Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

The most beautiful thing Snowden could think to believe in at the moment was love, and even though he was pretty sure he wasn't in love with Piper Goines and that it was good sense to avoid her in general, he felt overwhelmed by the need to be near a woman, inside her, and Piper's door was already open for him. The urge to be touched, listened to, overshadowed the fear that Lester would see him near her, so once more he found himself at her door, greeted by her patented lack of surprise, customary silence.

"I'm here for consolation," Snowden said as soon as he'd ducked inside the vestibule, out of sight from the street.

"Good."

"Would you rub my hands for me? They hurt from lifting shit."

"OK. It's a deal, then."

Upstairs, Piper obliged. There were too many bottles for it to take so long to find a little something to rub into his skin, but it did. Snowden sat on the fuzzy lid of the toilet while Piper pulled through the stalactite jars in the cavern under the sink, most of which ended up on the floor in the process. Snowden begged for her to settle with the petroleum jelly but Piper chose instead some pink paste meant for hair moisturizing that stank like a perm but felt good. They had sex in the bathtub because when they started kissing they were next to it and it was the only bare surface in her apartment.

Snowden woke up paranoid. His dream hallucination that he'd been sleeping in a coffin-sized office drawer turned out to be the product of the manila files underneath the sheets of Piper's bed, ones she hadn't bothered to mention or clear when they'd collapsed there. Snowden was pulling them out from beneath himself when Piper reached out for his hand.

"I didn't expect this, you know. I mean, it wasn't an expectation, do you know what I mean? I realize, at least it's my understanding of this whole thing, that we're just messing around here. But I want to tell you I really appreciate it, you coming over here to console me, taking into account how I must feel."

"Console you" Snowden sat with it a moment, admitted there was no way he could hold that statement that it would make him see it clearly. "I'm sorry, did something happen to you?"

"Jesus." When Piper flopped back on the bed like that, Snowden could hear that there were even more files hidden beneath her. "You didn't even see the article, did you? You probably don't even read the Times, do you?"

"Oh, I don't just not read the Times, I don't read nothing at all. I'm a total moron." Snowden caught the flash of white from Piper's rolling eyes as she jumped out of the bed and past him. He was beginning to wonder if he should follow her when she returned to drop the weight of the Sunday paper on the bed beside him. As she went searching through each section, Snowden became certain that when she was done she would leave the periodical right there where she dropped it for weeks, kicking it piece by piece onto the floor in her sleep.

"You know what? The most annoying thing about all this is now you're going to be all freaking happy about it too, about my travesty." Piper threw the section at him, bouncing it off his slow hands and down to the floor in front of him. The paper looked as if it had been shared by a bored army for a month, its sides soft and rounded from repeated bending, gray with the ink of smeared words.

"My editor in chief called me last night to tell me about it. The bastard even sounded happy that I'd been scooped. He's supposed to be my advocate and I could almost see the old fool smiling on the other end of the phone. He must have gone through my insurance records to get my home number. It was like his little payback for my piece knocking out his Special Report, as if I had a damn thing to do with that."

Snowden heard none of this, the auditory processor of his brain being infringed upon by the visual overload of seeing Cyrus Marks right there on the cover of the real estate section, his smiling visage centered and in color, Horizon Realty's swinging sign over his shoulder, the number showing clearly. Deja vu as Snowden found himself reading the paper with his fate caught in the text, but now the anticipation of each additional sentence given the context of joy. The article's tide, AMID ACCIDENTAL ASHES, A NEW HARLEM BLOSSOMS.

"See? See? Not only does the bastard not mention that I'm the one who broke this story, he doesn't even bother mentioning the New Holland Herald at all. You know, you think sometimes that black people are starting to get respect, then you look at the way the black press gets dissed. . It's goddamn antebellum. It really is."

"Although much has been made in our local tabloid press about the high number of accidental deaths in the historic Mount Morris section of Harlem, it must be taken into account that these figures apply entirely to the lower-income residents of the area, the elderly, the drug-addicted, and others who are obviously at a much higher risk than the flourishing and unaffected high-income newcomers." After that, Snowden read the sidebar about Mr. Marks, Harlem's favored son. Cyrus Marks was the only real estate agent profiled, his optimism for Harlem quoted and unquestioned, his hope for all Harlem, rich and poor, beyond reproach. A long, run-on sentence listed his charitable contributions and affiliations.

"The thing that kills me is the morally reprehensible tone this guy gets." When Piper got mad, she had a habit of slamming her fist down. The bed shook. "It's like he's implying it's some bourgeois Manifest Destiny, like Harlem is just weeding itself to make room for the moneyed fucks to come steal it away for themselves. It's disgusting."

Snowden got to the quote from Lester at the end. "A well-groomed, courteous man, Marks's one-time parolee, then chauffeur, and now lead agent. 'Of course white New Yorkers are welcome in Harlem, just as the former president himself. Black Harlem enjoys the diversity they bring to our community'"

If there were any lingering suspicions about the accidents, this article dispersed them beyond the borders of memory. It was the first moment since he saw Baron Anderson's lifeless body that Snowden could actually believe he would make his way out of his situation. Snowden had never considered sending flowers to a man before, but he promised as he read that Lincoln Jefferson, the reporter, would be his first recipient.

"You know, you could at least give me the respect of not smiling like that until you're dressed and out of here," Piper told him.

The following morning, Monday. The phone rang at seven-ten and it was Lester. Snowden heard the voice and groggily begged to know what was wrong, what did they want of him now, what the hell was wrong with this world.

"Everything's fine," Lester chirped cheerily. "Everything's fine now. Horizon has many friends, in many places. It's all been taken care of."

The day's relocation was originally scheduled for noon, but Lester wanted Snowden to show up at nine instead, back up Nina in reception by clearing the messages off the voice mail. Snowden had performed the duty before and disliked it. Nina was an adherent of the Ebonic school of customer service, felt rudeness as much her right as her paycheck, got even worse when she was forced to share her small territory behind the reception desk. Her image in Snowden's mind was intertwined with the smell of rotten flowers, provided by a decade of her sweating through her perfume in Horizon's cramped front office. The job was easy though, involved sitting in the small space behind her with a notepad, transcribing the messages from the eight or nine calls that, on busy days, overflowed.

When Snowden arrived, Nina didn't even look up, not even to roll her eyes. There were four calls blinking on hold. The voice mailbox was nearly full. Aside from two magazine reporters, every single one of them wanted to know about available properties, when they could come in for a tour. Snowden handled 114 calls by noon, left the rest for her when he went to change into his banana suit again.