Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

Outside Bobby's door was a cardboard cylinder. Bobby told Piper this on his phone and she sighed back through hers. She told him to wait and open it until after she hung up, which wasn't much of a request since she hung up right after saying that.

Bobby put down the phone. Piper's package sat on the floor leaning against the hall wall, and soon he was as well. He knew what was inside it. It was one of the paintings she had talked about the night before, she wanted him to see one. Bobby wondered if it would be any good. Bobby began to pray it wouldn't be any good. Bobby began to believe, in those few seconds, that the unseen painting would reveal itself to be very bad, hackish, an arts and crafts reject, hence proving that he'd been right the second time, that Piper really wasn't his destined companion. There was no way his soul mate could be a hack. This painting, Bobby realized, could be the one piece of evidence that would turn this whole series of events from a tragedy into a funny sidebar. It was his emotional out.

The one relationship that Bobby had been able to maintain for more than a year had been with a mentally ill administrative assistant (Borderline Personality Disorder — DSM IV) who had believed with all her crazy little heart that she was put on earth to be a singer. She took classes, she sang in studios, she sang in bands. The thing is, she never sang in key, and there lay the problem. She was so tone deaf she didn't even know she was, and it meant so much to her that nobody had the heart to tell her otherwise. The longer the charade went on, the more impossible it became to end it. She was attractive enough and had a British accent so bands kept asking her to sing with them, and even though each pairing never lasted more than two practices after she first opened her mouth, it encouraged her to keep at it. At times, at those deluded times when Bobby feared she was it, she was the one, he would imagine with great horror that he would spend his whole life this way, contributing to the conspiracy. Lying to her. Lying to himself until he went mad and actually believed that her shrieks were beautiful. When she'd dumped him to go on tour with a ska band who'd only heard her (computer-enhanced) audition tape, Bobby had actually laughed. It still hurt pretty bad, getting dumped, but while she was still midsentence in the dumping he'd burst out laughing.

Praying for ugliness, Bobby yanked the canvas from its container, unrolled it, and looked for liberation. The work was a mess. There were colors everywhere. All primary. A bunch of cartoons traced onto the background. None of them seemed to bleed into each other, yet just by sitting so close together in space they seemed to blend in the eye and create the illusion of tertiary colors everywhere. The illustrations were originals, not tracings, done in one unlifting pencil stroke, freehand. It was making Bobby's heart race, just looking at the energy of it. It was so vivid you could almost hear it talking to you, almost smell things that weren't there. It was brilliant. It was the greatest work Bobby'd ever held in his hands. Bobby rolled it up, shoved it back in its tube, and then really got down to the wailing portion of his morning.

Bobby got himself to stop by saying, "That's it, I'm done playing. I accept the rules of this world, and I vow to win by them. As I owe this world nothing, I hereby free myself artistically and morally to do whatever I have to. I will use all of my intelligence, my creativity, my passion to capture everything I want. I will reclaim the love that is rightly mine and forge a life for us together. I will write the book that makes the world bow before me. In this Horizon contest I will burn brightly, high above the others."

Bobby was in his suit when he went down to the storefront. Walking by Nina, he went straight into Lester's office, closed the door behind him. Lester was sitting behind his desk eating a corn beef special on rye, the juice from the coleslaw streaming down the man's fingers and into a pool on the wax paper. The sight made Bobby want to vomit, but he stayed focused, began the speech he'd spent the last hour rehearsing.

"My name is Robert M. Finley."

"I know that, Bobby. Good afternoon. Did you have a good time last night? I had a ball. No pun intended."

"Yes, but listen, sir, my name is Robert M. Finley, and I know you have an idea of who I am, but I don't think you understand who I really am, or what I'm fully capable of. That is my fault, because while I feel I've outperformed my contemporaries, I know I haven't really pushed myself to realize my potential. May I continue, sir?"

"Continue."

"I am by far the smartest, most dedicated participant in the Second Chance Program. No one believes as much in the goals of Horizon Realty, Harlem, or in the African-American community as a whole than me, sir. I, Robert M. Finley, dedicate myself with all my heart and by any means necessary to the uplifting of all three, and I live to prove that to you. Now, I have been made aware that Mr. Snowden has been involved in a special project for the cause, and I am here to ask for an extracurricular opportunity as well."

Lester took another bite, a big one, before licking the juice off his fingers, careful to taste every drop. After wrapping the remains of his lunch back up again, Lester fished in his drawers for napkins, used several. Dried, the man folded his hands before him, gave a sigh with a smile chaser.

"I can't tell you how pleased — strike that — ecstatic I am that you've come to me today with such passion, Robert M. Finley. Your talents, your experience, are what make you such an important addition to this community. Particularly during these times, when the Department of Corrections would see fit to build a halfway house in the middle of our historic community, despite our considerable protest." Lester removed a folder from the stack on the side of his desk, slid it over. Bobby picked it up, opened it. There were photocopies of blueprints inside.

"The convicts are expected to pour into the Mumia building this Friday, barring a miracle. These are not hand-picked Horizon men I don't have to tell you what type of men these are. I'm sure you've seen it: corner lot on 121st, sleeps thirty-eight. Those new buildings have such shoddy construction, just drywall and plywood. Like a four-story box of matches, if you ask me. But of course, they're just not built to last, are they?"

Just two guys sitting at the Lenox Lounge, nothing to see here. One beaming, one bowed. One saying hi to a seemingly endless parade of old friends and acquaintances, one wishing the other would just shut the hell up and get drunk so he would give up on murdering for the evening. This was Snowden's plan A: He would get Lester so drunk that nothing more could be done with the night except put it to bed. He would do this before every one of Lester's planned exercises, for a lifetime if need be. It would be like one of those fables, and if that didn't work, plan B was that he would get himself so drunk that he would be incapable of complying. Even though one plan was marked A and the other B, those letters in no way represented a hierarchical order of feasibility or allotted effort.

Snowden's wallet was padded with six twenties to make this happen, and he'd insisted repeatedly that the night was on him, but plan A clearly wasn't working. Lester didn't just baby-sit his drink, he'd adopted it. The contrast grew as the night progressed. Snowden's once broad shoulders evaporated, his neck slumping straight to his elbows in defeat. Lester would have been glowing even if he wasn't wearing neon. "Lester, you ain't changed in twenty years," they said as they passed their table. "Black don't crack, baby," they declared loudly at the sight of him. "Life looks good on you, brother. Good to see you out, back on top again." Lester sparkled — literally, the metallic threads sewn throughout his suit. Snowden's dreary presence beside him just added to the shimmer.