Drop by Mat Johnson Read Free Book Online

should follow and he yelled for me to bring the bags of Cottonals. Next thing we were in his car, driving. Neither one of us talking all those minutes we sat there as the road beneath us evolved from one lane to two lanes to three and we were on a highway, speed increasing steadily until David made a right turn at an exit marked Gatwick Airport.
    ‘This is an airport,’ I told David, but he just nodded. I’d failed; I was being returned to Philadelphia. David parked the car. It was quiet for a moment, the both of us sitting there, staring at a concrete wall sprayed with a green number 087. I wasn’t surprised. A fraud is never surprised when he is revealed, he is only relieved that the act is over. David pulled himself out of his seat and slammed the door behind him. I didn’t want to get out, but I unhooked my seat belt and followed him anyway because he wasn’t pausing to wait for me. I was too ashamed to apologize. At an elevator, we got on with others and their bags, their conversations about flights, food, and gates. David stood on the other side of the box, separated from me by a woman holding something large wrapped in white grocery bags. The doors opened and we all walked out, pouring like the twelve tribes into whatever direction pulled us. Finally David faced me, staring with his mouth open for a second. ‘Give me your passport.’ It was in my back pocket, already bent to the contour of my ass from the flight the days before. David took it from me without looking at my face and then walked away, leaving me standing by a cardboard donation placard for burn victims.
    ‘All right, we’re set. Now follow me, quickly. We haven’t much time,’ David said when he reappeared, and then scuttled off in front of me. We were walking towards a security gate, metal detector and cops in goofy looking sweater uniforms, and then walking faster towards the gates beyond.
    ‘Yo, sir, where we going?’ The answer was the back of his head, those beaded black naps bobbing as he hustled that body forward. Out among others, David was so much wider than normal folk. So broad that, walking as fast as he was, they must have felt a breeze when he passed.
    ‘Yo, sir, for real, where we going?’ As if to answer me, David turned in at a gate that seemed to be at the end of its boarding: a flight attendant just standing by a door waiting for her chance to close it. David stopped in front of her, turning to me while she took his ticket to hand me mine and say, ‘I’ll meet you by the baggage return when we get there, right?’ Then he was gone down the white tunnel towards the plane, lost in the turn of the hall. It wasn’t until the smiling lady took my ticket that I noticed the Amsterdam sign at the center of her podium. At the plane door I thought I saw the back of a black man’s head to the left, in first class, but I was ushered to the right towards coach before I could be sure if it was him.
    When we landed I tried to get out of my seat quickly, make it to the front of the plane, but there were too many others in my way. He wasn’t there when I left the gate, and I started hustling past the herd towards the baggage claim, certain he would leave me or take a flight somewhere else or do something similarly fucking crazy. At the baggage area, he wasn’t there, no surprise. I kept searching, rechecking that I was in the right place, searching through the growing crowd around me, looking on to the conveyor belt as if he might appear from the magic hole, rolled into fetal position amid the luggage, between an oversized suitcase and a folded stroller. After a few minutes the crowd began to thin, and it was very clear that there was no David anywhere, and that was simple to discern because a random turn of the room showed there were no negroes anywhere at all.
    ‘Chris!’ David’s baritone echoed, poking his head through the glass exit doors as if I was late, smiling politely and waving quickly for me to follow. Outside it was