Charles Johnson - Sorcerer's Apprentice

“Me?” I looked up. “Trim?”

“Look”—from my desk she lifted a fountain pen—“I’ll give you an ostensive definition.” Uncapping it, she slowly slid the pen back into the cap. “See?”

Lord , I thought. 0 Lord .

“Like, it’s nothin’ personal, though.” She was at pains to keep this catastrophe on a friendly basis. Aboveboard. “But if I flunk,” she said, “you’re finished.” Then, like a trap door, Wendy’s face sprang open in a beautiful smile. She touched my hand. “I can be nice, too, you know, once you get to know me.”

I didn’t believe her. She’d have to be crazy to say this. It was, for a timid Negro professor who never thought of using his position for leverage, an all-hands-to-the-pump panic. My heart started banging away; I could not snap the room into clarity. She was armed with endless tricks and strategies, this black girl, but Wendy was nobody’s fool — she used Niggerese playfully, like a toy, to bait, to draw me out. She was a witch, yes. A thug. But she had me, rightly or wrongly, at bay. I drew deeply for air. I asked, fighting to steady my voice, “You’d do this?”

“Yeah,” she said. Her nose twitched. “Mrs. Barnes’s baby daughter is strictly business tonight.” And then: “Say what you’re thinkin’.”

My voice shattered. “I haven’t done anything! Nothing! Not to you. Or anyone! Or—”

“So don’t be stupid.” She was standing now, crushing out her cigarette. Her blouse pulled tightly against her bosom. “My mama only got as far as second grade, but she always said, ‘If you gonna be accused of somethin’, you might as well do it.’” She smiled. Deep in my stomach I felt sick. What I felt, in fact, was trapped. Rage as I might, I felt, strangely, that this disaster was somehow all my own doing. Now she opened the office door. “Can we go someplace and talk? Do you hang out?”

Although I do not “hang out” (I checked my fly to make sure), she pulled me in tow downstairs to her sports car, clicked on her tape deck, then accelerated along the Lake Michigan shoreline, her speedometer right on seventy, damned near blowing off both doors, then tooled down Wacker Drive. She drove on, head back, both wrists crossed on the wheel. My square black hat crushed against the roof, hands gripped between my knees, I listened, helplessly, to Michael Jackson on station WVON, then saw the silver hood nose into Chicago’s squalid Fifth Police District. What was this woman thinking? Were we stopping here? In this sewer? Wendy parked beneath the last building on a side street. Lincolns, Fleetwoods, EI Dorados were everywhere. Onto the sidewalk braying music spilled from an old building — hundreds of years old — that looked from below like a cinder block. I sucked in wind. “You live here?”

She gave a quick hiss of laughter. “Are you afraid?” Her eyes, small as nails, angled up to mine.

“Yeah, I know you, Professor. We’re really ‘gods fallen into ruin,’ right? Ain’t that what you said in class? Didn’t you read that when you were a lonely, fat little boy? And you wasted all those years, learned twelve foreign languages, two of them dead ones, you dimwit, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith, believing you could contribute to uplifting the Race — what else would a fat boy dream of? — only to learn, too late, that nobody wants your goddamn sacrifices. For all the degrees and books, you’re still a dork.” Waving her cigarette, she talked on like this, as if I had been perfectly blind my whole life. “Civil rights is high comedy. The old values are dead. Our money is plastic. Our art is murder. Our philosophy is a cackle, obscene and touching, from the tower. The universe explodes silently nowhere, and you’re disturbed, you fossil, by decadent, erotic dreams, lonely, hollowed out, nothing left now but the Book — that boring ream of windy bullshit — you can’t finish.” Her hair crackled suddenly with electricity. “Or maybe one last spiritless fuck, you passéiste, with a student before you buy the farm. Yeah,” she said, opening her door, “I know you, Professor.”

I was too stunned to speak. If I’d known she was this smart, I’d have given her an A the first week of the term. Wendy pulled me, tripping, holding my head ducked a little, down cement steps into a hallway of broken glass and garbage, then into a long apartment so hazed with the raw, ugly scent of marijuana hashish congolene and the damp smell of old cellars that I could taste as well as smell these violent odors as they coalesced, take hold of them in my hands like tissue. For a moment I was dizzy. Someone was sprawled dead drunk in the doorway. Sound shook the air. The floorboards trembled. Yet what most confounded me were the flashy men in white mink jackets who favored women, the women who looked, in this pale, fulgurating light, like men. Meaning was in masquerade. I felt my head going tighter. Let me linger too long and I would never regain the university. Remembering what she’d said, I felt tired, fat, and old. Damned if I seduced her. Damned if I didn’t. Ten, maybe fifteen dancers, like dark chips of paint peeled from the shadows, swept me from my briefcase and Wendy. Someone pressed a pellet into my palm. That scared me plenty. But what moved invisibly in this hazy room, this hollow box of light, this noise-curdled air, was more startling than the seen. Music. It played hob with my blood pressure. It was wild, sensual, clanging and languid by turns, loud and liquid, an intangible force, or — what shall I say? — spirit angling through the air, freed by cackling instruments that lifted me, a fat boy and student still, like a scrap of paper, then dropped me, head over heels, into a dark corner by a man or boy — I could not tell which — snorting white powder off a dollar bill. He had a dragon tattooed on his left arm, long braids like a Rastafarian, and a face only a mother could love. Lapping up the last of the powder, he gave me an underglance. “What you lookin’ at, chief?” “Nothing,” I said. “You gettin’ high?” “No,” I said. “You drinkin’?” “No.” “You queer?” “No!” “Then what the fuck you doin’ here?”

What had brought me here? Even I was no longer sure what brought me. I became aware that my palm was empty. Lord . My hand had brought the pellet to my lips without telling my brain. O Lord . Hours passed. Twice I tried to raise my arm, but could not budge. Neither could I look away. Silently, I watched. Helplessly, I accepted things to smoke, sniff, and swallow — blotter acid Budweiser raw ether Ripple. The room turned and leaned. Slowly, a new prehension took hold of me, echoing like a voice in my ear. That man, the one in the Abo Po, lightly treading the measure, was me. And this one dressed like Walt (or Joe) Frazier was me. If I existed at all, it was in this kaleidoscopic party, this pinwheel of color, the I just a function, a flickerflash creation of this black chaos, the chaos no more, or less, than the I . There was an awful beauty in this. Seer and seen were intertwined — if you took the long view — in perpetuity. As it was, and apparently shall ever be, being sang being sang being in a cycle that was endless. I gazed, dizzily, back at the girl. She danced now fast, now slow. I followed her minutely as she moved. And then, perhaps I suffered hypnosis, or yet another hallucination, but my eyelids lowered, relaxing her afterimage into an explosion of energy, a light show in the blink, the pause before the world went black, and I suddenly saw Wendy — not as the girl who shotgunned me with blackmail back at Padelford Hall, who made me jump like a trained seal; who stood outside me as another subject in a contest of wills — but, yes, as pure light, brilliance, fluid like the music, blending in a perfectly balanced world with the players Muslims petty thieves black Jews lumpenproles Daley-machine politicians West Indians loungers Africans the drug peddlers who, when it came to the crunch, were, it was plain, pure light, too, the Whole in drag, and in that evanescent, drugged instant, I did indeed desperately love her.