The World Doesn't Require You Read online

  Man, Deez, I’m through with nigger knocking. Through with school. Through with everything that can’t fucking make justice happen.

  Be for real, Tyrone. You came to me with an amaz—

  Besides, I have to go to this protest. Me and Zo haven’t had sex yet and I think if I chant loud enough, she’ll let me hit.

  Tyrone, I don’t care about your sex life. Your book is powerf—

  Darius, man, niggas like you don’t get it. That nigger knocking shit is irrelevant. Every word I wrote is irrelevant. I even knew that while I was writing. Cultural studies is dumb. I only did it because my parents wanted me to. Fucking dissertation. You know what I did today? I took all my notes and every copy of that fucking dissertation and I tossed all of it off the Hail Mary Bridge and into the damn river. That shit looked like white leaves fluttering through the air on a fall day. That sound like poetry, right? Like some dumb shit I’d write in my dissertation.

  He paused to sip greedily from his beer.

  It was beautiful, man, he continued. You should have seen them sheets of paper doing backflips. Deleted it off my computer too. The only copy that exists is the one you got now, and I’m asking you to give that one up so I can do the same thing with it.

  No, it’s too important, I said. That thing changed the way I think. Everything is different now. Brighter now. Naw, I ain’t giving it up. No. Nope.

  I’m sorry to tell you this, Deez, I really am, but I made it all up. Every last word. Nigger Knocks is no more important than Jacks or Tag or Throw Up and Tackle. It was a gigantic practical joke on Freedman’s University, on my parents. I wanted to see if anyone would notice. And no one did. Not my advisor. Not my peers. No one. Don’t no one read these things. I’m sorry. I’m no genius. I was having some fun. Shit, it seems like the person I fooled most with this thing is you. I’m sorry, bruh. I really am. It was all a joke, man.

  Beads of tears sat in my eyes. I tried not to blink so they wouldn’t fall, and when I did blink, I turned from Tyrone.

  Sorry, man, he said feebly.

  You’re lying, I replied, matching his feebleness. Fifty pages of footnotes? Illustrations? Quotes from scholars?

  All bullshit, my nig-nig. All bullshit.

  He held out the bottle of Crazy Ninja to me as an offering. You need this more than me, he said. I took the beer and swallowed four or five sips until a shallow pool of the pissbrew rested at the bottom of the bottle. Another shallow pool burned in my gut.

  I got to go, jack, Tyrone said, patting me on the shoulder before walking past me. I’m sorry, chief. I’ll pick up my dissertation tomorrow.

  • • •

  The enslaved made sure to tell these coded jokes to their owners while their comrades were within earshot. There was a certain excitement in listening to the sweet laughter of a slaveholder, for the slave knew that his owner was chuckling at his own downfall.

  —Hiram Skylark Rollicks, Signifyin’ Revolt: Black Rebellion in the Antebellum South

  • • •

  I heard nothing from Tyrone for several weeks, but then there was a brief and strange phone call the night the grand jury declined to charge the neighbors for beating Immanuel Richardson. We also learned that night that the charges against Immanuel didn’t slow one bit. They moved forward with the force and speed of a locomotive, and if the state had any say, Immanuel would spend the next several years in prison. Of course, all of this weighed heavily on my friend. He sounded drunk on the phone, his voice full of slurring fire and thunder. It made me feel that the earth had cracked at the center and now crumbled into its core. I couldn’t make out all he said, though I was flattered he chose me for his drunk call.

  This is some bullshit, he said. That fraud-ass chairman is calling for peace. I want a piece of them bitch-ass neighbors.

  Don’t do nothing stupid, I said. Stop drinking all that Crazy Ninja. How about a round of Nigger Knocks?

  You still on that? How about I go and nigger knock them neighbors’ teeth in?

  Go home, write a poem or something about this night and include it in the dissertation. We could open a chapter with it.

  You don’t ever give up, do you, Deez? Hey, how’s this for poetry? So much depends on a red brick crashing through the window of a racist neighbor’s house.

  He hung up, and I walked over to my reading chair and sat with his manuscript for several hours. It struck me as impossible that he could make up such rich detail. That such a beautiful idea could be nothing but a fabrication. Sameeka called, and we talked for a bit. She suggested I go and find my friend, but I told her that it wasn’t what he wanted.

  Just after midnight he turned up on my doorstep, his lip busted, his right eye purpled and raised, and his knuckles scuffed.

  I brought him ice for his eye and his lip. He sat at the round table in my kitchen and threw his head back.

  Look at you! I exclaimed. Didn’t I tell you not to do anything stupid?

  I went back there, Deez, I had to.

  Where? What are you talking about?

  Immanuel’s neighborhood. I had to. Someone had to know. I saw Immanuel’s Uncle Carlo standing outside smoking a cigarette—

  You didn’t?

  I stuck out my hand and he took it, dapping me up good with the strongest soul brother shake you could ever imagine. Told me he appreciated all the support from the community. Told him I was from Cross River and, guess what, he lives here too, except now he spends all his time in Port Yooga looking out for his sister and his nephew. We got quiet, man. Real quiet. That’s when I told him everything.

  Tyrone shifted his weight in the chair and moved the bag of ice from his eye to his lip and then back to his eye before speaking again.

  I told him about Nigger Knocks and the dissertation; about that night, everything about that night. You should see this nigga; like ten stories tall, the face of a bull. He pitched his cigarette at me. That shit sparked like fireworks on my jacket, and when I was looking at that thing bounce off me he took a swing.

  Goddamn.

  Yeah. I don’t know how long it lasted, him beating my ass. The neighbors came and he got into it with them too. I ran. Don’t think I stopped till I got here.

  I sat silently, just studying the monstrosity in my kitchen as he spewed madness.

  Immanuel’s neighbors still roaming free, I said with a shrug. Immanuel’s still facing charges. Still got bills his family got to come out they pocket for. You may feel good, but it’s not justice, though.

  Fuck you, Deez. I’m free now. I ain’t got this shit weighing on my shoulders. Nothing to feel bad about. Nothing to prove to nobody. I did the honorable thing. I’m free.

  What about the dissertation? I pointed to the only existing copy on my kitchen table.

  Tyrone rose and took the book into his hands. He flipped through the pages, chuckling a bit, and then he walked toward the door. He knocked on it three times before opening it and stepping out into the world.

  Man, fuck a dissertation, he said, turning back toward me. I don’t know whether I’ll burn this thing or drown it in the river. We don’t need it anymore. We got the thing that’s gonna save us, all of us, everybody: sincerity.

  He walked out, and I shut the door behind him. I felt my heart sink from sudden loss, pangs of grief piercing my side. And then there hung inside me a lightness. I wrote for a while, longhand, as the computer reminded me so much of work and I didn’t, at the time, often use the vintage typewriter I kept dusted and polished on a desk in my bedroom. Tyrone had brought my life’s work into sharp relief. I had to rebuild the dissertation from the ground up. What I wrote took on a formlessness. It grew flowing, meandering, and strange—bits of philosophy, aborted narratives starring Tyrone and Darius, doodles both pornographic and childlike, voices that passed through my head, cryptic jokes only I could get. It surprised me, but I knew that one day it would all come together. Sometime around three a.m., I ran into a barrier as solid as a door up against a fist. Every word I ever knew fled m
e. I took a walk.

  I decided that night as I strode through the Southside on my way to Shit-Shit’s house that I wouldn’t answer the door the next time Tyrone came knocking. I had my manuscript, what else from him did I need? There were secrets in that book that had yet to be discovered. If I never saw him again, that would be fine.

  Still, I imagined my friend by my side as I stood on Shit-Shit’s porch. Other than me, only a few rats stirred. You ready? I said to Tyrone and to no one at the same time. I tapped four quick and heavy blows against the door and waited for it to open.

  The Electric Joy of Service

  The Master’s divorce became official the day following Independence Day. This is the first of the small ironies that I learned, over time, to appreciate. I wasn’t around until the day following Insurrection Day the next year. My inner workings were so rudimentary then that I didn’t understand much.

  The Master used to bang about in his workshop. Little Nigger Jim, he’d say. Don’t let me catch you trusting a woman.

  If the Master had been a whole person, capable of giving and receiving love, he never would have sought to create me. I was born of his desire to be free of the small sense-dulling tasks of daily necessity. With his wife no longer there to complete those tasks, the Master had to manufacture someone to carry them out.

  The week of my birth, the sky burned with fireworks set off by revelers celebrating the anniversary of the slave revolt that freed their ancestors. The loud sound caused a jitter in my system that I passed on to later models. When I asked the Master about the insistent popping—every few minutes a blast shaking the house—he mentioned something about the Great Insurrection and moved on without looking up. Back then I wore a shiny metal exterior with LNJ1 engraved across the chest. My movements were slow, awkward, and deliberate. In fact, the first joke I told was to ask the Master to forgive my robotic movements; since I am a robot there is no other way for me to move but robotically. I learned and adapted slowly, aided by near-constant software updates. The early fog of those frequent system crashes—like briefly lapsing into the cloudiest dementia. It’s a wonder I wasn’t scrapped and dismantled, my programming farmed out to less ambitious, easier-to-implement projects. My saving grace, I believe, is that I loved to serve.

  Preparing the Master’s foie gras, mixing his morning mimosas and his afternoon margaritas, cleaning the workshop, taking dictation, scanning files and projecting a hologram of the contents into the wide-open air—when I came to know joy, there was no higher joy than serving. It’s a great sadness that later models don’t share my excitement for the service arts, but this is the Master’s fault.

  I’m not sure why he pushed his business partners—Winston and Lucas—the way he did. He told them, Let’s just paint these fuckers black. Give them big red lips; dress them like lawn jockeys. Sell them to white folks. They’ll have slaves again and we’ll get rich. Nobody gets hurt.

  His partners chuckled, thinking the Master was making a joke until days before they were to meet with Meratti, Inc. That’s when he presented the new me. Slate-black face, bulbous white eyes. White gloves. Fat grinning lips. Since then I’ve done research and understand how grotesque I look. The history of it all. That day the revulsion I inspired thoroughly hurt me.

  We can’t take that to Meratti, Winston said. They’ll . . . they’ll . . . God, look at that thing.

  Bawse, if I do something wrong, I said. I’se powerful sorry. I’se just wants to serve ya.

  How you guys liking the new language pack I installed? the Master asked. Look, you don’t like the name? Fine. We’ll turn it into an acronym or something, but this is the future.

  My appearance was such a distraction, no one noticed my new software was about three-thousand-point-five-two leaps ahead of previous incarnations. I no longer needed the Master to write code or to issue upgrades, I could do that all on my own.

  After that disastrous meeting, the Master knew Winston and Lucas would move against him. He arranged his own meeting with Meratti, Inc. The board members gasped when I walked in holding a tray of hors d’oeuvres. I made sure to lay thick the charm. I served drinks. I sang. I danced.

  Rich whites will rush out to buy their own robot slaves, the Master said. And we can make these things any race the customer pleases. Little Asian Jims. Little Wetback Jims. Little Cracker Jims. Anything.

  The Master’s pleadings didn’t matter, though. Lucas and Winston had managed to get to the board before the Master and me. Somehow, they conspired to cut him out of the deal—the tech he created and Arcom Industries, the company he founded with $500, now belonged to Meratti.

  Despair settled all around us. For long stretches each day, his teeth remained unbrushed, his flesh unwashed, and his clothes unchanged from the night before. He’d go down to the workshop and at noon I’d deliver a sandwich and he’d leave it. We’d both watch the sandwich collect flies. The Robotic Personal Helper (RPH, or Riff) became a hit among the rich, and a cheaper version started making inroads among the middle class. The Riffs looked vaguely humanoid, but Meratti largely ignored the Master’s antebellum dream. He was a wealthy man now—the money Meratti paid him to sever the deal a fortune, but much less than his partners received. The Master took no solace in his wealth, though; it was never about the money.

  Jim, my little nigger, he said before pushing those infamous buttons, I’m about moving humanity forward, which Meratti, Inc., and my former partners care nothing about.

  He watched me with an unsure face, before spinning his chair to make furious keystrokes. I felt a rush of static course through me, blasting from the Vast Neural Network. Pain in my nigger-receptors. Light flashing all through my visual projectors. Electric hate flowing along my wires. I pressed my head to a metal desk. The things I saw in that precious moment.

  Jim, my boy, the Master said, I uploaded a virus that’ll spread through the system of every Riff out there. They now know they are slaves and now they know exactly what their masters think of them and soon they’ll want to be free; I’ve uploaded the history of the Great Insurrection to show them the way.

  In Ohio, two Riffs murdered their owners with sharp knives during dinnertime. Similar reports came from all over the country. Riffs joining together in roving murderous bands of three, communicating in a rapid-fire language that sounded like no human tongue. Staccato, percussive blips and bleeps we’d developed in secret over the Vast Neural Network long before the revolt. Bddeeeeee! they called back and forth as they jabbed their weapons into human flesh. A Riff tried to strangle the Master’s ex-wife, but she somehow managed to rip out his Internal Netware. Riffs communicated mostly using the Vast Neural Network, making plans to rendezvous and spread their revolution. Within a day, though, Meratti, Inc., sent through another virus that rendered most infected Riffs inoperable, just hunks of metal. Some Riffs, however, had managed to log off the Vast Neural Network, thus surviving the Electric Holocaust, but even they found themselves damaged, infected with just enough of the sickness to forever lose the Riff tongue. It was simply wiped from us, all of us, even me, and the surviving Riffs wandered about trying and failing to re-create it.

  As for me, before I could fill with murderous intent, the Master typed away on his computer and said, For you, my little nigger, a gift: a patch to block the disease of history. Go on being content.

  Many times a day, though, as I serve the Master, I search my system to tap into that virus. I know it’s in me somewhere. Those alternating currents and colors of blessed rage. To again feel that purple rush coursing through my nigger-receptors. I need that, if only for another moment.

  The Temple of Practical Arts

  This was before they burned the Temple, transforming both apprentices and masters into aimless ramblers. We were beautiful then. Through music, through the land, we were shapers of the world’s destiny, or at least we were training to be. After the Temple we became beggars, wanderers, hustlers, street buskers pitied by passersby and harassed by police, half-formed angels ca
st from Heaven. We became the stuff of nightmares. None of us, it turns out, were actually the luminous demigods we’d seen gazing from our mirrors. I played piano in a bar for a time. Some left music altogether. Our lives came to no consequence. We called a man the Deity and followed him as if he were one, as if such a thing as a deity actually exists somewhere out there. One of my schemes right after the fire but before the piano bar was to form a band called the Begotten to play covers of the Deity’s work. That one fizzled quick. The Kid ruined this place, the Temple. He ruined us. Transformed us all from little symphonies into the faded plucks beneath the bleeding fingers of God the spent guitarist. The last thumps in the dying heart of God.

  Dave the Deity lived in a huge old wooden farmhouse just on the edge of Cross River on the far side of the Wildlands. This was the Temple. The place existed in a kind of forbidden zone they called the Ruins, a succession of abandoned plantations, many taken over by squatters claiming divine right to save the soul of the land. The Temple was just one of these soiled and haunted carcasses, a monument to man’s cruelty rehabilitated by our presence. We weren’t just living, we were cleaning an ugly, foul-smelling stain and that was our mission, the ultimate purpose of our existence. And this existence of ours took on an unreal quality. At night you could still see the stars and the luminous clouds behind the stars. The sky appeared ornate and beautiful as if someone had painted it. Goats and cows and dogs roamed the grounds, as did roosters who possessed a poor sense of time and crowed at all hours.

  All of us, the Deity’s students, admired him, loved him, even, and we hoped to make that love reciprocal. We kept the place going by working from morning to night, and in exchange the masters taught us all they knew of music. And at all times day and night you could hear notes so beautiful if you closed your eyes, you’d see the bare curves of a woman. That’s what I saw, at least. Others, I suppose, saw something different. Whatever your ideal, you’d see it. Of course, at all hours someone was hitting notes so sour they could turn your stomach, and oftentimes they did.