Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

"Drunks. Make great. Alibis," Lester said. It took him a couple of minutes, eyes floating in their lids, but he got it out. Snowden ignored him. He didn't feel like listening, he felt like drinking, and he wanted to do that and watch her. She was still there, working. She was still there and her face still looked like someone had used it to kick the dirt off his boots, and Snowden was glad she still looked like that. He wanted to remember every detail of the abused face, every pus-bloated curve, every darkened shade her makeup failed to camouflage. Take that as the image you remember from this night, Snowden begged himself. Those fists will never hit that face, Snowden kept forcing himself to acknowledge. It offered little solace, but a little was something so he kept doing it. Slamming it down with six-dollar shots of whiskey until the logic made more sense.

Even by Snowden's standards he was exceptionally drunk by the time the watch admitted it was one o'clock. It was a belligerent, deceitful device, and he was pretty sure it had paused a few times when he wasn't looking (eleven twenty-seven, for instance, went on forever, and it had been twelve forty-nine for generations). Snowden fell asleep watching it, woke up thirty-four minutes past confused about where he was and what reality everybody was using, the one from his dream or the other one he now could recall only vaguely.

Trying to stand up, it was pretty clear that by consensus the world had changed its rules of gravity and nobody had bothered to tell him which pissed him off but Lester was saying something about "be careful" so maybe that's what he was talking about. The bladder said bathroom first, then when he was walking back out it was her again at the table collecting her tip and saying "Thank you" and Snowden said " J us t be careful who you love next time" but it was loud and she didn't quite hear him.

Outside Snowden remembered more about who he was, the place, the time, all that. And what he was doing. He was walking, each step deliberate — got to land on the foot's ball, lift the knee up high enough, do the right then left or left then right but never the same legs consecutively. It got easier every time he got it right. Then there was where he was going. Snowden was going back there. Snowden was going to tell them what happened, apologize, all that. Shhh, don't tell the sober mind, just keep walking.

Snowden trudged south on Lenox. The brownstones, they lined both sides of the street, leaning in and bearing witness with so many eyes. This is how it was supposed to happen. The night smelled of burning wood and Snowden knew this could mean only one thing, barbecue, but he stayed course anyway. He was tired, but the weight of his burden propelled him forward. He was lost, but then there came the sirens and they called to him, gave him the sign of flashing red lights and Snowden knew they were waiting for his arrival. Destiny was so amazing, even in this state there was room for awe at this. Just when Snowden feared he'd been led asunder another vehicle would coming running by, its lights and call demanding that he follow, moving so fast it was pretty clear whoever was driving was hungry too.

As Snowden got closer, the smell of smoke-roasted meat grew stronger, so that by the time he turned the corner and saw all the red and blue lights flashing on top of their vehicles, Snowden was starving, pushing toward them despite the fact that the fog made it hard to breathe. There was a whole house on the corner on fire, but that made sense because there were a lot of people there to feed, and it was that new flophouse, which was fine because nobody wanted it here anyway. People were gathered halfway down the block from it.

Negroes love some barbecue. Wooden horses had been erected. Snowden, who was finding his ongoing batde simply to keep his eyes open complicated by the gray air, couldn't find the line for the serving area, where to get the paper plates or plasticware. But he did see Bobby in the middle of the street at the very front. Oh friend of friends, so good to see a face of love on a late Harlem night. Bobby would know how to get a meal ticket, where the beer tent was.

"Where's the food, man?" Snowden put his hands on Bobby's neck, shook it. Bobby's head bounced a little, but the skinny man didn't even bother removing his grip from the FDNY barricade, let alone turn and offer a response. This was not good at all. Snowden was tired, and if he didn't get an answer, goddamn it, he was going to turn around go home, eat leftovers.

"Bobby, where's the food?" If Bobby knew he wasn't saying. Snowden felt pissed but powerless. Bobby was black and motionless and shiny from sweat, staring forward and up like he was watching a movie. Snowden wanted to punch him, but Bobby looked too much like a tar baby to risk it.

PIPER WAS BEING followed.

From the first time she showed up at the smoking ruins of Mumia Abu-Jamal Memorial Halfway House he identified her, noted her presence. Then she kept coming back. On her third visit, as she walked around the site taking yet another set of photos, he walked with her, unnoticed, staying directly behind her the whole time. On her sixth recorded visit back to the scene of the fire, when Piper ignored the police tape's yellow order not to cross its line, he was there waiting for her. He watched intently as she forced herself through the space where the temporary fencing almost met the wall. He was disgusted by the soft, rounded gut that revealed itself when her shirt became stuck on an odd barb, but he crossed the street to get a closer look anyway. To see exactly what she was looking at. As Piper moved through the blackened remains of windows and walls, he kept careful pace with her on the sidewalk beyond. Wondering what she was thinking. Fuchsia fedora pulled down low, raincoat collar up, pretending to walk his little wiener dog.

What Piper was thinking, in order of least to most importance: If I don't eat that lo mein today it's going to go bad; look for something suspicious; how the hell am I supposed to know what looks suspicious; thank God I finally got assigned a real story; the only reason they gave me this story is Gil Manly is covering the police shooting of Trevor Barber; I bust my ass every day for this paper and now they're cutting me out of Harlem's most newsworthy event.

The last thought was the one that resonated the most, whose hum had endured since she'd listen to Cole Jr. dole out the stories four days before. The Trevor Barber shooting was the big story; the NYPD shoot an innocent, unarmed black man every year or two and it's always the big story. Piper's big story was she was being denied it. The ripples of that fact grew as they moved farther away from the source, leaving questions in their wake. These questions varied greatly in their complexity, creativity, and merit but were uniform in their destructiveness as well as their subject matter: the worth and prospects of one Piper Goines. To drown them out, Piper began creating new ones of her own. They were good ones. They included such enticing distractions as: Why would a building that's just been built burn down as fast as a nineteenth-century log cabin? Isn't it a little convenient that the bane of this community was thwarted before it could even fully open its doors? Who will champion justice for the three parolees who died if I don't?

"Oh snap, it's Sherlock Homegirl!" was Dumbass's response as he clanked away at the pipes under Piper's bathroom sink with his immaculate tools. He'd been eavesdropping on her and his wife's conversation, his rare visit to the third floor sparked by a brown water stain that had appeared on his office ceiling directly below. "Sister of my love, just because you didn't get the story you wanted doesn't mean your fire is going to magically become more than just that. The dryer in the basement had a bad cord, they already said so on TV. That police shooting is already dying down anyway. I mean, the mayor himself reported the guy had a bunch of sexual assault convictions. Who cares about a hood like that?"