Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

If Piper made a sound falling down to the lobby five stories below, Snowden didn't hear it. He was too busy lunging forward to the last place she was standing, firmly grabbing the railing that she'd failed to. Piper was already lying still on the ground so far below by the time Snowden arrived to help her.

It wasn't that bad, is what Snowden said to himself to contradict the horror he was feeling. She didn't suffer the terror of the whole drop, surely she hit her head in the narrow stairway before she got that far. It's a shame that had to happen. Dear God it's a shame, that it had to, that it had to happen. An unspeakable tragedy, that this was a necessity. To ensure that Horus, who appeared beside him with a hand firmly on Snowden's shoulder, didn't attempt a repeat performance, Snowden repeated those thoughts aloud for him.

"It's a damn shame," Horus agreed, looking down, a direction Snowden looked purposefully away from. "A fine-looking woman like that one."

"They already know, don't they? You were sent to back me up, in case I didn't do it, weren't you?" Snowden asked him. Horus kept looking down at the body but started squeezing Snowden's shoulder so hard that it hurt.

"First of all, I'm not no one's 'backup,' OK? I done told you about that shit before. Think of my role in this venture as more 'quality control' if you want a name for it. Second of all, it ain't always about you, is it? See, that right there is the man I'm supposed to be overseeing." Horus pointed below.

Snowden forced himself to look down in the direction of the corpse once more and this time saw Bobby standing over it. The faintest of hopes fluttered through him and he thought Bobby would reach down for a pulse and find one and just as suddenly as things turned morbid they would spring back to being merely bleak again, but looking down at the body's anatomically impossible position, Snowden wasn't surprised Bobby didn't bother with the formality. Nor that Bobby should look straight up with the anger and pain distorting his face as they did. So many exhaustive trials Snowden had undergone since arriving in Harlem this last year, so many elaborate tests of moral fortitude and determination, but none more demanding than just meeting Bobby's stare without flinching.

Even after Bobby ran off, Snowden kept looking down because there was no turning away or back anymore. All the fear, the revulsion, the guilt, and disgust bubbling within him at the distant sight of Piper's broken body, Snowden identified, named as the price for Utopia. Doors on other apartments started opening, other heads poked out into the stairway just as his did, but Snowden forced himself to keep looking, to acknowledge the price before continuing.

A YEAR CAN go by rather quickly when you're busy. exactly 365 days after their first Horizon meeting, the winner of the Second Chance Program's leadership challenge was announced, and Cedric Snowden Jr. accepted gracefully. No balloons, no cake or streamers, just a firm handshake from a former congressman and a date for the press conference when, on site, the keys to the prized brownstone would be handed over. "If it doesn't happen in front of cameras," Marks chuckled away Snowden's reservations, "then it doesn't exist." In the end, the competition was far from stiff. Bobby hadn't shown up for work or answered his phone in the two weeks since the incident, and Horus was Horus, so the choice was rather obvious. Snowden felt proud anyway, took it as an honor because he felt he'd earned the right to.

Cedric Snowden tried to think about this honor as much as he could, about the responsibility of watching over the new recruits in the year to come, of overseeing their evolution into the men of Horizon. Cedric Snowden like to think about this because he found that when he wasn't, he was thinking about Piper Goines instead, a subject he drifted to even more despite a concerted effort not to. In Snowden's waking moments in the days before Piper's funeral, it was the image of her disappearing so easily over the railing that had captivated him. Snowden thought bloop every time he remembered it, as if attaching a cartoon sound effect would minimize the impact for both of them. Bloop.

At night, asleep, the image Snowden was haunted by was altogether different, though equally singular. It was Piper Goines falling down the stairway wearing a long flowing white dress, endless folds flapping. It was the type of dress Snowden doubted the real Piper would wear even if you gave it to her. In the dream, Snowden's view was centered on her as she fell down, the dirty tenement stairs a blur for both of them. Eventually his own vantage would halt and Piper's body would go flying below it, upon which point Snowden would kick himself awake as quickly as possible. The dream tended to come to him in those transitory moments at the beginning and end of sleep, leaving Snowden unsure if he was just imagining it, an uncertainty that led to Snowden rejecting his closet hideout for his well-lit bedroom instead.

The vision continued until the funeral, a bleak, silent affair even for its kind. The event created new images of Piper to replace all the others, surprisingly pleasant ones fueled mostly by the childhood pictures arranged as a collage before Piper's closed casket. Snowden had feared meeting the famed Abigail Goines of Piper's tales, but the woman up at the front pew was so drugged that Snowden doubted she knew that he or most of the other guests were there, even as she nodded and smiled at them.

People pointed at him, the last one to see her alive, the fateful friend with the fourth-floor walkup, yet nothing more came of it. But why should it, Snowden kept reminding himself. It was an accident.

Snowden kept looking over his shoulder, up into the rafters of the Episcopalian church, for Bobby Finley to arrive and declare differently, but the skinny man never appeared.

The congressman arranged for the ride to and from Connecticut to be provided by Piper Goines's former editors Olthidius Cole Jr. and Sr. The younger of the two drove. The older of the two yelled at him to pass any car within fifty yards, once going so far as to shove his battered cane onto the gas pedal in response to the disobeying of a direct order. For a while, Snowden amused himself by watching the large man cursing at his son and every single driver he managed to overtake on 1-95, pausing only to go off on tangental tirades about the Jews, the honkies, those bastards at City Hall, "those goddamn Dominican Puerto Ricans," and the niggers. Excluding the mention of the last two groups, Mr. Cole's private rants sounded much like his front-page editorials, evoking in Snowden the same exhaustion from their tediousness, only this time he couldn't just shut it off by putting the page down, so Snowden closed his eyes and pretended to fall asleep instead.

It was dark, late, and they were approaching a toll booth when Snowden had the dream he'd been waiting for. One minute his legs were numb and Olthidius Cole was leaning over his son to curse out the collector, the next Snowden closed his eyes and it began. In his mind, Piper came to his house just like before, dressed like her too, the same bags under eyes, the lack of makeup — it was very realistic. The biggest difference was that this time she knew everything. Everything. Like how important it was, what they were doing. Like how a piece of their soul was part of the deal, but that it was worth it. It wasn't just Piper who understood now, they all did — and by that Snowden took to mean all the unintentional martyrs even though she spared him the pain of listing them. "I understand," she said again to him, and then Piper looked right at Snowden and said, CiBloop," and was gone again. Snowden opened his eyes and they were in front of Horizon's storefront grate. Olthidius Cole turned around in his seat screaming, "Get out my car you freeloading prick," out his flapjack face.