Mat Johnson - Drop

At night I dreamed I was answering phones perpetually. I tried to censor my thoughts, because I knew that I had callers on hold, inside my mind. When Alex rang and I answered, ‘Customer service, how may I help you?’ it fueled her ‘Chris, what in God’s name is going on with you’ line. But I didn’t want help, I didn’t want to come over and talk about it, I didn’t want to go visit a good counselor her friend used. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted more but that’s the only thing I seemed prepared to accomplish.

When Mrs Hutton realized we were losing calls because of the half-hour wait just to get through, she brought in some new people. One girl named Angela was real sexy, and she sat in an empty seat between Reggie and me. Clive kept trying to poke his head over and get in our conversation. She had a short brown ’fro and earrings like silver tears. She listened to me talk with people all day. At night I lay in my bed with my hand on my dick staring up at the ceiling, thinking about her. I planned a whole future. I would take her back to England with me. She would be surprised to see how much more I was. I dreamed of coming home from work and us trying to make babies on my lunch hour. Unlike Fionna, she would love me, and if I ever fell she would catch me, too. The next day I went in to the job wearing the polished black three-quarters shoes I had bought in Camden Market, my stone thin-cut khakis and rust velveteen long sleeve gull-wing collar Armani shirt. The chair was empty: Angela was gone. Cindy saw my clothes and said, ‘The bitch failed the drug test, you sorry muthafucka.’

The next day, in Angela’s place, we got this tall skinny guy who wore patterned socks as thin as panty hose. His name was Lynol. He was supposed to be listening to Reggie’s phone calls but, even though he had the headphones on, he spent the day reading a book. I couldn’t see the cover so I asked him what it was about. Lynol said, ‘An inspirational novel based on the life of Jesus,’ saying the first syllable of Jesus like it was a declaration. The next day I came to work and he was sitting in the chair next to Reggie again, so I sat over in Clive’s.

Clive was gone for three days. Apparently he didn’t call because Mrs Hutton pulled me aside and asked if I had heard from him (since I was the other complete wreck in the office, she assumed that I knew Clive intimately). While he was absent, Natalie sat in his chair. On the phone her voice was a whisper she hid in her hand over her microphone. I sat on the side of her bad arm and had to be careful not to bump it. She had fallen on her apartment building’s front walk; it hadn’t healed right; the lawyers were still talking. She swallowed painkillers with chocolate milk.

When Clive did show up he looked crusty and dirty, like someone had used him to wash dishes, leaving him to dry without rinsing him out. He came back for two days then disappeared for one more.

‘You know that nigger’s on crack,’ Reggie told me.

‘You’re bugging.’

‘For real. I seen that shit too many times not to know. My cuz was on crack. My old girlfriend from high school, she’s a piper now.’

‘Your girl’s a crack ho?’

‘My old girl, my old girl. Way back. Old school. She wasn’t even my girl: I just kissed her.’

‘You think Clive’s on the pipe?’

‘Shit, can’t you smell that stuff on him?’

‘That’s his cologne.’

‘Not unless he’s wearing Eau de Crack.’

‘Nigger, stop lying.’

‘That muthafucka is smoking rock. Watch. Watch. Smell that muthafucka.’

‘I don’t have to smell him. Stop lying on the man.’

‘He’s all skinny too.’

‘And his nails were burnt,’ I remembered.

‘For real?’ Reggie asked.

‘Yup. I saw them when he was on the phone, they were all brown and shit like he’d been smoking.’

‘Damn. Now I know. That nigger is on crack.’

‘Clive’s smoking rock, huh?’

We told basehead jokes the rest of the day. When anybody asked where Clive was, we said, ‘Smoking crack.’ Some woman called for him and after she hung up Reggie said to the dead receiver, ‘I’m sorry, Clive’s currently sucking the glass bone. Can I have him call you back between rocks?’ Natalie actually whispered for us to shut up, but the word ‘crack’ was too funny not to keep saying. Immediately, Clive rose beyond my original estimation. Crack cocaine. None of this succumbing to the ebb of destiny and letting life do its inevitable damage for Clive. He was diving right into it, gloriously! Head first and smiling, stoned, all the way down. Clive had conquered his instinct for self-preservation. I didn’t even have the endurance to get a halfway decent alcohol dependency off the ground.

When Clive, my crack hero, reappeared, his clothes were dirty and he smelled like clear plastic burnt to black bubbles. He was sitting in his own seat, so I had to kick Natalie out and sit next to Lynol. At the end of every call Lynol said, ‘God bless you’, even though Mrs Hutton had already specifically asked him not to. I wanted to go rat on him, but I was too busy and lazy to get up from my chair, so I said, ‘Hey man, you still saying it.’

Lynol chuckled. ‘Well, I do believe I am!’

‘She might hear you. She listens in on the lines.’

‘Thank you. The spirit must have come over me.’

‘She fires people. She fired my girlfriend.’

‘Fool, stop lying, you never got nowhere with her,’ Reggie piped in, hand covering his microphone.

‘Oh, don’t worry. The Lord protects his sheep,’ Lynol smiled. Reggie was looking at me from the other side, wagging his head as if I was doing something wrong. When preacher man went to lunch Reggie leaned in. ‘You shouldn’t mess with that dude.’

‘I didn’t do anything to him.’

‘It just ain’t right.’

‘So you got religion now?’

‘I been had religion,’ Reggie said, unbuttoning his shirt and showing me a thick three-dimensional little man on a cross. ‘See.’

‘How much did that cost?’

‘Three hundred ones.’

‘You go to church?’

‘How am I going to afford church after I spent three hundred ones on this time-saver?’

‘You don’t like him either, you’re just afraid of going to hell.’

‘So?’

On the mornings when Lynol came late and I asked him why, Lynol would tell me that Satan messed up his alarm clock. How? He tricked Lynol into setting it to 6:00 P.M. instead of 6:00 A.M. Or the devil would have made him miss the express sub by misplacing Lynol’s transpass. Or the devil would have simply plagued him with sloth. But then he would get happy and make a fist in the air and say, ‘But I have conquered him this morn!’ and I would root for the devil just as I had rooted for the bad guys as a kid watching Batman or James Bond.

Once, at around two in the afternoon, the peak time for calls, when customers usually had a forty-minute wait, Lynol just put down his head set, unhooked his phone, stretched out his arms, and yawned. Me: going call to call, looking when I could as he casually lifted his backpack to his lap, unzipped it, and removed an apple, browsing some of the loose papers in the sack before zipping it up. Lynol wiped the apple with a napkin he’d stolen from Reggie and then bit into it with a loud crack. I was on the line with a welfare woman whose depression had slowed her vocal cords down to a bored fog and all I could hear was crisp treble of Lynol chewing through my earphones.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. Lynol smiled.

‘Having my silent communion-with-God time.’ Lynol took another bite and I could feel juice or spittle spritz my arm.

‘You’re chewing an apple, not talking to God. You’re chewing a fucking green apple. You might as well shove a carrot up your ass.’ I didn’t know what it meant, but I had the fire of the righteous. Staring at me, Lynol put the apple down on the desk, slowly ground the contents in his mouth, then swallowed it down.