Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

This obsession infected every part of Bobby, even his bowels. The man insisted on calling his toilet Irving Howe, after a critic he particularly loathed, just so he could take pleasure in shitting on it daily.

"Look, the problem is you're writing the wrong things." Snowden enjoyed baiting him. Rarely was something so easy, so rewarding. "People don't want books, man. They want movies. Even the bad ones get hundreds of thousands in the seats."

"Bullshit! They only want movies because the film industry spends a couple million dollars on each one to tell them to! If I had a couple million dollars, I could get a hundred thousand people to read anything, but books don't get that. The only way I could get people to read The Great Work would be to do something huge and crazy, create some spectacle for free publicity."

All this was not to say that Robert M. Finley had stopped writing. Bobby's newest work, The Tome, was just not meant for public consumption. With no readers, Bobby had intentionally started writing for no one. The only other person who got close to the 478 pages of The Tome was Snowden, who liked to use its pile to rest his beer on. The Tome was the first example of the principles of the "Robert M. Finley Emulsion Literary Theory," a theory that Bobby himself had invented. To any he could engage in a discussion upon the concept, Bobby often remarked that he was nearly twenty pages into its treatise, but that he would not reveal it until it was completely ready, and then as a mass E-mail. At its simplest (and despite hours of detailed explanation, the simplest version was more than Snowden could comprehend), it was about not actually writing, but showing, highlighting, and amplifying the poetry of the universe around us. Something about humans being imperfect, so avoiding themselves as a source. From what Snowden had heard of The Tome during impromptu drunken readings, it seemed to be collections of random conversations, stream-of-consciousness, and chapter-long descriptions of street noise. His second forty ounce near gone, Bobby would talk about the line between genius and insanity, the importance of walking close to it. Snowden just wished he would walk on the other side. Bobby swore, though, that with the right drugs opening your mind, you could dance to it.

At moments, Snowden found the intensity of Bobby Finley inspiring, something he could just sit and drink in front of for hours, and Bobby's intelligence gave it both a voice and elegance. After a while, though, it could get plain boring. Sometimes Snowden feared that when Bobby got excited (as he did) and pulled out a copy of The Great Work to quote, the thousands of others on the shelf would come collapsing down as well, crushing them. Just another fatal accident, and then Lester would be in here cleaning up, blank faced, except this accident would get press for the sole reason that it was so absurd. The earnest cream puff anchor on Channel 9 news would run the teaser, "Man Crushed by Dreams," during commercials only to offer the story as an almost lighthearted piece slipped in after the sports and weather. Snowden's own apartment was only a block away, and Bobby had even suggested that they go there sometimes, but since Snowden had already given Jifar his own set of keys it didn't seem right, the boy there, them drinking. If the kid wanted to see that, he could stay downstairs.

Those keys had been meant for Bobby in case Snowden got locked out. However, drunk, resting on the space cleared off Bobby's makeshift couch, Snowden didn't see the use anymore in getting another set made for Bobby. Not only would they most certainly be lost in the debris that blanketed every surface and floor, but there were other, even more compelling reasons not to. The most obvious was that while Bobby had implied that the burning down of his mom's boyfriend's house was a one-time incident, and while the fact that he was walking a free man certainly testified to the fact that a judge and jury agreed so, the burnt crap that emerged from beneath the surface anytime Snowden adjusted the mess around him contradicted that. While the majority of it seemed to be charcoaled packs of matches, black and flailing, the variety of what Bobby chose to ignite was nearly impressive. Plastic silverware, just the eyes in an entire issue of Talk, a collection of small colored plastic dinosaurs. Snowden began hunting for new finds, curved round and twisted by the heat, every time Bobby went to the bathroom. Based on one of his findings — an entire collection of male doll heads apparently disfigured and guillotined before melting in some postapocalyptic revolution — Snowden began to believe that Bobby was actually going out and buying things specifically to burn them.

A LOT OF people died in Harlem. This didn't surprise Snowden, it was a big place. What surprised Snowden was that almost once a week one of them died in a Horizon property. Sometimes it was a preexisting condition finally taking its toll, but often it was just a matter of one little misstep, a simple accident, and those that were living, weren't. Snowden's Tuesdays were booked with the special project from then on, going in and bagging it up to take it away. Bike riders without helmets or reflective gear, residents who chose to avoid the pedestrian route underneath the scaffolding of renovating buildings, commuters who ignored the plea to buckle up in the back of taxicabs. Snowden would ask the cause and Lester would tell him and then Snowden would spend the rest of the day imagining the end the person came to, piecing together his or her life before as he shoved its remnants into the Dumpster.

In an attempt to prove to himself that sudden death was not this random, that these people had brought this fate upon themselves (and therefore it was avoidable), Snowden looked for clues of moral or discipline lapses that preceded their demise. Snowden wanted reasons. When they were cleaning out the sty of the guy who croaked in his bed from diabetes, Snowden found two cases of Pepsi underneath the sink and caught himself pumping his fist to himself in victory. This was a rational universe. This guy was huge too, his mattress bowed like a hammock from the springs he'd crushed while sleeping. The whole thing had acted like a sponge. It wasn't the smell of the bed that made Snowden vomit, it was the layer of maggots on top of it, the sound of a thousand dry worms in agitated orgy. Together, he and Lester wrapped it in plastic, had to take it straight to the sanitation department and come back because it stank so bad. The man's room was a collection of empty ninety-nine-cent boxes of snack cakes, gun collector magazines wrinkled and stained, and cheap black porno. Videotapes were strewn across the floor of his bedroom, their boxes discarded beneath the bed, images of the poor, tattooed, and desperate covered in a layer of gray dust and the congealed remnants of their late owner. When Lester and Snowden finally unscrewed all the locks on the narrow closet in his hallway ("You can't bust a door like this, that oak woodwork's irreplaceable"), the final evidence in the deceased's damning was the strongest. Shotguns, wood and black metal, some barrels already sawed off by the same hand that had rubbed out the registration numbers, but mostly handguns, piled in boxes according to make, caliber. A cardboard barrel with the letters SNU written on it was the biggest, the visibly cheap six-shooters piled on one another like so many crabs.

The next posthumous eviction was a woman who'd lived in the second-story floor-through on 126th, right around the block from Sylvia's, the victim of a hit-and-run walking back from a bar all the way over on Amsterdam. It was a nice building too, even for a Horizon property, fully renovated the year before. There was a literary agent making an office of the garden apartment, the third floor held a thick bit of brown-skinned cuteness who smiled at Snowden in the hall as he carried up sheets of boxes to be unfolded. Lester said she was playing the role of a dancing plate in Beauty and the Beast, turned back to caution Snowden not to bug her for tickets to the show.