Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

It was that smile that woke up the brain that had for the last minutes been simply floating passively in Bobby's head. Impulse outgunned restraint and Bobby pushed the bottle past Snowden's hand, turned it over, and began pouring the contents into his guest's lap. Then he just held it there, staring into the eyes of the other.

It was not the gesture that scared Snowden, it was that Bobby's eyes weren't even angry. His mouth was breathing heavily and his chest bounced below it, but his eyes were dead like there wasn't a damn thing their owner could do that would disturb them. They were all mad, the men of Horizon, even the best of them. Snowden remained seated, took the glare and offered his own learned numbness in response to it. The beer soaked Snowden's pants, the couch, and the papers around him. The sound as it left the bottle and made its way to the hard floor died down, and then Snowden listened to Bobby's breathing even clearer until he decided to walk off down the hall.

At the door, Snowden paused, called back, "So I'll see you at work tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Bobby offered. "You'll be working for me next year. You know that, right?"

Snowden was so drunk he didn't care that he was walking down the street looking as if he pissed himself. He didn't, but what if he did? To the few people he did catch looking he was like, "Come on, now you mean to say you've never peed yourself before? Never felt the shame and release as the warm spray runs down to your legs, unbound? Who among you can say that?"

At his door he barely managed to locate his keys, get them out and working to keep from peeing himself for real. A struggle through the dark, into the bathroom where he did his business and left his jeans hanging over the shower curtain. It was Snowden's habit not to turn on the lights when he came home on nights like this: The orange glow of the street lamps provided enough to get by, any more would tempt him to toward distractions that would keep him awake until it was time to go to work the following morning.

Tracing his fingers along the walls down the hall toward the kitchen, Snowden adhered to the greatest lesson his father ever taught him: how to avoid hangovers. As he had so many nights, Snowden found the bottle of vitamin B, chased down five pills all at once with the jug of water from the refrigerator. It was after he'd put the jug back, in the fleeting light of its closing door, that he turned and saw the dead body lying on the couch past the counter.

Snowden stood as still as the jar of grease by the stove, the box of cereal in front of him, and every other inanimate object in the room. The flash of light had left him momentarily blinded and he was absolutely certain that if he turned on a lamp there would be nothing on his couch at all, and not because it had been an optical illusion, either (it hadn't, it had been a man), but because it was the ghost of Baron Anderson, come back to haunt him for tripping on the cord and stealing his son. Snowden was absolutely certain of this and equally so that he didn't want to witness the miracle, that it would scare him even more than he already was and force him to believe in something he'd rather not even if true. Then it farted and Snowden yanked his longest knife out of its drawer before hitting the light and finding Lester passed out on the couch, shoes still on.

The light did what the sound didn't, Lester blinked a bit as Snowden stood in disbelief before him. The man looked started at first, as if it was his home that had been invaded, his eyes blinking till they were answered with the replacement of his glasses.

"You have beautiful legs," Lester managed. His voice wasn't slurred, but even the drunk Snowden could recognize that the man was floating several miles above his usual plane.

"Sir?" Snowden looked down at his own boxers, made sure his penis wasn't hanging out. I am standing here with no pants, my boss has broken into my apartment, stoned off his ass, and I'm not dreaming. "Sir, what are you doing here?"

"No, no, I ain't the one in trouble. You the one in trouble." Lester's voice sounded like he was talking in his sleep. Snowden kept the knife in front of him, but Lester paid it no mind. His lids kept nodding, his voice trailing out between sentences as his eyes skipped open and closed.

"You told that woman. That paper bitch, the one you're fucking." The most terrifying thing about what Lester was saying was not that he knew it was Snowden who'd leaked the story: Snowden assumed that eventually he would get busted. It was the lazy way that Lester mentioned it, no hint of taunt or recrimination, casually adjusting the pillow beneath his head as he talked. It was as if Snowden's most private actions were Lester's common knowledge.

"It's all right, though. A couple, a couple TV spots, that won't matter. We're going to take care of that, take care of your indiscretion."

"So I'm fired now. You want me to leave?" Snowden asked. The Peter Pan bus rode to Philly all night, at least that was a way out of all this. Lester laughed at him. "You're cute, I mean that. You ain't fired, you ain't kicked out the program, and you ain't going nowhere. You just screwed up, trusting her. Trusting anyone. Not fired, just back with the pack. You was in front the other two, now just running with the pack again. You still got the potential. Just can't mess up no more." Lester's last words drifted off when he did, were replaced by the much louder sound of his snores, and still they managed to scare Snowden enough that he kept the butcher knife in front of him until his hand cramped from gripping so tightly.

Snowden remained standing in his underwear waiting for more. "It's hot," Lester finally mumbled, eyes still closed. He was right, the radiator had the room so hot the windows were steamed.

"Help me," Lester said, his arms hanging out limply before him; he hadn't even loosened his tie. His forehead had been invaded by an army of sweat beads, they joined into battalion streams to invade his pillow. Snowden opened the window, stuck a fan in it. Accidents happen. They'd both cleared out the slovenly apartment of a senile senior citizen after she'd fallen victim to the last heat wave of the summer. Her windows were painted shut and at the time Lester had said she hadn't called about it. Now Snowden could clearly see him painting her windows immobile in June, then refusing to return her desperate calls to fix the hazard. Lester stopped his latest round of snores, grumbled, "Undress me. The knife placed on the coffee table, within reach, Snowden went over to him cautiously, started untying and pulling off Lester's shoes. Yellow socks, so much foot powder that when Snowden yanked them free the cloud sent him sneezing. Lester responded by cracking the bones in both feet unconsciously before rolling onto his back, arms passively bent up to the sky like a newborn. "Shirt," he said.

The tie was a clip-on. A couple buttons down the front and a closed-eyed Lester responded to the stimuli by assisting Snowden with an effort to pull his own limbs out of the sleeves. Snowden could see the needle marks that lined the veins of Lester's arms even in the dark, like chicken pox on parade. We are all weak, they said to him. Count how many times I gave into temptation. Snowden was considering shoving Lester's arms back in his shirt so he could play it off in the morning, but then he looked down and saw his boss staring at him.

Lester beckoned lightly with his other hand for him to come closer. Before Snowden could pull away, Lester had raised himself close enough to whisper something in his ear. Snowden gave up, leaned into it, but the secret became a kiss when Lester finally reached him. It landed on the side of Snowden's nose, was wet, quickly turned into a tongue licking lower before Snowden could yank away, offer, "Sir, you're wasted," as an excuse for him.