Mat Johnson - Drop

When I came back, walking slow and staring at my hands till I reached the table, he was excited again, joyous even. ‘Look at that, Chris, look at that.’ Pints safely rested, I glanced at the television. Someone had turned it to an American sports show and there was Jordan, still young and in an away uniform the color of cinnamon candies.

‘That’s why I hired you,’ David said. ‘That right there.’ On the screen was the night after he returned from months of injuries, before the rings and most of the shoes, when he went to Boston and flew over Bird for sixty-four points. Ripping that tacky parquet floor up years before the demolition.

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning? Look at that! Don’t you even know what you are?’ He was drunk already, I was suddenly sure, because sometimes when he was drunk he could get mad in an instant, start yelling, even if he wasn’t really mad at all. He was already spilling his beer, too. I looked back at the TV, listening to him talk behind me.

‘Do you see that? Look at him flying up to the basket, legs pulled so far behind him they’re about to smack his bloody head. He’s got that tongue out, right? And that ball, it’s pulled all the way back, see? Like he’s going to have to force it through the net.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘You’re fucking right it’s beautiful. You’re fucking right. That’s why I hired you,’ he said, pointing up to the set. ‘Only you lot can do that. Anybody else, anybody else would never even think of it. Anybody else would be like “Two bloody points? Who gives a toss how you make ’em.” But you lot, you’re fucking mad, you make everything this frenzied scream. It’s the same with everything. Blues. Jazz. That’s you. That’s you, do you hear me?’ He grabbed my arm. I turned back from Michael to meet David’s eyes. Just glass there, yellow and brown glass; did he even see me?

‘Nobody could do jazz but you, who would think of that? John Coltrane could never be English. We just don’t think like that.’

‘It’s just an Africa thing.’

‘Fuck Africa,’ he was yelling again. ‘Fuck motherfucking Africa. Who the hell needs Africa? What the hell have they done lately? It was you lot that put Africa on the map. It’s about America, and it’s about you, nobody else. Fucking exploding oranges! Oranges shooting all over the place!’ David started laughing, spilling more beer.

‘You guys aren’t too bad. Reggae, that was y’all.’

‘Fuck reggae. One man, Bob Marley, and he was a fluke. The rest is shite. And Red Stripe is a piss beer, too,’ he added, giggling. ‘And I’m not even that, am I? I was born in Crystal Palace. Fucking Crystal Palace! There’s not even a palace there any more, you know that? You’d think they’d rebuild it or change the bloody name. Not even a decent football club. Chris, that’s the last thing I know that you don’t: nothing good comes out of this place, nothing has in years. This whole place is dead, it’s true. If it wasn’t for Margaret I’d be in New York. That’s a place. This place, you can smell the rot, can’t you? You love it, you think it’s lovely and you know I’m glad since I’ve needed you here, but the whole place is a corpse, innit? And me, I’m its fucking mascot. I’m decaying right along with it. That’s the only thing left I’m good for.’

‘David, you’re the man.’ I clasped him around the neck, trying to pull his spinal cord into sobriety. ‘You made me happen, cuz. I would have never got out of Philly on my own. I’d be nothing without you, I know that.’

‘No,’ he kept muttering, shaking his head violently and then becoming dizzy with the movement, eyes squinting the vertigo away. ‘Shit, why do you think I needed oranges?’

The lido, three hours later, pints and pints down the road. I went over the wall second this time, pushing David’s drunk ass first. We undressed over by the deep end, him at his leisurely pace and me frantic, just wanting to get it over with, get him home, into his bed and safely passed out. Pants, socks, shirts, drawers, I laid everything out neatly so I could get dressed as soon as possible.

‘Two minutes this time, you fat bastard,’ I told him.

‘Right. A minute or two. You got a match?’ he said, tripping on himself trying to get his socks off. I noticed the cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, bouncing as he struggled.

‘Why the fags, man? Since when have you liked plain tobacco?’

‘She left a carton, didn’t she? I think I’m going to take it up.’

‘If you want to take up one of her habits, why not try reading some of her books?’

‘I did. But they were bloody awful, weren’t they?’

The water was cold, but still free, freeing. So much liquid in my stomach, in my blood, affecting my head, and now all around me. I touched the bottom, felt around in the darkness for change, and then rose to the top and did the backstroke all the way down to the kiddie end. Above me was orange-red sky, like someone had vegetable dyed the clouds (or cloud, since it was just one slab as usual). Wouldn’t that cloud make a great duvet? Hugging me like it seemed to hug this city all the time?

I hit the back wall with my knuckles, stopped floating and stood up, sat on the edge, and looked around. There were children’s things scattered about: yellow flotation devices, bathing caps with rubber flowers. When I had my child, this is where it would play, I knew. It would have David’s accent and call him uncle, come home from school in one of those green and plaid private school uniforms (or public school, or whatever). We would hang out at this pool, sober, all day, reading the paper and licking flakes. What better world than that can you imagine?

I didn’t know David was going to dive, never thought he would be mad enough to. Up in the air, hands over the head, sucking in that gut of his for once. Boop and then gone. Nothing to the water but a slight ripple in surface, quickly vanishing as it forgot itself. Nothing in the water at all.

I walked back to the other end, looking into the surface, trying to make out some brown within the gray. I started counting. 1, 2, 3, 4 … 27? 38? And then I started running, bare feet on stinging concrete, to where he went down. And there David was. He was waving up at me from underwater, big tube-steak arm moving in an exaggerated ‘Hi there!’ Was he smiling? It was hard to tell because the wind was blowing and the surface rippled, and sometimes he was there, sometimes he was gone. Sometimes David, sometimes just dark wet space, nothing. I stood, above him, watching him until he rose to the surface.

‘Ugh,’ I could almost feel the air pulling back into his lungs, his chest getting wider. ‘Wooh,’ he said, spitting and wiping his palm across his face.

‘What the hell were you doing down there?’

‘Sitting.’

‘Sitting and doing what?’

‘Listening,’ he said, looking straight to the sky and my sheet of cloud. Below him his arms and legs made circles.

‘There’s nothing to hear down there,’ I told him. David nodded, but didn’t say anything else, just looked down into the water.

Not a word. Not even after we’d gathered our clothes and dressed again, had climbed back up the wall and made it down once more. Out in the open emerald of Brockwell, David just started walking away from me, towards the direction of his home. From behind, I knew his shoulders should never look like that, a collapsed bow, his head disappearing into his chest until just a little bump of it remained. I yelled, ‘Big man, I’m going to talk to my jawn, tell her we’re going out of town, then I’m a come crash for a while, maybe a week or two!’ David lifted an arm slightly to tell me he’d heard me but kept going. I was too tired to chase after him.