Mat Johnson - Drop

Detonation. Blast. Silence into roar. Fleeting recognition of mortal inevitability as I dropped the package to protect myself, to shield my ears from the pain as noise exploded out from it, hit full speed against the glazed tile walls and then bounced back, making me trip over the toilet and fall back into the urine-stained wall. Even more startling than the sound, on the ground before me the envelope spun around like an insane top. Tangerine smoke rose out of the movement, pouring up into the ceiling in a thick stream and forming an orange cloud there. Everywhere around me the smell of burnt matches, and something like citrus. And then, it began to rain a heavy storm of confetti, gold and white, tiny squares upon me.

I didn’t move until most of it had landed. It was everywhere, on my shoulders, hands and hair, stuck to the mirrors over the sinks, in the toilet behind me. It lay on the floor like magic sand, covering something that had broken free of the envelope during the explosion.

It was a card. Plain white, decorated with a golden exclamation point. Careful of further surprise, I opened it. Inside, in bold orange lettering, it said: ‘I saw your work in Market Edge. The fruit thing. Stunning. Original. Call me for further conversation.’ Underneath that was stapled a black business card: David Crombie, Urgent Agency, Brixton, London SW2-4H6, (171)654–782 .

Home I was skipping. Urgent. London. Job. Me.

An odd double ring occurred when I dialed the number. Bring-bring. Bring-bring. Bring-bring me somewhere lovely where people are so alive you can hear their pulses bump-bumping as they pass you on the street. Take me somewhere like that and let me get going. Save me from Philly town.

‘Aw right’ was how the male voice answered the phone, very relaxed, hands on his balls, probably. I could hear the muted trebles of a television in the background.

‘Hello, I’m calling for David Crombie,’ I said. There was a pause. More television: an unintelligible sentence, and then laughter.

‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ he said, finally.

‘Yes.’

‘I know who you are and I know why you’re calling.’

‘I’m calling for David Crombie?’

‘You’re calling because you either want a job or I blew your fucking hand off.’

He was doing an American accent, poorly. A ghetto John Wayne. ‘Christopher Jones! The tangelo fellow, finally making his appearance onto the scene. Fantastic, man, fantastic work. Bad picture, though, the one they took of you. Pick your afro even next time. You really must mind that. You looked like one of those troll dolls from the sixties, like. One of those little dolls with the big nose and the eyes bugging out and the hair shooting up in the air, cute bastards. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

Yes, I offered. He kept talking. I could almost see him, somewhere on a couch far away in a room I couldn’t imagine, staring into that magazine at a picture of me. ‘You’re a little bit older, aren’t you? Than most of the other prizewinners in the magazine, you’re a little bit older. Am I right here?’

‘Yes, actually I am bit more mature than my peers. I only began my undergraduate degree three years ago. Previously, my mom was suffering from cancer, so I provided home care assistance for her for a while, for my first six years out of high school. I only began my undergraduate studies three years ago and, as of this August, will have managed to finish a year early by taking courses during the summer and Christmas sessions, as well as an increased credit load during the regular terms. A major in marketing and a minor in photography. So, yes, I am mature, and I think I bring that maturity to the work that I do as well.’

‘Fuck mature, mate, you’re talented. That’s what you are. I didn’t ask you to call because you’re long in the tooth, I called because your work’s brilliant.’

We spoke of oranges.

After that, David called me. Usually about once a week, but never at the same time or on the same weekday. I sent him my portfolio, just some clippings of print ads I’d done for groups on campus and a few black-and-white ads in the local paper for some mom-and-pop stores, but he liked it. Every time the phone rang I thought it was David, and due to the state of my social life, it usually was. I feigned illness and stopped going to class so as not to miss a call, but since I’d never been absent or even late before, nobody questioned my claims. I had a sense that school didn’t matter anymore. Finally, almost exactly one month after the first contact, David called and asked, ‘What’s the Grand Canyon like?’

‘It’s really big, kind of red and orange color, and you can rent donkeys to ride down into it.’

‘You’ve never been there, have you?’

‘No.’

‘How about Mardi Gras? All that music, the dressing up and the beads. It looks brilliant.’ No, it doesn’t look smart, but it does look fun, doesn’t it? Never been further south than D.C., and then just inside the Smithsonian pushing my mom around, right before she passed. ‘Okay then, what about New York? The Big Apple itself. The missus, she’s been a couple times for business recently, but I haven’t been in years. Usually all I have time for is holidays on the Continent; when I do get a chance to visit, it’s down to Jamaica to see my family. I got a job offer in New York once, from Binger-Strauss. How close is that to Philadelphia, then?’ Two hours, no more. ‘So, do you go there a lot?’ I went once, in sixth grade, to the Natural History Museum. I remember the tunnel we drove through. I tried to hold my breath the whole way but couldn’t.

‘Well, when you weren’t in university, what did you do for fun? What did you do to tell yourself you were alive?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, I took care of my mom. I read books a lot, got a lot of books from the library. I rented movies. Basically stayed inside and avoided all the craziness.’ He was laughing at me now.

‘You mean life.’

‘That life, the Philly life, yeah, basically.’

‘Well, now you’re going to start going places.’

‘Yeah. I’ll be done with school in August.’

‘Right. And then you’re coming here.’ Here?

‘London. You’re coming to work for me now. Urgent’s not much. I broke off from the Patterson Group about nine months past, took some clients with me. But it’s just a beginning. I need a real talent by my side, someone I can build something with.

And I know you’re the one to do it. So, you willing?’

Alex was driving, and I didn’t notice she was taking Exit 34 off 176 until we were already snaking too fast along the curves of Lincoln Drive into Germantown.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Dread, realization that escape was not to be so simple, that I was being forced to confront the beast before passing it.

‘Chris, shut up. Your flight isn’t for four hours. Why don’t you just lean your head back against the window and continue drooling like you been doing since Harrisburg,’ Alex said, and kept going. She’d gained a little weight, but she was still that skinny ass, bucktooth, high yellow, crazy thrift-shop-clothes-wearing camera clicker she was when we had gone out years before. My buddy, my confidant, my fellow freak. That’s how we understood each other: in this place we were twins of rejection. Alike except she was crazier than I would ever be, because Alex’s way of negotiating this city’s disregard was to counter with her own blind adoration. Wasting good love on this place.

Kelly Drive: a coiled pathway through a forest where traffic insisted on driving as if the road were straight, a slalom beside a creek within a cave of trees so big, so old that they had been here even before Germantown was a ghetto. Before the blacks, before the Irish, before even the Germans themselves. We drove, under the stone angles of the suicide bridge, into that dip in the road that makes your stomach yo-yo. Together, leaning into curves even before we saw them because our bodies knew this path like that.