Mat Johnson - Drop

‘Right, then. Off with your knickers.’ David started undressing. It couldn’t be more than fifty degrees — how cold did that make the water? And it was August. What kind of people built an outdoor pool in a place that was fifty degrees in August? So why the hell was he taking his clothes off? I could dog paddle, but that had been at the YMCA on Green Street over twenty years ago. What were the boundaries? When could I say no? ‘Come on, Chris, I didn’t drag you all this way to bugger you.’

‘Niggers don’t do well in the cold, man. You Jamaica folk should know that. It’s not in our blood.’

‘Then go be a nigger over there by the wall. Because I plan on splashing.’ If I planned on being a nigger, I would have never left my block. If I drowned, at least I would have accomplished that final escape. The only thing more pathetic than a brother living like a nigger was a brother dying as one. I started undressing, real fast, throwing my shit away from me at random so I couldn’t change my mind when my bare ass hit the air.

‘All at once then, don’t do any toe-testing shite,’ David told me when I got down to my socks. ‘Don’t dive, though. It’s too shallow, you could break your neck in there.’

A flying cannonball to freedom. I was running, teeth gritting, and then for a moment I was in the air, the whole of my body wrapped in a ball. The ice water swallowed me, stealing my heat as I sunk to the bottom. I tried screaming but I was just making bubbles, so I forced myself to relax. Above me, through a rippled membrane, I could still see the color of the sky, an orange haze of clouds. Then my butt hit the ground and I let the rest of my body follow until I was lying down on the concrete bottom like I was tanning, water coming in my nose and me not caring. I thought I heard whales, but it was the echoes of nothing. I couldn’t hear anything because home was gone and I didn’t know how to listen to this place yet. I felt that, if I looked, I could see America, Philly, everything that was ever pain floating away, dissipating beyond me. Even my air, all my reserves, breathe out breathe out, so that finally, when I suddenly rose, hands flat and arms outstretched and face smiling stoned but happy, a whole new space was filling my lungs. My body stopped at the surface, but didn’t my spirit keep soaring?

I woke up in my clothes on the white canvas pelt of a bare futon. There was nothing else in the room but wood floors, windows and the sunlight screaming in from outside. When David took me back here the night before, both of us still dripping through our clothes, the place had been furnished by the undefined abundance of darkness. Now it was vacant, waiting to be filled.

I gathered myself and rose, my weight creaking on the boards and adding a more immediate sound than the disinterested swooshes of cars passing outside. There was a bathroom in the next room with no toilet paper, and then a glowing living room that contained only a television staring across the floor at a gaggle of beer cans laying empty by the opposite wall. Motivated by the bare cleanliness of the house, I gathered them up and took them downstairs, hunting for a place to put them. This apartment was weird. Not because of its alien additions, like the freakishly large three-prong electric sockets on every wall, but because of what wasn’t here. No pee-like water stain circles on the ceiling with exposed plaster and planks at their epicenter, no dirt shadows or scales of paint chipping off the wall. In the cabinets and drawers, no cockroaches, dead or alive. No half devoured mouse poison behind the refrigerator. No radios vibrating the windows as the cars that chauffeured them tore down the road. Outside, just the park we’d walked through to get here and the wind, blowing in cool and welcoming. Beyond, the small hills looked as if you could crawl out and snuggle into them, pull a fold of that grass over you like a comforter and rest.

I turned on the television. There was something wrong with it: no matter how many times I kept turning the dial, the same five channels kept appearing. Giving up, I took a nap, waking only when I heard the keys in the door. David yelled, ‘Oi, it’s half-past noon. You’re supposed to be earning.’

‘Earning what?’

‘My money. It’s time for work. How does Christopher like his new flat?’ David walked out into the hall. He had my luggage with him so he dropped it there.

‘This place, this is me?’ I asked, not prepared to believe it. Not wanting to look like a fool by investing in such an impossibility.

‘It’s yours. Or mine, but it’s yours to use if you choose. You’ll have to get some furniture, as you can see. Open the windows up. You should get some plants, I imagine. Nice place, isn’t it? It used to be my flat, you know, back in the bachelor days. Been letting it out for years. The last tenants moved months ago, so I held it for you. Your rent’ll be the BT, lights, gas, the taxes. I’ll take it out from what I pay you so you won’t have to bother. So, do you like?’

I just shrugged. Too scared that if David heard my surprise, he would take it away from me, send me to a hovel more in line with the style with which I was accustomed.

The office was on the third floor of their house, a tall attic room with curved ceilings like the bottom of a boat. Urgent Agency had a separate entrance, a door along side the residential one.

‘This is your desk. This is it, where you will be working,’ David told me, pointing at a long wooden table with a computer covered in clear plastic like a ghetto couch. On the wall was a picture of Margaret dressed up like a gunslinger, smiling at a party, along with photos of random people I didn’t know. Piled next to the desk, in a mound that was nearly twice as tall, were more of Margaret’s mysteries, seemingly raked together into a pyre.

‘She was supposed to clear out her stuff from here. Especially the damn books. I told her, “Don’t bring another book in this house until you throw some away.” But we’ll take care of that. And I’ll be right over here.’ David pointed to the only other desk up there. Next to it was a tall glass bookshelf, the bottom stacked with oversized magazines and what I recognized as design texts, assembled in accordance to no particular order or respect for gravity. The top shelves were arranged with equal care, but different contents. Paperweights, some glass, some metal, some seemingly gold, in various designs but with multiple versions of some forms. Awards. There had to be over thirty of them. Piled carelessly on top of one another like a spoiled child’s toys. The rest of the office was just space. An acre of thin, gray carpeting, exposed wood rafter beams and freshly painted white walls. I coughed and the room echoed back at me. David’s ten-pound palm gripped my shoulder.

‘Chris, this is going to be it. This is going to be massive. Something like they haven’t seen before. I know there’s not much at the moment, but see this, look, and dream. We are at the beginning. Two black boys, in pretty black Brixton town, in a very white and very old city that won’t know what hit it. I’ve been working in advertising twenty years, Chris, nearly half my life, and I know the scene: some of these agencies are a hundred strong, and they are evil. We, on the other hand, are two, but we are good. No secretary, no graphic design staff, no production team, no clerks, no receptionist, but also no infighting between creative teams for a chance at the same bone. No locking your office door when you go to lunch because you’re scared someone might steal your ideas, no control-hungry project managers or account executives to impose their mediocre visions, or wondering if you’re going to get fired every six months if your client decides to switch agencies. The only people on the payroll are you and me. We are the account managers, we are the account creatives. You will compose the copy, I will produce the design. The layout, the Fiery, the blues, I’ll take care of everything. Two people but combined together, and I tell the absolute truth here, we have the connections, the money, the talent, and, most important, the desire that will make this happen. All we have to do is show these bastards that we can sell better than the impotent gits they’ve got on their dole now, from there we can hire the support to fill this office till we have to put desks on the bloody stairs. Now have a seat.’ I did. The chair was leather, soft like old lady skin, my back blended into it.