Mat Johnson - Drop

David was: belly so big, so generous, soft like peat moss. A devious smile on a pudgy face making him look like a wicked baby. Hairline retreating and leaving flags of gray in its wake. Biceps bulbous with muscle, thighs thick with it. Looking like a French-horn sounds if the player is giddy and excitable. Arms in the air, smiling, like he might fall forth upon me right there, swallowing me with his flesh and consume all but the polished bones.

‘You look like a hole’ was the first thing he said to me, nodding, finishing the can of beer in his hand and then dropping it so he could squeeze me into him. ‘Margaret, that is the face of desire,’ David said over my shoulder as my ribs struggled for room to expand.

‘Darling you were supposed to be asleep.’ Margaret picked up the beer can and walked past us out the living room. These people had money. Everything in the house looked either extremely hard or unrealistically easy to break. The only things cheap in the place (besides me) were the paperbacks that filled the shelves that wrapped around the walls. Short, chubby fiction hugging the room.

‘You’re here!’ he said, releasing me. ‘The Sound of Philadelphia has arrived! I knew we could do it! I knew we could get you out of there!’ And he kept going on like that, as if he were Harriet Tubman and I had hay in my ’fro.

‘You are the secret weapon. Do you know that? How could you come all this way and not know that?’ David reached up and seized my neck. I once met Dizzy Gillespie coming out of a hotel off Walnut Street and shook his hand: this is how thick David’s palms were. ‘You’re a crazy bastard, Sir Christopher, my wife has brought home a crazy man. This is our time! Things are going to happen, mate! You can feel it, can’t you? Tell me! You can, can’t you?! It’s right, right?’

When you talk to a drunk man you must stand directly before him and stare straight into his eyes. When you look at him you must believe that yellow is the color that always serves as his pupil’s sea, that the smell on his tongue is the saliva of knowledge. You must walk his logic’s path beside him, comfort him that your feet are on the same ground and that you too can intuit the turns that lie ahead on this trail. You don’t grow up poor and not know this, learn this as a means to comfort or just to avoid a beat down. So this I did, to the best of my ability until, a half hour later, I was sent for more beer. The kitchen had white tile on the floor and a window over the sink where Margaret was leaning, cigarette held near her thigh, an arm around her waist, her eyes staring down at her feet or something near there. When she saw me Margaret said, ‘It’s over to the left. Pull them from the bottom drawer, those are the coldest,’ turning up to watch me move. ‘I should have warned you at the airport, sorry about that bit. He’s been so excited you were coming, he’s been up probably as long as you have.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I told her. Why would I? This was familiar, something I knew I could deal with. The house showed that he was good at what he did, but the drunk thing meant that he needed me. That’s why I was smiling. If he needed me, it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Job security.

‘You know, you did the right thing in coming. Give me those.’ Margaret reached for the beer. ‘I put your things in the guest room; you can rest here until David shows you to your flat. The door’s open upstairs, you’ll see it. Get settled. I’ll call you for dinner.’

I went back into the living room and straight to the steps. David was on the couch, lying down with his hand on his head. ‘Brother?’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ I stopped. Somehow David’s shirt had disappeared off of him. The belly, revealed, was larger than the fabric had hinted, seemingly growing in the room’s darkness. His exposed skin was the brown of old, polished wood, his hair black and soft as ash.

‘I’ll take care of you,’ David said to me, and rolled over.

After what seemed only minutes, I woke up and the room was shadows. There was music coming from out the hall. There were smells that followed it, sweet, thick, and salty. There was a big hand rocking my foot.

‘Chris, get up. Time to make the hole whole,’ David told me. ‘Here,’ he said, and he held a lit thing out to me. Rumpled paper pushed between my lips, sour smallness.

‘I don’t smoke weed.’

‘Flesh of my flesh, swallow.’ His hand pulled away, making me hold the thing myself and, fuck it, pull its breath in. ‘Welcome to the land of the green man,’ David said, as we walked down the stairs, my head lifting as my body moved down.

Feast, blessed consumption, laid out on the table like a trap. Ackie and saltfish, fried plantain, corned beef, yam, cabbage baked salty with shredded pork, curry goat and jerk chicken with coconut rice, chicken tikka, samosas, Margaret pouring me wine that wasn’t Mad Dog or Boone’s — it even had a cork instead of a twist top. Music so loud (Curtis sang ‘Gimme your love, gimme your love, gimme your love’) and all amid verbal silence, a long and wordless prayer. The meal continued in that fashion, the room too intimate for words.

‘Thank you,’ I smiled, breathing heavy, reaching for more as they smiled with me, grabbing at the finger paints of food.

There came a point when we were not eating, when the dishes floated from the table in their hands. I was pregnant with gluttony. I was giggling.

‘I’m not hungry,’ I told the man that stood in shadow before me, silently investigating me now that I was slow and bloated, unable to flee and too at peace to protect myself, and feeling for once like I didn’t have to. Feeling for the first time like this was where I was supposed to be in the world.

‘Then what are you without hunger?’ A smiling David teetered in my vision, subject to a separate, rocking gravity. His face looked like a ritual mask, wooden and with an expression of timeless inscrutability.

‘Smooth’ was my answer.

‘Yes,’ David said, and we laughed. I knew already that I would always owe him. I didn’t mind that.

Grass a little too long, and wet, and us running through it. David was in front of me, flying like a hunter chasing gazelle, and I was bringing up the flank, not even running anymore: letting my weight fly forwards on its own, moving my feet so as not to insult my momentum.

‘Faster!’ he kept yelling, my head sobering with every pant. Wherever, man, I’m just following you. Over the metal fence even though it said Park Closed ? No problem. Into a vacant field under orange skies someplace that is still nowhere to me? Fine. It seems to have worked so far.

‘There she is. The lido.’ And I saw brick walls, tall and thick, surrounding a space twice the size of a basketball court. David kept moving until he was at the structure, leaning on it, breathing hard, laughing. Breathing heavy enough for me to say, ‘Don’t die on me now, I just got here,’ and for him to bend back up and say, ‘Never, mate. I’m having too much fun. Here’s the entrance.’ He was grinning because there were no doors anywhere in sight.

‘How?’

‘How do you think, then? Right over the fucking top. Not a problem. My friend’s the director, so no worries. It’ll be okay.’ I looked up and all I saw was twelve feet of dark brick, not many grooves, just tall enough to fall and break something.

‘He couldn’t get you a key?’

‘Chris, it’s four o’clock in the morning. We could go banging on his door if you like, but his missus would kill me. The ground is the highest on this end, it’s the only side we can do this on. Come on, up and over. Be a lad.’

I stood on his shoulders. I was covering his jacket with mud and grass but it was obvious I cared about that more than he did. I hadn’t slept properly in two days, I was supposed to be here for a job, what the hell was I doing? Well, I was reaching for the top of a wall, trying to get a hand somewhere it could hold on to, and then I was swinging a leg (shit, did I hit your head?) and boom, I was sitting, looking out at a pool shimmering back light at my eyes, happy like a puppy to see me. And then I was laughing, too. We both were. Even when it was David’s turn to climb and he was using my leg like a rope and crushing my balls with his weight as I struggled to stay up there. Laughing when I jumped and could feel the sting in my ankles and had to skip it off like a schoolboy holding his pee, laughing when David came down and tripped his way forwards for a couple of feet before he gained his balance.