Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

"I am on top of all my appointments, sir. I know I missed half a day last week but I had a really rough time hunting the night before and I called the Armstrong family and apologized profusely and they said they understood and I'm showing them a new property tomorrow and I think it's an offer they can't refuse, I really do."

"Mr. Snowden, I'm sure you're doing fine with your daytime duties. I'm not calling to bother you about that. I'm calling to compliment you on your handling of your nighttime ones."

"Sir, we shouldn't be talking on the phone." Snowden wondered if cordless phones could be traced. Apparently mobile ones could be very easily, a guy in the joint who'd been busted for selling stolen ones told him that, but as far as cordless ones he didn't know.

"No one's listening. No one cares enough to. What you did, that was a big deal. The problem you solved was a major one. The man was a menace. Strategically, this greatly reduces the amount of resistance our efforts will encounter in the year ahead. It puts us far ahead of schedule. I want to thank you. I'd like to apologize to you as well. To be honest, I didn't think you had it in you. I was wrong."

"No, no, no, no apologies. I don't want your apologies. Keep them to yourself," Snowden told the congressman.

"Look, I'm trying to be contrite here. I'm being a very big man by admitting I was wrong, and you're going to be gracious and accept that from me," Marks insisted.

"No, no. I owe you the apology. I owe you, sir, because I been thinking a lot about this lately, trying to not let my emotions or preconceived notions get in the way and now I know what the problem was: I was wrong. You see I been thinking that we are people, right, and the reason we're not just animals is that we have civilization, decency, morality, consideration, right? We have society, that's what makes us people and not just bald apes. But then you think about it, some people are human, but they don't have decency, they aren't civilized, because that's learned behavior and they never got educated. So then I was thinking about the folks. I think — and don't tell any white people I said this because you know they already think we're all this way — that during slavery, when they were trying to turn us into animals, that on a tiny bit of us they succeeded, and these beast folks been running around for a hundred and fifty years breeding like crazy because that's what beasts do. The responsible people, they have little families, do you see where I'm going? So with every generation the ratio gets more out of whack. So I get it, the whole Little Leaders thing, now. I really do. You're saving them and their descendants from a life of inhumanity, right? And really by killing the parents we set the offspring free, which in a way is a blessing to the victim since. ."

Snowden kept talking. The thing about sitting in the closet all the time, about just going to work and wearing a face that you took on and off like a blazer, was that you never had someone to really talk to. Snowden felt very lucky he had someone. Even if he got to the point when he'd been talking so long he couldn't remember who that someone was. Pausing to focus on the receiver, Snowden listened for a change. As seconds passed Snowden became sure no one was even there, until a voice said back to him, "exactly."

The new novel started with a character named Robert M. Finley slipping a package under a woman named Piper Goines's Harlem door. Even the weather conditions were the same: clouds in "white streaks, softly smeared on a lazy sky" and "the boastful warmth of an immature spring." The day of the week, the date, the time of day all were identical. What he was wearing, what she was, it was maddening. The only thing that kept Piper from getting completely freaked out and throwing the pages away was the same thing that stopped her fictional self from doing so: the artistry of the prose and the innate curiosity on the part of the reader, pages that kept turning fast enough for her to be captivated.

There were several assumptions within The Orphean Daze that Piper took critical exception to, if this speculative story was going to be as true to known fact as it purported. First of all, Robert Finley could not be accurately described, Piper felt, as "an upright assemblage of bones, charred and dusky, grinding dryly forward." Regardless of how skinny he seemed there was some muscle to him, and the whole burnt theme applied to him throughout the work just didn't fit, didn't acknowledge the fiery passion Piper felt was the character and man's most prominent feature. Second, when you compared this description of the Robert Finley character with that of the Piper Goines one, "lush lines curved from the pressure of her bounty," the narrative played into the whole Beauty and the Beast myth, which besides being an extremely overused cliche was a pretty pathetic male fantasy to begin with. "Ugly guy wins beautiful girl," the fraternal twin to the equally vapid "poor girl wins rich guy" Cinderella idiocy.

Piper read, looking for more faults to distance herself from the work, but didn't find many. On the page were two people struggling to make a life together. Not a perfect one, just a life, compiled as it was from the building blocks of minutia. Piper recognized the sorrow at the core of all living, the unexpected blessings that resonated because of it. Bargaining with eyes that managed to feel dry and watery at the same time, Piper's mind kept making the promise that after the next chapter she would close her lids and go to bed, but she never did. It was as if Fate had dropped its notebook and Piper had to finish as much as possible before he noticed it was missing and came looking for it. Piper kept reading because she couldn't bring herself not to, out of control and hell yes resenting that, but her only defensive action was to read faster.

In the last chapter, decades in the fictional future, after one widowed lover has buried the other and had months of mourning, The Orphean Daze follows them moment by moment as they visit their safety-deposit box. The way it proceeds, it gives the impression it's for some official papers, possibly insurance documents. Inside the box, however, its papers oxidized yellow by time, is the fictional version of the book Piper couldn't stop herself from reading. The character takes it home, and the last paragraph is about them reading it. How none of the facts are true but everything else is. It wasn't until she finished the last sentence, at four fifty-four in the morning, that Piper realized she didn't even know which of the couple was dead and which was the survivor. That the point was they'd come so far that even to the reader it didn't matter anymore.

Bobby Finley, ladies and gentlemen! Bobby Finley, Creator of Worlds!

Piper had fallen in love with writers just by reading their work before. Ugly ones. Dead ones. There'd been times when she'd read the beauty of their work and felt like their souls must be the same, looked to the back jacket picture, and pined for someone she felt was no longer a stranger. Piper was a lover of books, writers wrote to entice readers, it was an understandable weakness. So how the hell was she supposed to defend her heart against a book intentionally written to seduce her?

Demanding to know just that, Piper found Bobby's number and started calling. I will not be manipulated, she was going to say as soon as he groggily said hello, but he didn't. After two rings, the voice mail service did instead, and Piper had not prepared a statement for recording so slammed the phone down again, only to keep hitting Redial for the next half hour in an effort to get him to answer, which he didn't.

Not a damn thing you can do if you stay up until four fifty-four in the morning. If you have to be somewhere three hours later, as Piper had to be at the Herald, it was best to stay awake, not torture yourself by nodding off and then having to rise from the deepest valley of your sleep cycle, Piper told herself. There was only one rational thing to do. So Piper put on her coat and shoes and set out into the cold morning darkness to go wake Bobby's black ass up.