Tal slams the door as hard as an angry teenager can. I feel a flash of rage with the sound because I’m in annoyed-dad mode. I yell after her, “That’s inappropriate behavior,” and I can’t help myself.
I sit in the car, waiting. I sit there, disliking myself, wanting to apologize to Tal, to restart, go back to the moment I was coming down the steps and she was brushing her teeth yet still managed a sudsy “Yo, Pops.” Spitting the paste out in her cup then giving me a sloppy, green-foamed smiled. Yes, let’s go back to that moment. I could win it from there if given a second chance.
Tal takes way too long. I stick the key back in the ignition, turn it just enough to give power to the clock I installed in the dash. 9:48 A.M. I know it’s been at least twenty minutes, probably twenty-five, probably thirty. The anger is there within me, but I refuse to recognize it. I say to it, Go sit down. Wait for ten o’clock. Because that’s when I can get mad and be fully justified.
At ten A.M. exactly, I leave the car and don’t even slam the door.
I know where the elevators are and I’m halfway toward them when a brown hand reaches out from behind the desk and pushes on my chest. He must’ve said something first. I didn’t hear him. What I hear are the words in my head — I put them there — that I’m preparing to say to my daughter without losing my temper: I thought we agreed that you would come in and out.
“I said, ‘I’m going to need you to sign in.’ ” They got this brother dressed up like a general in the Protect White People Army. He’s got the trimmed police hat, he’s got the matching military formal wear, top and bottom. It’s dark blue with a flippant sky-blue trim, a nice silly color to remind you that while the bearer of these clothes has authority, he is also subservient and nonthreatening.
I go to the desk, ask for a pen.
“You ain’t got one?” he asks. It’s then that I realize we’re enemies. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s just that he thought I was ignoring him initially. I look at his face. It’s more than that. The suit says, Welcome to Disney World, but the face and eyes shoved in it? They hate me. Does he think I’m white? No, a black man his age, and his position, would instinctively know not to show such disdain for a Caucasian. So he knows I’m black. When I remove a pen from my pocket and sign my name in, he says, “I knew you was holding out.” No way he would talk to a white boy like that. When I’m done filling out the time, he even says, “You going to let me see some ID or what?” I want to argue. But what I don’t want to know is what it must be like to be a black man working up in here in this monkey suit for decades for these wealthy white folks. I never want to know that, and this man has intimate knowledge of all that must entail. So I show my ID. He looks at it, intently, then says, “So you the one that turned out to be Ms. Karp’s father, huh?” When I don’t say anything, he adds, “I remember her mom. Sweet girl. It’s a damn shame what happened to her.”
I take my ID back, but I can’t look at him. I’m feeling a little dizzy when I hit the elevator button to go up.
The door to Irv’s apartment is open. Not just unlocked, open. My emotions are alive and shoved together, my heart is a crowded bus.
“Irv? Tal?” I say from the building’s hallway. Nobody says anything back to me, so I walk inside, through the kitchen, to the entrance of the living room. It’s not quiet. There’s a television on. Sports, or someone yapping about sports. And there’s Tal, talking. She’s watching TV. She’s up here, watching TV, laughing, having a good time, laughing at me. Even if she’s laughing at something else, knowing that I’m sitting in the damn car waiting for her, Tal’s laughing at me.
I walk in. Yeah, the TV’s on. On one of the sports channels, one of the ones where loud people talk about what’s happening on the other sports channels. Irv’s in his easy chair, feet sprawled out before him. His head’s back — he’s not even awake. The place reeks like dive-bar carpet.
“What the hell is going on?” I don’t know. I don’t yell because I don’t want to yell, but also because of Irving Karp over there. Tal’s still laughing. Hands to her face, presumably one holding a phone.
“When you say you can just be a minute, I don’t actually assume it’s only going to be a minute. I mean, I already give you leeway. As far as I’m concerned ‘a minute’ can be up to ten minutes. Maybe. Maybe fifteen. You got me down there waiting in the car for more than a half an hour for you.”
Tal doesn’t say anything.
“All this time, and where’s the clothes? Where’s your coat?”
“You’re yelling at me and my grandfather just died!”
Really, only the first six or seven of those words even make any sense. The word I really don’t get, even though she makes it out before the sentence transitions into a wail, is the died part. I look over at Irv.
Irv’s head is tilted all the way back in the lounger, but his eyes are open and frozen and staring straight up above him. I actually look up there too, like there will be instructions on what to do next stapled to the ceiling.
—
Into the landline phone, I’m saying, “I’d like to report a death,” but I don’t like to. Not at all.
I look at my daughter. I want to tell her that I’m here for her, and I do, but it doesn’t improve things because she can already see that I’m here, and the only reason I’m here in this apartment is for her.
“This is it, Pops,” Tal says after I’ve hung up.
“What is ‘it,’ honey?” and I put my arms around her.
“This is what the ghosts were trying to tell me.”
18
OUR FATHERS ARE dead. Tal’s and mine. We are alone, together. Now we are completely in the present, the past having dissolved.
Tal tells everyone in Mulattopia she can that she knew. That Irv was going to die. Not because he told her — she now claims he didn’t, she claims the words never actually came out of his mouth — that he was going to die. That the ghosts told her. Whether they believe her or not, the Mulattopians come to the house. In groups, mostly. Of at least three — one time, nine — and offer their condolences. But they also listen to her story. Not just politely, not just consolingly. They listen without moving their bodies. They listen for detail. Tal tells them, “I, like, knew.” She knew as soon as she entered Irv’s building. That she decoded the sign of the bathroom visitation en route. “I’m in the elevator, rising, right? And I’m thinking, This must be what dying is like, you know? And it totally hits me. What I saw upstairs, that night. What you have all seen, in my video. There’s life, and death, and all that, and they’re both happening at, like, the exact same moment.”
“Yeah,” some say and they nod and nod and some may actually mean it. They finish by looking together at the clip on her laptop once more. They point out new evidence and theories from that night, and this seems to console Tal. I walk through the room after the first of these encounters, giving my daughter a casual sniff. She doesn’t smell like weed or booze. She could be high on something else, of course, but I doubt that’s it.
The attention is fine, the concern is fine, but when I try to talk to Tal alone about the loss, about enduring it, I just get the same platitudes. The only ones Tal really talks to are the ones who believe in the ghosts of her imagination, and Sunita Habersham. The latter insists on cooking for my daughter, even if she only knows how to make coffee and tea and instant oatmeal and other recipes that primarily involve the boiling of water.