Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

They were like twins, her sister and her mate, one identical mindset compensating for the fact that they looked nothing like each other. As obnoxious as they could be in tandem, Piper had produced more tears at their wedding than the collective attendants. It was the natural order of it that got to her, that maybe there was somebody out there to perfectly match each individual. That maybe there really was one person out there perfect for her.

Piper's sister and brother-in-law were arrogant about their relationship too, but equally arrogant, so it took nothing away from the symmetry. If they were the type, they would have used the term "soul mates," but they weren't so called themselves "power couple." Since moving in, Piper came to call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass. In response, Dumbass, or Brian as he was known to the others in his life, usually referred to Piper as Assata Shake'n'Bake, Rosa Park Avenue, or Sister Soul Food, depending on how the spirit moved him. Dee, known to all as just that, preferred to call her sister Audre Lorde Have Mercy. It wasn't that they hadn't read the books, they just didn't feel them like that.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber. Dee born in New Haven, Brian in Providence. Dee the vice president of Jack and Jill's Connecticut chapter, Brian the treasurer of the Rhode Island contingent. Brian and Dee trading locations so one could be a Bulldog and one be brown at Brown. Two memberships to organizations named with three Greek letters, both with two A's bookending them. Three years apart, but how many early encounters until the First Friday where fate connected them? A shared hotel, Virginia Beach, spring break weekend? A shared ferry from Hyannis Port? Piper wondered. Piper wondered if the narrowness of Shark Bar hadn't made their world even smaller, how long those uneventful encounters would have continued. Piper stopped wondering if her own counterpart was entering her life, repeatedly and unnoticed: It was too painful.

Piper: impeached as Basilius from the NAACP Youth Group after calling former leader Walter White a "bleached coon" during the introductory address at the Teen Summit in Niagara Falls, a painful event compensated by years of bragging rights. Earlham College, class of '92, Fight, Fight, Inner Light, Kill Quakers, Kill. The best editor B.L.A.C.'s newsletter would ever claim. Greek affiliation: once sucker-punched by a Kappa Sweetheart at a Ball State step show. Ten years later and single, some false alarms but no children, no furniture that cost more than a day's salary. A job she loved and was good at. Hope. In painting, an art freed from ambition. A refusal to ever buy a cat as a companion, or let herself get to the point where she'd be tempted to.

Dee, Dumbass; hers an artistic and slightly cool career that didn't really pay for her lifestyle, his a dull career playing with money that paid for them both. For fun they bought things and went to foreign resorts that called themselves "spas," hung out with other finance men and their creative wives. At night they planned to breed others just like them. For fun Piper went downtown, paced bright openings and got just drunk enough that her work looked better than theirs, took a cab home and hoped secretly that the driver would complain that her destination was Harlem so she could fight a little injustice on the way. If they were away, Piper would simply come in the front door and go to sleep in their living room, look around at how beautiful and comfortable it was and admit that she was as jealous of their lifestyle as she was disgusted by it. They never got too sad because they were sure about life, and as bankrupt as their value system was, it would never force them to accept its insolvency. It was impossible to own everything, and as long as there was more to acquire they would have faith that further acquisition was the key to happiness.

Piper got happiness doing, not buying, which worked out well because her job gave her a lot to do but hardly any money to buy anything with. If evenings were disheartening, it was in morning that she found her victory. Just waking up and being happy about your life when you remembered it was a damn good thing, but actually being excited about the work in the day to follow was the richest possible blessing. She loved her job and the moments it gave her: when she was typing and felt like the mute were given the ability to scream through her to the page, later when it was on the newsstands and she could look and see her own mark on the world. Seeing her name in print made her feel alive, made her feel immortal. She was connected by a continuum of newspaper issues going back week by week to the time when this paper brought news of Jim Crow and lynchings, called for boycotts of the whites-only-staffed department stores on 125th Street. No handmade Persian rug felt better underneath you than a purpose.

While Piper liked to think that she rose an hour early just for the opportunity to whistled past Dumbass on the stairs as he tried to numb himself for another dehumanizing day of numeric servitude, getting to the paper before her coworkers served a more practical purpose. The New Holland Herald, the last great lion of the preintegration news media, was a paper of many distinctions. Unfortunately, its most current was the fact that it had to be the only twenty-thousand-plus periodical in a major urban area to have only one computer in the entire company. Copy was manually typed in the office by staff writers, submitted by fax or in person by freelancers. Corrections were made on the page, or for the occasional major changes the writer was forced simply to rewrite the work. The publisher Mr. Cole's recited response to requests for computers was, "If James Weldon Johnson didn't need one when he was writing in this very room, then neither do you." On Wednesday all of the articles were taken to a printing service, where typists rewrote the entire edition word for word and laid it out into a template that had been created years before. Often, the section tides failed to match the copy below them as articles were arranged in random order. It was a standard sight to see an article on poor nutrition in public schools under the header DINING OUT complete with the illustration of a man and a woman in formal wear, martinis in hand. The edition was quickly copyedited because the whole thing had to be done by four-thirty P.M. or the paper was forced to pay overtime, which was a sin worthy of dismissal. Since the typists were going so fast that they were not even reading what they duplicated, it was impossible to catch every mistake. In the past this practice had led to several rather dramatic copy errors, the greatest one of Piper's tenure being the obituary headline that read MR. GAVIN WYATT, 79, LIES, which resulted in a two-week campaign of irate phone calls from his descendants, all of whom insisted he was an honest man.

Mr. Cole was impossible to shame and that was his most impressive attribute; his claim to fame was that he had run 342 continuous "Special Report" front-page editorials, 176 of which contained the exact same headline: IMPEACH GIULIANI. The columns were always in a darker, bolted shade than the rest of the edition and sometimes covered nearly half the front page. The majority of sentences ending in exclamation points gave the impression that Mr. Cole was constantly screaming at the reader with incredulity! This was accurate! The column was the only thing he cared about. Piper had seen him in the office receiving the first printing of the new issues and he rarely cracked it open unless his own editorial was continued inside. As long as his regularly occurring "Special Report" was uncut and errorless, Mr. Cole was unmoved. Mr. Cole looked liked an aged orangutan, was old, belligerent, and eccentric in equal measure. When Piper was hired she was pulled aside by several people and told that at times he acted committable insane, and on such occasions she should just nod at everything he said and, if he got violent, go home.