when comics were for children. We don’t care. Or I don’t care and I’m amazed that she doesn’t seem to mind. My inner child has found a friend.

After an hour of reading digital bootlegs of The Micronauts: They Came From Inner Space on her laptop, Sun grabs her shirt, and I look at her ass, at panties that say TUESDAY even though it’s Friday night. She puts jeans over them, and I watch as she tries to discover where her socks are hiding. All this because her bed’s too small for both of us, and because I don’t want Tal sleeping in the house alone. And because Sun wants to literally sleep with me. Because Sunita Habersham says she’s my lady now — although she still insists there’s no ownership involved, so I don’t really know if this means we’re exclusive. Or more specifically, if she is. But I know she chooses to lie down for the night with me. For that honor, I can motivate myself to rise from postcoital bliss, dress, and walk out of her camper and into the cold to my father’s house each night. Because she’s my lady now.

“I’m not coming up,” Sun says. I’m standing with my hand on the door handle, now frozen. “I’ve got to make a social call tonight.”

I say, “You’re going to love this: there’s a black comic-book exhibit at the African American Museum, they’ve got Jack Kirby’s first illustrations for Black Panther . I’m taking Tal tomorrow morning. Tosha is bringing her kids. You want to come? I was hoping you guys could meet.” I shoot this out quick, to stop myself from asking who her social call is, if it’s a man or a woman, if it’s friendship or some other kind of unbearable intimacy.

“I can’t, sorry. What time are you coming back from the museum? You want to meet after?”

I look at the time on my phone. I don’t want to, I don’t mean to, but I get so far into the gesture that aborting it would be even more awkward. It’s 11:42 P.M. She’s going to see someone she doesn’t bother to name at 11:42 P.M.