Horus was deputized to go over the inventory with the clients at the end of the day and get their signatures, a duty he boasted of daily, throwing in comments like, "Y'all better get used to the way I run my ship. I'll let you come for tea when they give me my brownstone!" Though a big man, Horus provided little company. As soon as he and Snowden ran out of merits to debate between the 1996 Bulls and 1968 76ers and the conversation slowed, it was Horus's habit once again to remove his laminated cutout photo of his dream Mercedes and hijack the discussion to one about the merits of the CL-class coupe versus the SL-class roadster, pointing down at the faded image like he already owned it.
After work on Sunday, a good four days after his conversation with Robert M. Finley, Snowden finally admitted to himself that he'd become a truly unhappy person. He wanted to get drunk but didn't feel like getting drunk alone, and the TV lineup was so bad he couldn't even be bothered to flip through the channels as he was apt to. Left with his thoughts, there were no distractions to keep him from realizing that the majority were not happy ones.
Throughout his life, Snowden was sure he'd seen people on the street and behind cash registers, heard them on the other end of phone lines, who were perennially pleasant. Truly happy people among us. Snowden could barely imagine them even crying, but he was sure they did, short bursts never louder than their normal talking voice, things they wiped away like mucus before returning to their state of happiness once more. These people often seemed bland and stupid as well, but what a small price to pay for true happiness. The ones Snowden envied the most were those who seemed to be happy just because they believed in something, something so big it shrank all their own obstacles down to minutia. It didn't seem to matter what that thing was, either, just as long as it was big and depended more on faith than reality. Nursing his anxiety, Snowden wished he could believe in something big and beautiful, even this Horizon insanity he was being pushed into, that he could rid himself of the certainty that eventually it would engulf him.
The most beautiful thing Snowden could think to believe in at the moment was love, and even though he was pretty sure he wasn't in love with Piper Goines and that it was good sense to avoid her in general, he felt overwhelmed by the need to be near a woman, inside her, and Piper's door was already open for him. The urge to be touched, listened to, overshadowed the fear that Lester would see him near her, so once more he found himself at her door, greeted by her patented lack of surprise, customary silence.
"I'm here for consolation," Snowden said as soon as he'd ducked inside the vestibule, out of sight from the street.
"Good."
"Would you rub my hands for me? They hurt from lifting shit."
"OK. It's a deal, then."
Upstairs, Piper obliged. There were too many bottles for it to take so long to find a little something to rub into his skin, but it did. Snowden sat on the fuzzy lid of the toilet while Piper pulled through the stalactite jars in the cavern under the sink, most of which ended up on the floor in the process. Snowden begged for her to settle with the petroleum jelly but Piper chose instead some pink paste meant for hair moisturizing that stank like a perm but felt good. They had sex in the bathtub because when they started kissing they were next to it and it was the only bare surface in her apartment.
Snowden woke up paranoid. His dream hallucination that he'd been sleeping in a coffin-sized office drawer turned out to be the product of the manila files underneath the sheets of Piper's bed, ones she hadn't bothered to mention or clear when they'd collapsed there. Snowden was pulling them out from beneath himself when Piper reached out for his hand.
"I didn't expect this, you know. I mean, it wasn't an expectation, do you know what I mean? I realize, at least it's my understanding of this whole thing, that we're just messing around here. But I want to tell you I really appreciate it, you coming over here to console me, taking into account how I must feel."
"Console you" Snowden sat with it a moment, admitted there was no way he could hold that statement that it would make him see it clearly. "I'm sorry, did something happen to you?"
"Jesus." When Piper flopped back on the bed like that, Snowden could hear that there were even more files hidden beneath her. "You didn't even see the article, did you? You probably don't even read the Times, do you?"
"Oh, I don't just not read the Times, I don't read nothing at all. I'm a total moron." Snowden caught the flash of white from Piper's rolling eyes as she jumped out of the bed and past him. He was beginning to wonder if he should follow her when she returned to drop the weight of the Sunday paper on the bed beside him. As she went searching through each section, Snowden became certain that when she was done she would leave the periodical right there where she dropped it for weeks, kicking it piece by piece onto the floor in her sleep.
"You know what? The most annoying thing about all this is now you're going to be all freaking happy about it too, about my travesty." Piper threw the section at him, bouncing it off his slow hands and down to the floor in front of him. The paper looked as if it had been shared by a bored army for a month, its sides soft and rounded from repeated bending, gray with the ink of smeared words.
"My editor in chief called me last night to tell me about it. The bastard even sounded happy that I'd been scooped. He's supposed to be my advocate and I could almost see the old fool smiling on the other end of the phone. He must have gone through my insurance records to get my home number. It was like his little payback for my piece knocking out his Special Report, as if I had a damn thing to do with that."
Snowden heard none of this, the auditory processor of his brain being infringed upon by the visual overload of seeing Cyrus Marks right there on the cover of the real estate section, his smiling visage centered and in color, Horizon Realty's swinging sign over his shoulder, the number showing clearly. Deja vu as Snowden found himself reading the paper with his fate caught in the text, but now the anticipation of each additional sentence given the context of joy. The article's tide, AMID ACCIDENTAL ASHES, A NEW HARLEM BLOSSOMS.
"See? See? Not only does the bastard not mention that I'm the one who broke this story, he doesn't even bother mentioning the New Holland Herald at all. You know, you think sometimes that black people are starting to get respect, then you look at the way the black press gets dissed. . It's goddamn antebellum. It really is."
"Although much has been made in our local tabloid press about the high number of accidental deaths in the historic Mount Morris section of Harlem, it must be taken into account that these figures apply entirely to the lower-income residents of the area, the elderly, the drug-addicted, and others who are obviously at a much higher risk than the flourishing and unaffected high-income newcomers." After that, Snowden read the sidebar about Mr. Marks, Harlem's favored son. Cyrus Marks was the only real estate agent profiled, his optimism for Harlem quoted and unquestioned, his hope for all Harlem, rich and poor, beyond reproach. A long, run-on sentence listed his charitable contributions and affiliations.
"The thing that kills me is the morally reprehensible tone this guy gets." When Piper got mad, she had a habit of slamming her fist down. The bed shook. "It's like he's implying it's some bourgeois Manifest Destiny, like Harlem is just weeding itself to make room for the moneyed fucks to come steal it away for themselves. It's disgusting."