Mat Johnson - Loving Day

The last time I see George is when he stops by my table after the judgment to say, “I’m taking Tosha to Sandals Jamaica tomorrow, so don’t expect any visits. You enjoy your vacation too.”

Sunita Habersham is not going to rescue me. I know this. And I know why. And I understand, too, although I desperately want her to, although I fantasize about it, although once a nurse comes by in flipflops and I think it’s Sun for enough seconds to be crushed by the truth. When Tal doesn’t appear, I know why as well. Because she knows what Sun knows now. That I tried to burn her beloved house down. And Tal might even know why I tried to do it, that it was for her as much as anything, but I know she doesn’t forgive me. Forgiveness comes later in life, after you’ve created enough disasters of your own. The biggest revelation, I’m surprised, is how many other Mulattopians join in the silence. No Roslyn with her army of lawyers, not even to gloat. No Spider. Because they all know. That much is clear by the third day, when they release me to the general prison population and no one comes to bail me out. They all know. About my intentions. About the house. I know that they all know.

But I know more than this. Because when the charges are listed — Assaulting an Officer, Resisting Arrest, Burning without a Permit — that not one of them told my story. Because for days I wait for the real charges to hit: First Degree Arson, Attempted Arson, Destruction of Historically Protected Property, and so on. But they never come. The mulattoes never snitch on me. They protect their own.

—

My cellmate, Héctor, doesn’t seem to be a bad guy. He doesn’t talk too much, which is a good thing, because the cell is too small to navigate through awkward conversation. His is the top bunk, and there he cries every night, which really frees me up to start doing the same if I’m so moved. Besides the one morning he says “La vida es triste,” and shrugs, we don’t talk about it. I like it in the cell better than in the lounge, which is much too communal for my tastes. The scary black dudes, the scary white dudes, and the scary Latino dudes all hang in their own sections of the hall, surrounding a loose collection of just plain scared unaffiliated dudes who sit in the middle waiting to see which tribe is going to victimize them. I try to hang over by the black dudes, but get the look that tells me I’m a racial suspect, so go sit on the edge of the Latino section a noncommittal distance from Héctor. In the great American mulatto tradition, I pass myself off as a Puerto Rican. By the end of the first day, this proves to be a wise decision, and the only cost is the sacrilege of lying about both my dead parents’ entire ancestral lines. Which is not a small cost, and hurts every time I repeat it in my pathetic high school Spanish. It hurts more than later, when one of the guys calls me the “Crimson Coconut,” a name which sticks in the ward across cultural lines, even though the burning redness on my face is already starting to fade away. But it’s worth the humiliation to be allowed into even the outskirts of a tribe.

My first visitor comes two days later. It feels like much longer, so much so that when I get called up, I tell them my name again, because I think they have the wrong guy.

“Someone, they love you,” Héctor says from the bulge of the top bunk. He sounds slightly surprised.

Sunita Habersham sits in a crowded cafeteria-style room at a round table, and doesn’t look up at me even when I sit down across from her. In front of her, a stack of comic books sits in a perfectly organized pile, but even still she adjusts the corners of it with her hands, identifying some invisible lack of symmetry. When I say hi, she says, “I got you this week’s pull list, and last week’s; I don’t think you read them. I could have brought in more but Spider chickened out. He’s scared of prisons. He’s waiting in the car.” Sun’s voice trails off at the end, and then she finally looks up. And then she stares straight at me. And we’re not talking.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and in doing so realize while I truly need to express these words, and am completely and eagerly willing to say them, they are also utterly inadequate.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Sunita asks me too loud, but nobody else in the place turns around, because that is not just an appropriate question in this room, it is the whole theme. It should be painted in ornate gilded letters on the wall. But Sun knows what I was thinking. And the only addition I could add would be offensive: that I thought I could pull it off.

“Tal wants to come, to see you. I told her not to — I don’t want her to see you like this, Warren.”

“Me either. But please tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll talk to her when I get out.”

“We can try to get the cash for the bond, but that amount…Jesus. I know Roslyn has it, but she’s been bugging since Loving Day. The protesters are still there, you know that right? The white protesters — the black ones left, I think they had to go to work. Somebody got the city to serve eviction papers this morning, now they’re saying all the propane tanks constitute a fire hazard. Roslyn’s told everyone to kill their cell phone service, instituted a ‘media blackout.’ She’s even telling people you tried to destroy the ‘sacred house.’ ”

“To be fair, I did try to destroy it.” I have to admit.

“Yeah, but she’s acting like that shit hole is the Temple Mount. All this while the construction crew has started chopping it up.” Sunita starts laughing, covers her mouth when she can’t stop. I smile but am silent. I want to laugh too but am in jail and that isn’t funny. “I can’t deal with all this. Your court date isn’t for weeks, but I think I have to get out of there. Tal’s fine, has everyone around her. But I need a break. Spider’s going down to work a zydeco festival in Louisiana next week. I’m thinking of going, but I don’t want you—”

“Go.”

“I went on your computer, emailed your friend Tosha. She said she thinks she can get her husband to drop the charges but I don’t know how soon—”

“Go on the trip, get a breather,” I tell her. “I’ll wait here till you get back.” And Sunita Habersham starts to smile a bit at that too, as I intended, but looks at me again and stops.

“Wow. You really fucked up.”

“Yeah. I do that sometimes.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sunita Habersham tells me, then pushes the comics across the table.

It won’t be for another hour, when I’m be back in my cell on my mattress, that I’ll open the first comic on the pile, The Manhattan Projects 12. It will take until then for me to see the note that I’d forgotten I’d even written to Sun, as it falls out onto my coarse blanket.

Thanks for leaving this. Love you too , it now says at the bottom in Sunita Habersham’s handwriting.

—

I finally manage a successful career in comics, both as a merchant and an artist. The comic books I read to the point of memorization, I sell. Their market value in cigarettes and stick deodorant proves to be so high that I use that boon to trade for pencil and paper to start drawing daily comics of my own to cash in on the boom. The result is really some of my best work; it’s like printing money. Thursday’s full-page spread of our local representatives from the Latin Kings portrayed as superpowered mutants goes to the highest bidder for three breakfast muffins and a mini-tube of Aquafresh. Some of the black crew are so impressed by it that they’re even talking of claiming me now.

Ten days later, the guard comes to my cell and gives me three minutes to gather my things and get out.

“Holy shit, the mutts bailed me,” I say when he leaves. Héctor hears me.