Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  I suppose I should’ve been a superhero or an agent with no mission—AWOL, lost, forgotten, like a cold war relic, the laboratory, the training camp blown-up, the notes destroyed, my creator insane or in ashes. There would be, of course, those who knew of my existence. Perhaps they’re watching me, or looking for me. I should have been a vampire or a werewolf. But if that were the case, then there would be some kind of unbroken bloodline tracing back to the original. I feel artificial, man-made, like saccharin or LSD, something synthetic that was fucked up but issued nonetheless. I should have been something inexplicable, but at the same time nameable—a tolerable paradox, a recognizable dichotomy—like the Silver Surfer, both blessed and cursed; protector of the innocent, the ignorant, the stupid, the cruel; guardian of the land of the obvious; and, obviously, phenotypically different. My internal conflicts need be expressed not in words but through the power cosmic—bolts of pure space funk and blues blasting from my fingertips. Then love me or hate me, you’d at least see.

  If I have the power cosmic surging through me, it seems only to give me angina and a nasty paranoid streak. I turn my gait up a notch. It hurts, but Brooklyn is dark and the streets are mine. There are no cops, no nervous pedestrians. I run and think, or I think and run—either way, I meander through the treed streets in the Heights: ginkgo, birch, oak, American elm. Their thick leaves sheath the streets, delineating a distinct border between earth and sky. They are healthy trees. Most of them have neat beds of perennials at their base, or ivy—Boston or English—and are fenced by wrought-iron painted black, or unfinished cedar. It’s a wealthy neighborhood. The houses are even bigger than Marco’s. They are old, kept old with the detailing—crown molding, sconces and chandeliers, dark oak floors, antique dining rooms, shutters, and mahogany doors.

  I know I’m drifting, in widening concentric circles, toward the bridge—and then back south down Clinton to Atlantic Ave, the divide between old and new, with the North African and Middle Eastern stores, in which there are jugs of olive oil; bins of grain, coffee, and dried fruit; spices and dried herbs; olive-filled buckets; and in the afternoon, especially Saturdays, white people. I suppose there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that, but there is, for me, and when I shop, for them. I stand in line and they stare at me until, of course, I stare back. Then they look away. It’s strange that it should require an imagination to understand that I like olive oil and the bargain prices on Bulgarian feta, too. And stranger that they don’t seem to possess imagination in even that tiny amount. At times I’ve chosen to extrapolate, generalize—a widespread condemnation of an entire people based on the observation of a nervous few. When he first moved to New York, Shake applied for grants to study the habits of Upper East Side white people—their rituals, their culture. It was, of course, rejected.

  I turn north, up Henry Street, and finally break a sweat. Even on this hot night it’s taken me over half an hour to get warm. It’s an awful feeling, running cold. Sometimes it’s what keeps me from running. Things bind up and creak and grind. I breathe short and shallow. My sternum aches and I remember my father and his father and prepare to die alone, late night on the asphalt. I’ve been told that I have a death wish. When my chest aches and my stomach acid rises up my esophagus to my larynx, I know it’s not angina, but I can’t believe it’s anything else. I speed up to run through it and then belch or gag up a bit of bile; my sternum pops like a rude knuckle. I wipe my forehead, spit, and I’m free.

  I haven’t run in three days—just enough time off to be fresh, fast. The temperatures of the air outside and my musculature seem the same. I lengthen my stride a bit. Whatever the disaster of my past life, or the low-calorie days and sleepless nights, I can still run, which is something that Claire and many other people, being neither ex-junkies nor ex-athletes, cannot understand. She would say, when she thought I was angry, “You should run,” as though it would be some cathartic event. Her suggestion would make me angry.

  Gavin’s father would sometimes show up at his mom’s apartment ready to run. He’d point at us and say, “Up,” and then he’d walk out and bark back to us, “Suit up.” He was still young—about five years past his prime—just twenty years our senior, dragging two hungover, hairless late bloomers through a world-class workout. He’d run us hard until one of us puked, and then he’d shut it down and we’d coast back to Gavin’s, his old man quiet and content for the moment—he still had it. Then he’d disappear and come back with meatball subs, beer, and cigarettes. We’d absentmindedly shoot baskets in the driveway until the food was gone, and then we’d play hustle and there’d be a hard foul, and then a fight. Gavin, by that time, probably could’ve held his own against the old man, but he never did. He’d just jab at him to keep him at bay. Then his dad would charge and they’d wrestle. The old man would sneak a rabbit punch in, and I’d pull him off and throw him down on the driveway. He’d call us pussies and weave off in his latest jalopy. I think that we each realized for ourselves that talent and potential were both, in the end, irrelevant, and that winning, and winning big, which required some dark manipulation of mind, body, and soul, was all that mattered. Gavin will not run with me anymore. I suppose I don’t want to run with him, either. I don’t know if I will run with my children. It has become a solitary endeavor.

  Ahead of me are two cyclists. They’re riding the wrong way. This always peeves me—you walk and run against the traffic; you ride with it. They’re wobbly, struggling, almost the same amount, up the incline. And this isn’t a hill. New York City, for the most part, doesn’t have any—not like Boston. I drop it in gear and begin to reel them in. I can’t tell if they’re wobbling from the effort, or if they’re drunk. They look to be stuck in too high a gear. They come back to me. By the time we get to Remsen Street, they’re mine. I pass them. The man dismounts, startled. This is going to be a good one. I have no internal organs, only gears, which drive steel-spring legs and suction feet that grip the road and release. I’m like some high-tech primordial machine.

  For the last ten months I’ve been drifting back to the bridge though never attempting to cross it. As I get closer, the day comes up, rolling through my head like some conspicuously edited newsreel: I’ve just finished running and I’m walking home from my then favorite coffee shop—now closed—with a pound of freshly roasted beans and the Times, and I smell a strange chemical taint in the air. There’s what seems to be a snow flurry over the East River. I run into one of Claire’s pals on the corner; she’s taking her two kids to school.

  “Hey.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask, looking around in the sky.

  “I heard there was an explosion in the Trade Center.”

  “An explosion?” I look west, over the docks, up to the north tower. It’s smoking up top.

  “Someone told me a prop plane hit it.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Apparently not,” she asserts, as though she’s annoyed by my faith in pilots and air traffic controllers.

  “No, look.” I point. “Do you know how wide that building is?”

  She doesn’t seem to understand—the physics of it. I run. The streets are full of parents and children. Some watch me sprint up the street. I open my building’s gate and bang on Marta’s door. She peers through her diamond window.

  “Close all your windows, now!”

  Up the stairs to the top, banging on the other doors. Claire’s preparing the recycling. The apartment door’s open. She’s smiling. Things are going well. The kids are dressed and fed and ready to go—a plan she’s had ready since mid-August. She looks up.

  “What’s up, hon?”

  I think I’m breathless, but I’m not, so it comes out as a roar.

  “Close the windows!”

  She keeps wrapping the packing tape around the newspaper and pizza box—still happy—not wanting to change her expression, not wanting to heed mine. For once, for a moment, things seem to be going well in our lives and there’s no reason to let it go.

&nb
sp; “Get inside, now!”

  I never raise my voice at Claire; now I’ve done it twice in ten seconds. It crushes her smile. Her long mouth makes the transition dramatic. She drops the taped bundle and backs inside. The windows are closed. The AC is on. I shut it off.

  “It’ll get hot.”

  I bark something at her. X and the girl are on the floor, playing with toys—dinosaurs, trains, and farm animals.

  “Where’s C?”

  “In his room.”

  The boy’s room is a half flight up, and just as I’m about to push off the landing and go through the door, he yells.

  “Daddy! Daddy!”

  The second plane comes and it hits like the news of a loved-one’s death, shapeless, soundless, but reverberating, bassy, like the echo of a giant vault door slamming shut—but it’s on my insides. The shock stops my heart. I’m frozen, one foot in the air, one foot on the ground. Then everything begins again—my heart, doubly so, making up for lost beats. I crash into the hollow-core door. C’s on his bunk, looking out the window. I see his face. He’s a child, then he’s not, at least not in his face: It’s wiped clear—no chocolate, no jam smears, no innocence. Then the child returns, which is worse, because that face can’t absorb the horror of the fire across the river.

  I land and then I have him, and even descending the stairs, wrapped in my arms, he’s still looking out. Then I’m back in the living room, holding him. He wriggles free and slides to the floor to join his siblings. Then we just seem to stare at each other—Claire and me—alternately asking if the other is okay. Looking at our kids on the floor. Walking to the kitchen to listen to the news—kept low so as not to let them hear. Picking up the receiver, listening for a dial tone.

  Gavin finally gets through on the phone.

  “You guys okay?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “You got wheels?”

  “We can’t go anywhere.”

  “How many people are in those buildings? Is Brian up there?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Dude, get out of there. Do you know what’s going on? Bush is six miles high on Air Force One running to some bunker in the Midwest. I’m getting a car, somehow. Fuck! They closed the bridge.”

  C’s gone. On the floor he’s left several pictures—planes, towers, fireballs—some the separate objects, some the entire event synthesized in colored pencil and water paints. I find him back in his room, on his bunk, pressed against the window as though he’d be sucked out if it were opened.

  “C, get down.”

  “People are jumping.”

  “No.”

  “Then how are they getting down?”

  “Come downstairs with me.”

  The first tower falls. This time his face doesn’t change, as though he’s already adapted to it. Across the river a cloud rises—ash—gray and white. It unfolds from itself and unfolds again and again, crossing the water, coming to us like a late-Cretaceous plume of postfire. And then we are in it and can no longer see.

  I come up the back way, around Cadman Plaza Park, behind the shell of the in-progress Federal Building. Through the windows I can see the hundreds of light bulbs at the ends of hundreds of pigtails, temporary lighting that stretches up and up through a void in the building’s diaphragm, twisting and seemingly replicating itself as it goes to the top. I catch my reflection in the glass of the first floor, and I remember why I haven’t been running. I’ve dropped weight, enough since I last saw Claire for her to notice, to worry.

  I don’t wear a watch, but I know the checkpoints for my splits. I base my progress on feeling. I feel I’m moving fast when I hit the concrete runway—the approach for the bridge—which isn’t really a runway, but it seems like it to me so I have to build up speed for liftoff. Even at this late hour there are cars backed up at the light. Their exhaust stinks and they throw off thick heat, which makes them bend in the wash of headlights and streetlights. People stare as I run by their windows. I run on the divide, the embossed yellow line, which separates cyclist side from pedestrian, and then I’m past the cars, bending left toward the bridge. The concrete turns to wooden planks and I rise above the heat and fumes, into the cooler air and headwinds above the river.

  It’s 1:25 a.m. and all is well. The electric lights line either side of the wide wooden path and evoke gas lamps, their lenses frosted or etched—I can’t tell, but their light is diffused, making the path ahead always look like a glowing entrance. Up above the lamps is clear. The sky is lacquered azure. No stars here. The moon is behind me. The clouds have gathered again, gray and fat over the mouth of the river, over Lady Liberty. And when I see them, I notice the air’s thickness, the density of the water in it. The bridge cables rise and cross and attach to the highest cross span. It seems impossible, their suspension, their heft, glazed by subtle lights, slack and taut, delicate, heavy, twisted steel—now bonelike, now like sinew and back to braided steel. My list—Claire’s list—seems small, manageable, unremarkable, no different from what any other family contends with, and it is, after all, only money. “There but for the grace of God go I”—up the planks, loosely through the night. I like the greasy slip of my arms, going back and forth against my sides, my sweat evaporating in the night air. Plank after plank goes under me as though the bridge is a giant conveyor belt that I run against.

  I wonder how my wife is and I feel like a bastard for not having wondered before, that my latest thoughts had been to sneakily indict her as an architect of my demise. I wonder how her nose is, if Edith would cough up the dough for a surgeon to reset it, or if Claire will finally be blemished. I can’t see her transformed face, but I do see her—young woman, young mother, then mother, ringed by her babies on the beach. Low tide. Sunset. Happy to see me as I appear on the dunes.

  There must be wind down on the river, too. The dark water has low crests, which reflect the dim light they gather. They look like hands, and the lapping of the river against the stone pilings sounds like slow claps. Above, the D-train wheels spark against their track, lighting up the Manhattan Bridge’s steel. And after the light there is shadow, dark forms of ghost welders on the beams, and the memory of the train wheels’ spark allows me to see their old torches. The steel, the stone pilings, the dark water all know their own stories, and they reveal them in their own way, the bridges through their solidness, the river with its ceaseless motion—lapping. But also, they are in audience.

  A river is a good place for ghosts. Perhaps ghosts believe they are like rivers. Or perhaps they feel they’re like bridges, that they are useful in that way. My mother is a ghost and I hope for both our sakes she finds a river to haunt. I think she may have made some ghosts of her own, flushed some babies down before me, and perhaps some after, and I think, now, I know why. It wasn’t because she didn’t want children, but because her children would never be children. In the end, they would fail, and so would she. So standing at the top of her diasporic arc, she flushed. I wave out to the dark water, if she is there, to tell her I’m okay.

  It’s a strange thing, indeed, to go through life as a social experiment. I’ve been to Dublin and London, walked in tobacco and cotton fields. I’ve been to the Oklahoma reservation Minette walked away from, and I’ve seen the Mississippi dump into the Gulf. And I’ve seen a faded rainbow, like the parabolic wake of an arrow, shot through the center of them all. Ellis Island is to my left, and I scan back, south to north from the mouth of the river to the Empire State, red, white, and blue, and back again then up the rising central tower of the bridge to Old Glory. I’m on the flat now, around the back of the tower.

  When you do something three hundred times a year for a decade, it becomes, even for me, habitual. So when I look down to where the towers should be, the cognitive dissonance hits me like a punch to the inner ear. I go down as though someone has taken my legs, and then my body, and I’m only a head that drops. Then I’m up again—vain, a cosmic vanity because no one’s there to see it. There’s blood in my mouth.

&nb
sp; Brian is buried in a mass grave down there. I know it. Incinerated in an enormous oven. I feel I should call out to him but I know he won’t respond. Just as he never called—returned my stupid message on his machine: How are you doing?—“Not well. I’m dead.” I see him with his shaved head and eyebrows, his saffron robes and alms bowl. He’s sitting at his desk next to the window. I see him on the soccer field, on the baseball field—awkward—then leaning against a locker, talking close and cool with yet another girl. His hair was black, thick and loopy then. I remember him watching Dirty Harry and thinking he could fight and then getting his ass beat. I wonder what the woman he’d told me about, when he first disrobed and moved back, was doing. Did they stay together? Was she dead, too? I wonder what he’d say to me. Do the dead cry out for retribution? Some said they do—but did they really ask the dead?

  The television, the radio, the newspaper—I heard and read that there were no words to describe what had happened. It was said that it was tragic. It was said that the people who had died were heroes. And I heard some try to evoke the spirit of the heroes by speaking their names, as though their evocation would, in turn, make them heroic, too. I don’t know what happened on that day, at his desk. I don’t know if he was buying or selling puts or calls. I don’t know who he saved or who he may have abandoned before he was crushed or burned. I do know that if I call his name into the air, it does not imbue me with his spirit, nor absolve me of the guilt I feel: Ass and fool that he was, I didn’t mourn my old friend. I know that when I heard the corporate-speak, the market-speak, the military-speak, the politico-speak—I know that when I heard all the speak and watched the markets tank while people spoke of patriotism and unity, it made me lonely. It made me sad. It made me seethe.

  Beyond my arm extended is a mass grave. Why is it that those least equipped to speak, speak—the most, the loudest, in sound-bite, reductive, in attempts to name and dichotomize, to clarify with words that are general and misused, with phrases that are hackneyed? With anthemic statements that do little to cloak the next agenda—more death. Why more death? I don’t recall any symbols or ideas buried under the debris—just people. Mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, lovers and beloved, who were caught in the whirl of the bartering and the bloodshed of nations—the ill will of men. Men who have claimed the position of God, to deal death with impunity: their people, asleep or tranquil and full of their opiates. Yes, in some way complicit in their own slaughter, but how could they have known? How could anyone have known that one morning they’d awake to be ripped by fire?