Tal’s tent door is open, Tal’s not in it. Tal’s gone. She’s lost. No, she’s at my laptop at the kitchen table, images from the cams up on screen, and she’s screaming “Make it stop! Turn it off! What the fuck?!” back at me.
The control panel. It’s on the wall. Tal points at it and yells, “Shut it down,” like I need the suggestion. I open the plastic flap hiding the keypad and keep entering the code but it doesn’t work and the whole thing is flashing with buttons on the side that say: DISABLE. ALERT POLICE. ALERT. FIRE DEPARTMENT. RESET. PANIC. I am panicked, so I hit the panic button. Strobe lights start flashing out of the alarms to the rhythm of the horrible sound. This is the worst nightclub ever. I make a panic sound too; it’s kind of a moan, kind of a whine; it’s a whole new tone in misery. Tal reaches past me and hits the code again and then DISABLE and everything stops.
We have silence. It’s a gift that just arrived in the mail from someplace on the other side of the world. After a second, I hear Tal sigh and watch as her shoulders slump down with the weight of her exhaust. I can even hear the hum of the laptop now. When the footsteps hammer on the front porch, I can’t confuse it for yet another sound effect of structural decay. Tal hears it too, starts for the door until I catch her arm. I wait for the doorbell to ring. We wait.
The doorbell doesn’t ring.
There is pacing on the porch, a story told in slow thumps.
We wait for there to be a knock; there is no knock. We wait for someone to call out; no one says anything. Someone is on our porch. The footsteps are solid, hard. They are angry. Slow, boom, boom. Deliberate. They go from one side of the porch to the other.
It’s dark in here but the sun is still shining on the other side of our walls. When the footsteps get closer to our window again, I can see movement through the blind cracks, past the distorted, blown glass. I see a dark hood float by and I look at Tal and she’s seen it too, and that’s when I remember the Taser in my left hand. I look at the computer again, at the camera feeds I have set up. There are none aiming at the porch. It is behind the lines. It is out there.
“Call the cops,” Tal whispers to me.
“We. Are. Black,” I remind her.
“Call that guy George, then,” she says.
“No. Hell no.” This guy is on the front porch right now, pacing back and forth in madness. The cops are for after. The cops are for notepads and “Can you describe the suspect?” and then once they leave nothing changes and you never see the cops again. Also, they are good at shooting unarmed black people. We are still black people by police standards. I power the Taser, and listen. The walking stops.
I get close enough to the window this time to look around. From the angle, I can see only empty porch. They’re gone. It’s okay, now. They’re gone. Then the knocking comes. One bump. Then two. Not light. Not like a polite request. Hard thuds. Slamming their palms on the wood. I look at Tal. I can see her breathing, short heavy gasps as big as her eyes have grown. And then a third banging demand, shaking the door with its force.
There’s no peephole to look through. There was no peephole needed in the eighteenth century, when this door was put here. If you wanted to stop by, you sent a letter. Servants would greet you in this foyer and take your calling card to the master. I have to open the whole damn door to find out who’s on the other side. Tal, she gets it now, she feels it, she tries to stop me, puts her hand over my arm, but frantically I wag her away and she obeys me, and I don’t start unlocking again till she’s over by the kitchen, holding a knife forward like a beast is about to come charging. I turn the knob and slowly pull back the door. I have the Taser in my right hand, but no plans to use it.
They’re there. Waiting on the far side of the door for me, silently.
I just fucking zap them.
There is a rational part of my brain and it says, Don’t zap them, Warren. Ask questions first, find out who they are and why they’re here, on your doorstep, lurking, banging. Find out their hopes and dreams. Offer them a glass of water. And that part of my brain has control of my left hand, which is holding the doorknob. The right hand fucking zaps the crackhead.
Two little twisty wires briefly connect me to the form of fear incarnate. And that right hand, it does a great job, aims for the stomach area to avoid giving it a heart attack and I hold the trigger for a good four seconds, which is much less than the twenty the instructions recommended but enough time for me to perform the even more recommended act of catching the body to avoid head injury and/or lawsuit.
I lay the crackhead on the ground. Its flesh is soft, not just because of the plush material of the jumpsuit. It’s soft because it’s a woman, I can see from the hips before the face. I got her. I got the intruder. I really got her. I turn her around to see her face.
“You killed my principal!” Tal says, over me.
I got Roslyn.
Tal drops the knife to the floor, and it bounces loudly in a way that I find judgmental and overly dramatic.
“I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought you were a crackhead,” I tell my employer.
“Intensation,” Roslyn utters, which is not even a word. Her eyes are shooting around, looking for pixies. Her gray hair screams out from under her hoodie. Tal squats down beside Roslyn, and the older woman’s eyes actually manage to land on her for a few seconds before going off fairy-hunting again.
—
We are driving to the emergency room. It is twenty-seven minutes before sunset. We can drop her off in eleven minutes, then get on the Wissahickon entrance to the Roosevelt Boulevard to make it downtown on I-76 in sixteen minutes and still not break Talmudic law. The whole Karp family is supposed to be there. It’s too late to cancel. They’re already predisposed to hate me. For what I did. For what I didn’t do, even though I didn’t know Cindy Karp was telling the truth. This has to happen. We have to make it happen.
“We’re not going to make it. Let me call Irv now,” Tal tells me from the passenger side. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Roslyn, who’s laid out in the back of the car on the sofa seat in a fetal position. More than five decades since her birth but she forms the pose as if she was born yesterday.
“We’re going to Irv’s Shabbat. That’s not an option, you can’t miss — you have to talk to him, clear things up. She’s okay. You’re okay, right?”
“Shabbat shalom,” I hear behind me.
“Dear God, she’s speaking in tongues.”
“No, Pops. Miss Roslyn? I’m sorry, I know we’re all in the middle of a little crisis here, but do you already have plans for dinner?”
I don’t hear a response. I look through the mirror again and see Roslyn’s eyes have closed. Her lips are moving, and I can just make out a slurred chant of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo so I know she hasn’t passed out completely.
“She’s fine,” I tell Tal, who won’t even look at me. As we sit at a red light, I reflect on the fact that I’m pretty sure I’m getting sued at the end of this. I’m pretty sure all this, the Tasing, this drive, it’s all going to be used in a deposition of some kind. Sirleaf will confirm this, I’m sure. I can already see Roslyn on the stand, the blessed earth mother, and the whole of Mulattopia in the gallery staring at me. When the light goes green, I ask Roslyn again if she wants to go to the hospital.
“Like every cell…yodeling,” she says. And then it goes quiet. Really quiet. Until the car behind me honks for me to move.
I haven’t been to the emergency room at Germantown Hospital since I was five and stuck a cherry pit up my nose. I actually visited the hospital twice that day, for the same ailment — albiet for different cherry pits — due to the fact that I suffered from a combination of stupidity and poor fatherly supervision. My mother would never take me to Germantown Hospital, choosing instead to hire a cab to drive me to Chestnut Hill, where the hospital served a predominantly wealthy white clientele, and according to her reasoning, was therefore less likely to kill you. I pull up to the entrance, jump out of the car and open the back door. There’s a wheelchair on the curb with G-TOWN spray-painted on the back of it like a scarlet letter. I pull it over, the wheels worse than a shopping cart, and I see Tal getting out too.