My mind jumped to Donatella Batlisch, to the footage from the motel TV: the woman flying forward suddenly with the gun blast, collapsing, limp. Good news for the southern interest, happy days at GGSI. But no, no. Newell just meant the late frost. “We’re coming up on Halloween, and here we still got acreage coming into flower. Don’t see that every year; no, ma’am.”
And for a second as I approached them across the lobby, my fake smile was real, a smile of appreciation for Martha. I watched her nod admiringly. I watched her touching Newell’s elbow. Jesus. She was a natural.
“Oh, Mr. Newell—”
“Please, please, Jane. Make it Matty.”
“All right, then. Matty.” She made it sound like “Hercules.” He beamed. “Matty, this is my associate.”
Newell peered at me, confusion in his small eyes. He had a lanyard around his neck, dangling an ID card in a plastic sheath. His face was soft, his hairline retreating, just as it was in the picture. Since sitting for the corporate head shot, though, he’d grown one of those little Tommy Jefferson ponytails, and it didn’t particularly suit him.
“Your, uh, associate?”
“Associate, assistant.” She winked at him, mouthed the word servant. “Whatever you want to call it. He does what he’s told.”
Matty sized me up, smiling weakly.
“Just seems like …” He shrugged. “Well. Funny work, for a nigger.”
Grin grin grin. Smile smile smile. “Oh, I know, sir, I know.” I glanced at Martha, at Ms. Jane Reynolds, making sure it was okay to talk. “I guess I’m a funny kind of nigger.”
Matty Newell gaped for a second, then laughed, a nervous, throaty chortle, shaking his head at this strange old world of ours. The flags snapped sharply outside in the brisk wind. The Asian children in the photomontages were frozen in their happy cartwheels.
“Well, come on up to the top floor,” said Newell. “Have a good look at the joint. Then we can talk about whatever it is y’all are selling.”
The whole building had that same pleasing color scheme, easy white and gentle blue, and every wall was lined with more of the glossy enlarged pictures. On the way to the elevator was a housewife of some indeterminate Southeast Asian ethnicity, reaching into her closet for a stack of towels—while reaching through the closet wall from the other side was a black slave, grinning, servile and unseen, as he provided the stack of sturdy cotton towels.
I did not blanch. I did not slow. I walked past, sticking close behind Martha, noticing things.
I noticed the pattern of the light fixtures in the long hallway: a bank of two, then a bank of three, two and then three. I noticed the pants of the slaves in the photographs, black like Marlon’s pants, like the ones I was wearing along with my inoffensive peach sweater. I noticed the lushness of the white carpet. I noticed everything.
The elevator raced us soundlessly upward fast enough for my ears to pop, and I stood clenching and unclenching my jaw, standing in quiet self-erasure at the rear of the car. I looked anywhere but up at the camera mounted in the high corner of the elevator. I studied the button plate on the elevator doors: MURDOCK ELEVATORS, it said. Murdock, Louisiana. Martha laughed and flirted with Mr. Newell.
“No, sir,” she was saying. “Oh, no. We’re up from the Birmingham office, but the company is headquartered in Georgia.”
“Georgia, huh?” said Newell. “And how are things in the State of Surrender?”
“Oh, stop,” she said, and slapped him on the arm.
He laughed, eyed her nervously, hoping not to have offended, and rushed to reassure her. “I’m only teasing, of course. Bygones be bygones and all that. Every state free to choose its own path. The American way.”
While Newell mouthed these wooden platitudes I had another quick flash of Batlisch, flying forward, arms out, the panic of the crowd. I wondered what Martha was thinking about. The elevator dinged, and we stepped directly out into sunlight; the whole top floor was taken up by one room with windows for walls, the sun streaming in gloriously on a bright open penthouse with marble floors.
“This is my office,” said Mr. Newell, and immediately snorted and waved his hands. “Just kiddin’, of course. This is the observation deck, what we call the perch. I love taking folks up here. Just gives a real strong sense of the place.”
He walked up to the glass and gestured for us to follow—well, for Martha to follow. My presence he had more or less forgotten: I was the rolling suitcase. I did what I was told. I was not worth thinking of.
He stood at Martha’s elbow. “Really something, huh?”
“It sure is.”