Protected Entity

Protected Entity Part 2 of 2

"What you think?" I ask Riley as we stroll the Hudson River walkway.

"I think we have a problem." Shadows grow long around us. The water turns a murky purple beneath the graying sky. "There's definitely something up there but there's too many statues and masks to sort through."

"You felt it, right?"

"Yeah," Riley says. "Powerful shit. Like a caged animal or something. I know one thing: I never seen your ass move out of a room that fast." We both have a good laugh. "What'd you get from Calhoun?"

"The guy's all kindsa trapped in his head. He's got this lingering discomfort though—"

"Another shocking discovery by Carlos."

"No, I mean there's something else. When that festering rage passed through the room, it didn't come from him, but it knew him. Or he knew it. Something. There was a familiarity between them."

"Maybe," Riley says, "he paid some charlatan to spiritually bind him to one of those masks and the shit worked."

"There's definitely something he's not being straight about."

Riley's nebular glowing body straightens suddenly. He's getting a message from the Council of the Dead.

"Those telepathic motherfuckers want an update and an answer ASAP," he reports.

"Imma do a little archive work," I say. "But we need some time in that room without Dr. Africa's prying ass around."

Riley nods. "Tonight."

***

The basement research section at the Harlem Public Library is incongruously tidy. It lacks the towering stacks of coffee stained parchment one would hope for in a historical archive, and the antiseptic smell and glaring lights would better suit a hospital. But that's only if you stay in the main reading room. If you down with Doctor Tennessee though, you don't stay in the reading room, you go into the backstacks. "The reading room for suckas," Doctor Tennessee told me when I first came through for a visit. "The backstacks where all the good shit hiding. If you workin' anything deeper than a middle school book report..." she peered over her bifocals at me to confirm. I was trying to track down an angry architect ghost at the time, so I nodded. "...Well then you gonna need to go into the backstacks. You smoke?"

"Cigars."

"Gimme one." The little Doctor ambled quickly down a corridor and around a corner. A second later she poked her head out and waved at me. "Well, c'mon then, mister. Ain't you gonna join me?" I looked around the crisp, sterile reading room and then ducked under the counter and followed the old woman out the door. That was the first of many, many afternoons spent sharing smokes and jokes in the little hidden atrium between the main library and the backstacks. Mostly I just let Tennessee talk, rambling stories about her childhood outside of Memphis mixed in with animal fables, historical anecdotes and musings on the history of jazz. Then I make my request.

"Calhoun," I say. The good Doctor has wound down and is now sitting peacefully, sending little smoke cities up along the gray bricolage of air ducts and fire escapes.

"John Calhoun?" She spits back at me. For all the spiraling stacks in the labyrinth surrounding us – there is an even larger library inside the doctor's head.

"The very same."

"The cat that wrote all the books 'bout Africa or his plantation owning great grand-pappy?"

"Come again?"

"John Richard Calhoun III is a preeminent scholar of West African culture and religion. You can't draw a smiley face on a paper plate in Benin without the guy writing a book about it. Lives around these parts I hear. His great grand-pappy ran one of the most heinous and successful slave plantations in the North. Name was known far and wide. Made a fortune off it. You know the deal, Carlos. God may work in mysterious ways, but when He feeling ironic, the shit just become straight predictable."