Mat Johnson - Drop

‘Chris, you fucking nutter, get under the table before you get killed.’

But it was just funny, that’s all it was. Beige, black, and brown hands swinging to claim maroon blood. So many sounds, everything moving: chairs across the room, pictures off the wall, projectile napkin dispensers, even my chest jumping as I go ha-ha-ha and laugh at all this around me. Play on. My first public brawl outside the States and I didn’t care because they didn’t have guns, did they? It wasn’t like home, they could beat on one another all they wanted, there would be no random shooting. The pop-pop wouldn’t find me here. This was a new, safer world. What were they going to do, kick my teeth in? I could get caps.

We took the night bus home from Trafalgar after that. That was when Margaret wouldn’t let David have the car (note: speed bumps are not to be used as ramps, particularly not at four in the morning, in a quiet suburb like Croydon, in a Fiat hatch back when the driver is drunk and the car is too too fast for such roadways). I made us sit on the second level, in the front, my novelty spot. David sat next to me eating the hot dog he bought for two quid right next to the stop and I looked at the road as we wandered south. We were going through hotel-lined streets and I was staring at the buildings, their smooth white facades going on for blocks like an army of cream cakes, occasional small signs hung before them to offer entry to the temporarily homeless and financially secure. No one was on the streets, not even rats. No light was on. No one was awake because no one knew each other. A neighborhood of strangers probably thinking about someplace else, maybe on their way there, maybe not.

‘It’s lonely out here, isn’t it?’ I asked. David’s hot dog was gone and he was brushing mustard off his face.

‘Sure. It’s a lonely world. Why do you think people get married?’

‘Why?’

‘Love shits on lonely.’

‘If we ever have Aphrodite as a client, you got to use that one.’

‘My Margaret, she’s my world. She’s what keeps me weighted.’

‘I feel the same way about my account at Barclays.’ We were crossing over the Lambeth Bridge and I was checking my watch against Big Ben’s yellow face and getting off on that, loving a cliché.

‘Oi, you little yardie, I know what’s in there, I’m the one that puts it. But I’m telling you, you gotta have someone. My Margaret, she’s my roots, man. She’s like, if somebody shook the world, y’know, she’d be the thing that keeps me from flying off. A man has to have that, can you understand?’

Twenty minutes later, we were at the Chinese take-away off Effra Road bleaching our brown under bright fluorescents. ‘Chris, that’s what you need.’

‘Whatever boss.’ I reached for my bag. How did I live before curry and chips? Fuck cheesesteaks. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I added, but I wasn’t thinking about no woman, not in any sense beyond the normal unceasing mindless fantasies that populated straight men’s minds. What I was doing was staring behind the take-away counter at the aluminum trays with their clear plastic tops and thinking, That’s the only thing I miss about America: Chinese food in white cardboard boxes with little tin handles and red dragons on the side. Going on eight months over here and wow, look at that, that’s the only thing missing for me.

Friday, I opened the door for her. This little woman, too proud to even look up at me past the rib she came to. She stood, beneath layers of white skies and before wet sidewalk, a vision. A face so black it was bold, cheeks a duo of sweeping circles beneath the soft rainbow of a head wrap that contained all the colors that could scream or cry for you.

‘Is this the place?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Is this the place that’s supposed to be taking pictures of me?’ she asked. She was so much smaller than I’d been expecting, but she had to be the dancer David hired: she was too pretty not to be getting paid for it.

‘Please, please come in,’ I managed. I shouldn’t even have been answering the door because by this time, besides clients growing and waiting for our attentions, Urgent had a secretary too, a bony, Marlboro Light-smoking Brixton boy named Raz who should have been down here with this woman, saving me from my awkwardness. The shoot was scheduled for a half hour before, but models, David reminded, were always late. Taking in the smell of her: of violet water and hot sauce.

‘Fionna Otubanjo?’ She just walked by me and started heading upstairs; I couldn’t tell if she’d nodded. Tiny, this one. The size of a girl but the shape and proportions of a woman, making the stairwell look cavernous as my eyes struggled to keep perspective.

After I took her coat, introduced her to the photographer, the stylist, and even Margaret, who was taking a rare intermission from her reading to make an appearance on the third floor, I showed Fionna to the bathroom that would be her dressing room for the day. Then I pulled David to a far and relatively secluded section of the floor.

‘Cuz, she’s gorgeous.’ Somebody in the room had to acknowledge this.

‘Really? A bit of a head on a stick, I thought. A short stick at that. She looked bigger on her Z card. If you like, maybe later we’ll go for a curry or something, you could ask her to tag along.’ David reached into the cereal box in his hand and threw a kernel into my mouth.

Golden Crowns, an old-brand cereal owned by one of several companies that realized Urgent knew how to implant hunger in even the most bloated, who understood that our work was the stuff people were starting to whisper about, the kind that would be bringing back industry awards in the year to come. Its box stood in the center of the white cove, ready for its picture to be taken, short and proud and belligerent with caloric prophecies. Golden Crowns, a combination of flour, water, high fructose corn syrup, and yellow dye number 24, but also something so sweet it didn’t need milk or morning.

‘Alright, luv,’ David was bellowing at the emerged Fionna. ‘What we need you to do is just run, leap right over the box, right? Spread your legs open like scissors, give it as much as you can. We want to capture you directly above the Golden Crowns, almost as if they gave you the gift of flight.’

‘I can do that,’ Fionna said, looking at me, and wasn’t it immediately clear that she could do much more? That she could hold your head in her lap, rub her little palms over your face and wipe away everything else besides the blackness behind closed eyes? That if there were arranged marriages I would have had David call her family immediately on my behalf, have stood behind him smiling and jumping up and down like a horny Masai?

The photographer’s tin can lights sat on the floor, hung from erected scaffolding, rested on the ends of tables and chairs, all pointing in one direction, metallic ravens holding brilliant court. The heat almost solar in intensity, pulsing away from the illumination to the rest of the space beyond, the warm touch linking all those in the room together. And within the fire, one body moving. To watch her run, to see her leap. The determined start with bare feet slamming the floor and then the jump, the seizing of space with a ferocious kick, a smile that flashed gloriously as soon as the pivot foot left the ground. How could one so short fly so high? And all this along with a bowl of glued Golden Crowns in one hand and a spoon in the other. Running and leaping and landing. The toe and ball of one foot touched back down and the rest of the body followed, the flesh moving slightly past the limits of her bones for a moment until it bounced back into structure again. David walked behind me and snapped his fingers by my ear — ‘Pay attention to the work’ — but how could anyone with her perspiring until the midnight fabric of her leotard became even darker beneath the neck and arms, her form becoming an essay on the possibilities of blackness, a diatribe about refusing the limitations of one word? I sat, leaned against David’s desk with my shirt open, my sleeves rolled, watching. Witnessing the sweat drip away from her as she ran and explode around her when she landed, giving a shine to the floor. Steaming the windows to opaque rectangles, forcing me to sweat along with her, to feel my own oily wetness and susceptibility, until, in one particularly triumphant soar (spoon and bowl held by hunger), she landed in the puddle of sweat that she created, broke the spell, and bore a new one in a helpless painful cry.