Mat Johnson - Drop

‘I thought it was the Witnesses.’ Margaret was different: wrinkle lines had fallen smooth and her long bangs had been trimmed above her ears. She wore a jumpsuit that was baggy and white, and when I fell to my knees before her, grabbing her legs in my arms, I could feel how soft the material was against my unshaven face. On the ground, hugging Margaret’s calves, the material ate my tears as I cried, ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ into them.

‘Chris. Up. Get up. You’re being silly. This is too much.’ After she pulled away and past me, I rose, followed her inside, wiped the snot and tears on my sleeve as we entered the kitchen.

‘How about I make some tea?’ Margaret asked nervously, refusing to face me, instead charging to the cabinet.

‘Yeah. I’m so sorry.’

‘Stop. You don’t have anything to be sorry for Chris. Really.’ She closed the cupboard and quickly grabbed my wrist, nodding each word into my face. ‘You don’t. Nothing at all.’ She was a merciful liar.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ I asked. Margaret let me go.

‘No, because you don’t smoke. And I don’t either any more. Have a seat. Milk?’

As we talked, Margaret was surprised about all the wrong things: the news of Fi’s leaving caused little more than a side-of-the-mouth, eye-rise shrug, but the fact that the loss of David also meant the loss of my career credibility seemed a surprise.

‘Don’t overestimate David’s weight. He was an odd one in that world. Did he ever tell you on what grounds he was dismissed from the Patterson Group?’ I nodded no. ‘Embezzlement, right? The senior partners said they were investigating David for stealing over thirty thousand pounds.’

‘David wouldn’t do that.’

‘That’s what he said, of course. That it was just an excuse to “kick the nig-nog off the job”. Their last chance to keep him away from senior management. I almost wish he had stolen it now. At least we wouldn’t have gone so deep in debt to start Urgent. We wouldn’t have had to get so many loans. The bank wouldn’t have seized the house. I wouldn’t be in this situation now.’

‘What do you mean, they seized the house?’

‘Not much of a coup, the state it’s in now, but they’re taking all of our holdings until I can cover the back payments. I’m working a double shift just to get myself out from the hole I seemed to have been left in. I won’t even have David’s old flat at the end of the month. The bank’s taking control of that, too.’

‘My flat? The one I live in?’

‘I know, Chris. Really, I do. I wish I could do something about that. Four weeks, then they’ll have it.’ My house. Margaret looked at the table, at the nicks and grooves it held. She was waiting for me to say something but I kept my mouth shut.

‘Chris, you know what you’re going to have to do.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’re going to have to back to America.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I know.’

‘Fine. I’ll just go to New York, get a job on Madison Avenue for a year, and then come back again.’

‘Don’t worry about coming back, just go home. And move on. If you go back you’re going to have a life there.’ Margaret reached for my hand. ‘You’ll find new loves, you’ll get a lease, obligations. Life will go forward. Don’t fight that. You’ll never be fulfilled that way. You just have to accept it.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘It’s the way of life, Chris. My father came here to work for one year, and after that he planned to go back to St. Kitts. He was adamant about it. Thirty years later he’s still in Camberwell. And I know he was miserable till he accepted that reality.’

I nodded yes because she was someone whom I respected and cared about, but I wasn’t accepting shit. This was the place where my life was supposed to happen. I wasn’t losing that. If I had to leave, I’d just go someplace where I knew I could never get comfortable. Someplace I knew I could never stay.

Down at her Fiat, Margaret gave me a kiss, a hug, and twenty fifty-quid notes for my furniture. I tried to tell her she could take it, use it to replace her own, but she folded the paper into my hand, saying, ‘It’ll get you back, get you settled. I was going to give it too you anyway. Do what you need to do.’ Margaret got into her car and closed the door; I kept standing there, trying to think of something that would prolong her stay. After she fastened her seat belt, she rolled down the window but didn’t say anything. She just stared at me long, as if she wanted to remember what I looked like.

I followed her taillights down the street, and after she turned I kept walking. End of this block, end of this pavement, end of this world. Looking around, just a bunch of row houses on a wet street of a dark city, but to me everything I’d ever hungered for. A place without guns, where most violence was limited to the arm’s reach, where it took them a year to murder what Philly could disposed of in an up week. My home. A city in the world as opposed to hidden from it, a land whose intersections led to every continent floating. Success was defined by how far I’d run from the place I’d been born to. And that’s what I would lose by going back there. But it was pointless: I could already feel the other place pulling on me, the familiar tug of a gravity I’d thought I’d conquered. Rubber band delusions, all it was, because now the tether had reached its limit and was tugging vengefully back at me. You go up, you go down, boy. Dogs shouldn’t forget their chains. Fighting to remain on this London curb, I stared down and could already see the terrain of pain that awaited me. It said, Did you think you had unfastened me? No, I answered. Then I began falling.

Visibility was clear. I knew exactly where I was going.

50,000 feet. Nothing but a slab of asphalt embedded with diamonds, rivers of tin wires leading into a sea of melted mirror glass. Highways were faint white hairs, barely visible at all. A white slate of cloud hung between us, too weak to catch me. Planes seemed nearly still as they floated above the ground, each at a different altitude. Slow targets as I plummeted to the earth between them.

20,000 feet. Gray stalagmite skyscrapers rose out of its earth to meet me. Miniature versions of buildings gave me orientation, reminded me where I was, like falling into a living map. A city of roofs: the long, linked tops of row houses, the brick boxes of schools, the swimming pools on Center City penthouses. The small green and tans of baseball fields linked together by deliberate straight roads. Toothpick bridges stitched Pennsylvania to New Jersey, trying to close the wound of the Delaware. The Schuylkill, a snake laying on trees. The forest of Valley Green was just a head of broccoli.

5,000 feet. Falling, I touched ground at City Hall, bouncing off the metal hat of William Penn and shooting further west, leaving him nodding in my wake, a colossal novelty doll. Skinned a knee clearing the lightning pole of Liberty One, swish swish swish , its point shaking like a car antenna after my impact. Flying west, past office windows as people with jobs glanced up and then continued working. Falling down, meteor boy, returning.

Smack. On the ground. Ripping a body-wide groove in the middle of Spruce Street, right along the yellow lines. Heavy chunks of concrete cracked and flaked as I smashed through them, a finger stroke through a pan of brownies. Face forward, arms at my sides, I would have been screaming if the asphalt wasn’t filling my mouth, a solid stream threatening to push back teeth from gums, giving me Dizzy cheeks as it forced its way down. Hard spaghetti spirals pressing their way into my nostrils, spinning pigtails to my brain. Black road digging under my fingernails as if they, too, were entries, trying to leave my palms heavy with its indigestible burden. The sound of an army of drums being broken, beaten until their canvases became the battered victims of percussion. Even through my road-stuffed ears I could hear that, hear the echoes of it as skidded from 49th to 52nd Streets.