Mat Johnson - Loving Day

They start parting then. They start giving me room to reach her. The house is even more full of them. The whole camp. It’s here. All of them. Faces I recognize but don’t care because my daughter is in so much trouble right now.

“Tal!”

The crumbling mansion is packed. In the hallway, on the stairs, into the dining room, all facing the living room. Chop it up, chop it up now.

“Tal!” A few people point into the living room. They seem scared. They are scared. They are scared of me.

Tal sits on the couch. To her side, sitting up on the couch’s back, rests Roslyn, who has a hand on my daughter’s shoulder. On the other side is Sun, who looks more concerned than anyone in here, but not scared. Concerned for me.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask my daughter. Nobody else here matters more. Nobody else in the world.

“Stop embarrassing me.”

“Why is everyone in my house?” It comes out lighter, slightly deflated. But only slightly.

“I saw them,” Roslyn says. She’s smiling. She’s excited. Everyone is excited, smiling too. Everyone but Sun. Sun stares at me, monitoring. Looking across the room at my eyes, Sunita Habersham mouths Stop . But nothing here is ending. Roslyn says louder, “I saw them too. I finally saw them.”

“She saw them,” a few other voices reiterate.

“In the front top window of the house. I had my doubts. I admit it,” Roslyn says to me and the rest of the room, with an emphasis on the latter. “But I saw them. The First Couple. It’s all true,” Roslyn continues. Heads nod around me. Quick words say the affirmative.

“I had a séance and they actually showed up. How cool is that, Pops?” Tal asks, holds out a hand to the air for a high five. When I don’t step forward and smack it, Kimet gets off the floor and does it for me.

A cult. Tosha is right about this part. About them. This has officially passed into madness. Later, I’m sure, I will tell this story at dinner parties, and to new friends. And when they ask, “Were they really that bad?” I will tell them this story. I will leave no detail out, either. How they all sat on the floor Indian-style, around Roslyn, who sat on the couch above them. How they lit Pottery Barn candles trying to pretend at mysticism. How sage burned in the air, misting around behind the older woman. How Afro Celt Sound System played in the background, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other ethnic hybrid hot hits were cued behind it. And I’ll add this part: what One Drop, standing behind the couch, says to me with two hands on Sunita Habersham’s shoulders, massaging them absently the whole time he’s talking.

“Hey man, your daughter, she’s a spiritual seer, Holmes. You don’t know this, but she’s a powerful woman.”

There are several responses to this statement that would be appropriate, and I go through them in my head, I do. I take a good three seconds to consider each one, carefully, and Sunita Habersham, bless her, she sees me do it. Her face goes from annoyed to cautious to seriously worried about how I’ll react to the stimuli given. I know this because she removes One Drop’s hands off her shoulders and starts to come for me. Our eyes lock, and that actually helps — she won’t realize it, but it does, in some quiet part of me, the part not about to start roaring.

“Get your hippie half-breed asses the fuck out my father’s house and away from my daughter before I kick the Uncle Tom out the lot of you!”

Roslyn doesn’t bother to frown. Everyone else is still as well. They just stare at me. Even Sun freezes, for a moment. But only a moment. When the air stops vibrating, when the biggest sound is the weight of my breathing, then she gets up and walks by.

“Don’t,” she says. No extra verb. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t screw me. Don’t kiss me. Don’t bother explaining yourself. It’s all in there. And then Sun’s past me. Into the hall. Out the door. Down the steps. We all hear her feet go, boom, da boom, boom. Still, it’s motionless inside. Tal looks like she is about to cry, but other than that, frozen. Roslyn has dropped most of her smile, but the sides of her lips still tilt the edges of her mouth.

“Get out of here!” I follow with. Still that doesn’t work. Nobody moves. I close my eyes, to listen for it. To listen for movement.

What I finally hear is, “It’s okay. My father needs alone time.”

I stand there. I don’t open my eyes again. I don’t want to see them. I don’t open my eyes till the last footfall moving past me has grown silent.

I can breathe normally now. I am myself once more. The rage has escaped me. I have returned to normal. The house has returned to normal. Almost normal. When I do open my eyes, the overhead lights are back on. The candles are blown out. The music has been silenced.

Tal is gone.

Roslyn is not. She sits right where she did before. Staring at me. Smiling.

“You didn’t see anything,” I tell her. I know this. I know this even though I’ve seen things.

Roslyn keeps smiling, but doesn’t bother looking at me. Slowly she rises.

“They might believe you, but I can see what you’re doing, that’s what I see,” I say into her silence. Roslyn reaches for her purse at the couch’s end, brushes something off of it, then puts it on her shoulder. When she doesn’t respond I say, “You’re turning this into a cult.”

“It’s not a cult. It’s a karass. A people linked by a higher purpose,” she says lightly as she walks by me to the door.

“That’s the kind of shit people in a cult say,” I get out, but Roslyn doesn’t look back, my sound just another creak in the room.

SUNITA HABERSHAM IS NOT taking my calls. Her line rings, I see her face on my phone, and then the only voice I get is the one recorded for the entire world. Tosha won’t talk to me either, but this I barely notice, because Sunita Habersham is not taking my calls or responding to my texts and I feel the loss like one leg is gone and I have to struggle every moment not to fall over. I don’t leave my father’s house. I don’t go out. I don’t go to see her. I know she’s there. I know Tal is with her. Tal contacts me, after The Explosion, with a text that says, I’m staying with Sun now . Followed immediately with another text that says, Cuz UR an asshole . Tal, I miss, but she’s my teenage daughter and teenagers are supposed go through a period where they hate their parents and so basically this puts us right on schedule. As long as the cult doesn’t steal her, that door will reopen. The door to the life of Tosha Evans, that will reopen as well, we’ve been friends too long to not be now just because of mulattoes. There’s another door I keep thinking about. The one to Sun’s trailer. It’s a little aluminum door, with white metal siding on the outside. If I don’t get that door open again, eventually it will rust shut on me forever.

Everyone else in Mulattopia, they’re cordial. Very tolerant. Polite. The guy who still owns the land to this place? He should be tolerated. No one stands before the house and denounces me. I am never cursed back out. No one will look directly at me as I walk around my own property either, but they don’t make faces or other visible displays of disapproval.

I’m not mad at them, for this genteel shunning. I can feel my own shame, at the way I chose to express myself. My anger, having been given full vent, is largely exhausted. This primal emotion has been replaced with another: loneliness. The major cause of this is Tal and Sun not speaking to me, but I’m surprised to find that this is not the entire cause.

Yes, I believe this has become a cult. But it was a cult in which I was a member. Part of the allure of all of this, even as I’ve struggled against it, has been the seductive feeling of my own group inclusion. I still move through these people, but I feel disconnected from them now. I feel the absence of a kinship I took for granted. The only thing worse than a cult is a cult that won’t have you as a member.