Mat Johnson - Drop

‘What is it that you think I’m doing, Alex?’

‘You know what you’re doing,’ she said, trying to grab at the Santa-red diskette that I quickly pulled away from her.

‘That’s right: I know what I’m doing,’ I told her. ‘I’m creating. I’m giving everything I have, my world, myself, to do it. That’s the only way I can. I’m not good enough to hold anything back. Everything or nothing. That’s the only way I’m going to escape.’

‘Escape what? Getting up and going to a job you hate, just like everybody else? You’re so special, that’s too much for you? You have to do whatever you can to get ahead? Even if it makes us look like animals?’

‘To who? White people? I don’t care what stupid white people think. And really, I don’t give a shit what stupid black people think either. The image is a negative statement about humanity, and, yes, we’re human. If they want to jump in with their coon issues, that’s their problem. Honestly, do you think it’s really possible to click a lens in this shit-hole town without the subject being offensive?’

‘You wrong,’ Alex said, and as mad as she was, you could see it was as if I had offended her personally, which just made me madder.

‘That’s it, Alex. That’s what I don’t understand about you. How the hell can you, a smart, educated, somewhat rational human being, love this.’ I motioned. Arms wide, I motioned to everything. The telephone poles crucified with endless staples and pamphlets waiting for rust or rain to release them, the knuckleheads bobbing down Chestnut with their shirtless, chain-gang struts, fucking yam-man, who was standing in front of Burger King pretending to be the door-man and now (Oh God) coming over here: I held it all out to her. ‘How?’ I demanded, not surprised by the tone of jealousy seeping through.

Alex was writing me off with sideways nods. ‘You look around here and as soon as you see ugly, damn if you see extra. All those things that you should appreciate, all those things you should be thankful for, you can’t see any of it. You go blind. It’s pathetic. If I was like that, how the fuck could I love you?’ And as if this was a play and that was his cue, yam-man appeared beside her.

‘Hey, can y’all hook a brother up with—’

‘Yo, just get the fuck away from me!’ I was suddenly yelling. The throat-shredding, barely intelligible kind. So loud that I was as surprised as he was by my reaction. When the echoes of my scream had died, my face offered a demonstrative apology to yam-man as he shrugged an understanding forgiveness my way, but then both silent gestures were enveloped by the next scream. Female this time, the simple conjunction ‘Ass-hole!’ followed with the punctuation of a slam from a rusty car door.

In the driver’s seat, Alex had sat down so quickly that a bit of her hair was caught in the jamb. She didn’t bother to free it. I ran out to the street, but she wouldn’t look up at me. Automotive coughs as the wreck tried to start itself, gears shifting angrily into first, and Alex was screeching away from me. Standing in the street, my 3.5-inch floppy in hand, I watched her go through a red light just to put some distance between us.

July. She wouldn’t answer my calls, no matter how many times I dialed the number. She knew from her caller ID box that it was me. Ring-ring for Christopher, no pickup except for the recorded dismissal of her machine. After a few days, I started calling when I knew she wasn’t there just so she wouldn’t be sitting, listening to me babble. Pleas sat on her answering machine like sloppily wrapped presents, waiting for her to get home and open them. But all I was getting in return was silence, a conspicuously quiet phone. She knew that my holiday was coming, what firecracker lights meant to me, that I needed to recharge on them to last another year, she knew that there was no way I would go out there alone, unescorted and unprotected, to face the mob of Philadelphians that would also be present to witness the glory. I even had her camera, and regardless of the fact that she wasn’t getting any work, she loved that baby. I knew that was eating at her. But that’s was how tight the door was shut.

On the morning of the Fourth, I realized I was going to have to go over to meet Alex in person. Let her beat or scream or chastise or whatever she had to do to me before we headed down to the Parkway to watch the sky combust. I bought some flowers in Reading Terminal, figured they might soften her some. Calla lilies, long and white like she liked them. Only three but shit, they costed. At the thrift shop on 44th Street I picked up a vase, a long orange glass cut like crystal. Back at the crib, it took an hour in hot water to get whatever gunk was in it cleared out. I was just trying to shove those stems in when—

Pop pop pop poppop pop

— the familiar sound of a community coming undone. It had finally come for me. This time, no faint ghost. This time, right outside my window. So loud I dropped the vase in the sink and broke the bastard, only two hours after I bought it. So shocked that instead of hugging linoleum like a sane man, Chris Jones was hanging out his window, poking his head through that big rip in the screen that the mosquitoes had been flying in for months.

Outside, an absurdly large American car, too damn long to be taking that curb that fast, screeching out an angle in front of my building. Hanging out the passenger window, the upper half of a shirtless well-built man, all I could see of his head was the top of his baseball hat (maroon and white, the old school Phillies kind). He was going through great lengths to point something out behind him. But it wasn’t called pointing when you had a gun in your hand. Pop pop pop goes this weasel, bangs even louder than the wheels screaming a turn underneath him. It was the only thing screaming though: everybody else standing around the intersection was too busy getting down on the ground to make a sound. Pop pop pop . Hiding behind telephones poles and stationary automobiles so that the next pop wasn’t for them. Look at the weasel, his gun pointing everywhere as if he wasn’t even aiming at anything at all, just trying to see how many times he could pull the trigger. Pop pop pop . That gun looked like part of his arm.

It didn’t matter how bad it wanted to, there was no way that Caddy was going to make that turn. Pop pop pop pop . Even when the nose cleared the parked cars below my window, the ass just flew out to greet them. Thin metal crunching, plastic cracking in long dry lines, glass going from one unified plane to many smaller individual ones. The car it clipped jumped up onto the sidewalk. Weasel man, not prepared for the impact, flailed around like a mouse in a cat’s jaw, then went limp against the side of the Caddy. Arms flailing towards the ground, chest banging against the passenger door as the smoking wheels took him through a red light at Chester Avenue and beyond. Leaving bodies hugging sidewalk behind him.

I ran down the steps, calla lilies in hand. Outside, people were already rising from the ground, checking for newly opened orifices, searching their clothes for signs of wet maroon. Once satisfied that they had gained no new holes, they looked around at the others. There was a woman thirty feet from my door, lying next to the parked car that the Caddy had slammed into. She was still on the ground, forehead resting on the pavement, hands loosely hanging away from herself. Just as motionless as the car she lay beside.

I ran over, knelt by her. It was an elderly woman, a skinny one. The scarf she had tied around her head had slipped off and sat limp over the back of her skull, revealing a freckled scalp and a loose collection of white hairs. I brushed the material aside and reached for her neck to check for a pulse. Life had battered that skin soft. A hand shot out to slap my own. I jumped back, startled.