She presented the phone and laid it on the table. There were a number of words there. Arrogate. Quixotic. Ataraxia. But the phrase she pointed to was at the very end of the list. Residual Supremacism.
My personhood drained out of some hole at the bottom of my feet. I remembered George using that term with me.
“I know what the words mean,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure if it was some psychological condition or technical term. He kept pointing to the bookshelf and repeating it. I haven’t put together what it has to do with him firing you, but deep down I know there’s a connection. That’s why I rushed out.”
“Residual supremacism,” Richard said. “It’s causing me lingual perplexism.”
“I know what he’s talking about.” I tapped my chin. “Do you remember, Richard, when my mom visited after my dad passed away? Well, one of her last acts in life was to stick this miniature copy of the Koran on top of my bookshelf inside a hand-stitched pouch. It’s the kind of Koran you might get at an airport gift shop. I swear, I never once saw it there, not until George noticed it the other night. We were all drinking, so I didn’t think anything about it. I just put it back where I found it.”
“A Koran? What’s the connection with residual supremacism? Did you read it to him? Did you try to convert him?”
“No, I didn’t try to convert him. But I do remember George asking me why I was putting the Koran above the Nietzsche.” My breath caught in my throat. My eyes closed in regret. “I’m right, aren’t I? I fucked up when I put the Koran above Nietzsche. He even asked me why I did that. But I thought he was only joking. Maybe he thought mine was some kind of symbolic gesture. You know, like when people make a minaret higher than a steeple.”
Richard twisted Candace’s hat which she had set down on the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, the Koran thing is weird, but come on. That a Muslim has a Koran in his house is not entirely—”
I slapped the hat in his hand. It landed upside down as if jesters were about to erupt. “Muslim? I’m not a fucking Muslim.” The children near me clapped. The waitress made a face.
Richard put his hands up. “We can go after Plutus.”
Upon hearing about Richard going after her paycheck, Candace spoke up: “Do what when?”
Richard slammed a palm. “We allege discrimination. We link the things George said to you in the office with this residual supremacist crap. I think a court, especially an urban Philadelphia court, may be interested in hearing about a blond-haired German firing a dark-haired, dark-skinned subordinate based on religious discrimination—”
“No,” I snapped. “I’m not about to go around claiming anti-Muslim discrimination when I’m not a Muslim.”
Richard sighed and launched into a lecture on American history, invoking everything from the Declaration of Independence to Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois and JFK and Justice Brandeis and the X-Men and Ellen DeGeneres. He even tried singing the acronym “EEOC” like do-re-mi.
But I didn’t hear him out. I vacated my seat and leapt from the art museum, taking the back exit overlooking the river. Richard was old and patient and didn’t chase after me, and although Candace tried to, I left her behind very quickly.
I stepped out into the cold, my eyes fixed on the river. The ice was a dirty gray blanket with an occasional piece of knotted wood sticking out above the surface, like fingers pointed at me, accusing me of being a Muslim, the Fascist of today. And the disembodied nature of the incrimination meant that I could lodge no protest.
* * *
From the back of the art museum it wasn’t a long walk down the hill to our building; but in my loafers, with the iciness caused by the perpetual northside shadow of the museum, it was treacherous going. I slipped and slid and stumbled through the stamped snow, using mental transference to take me to a giant green meadow somewhere, where I didn’t feel any of the vertiginous vibrations of confusion, where the clouds made collages in the shapes of rabbits peeking and dragonflies bursting and the sky sang a libretto of soporific blue silliness. Not this gray. Not this cold. Not this weight.
Crossing Kelly Drive, passing the Joan of Arc statue, weaving through the scaffolding erected around one of the museum’s annexes under refurbishment, I clawed and unclawed my hands. I imagined Marie-Anne examining my hands with pity, like she did that one sleet-splattered winter in Atlanta a decade ago. On one of our dates she had asked me why my fingers had a hookish bend to them and I had said it was because I had started writing love notes to her. That was the first time she had told me she loved me. And for a brief time I had been called Captain Hook. The world had been good then. The worst thing it turned me into was a fictional character.
It started snowing again. A flake landed on my eyelash. The smash of the eyelid made it melt. I became weary. The cold day seemed to flicker. I peered up at the lampposts. They looked like they wore helmets of smoke. I was reminded of nights in Bethesda, where Marie-Anne and I had moved after college, back when I was trying to fake it as a film director and she had been working on her first — and eventually only — attempted novel. We had loved smoking opiates. The world had been freer then. It hadn’t cared to snare me.
I reached the apartment building. It was under construction as well, getting turned into a condominium. The new ownership had offered a 10 percent discount to all the current renters if they went ahead and purchased the apartment they were in. Marie-Anne and I had talked about it, because the mortgage would be less than the $2,250 in rent that we paid at the moment. I passed the number through my head a few times. It was going to be hard to make rent without my income. Student loans, car insurance, parking spots, credit card debts, Acela tickets, and a meager savings ate up all of our income. We hadn’t exactly been paycheck-to-paycheck, but it had been pretty close, because that was what happened to those who lived above their means. I should have paid more attention when the brunette had talked about unemployment benefits.
I gave a light wave to Marlon. He was my favorite security guard. We had a bit of a conspiracy going: I procured varsity jackets for him from the Philadelphia chapter of the Emory Alumni Association and he distributed them to the homeless guys on Fairmount Avenue. Over the past two years a large group of men with an E on their chests wandered around the city.
Marlon wanted to jump up and talk about our thing, but I shook my head and plodded along.
The elevator was hot. The box strained and whined for a few floors and let me out. The hallway before me expanded and contracted like a scene viewed through a glass bottle. The smell of winter, that wet dog and burned bacon smell, permeated the air. They hadn’t yet finished fixing up the hallway, and the peeling paints of the ceiling fell like the dead skin cells of a sardonic higher being.
When I entered the apartment the first thing I saw was Marie-Anne bent over to pick up a spoon. She straightened when she heard me. She was in a pink terry-cloth robe with bunnies on the lapel. The house smelled like she had been cooking. I moved past her without smiling and went to the kitchen, inspecting the source of the smell. The stove had four different blackened frying pans on it. Hot oil had splashed on the side of the fridge.
“I see you didn’t go to DC yet,” I said.
“It got pushed to tonight,” she replied, and poked me with the spoon. “So I thought I’d try to make dinner. Total failure, as you can see.”