Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

"You know your friend Bobby sent a cassette tape to my job, I just listened to it today. There was a poem on it. I got really creeped out — it was my own voice from my answering machine spliced up, the words rearranged."

"I'll talk to him about that."

"Don't," Piper told him, her head leaning on the windowpane like she wanted to stick it through the glass. "The crazy thing was the poem wasn't that bad. It was about destiny, the importance of seizing your destiny, I think. It was actually really good. Once I realized that, I wasn't freaked out anymore. Mitigating circumstances."

"What are you watching down there?" Snowden stepped closer to follow her eyes to the street below.

"Do you see them? You should have heard them going at it. Is that what woke you up? Can you believe that? If he hits her, I'm going to call Giuliani's goon squad, I swear to God." Snowden saw the couple. The woman had her arms crossed, staring across the street at nothing. The guy was pacing like he was trying to wind himself up. Piper kept her arms crossed around her body but leaned back into Snowden. Relieved, Snowden placed his arms around her. Looking below he saw the other couple and thought, What's the difference between us and them? Three months? So let's enjoy this point Let's make this stage last and that stage as brief as possible. Snowden smelled the oil in Piper's hair and wanted to pull her back to the couch, stared down and wished he believed in God so that he could pray that the other couple would clear off and let them enjoy their good moments.

"They were so loud they woke me up. I was having a good dream, too, and then they started. I think he hit her already, I do. I just want to see it before I call the cops. I don't want anybody to get shot for no reason."

In seeming response, the guy stopped his pacing for a brief moment, then sprang at her. His arms were straight up in the air to show his exasperation, so he was totally unprepared when she punched him right in the mouth, a full-bodied right hook that sent the man to his knees, trying to keep his jaw from coming off his face by holding it with both hands.

"Should we call the police now?" Snowden asked. She kept hitting him. From his knees the man collapsed forward, tried to hold her arms, but she just started screaming, so he gave up, rolled himself into a ball and let her pummel him. The woman screamed, cried the whole time like it was her that was on the receiving end.

It seemed to Snowden another half hour before the couple joined each other arm and shoulder and dragged their heels over to Lenox so that he and Piper could do the same to the couch a few feet away. The scene had oudasted Snowden's arousal. Piper went to the kitchen, took a bottle of bourbon off the counter and two glasses, so they went down that road instead.

"That's the thing about living in the city, you see everybody's business up close. Whether you want to or not. At least here they're all strangers." Piper sat down on the couch's end, guided his hand to her side. Tall water glasses sat on the coffee table, both filled with an inch of alcohol.

"I hate the city," Snowden told her. "Harlem's OK, and I'm going to try to do this, try and give to it for a while, but when I get my nest egg I'm going to get a nice place way outside the city, someplace cheap where the money will last." Snowden was always tempted to discuss nesting after new sex, even in cases where he doubted it would go much further, like this one.

"No. You don't want to go out there. There's nothing outside of the city limits. It's like Mississippi out there. Upstate New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania? Mississippi. Just rednecks. All looks the same, too, north, south, it doesn't matter. Nothing for black folks. This is all we have. That's why making this place livable is so important."

"Not that far out. Like, the suburbs. They got folks in the suburbs. Shit, like the place you grew up, that's what I'm talking about. Start my own family out there, kids running around — "

"Running around, draining the energy out of you with every step, taking a year off your life for every one they get. Selfish, destructive, constantly demanding vacuums, that's what kids are," Piper spit. "And talk about loud, your little suburban world sounds about as quiet as a school bus."

"Rather hear that than this four-fifteen in the morning argument in the street stuff. In the suburbs, summer is nice and calm like it's supposed to be, relaxing." Snowden was smiling, hands before him like he was holding the dream up for Piper to get a look at. She wasn't looking at it, she was looking at him like he was a madman. Like a madman had sneaked into her apartment and had sex with her.

"Summer in the suburbs isn't relaxing. Don't believe that. Suburban summers are not relaxing. It might be stiller at night, just the hum of a hundred air conditioners, but all day, you never heard anything like it. Lawn mowers, constantly. Not a lot of grass, just people mowing their little lawns, going over the same patches over and over. So scared something's going to grow, something wild, they're out there all the time, wasting fossil fuels, creating smog. Weed whackers, hedge machines, blowers, it's crazy. Then you've got all those damn ice cream trucks. So loud you can have all the windows closed, the air conditioners going, the lawn machinery roaring, and you can still hear their electric music box sound playing the same four bars over and over, because that's how they want it. Not just one truck, either, a fleet of them, one showing up before the last one can disappear. Can you imagine how insane you have to be to work in one of those? Or how nuts it drives them to hear that same song, over and over, every day for months? Sure, they're selling ice cream, but that's not what it's about. The ice cream, that's just to support their real agenda, to drive you as crazy as they are."

Snowden looked at her in awe. She was Bobby's soul mate, he was suddenly sure of it. She was just as crazy, in just the same way as he was. Snowden couldn't even look at Piper, the guilt of his betrayal so palpable. Maybe there really was someone out there for everyone. Maybe Bobby had found his one, that one person in the world who would put up with his combustible insanity. Maybe the woman Snowden had screwed on her hallway floor without a moment's consideration really was Bobby's one chance at happiness.

"I'm sorry," Piper said. She'd hopped closer and laid her hands over his own. Snowden looked at her and couldn't figure out what transgression she was referring too. "I should have called you, told you I was working on it. I just got so excited, and I didn't even think it was going to be published this week, it wasn't supposed to be. But I don't know if I would have told you before next week's issue, either. I might have, but who knows? But I wasn't trying to use you. I certainly wasn't trying to single-handedly destroy the real estate market in Harlem."

Snowden shrugged before responding. "Look, lady, I'm going to ask you something, but y'know, it's not based on anything but my own paranoia." Snowden paused, tried to think of a good way to ask his question, but couldn't find one. "It's just. . everything is kosher, right? It's not like there's some psycho killer walking the streets they don't want us to know about."

"Oh my God, wouldn't that make a great story?" Piper mused wistfully. "Sorry. People like that, they kill in patterns, similar ways, similar people. I looked, trust me."

"So there's not like a Chupacabra monster running around?" Snowden asked. He tried to laugh at the question but it just came off like a nervous tic.

"Wow. That would be cool. Can you imagine how many Herald copies we could sell? But there's nothing. Totally different people, obvious circumstances. I mean, there's dumb things. Like, I got all excited because I noticed in the coroner's reports that a bunch of them all had five-dollar bills in their pockets, at least twenty bucks' worth. But then, some didn't, and there's always some stupid stuff like that, some little coincidence that if you look hard enough you can connect. That doesn't mean it's not meaningless."