Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

"That doesn't sound bad. You can't have to do more than one a month, right?"

"No, you'd be surprised. It's a rough city. You got to be careful in this place. Drugs, disease, stupidity. Old age. Mostly accidents."

"So come on, you can tell me," Piper leaned forward smiling, rubbing her hands together. "How often do people around here, y'know, drop off?"

"I don't know. I guess we're doing people almost once a week," Snowden said.

Piper pulled back, stopped smiling. "You mean that in this little area — what, a square mile, maybe two — there is at least one death a week, accidental?"

"Yeah, crazy right?" Snowden looked over the last of his platter for a discarded sliver of bass to nibble on.

"That's insane. You're pulling my leg, right? You're just messing with me." Piper said the last sentence like he'd admitted as much, grabbed the dishes off the table and started piling them for removal.

"Oh, I'm not lying to you, for real," Snowden pleaded. He wanted the smiling Piper back. He was pretty sure that one would kiss him. "I make a lot of extra cash for those days, so I know."

"But it seems like there wouldn't be that many accidental deaths in the whole city," Piper blushed back at him, offering innocent amazement. "That's so wild. Just out of curiosity, what were their names?"

"SHE'S AN AWFUL. . awful person," Bobby decided. He was drunk, lost his way after the third word of the sentence, found it again. Snowden agreed with him. Piper seemed all right to him, but for the purpose of this discussion, yes, she was an awful person. To jilt the person who loves her without even giving him the respect of acknowledgment makes her an awful person, in that moment. We are all awful people when we do that. Snowden raised the nearly dry remains of his own jug of malt liquor in salute to the truth of it, was reminded by its lightness that to go further into oblivion he needed more, but his tragedy was that he was too drunk to get up and get some.

"She was. . there should be another word for rude. Something like callous, but harsher."

"Asshole," Snowden offered. Bobby burst out laughing at the joy of it, that the language hadn't failed him, that he wasn't going to have to learn French or create his own collection of syllables to give voice to his emotions. Bobby stumbled across the room to slap the hand of the man who pointed this out to him. They slapped bottles instead. The glass broke. Neither one acknowledged it, or looked down to where the shards had fallen, because neither one felt like being bothered to pick them up.

"She was an asshole," Bobby continued, getting a little more comfort from taking this woman who'd inexplicably consumed his mind, dumping her in the past tense and leaving her there. The two actually had more than a bit in common, Snowden registered. The passion, the moral certainty, the disastrous attempt at art. To his eye, Piper's work looked like she subjected herself to paint colonies, squatted over the canvas and let go. Snowden burst out giggling at the thought. Emboldened by the sound of laughter, masculated by his protest, Bobby continued.

"I was lucky! She was an evil whore!" The last word Bobby screamed. Snowden sat with it for a little while and got uncomfortable. There was no form of torture that had been invented yet that would get him to disclose that he'd had dinner with her the night before, that she had in fact chastely escorted him at evening's end to the door, so Snowden protested on more general grounds.

"Dude, I don't know about that, man. I mean, you can't really say she was a whore, can you? I mean, it doesn't really apply here, does it? If she was a whore, she would have given you some, got you all worked up, then dissed you. This one, she didn't even bother calling you back."

"Hey man, I'm not talking in a literal sense! I'm talking in the sense that, I don't know, I'm a man and she's a woman and she did me wrong, right? Like, I can use it that way." Registering that the other was clearly unswayed, Bobby tried another vein of reasoning. "Okay, she was a whore in the sense, in the sense that she was nice to me that day, right? Real nice, so in a way she was kind of promiscuous with her. . her politeness."

Both of the men became silent. Bobby's last comment sounded so stupid, Snowden felt as if it lessened him just to hear it. He just stared at his feet, watched the alcoholic optical illusion of the ground swaying beneath them. After a few minutes this way, Snowden accepted the fact that the snorting, gasping sound coming from the other man was crying, but he couldn't bring himself to look up and face it. Snowden literally couldn't, he was so drunk he felt like his head had been filled with BB pellets when he wasn't looking.

"The word piper means 'crackhead' in Philly," Snowden offered, head bowed.

"There you go!" Bobby pointed across the room, energized. "That's what I'm talking about!"

Just because every metal sidewalk door you've ever walked on has held your weight doesn't mean they all will. Some become concave from years of pedestrians and simply fold beneath that one foot too many. Sometimes there's rust, underneath where you can't see it, making it brittle like metal matzo. Step on the wrong one and you could shred an ankle, a kneecap as you loose the ground beneath you. Step on the wrong one and you can, your whole body, go right through. Who can say how far down it will be before you reach ground again? You can't. You don't even know how long it would be before they found you. It could even be one of those grates you tread over every day without thinking, like it was for Irene Bell of 843 Lenox, #4. One minor step in a day of many, the context changes and it's the final one. They find you two weeks later only because it smells so bad the Con Ed man checking the meter next door to the abandoned building thinks it's worth calling the cops over. Think of how bad that's got to stink, that a man would call the police in response to it. So many ways to die. If you don't choose one, a method will be appointed to you. Life's only guaranteed service.

Snowden wasn't exactly feeling sorry for Ms. Irene Bell. Part of this was due to the fact that when he opened the trunk she used as a stand for her small black and white TV he saw that it was filled nearly three feet deep in other people's wallets. The collection ranged immensely in size, color, and quality of craftsmanship. The ones at the top of the pile had stubs to recent movies inside them, the ones at the bottom held licenses that had expired years before. She deserved to die, Snowden decided. She deserved to die because everyone deserves to die, so really what was the point, which was Snowden's new attitude to death in general. There didn't seem to be any other way to deal with it.

There were moments still, like when Lester had him run an envelope down to a buyer on Fifty-first and Madison during the lunch hour, when he saw all those people and thought somebody must have figured out an escape. Staring at the thousands pushing forward, each one a part of the crowd he wished to avoid, Snowden could believe that in the millennial of humanity surely someone had figured out how to avoid mortality. But that mix of optimism and paranoia never lasted long. No matter how many people, no matter how decent they were or how much money they acquired, the odds were still the same. Everyone was going to die. So how could you feel sorry for Ms. Bell, probably miserable in her dirty little apartment, going out into the city to ride the crowded subways in search of someone to lean against and steal from, to plant some of her misery into his or her life?

Snowden crumpled her designer dresses into balls and shoved them in one more trash bag and this time thought of how many days would be better without her. How many men would pat their inside pockets and women check their purses and see that what they worked for was still there and not even know they had a rusty basement grate and a twenty-foot fall to thank for it. Life has many stories, but one ending. Snowden decided it wasn't always a sad one.