Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

His guts twisted on themselves and he uttered a startled groan, cursing the barbecue and all it had wrought. Intestinal turmoil and insomnia were his buddies until dawn, when he finally fell back to sleep.

Everybody was gone by noon. He heard the luggage catch on the lip of the elevator, the groups huddle below his window as they waited for the correct shuttle bus. They made farewells and traded personal information, some sincerely and some for politeness’ sake, and he was struck by the momentum of endings. Then it seemed only he was left in the hotel, floating in his bed three stories above the town, a patch of bad weather hovering over things. A brand of darkness that set people who saw it waiting for lightning and noise.

Things had been reset. Over days he had re-created the chaos of his rooms back home, and it had been undone. Last night he had been on the verge of delivering a name, and had been silenced. By a wobbly table, his stupid foot, a momentary lapse of balance: it didn’t matter. He had been returned to the day of his arrival. In his new room, he started from scratch. The housekeeper had made a gift of a neat pile of books in the center of the desk. He reached for Gertrude Sanders’s contributions to the world of letters, the official version and one less so. He hit the books.

. . . . . . . .

Colored.

The sliver of himself still in tune with marketing shivered each time Gertrude used the word colored . He kept stubbing his toe on it. As it were. Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. She was a few iterations behind the times. Not that you could keep up, anyway. Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

It was her use of the word that got him thinking about it. You call something by a name, you fix it in place. A thing or a person, it didn’t matter — the name you gave it allowed you to draw a bead, take aim, shoot. But there was a flip side of calling something by the name you gave it — and that was wanting to be called by the name that you gave to yourself. What is the name that will give me the dignity and respect that is my right? The key that will unlock the world.

Before colored, slave. Before slave, free. And always somewhere, nigger.

What was next? In the great procession. Because things never remain still for long. What will we call ourselves next, he wondered. If he knew what was next, he’d know who he would be.

. . . . . . . .

People started stopping him on the street. When he went out for coffee. When he went out for lunch, his research material in a white plastic bag dragging down his arm, dead weight. It began with double takes as he stalked Winthrop Square. They’d gesture at him and whisper to each other, That’s him. They approached, fingers on his shoulder. You’re that guy, aren’t you? I know you. Didn’t I see your picture in the paper? Lemme tell you something.

He had considered his three clients, one after the other, and listened to their arguments and entreaties. But in truth they were only three of a thousand clients. Thousands. He was quarry now, out in the open, exposed. If they had an opening, they took it, blocking his path or looming over him as he sat guzzling his coffee. The former bookkeeper for the factory, whose posture was such that he appeared to grow into himself. Teenagers on skateboards who scraped across the pavement halted two inches from his face, and cackled excitedly before jetting off. Widows and veterans with their disparate agendas. Homemakers laden with shopping. The old white man he had met the first day, the one with the dog, intercepted him and laid this spiel on him while the animal gnawed on his shoelaces.

He said, Okay, okay.

In the middle of the afternoon he sat on a bench in the square. Was he daring them to approach him, did he want them to? Did he need something from them? He didn’t know. When he caught people across the street squinting at him, he filled in their backstories. That one descended from the second wave of newcomers, the ones who showed up in Winthrop when the plant had taken off and was expanding. That lady over there claimed a direct blood tie to those who followed in Goode and Field’s wake once word of Freedom spread, once people heard of the place where colored folk could be treated like human beings. Advertising of one sort or another had drawn them here, slogans with their luminous entreaties. Freedom was a place where you could get a fresh start. Winthrop, now there’s a place where a man can make his mark. The future is yours. Odds were, if his stories didn’t fit the person in question, they were right for somebody else. That white guy right there had only been here for a month, he tapped out code for Aberdeen and was raising his kid by himself, an easier proposition here than in the city he had left. New Prospera was the final element; after that his resurrection would be complete.

They wanted to know what he thought about things. By the end of the afternoon they were beginning to scare him. Better to be back home on the thirtieth floor of a midtown office building than down here in muck, elbow to elbow with these specimens. Giving him the Muttonchop treatment. At lunch he was granted a monstrous vision as the waitress quizzed him, her pen poised over her notebook. Him as the last living being and the rest of humanity turned to zombies. Like in the horror movies. As was custom for such situations, no reason was given for this transformation. Why is everyone so alien? Just because. He runs through the streets of a deserted town, newspapers twisting in the wind, dumbfounded headlines ripping down the ave. They come at him, lurching, wearing the same clothes they used to wear, normal-looking yet in complete exile from themselves and their histories. Surrounding him, after pieces of him. Hey, mister — what’s your name?

The waitress told him New Prospera had a nice ring to it. They approached him and asked questions, as if he could help them. As if they could be helped.

He made some headway. At one point he took a break and found himself by the window of his hotel room. Not looking at any single thing but feeling as if he were peering through the surface of Winthrop Square. To whatever was below. Just spacing out, really, when Albie shuffled into his field of vision, moving erratically down the sidewalk.

Everybody’s uncle stopped all who walked by, for a quick hello or catch-up. Almost his opposite number — instead of being hunted, Albie was the one in pursuit. From the window, he watched strollers bend toward Albie’s gravity as they passed him. But then, when he pulled back, he saw another level of citizen that purposely avoided Albie. From his angle, he saw them change trajectory so they escaped Albie’s zone, crossing the street or suddenly darting into storefronts. Anything to avoid this strange man. It didn’t matter what his name was, or how many times a day they said it, wrote it on envelopes, read it on signs. The old man was weird and unsettling. And that was that. He felt guilty for his vantage point on the third floor, as if he were eavesdropping on people’s thoughts.

It was the last time he saw Albie. Winthrop’s favorite son. Why hadn’t the two freed men named the town after themselves, he wondered. Goodefield. Nice place to raise a family, they’re closing the drive-in to open a new mall, and it’s about time. Certainly the duo didn’t lack for ego. It required a certain lack of modesty to lead your followers across hundreds of miles of wilderness and whatnot, and all the homesteaders in their caravan qualified as followers in his book. He crunched the names, fed them into the input slot of his particular talent. Goode the Light, Goode Delight: a maker of vibrators. Field the Dark, Field Dark: where you find yourself when you are lost. Darkfield: manufacturer of military equipment, ordnance, and such. Darkfield Military Supply. Darkfield Secrets and Enigmas Inc.