Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  I looked for her, waited across from the ice cream shop, drifted around the perimeter of the yard, waited outside thrift stores I thought she might be browsing in, and searched from my dorm room window, while my roommate, a pimply hockey player from Maine, watched with suspicion. I hated him, but I almost confided in him because I didn’t know what to do. I drank and waited; wound up hospitalized for exsposure, wandering through the late streets of wintry Cambridge and Boston, trying to figure out what to say to a girl like that, trying to be near her and make her want to be near me.

  I tried to imagine her life at school: how she spoke, how she moved. I wondered if she was as alone as I. The other black students, I thought, regarded me with suspicion, because I seemed to have no concrete reason to be there. I wondered how she appeared to them. Ah, the promised few: what a horrible burden. There’s a limited amount of space for people, any people, anywhere. And on the inside of any powerful institution, especially for people of color, that space gets smaller and stranger. Most white folks believe the reason you’ve come in is to lift up your people. But you can’t bring your people inside, except compressed into a familiar story that’s already been sanctioned. And you wouldn’t be there in the first place unless you were a recognizable type: the noble savage, Uncle Tom, the Afro-Centric, the Oreo, the fool. Those students made sense, but Kali, I thought, was different—an artist—and her crippling beauty seemed to refract the images around her into new things.

  I remember realizing that she may not be a student—may have only been a visitor. The thought made me stop and sit at one of the chess tables in the middle of the square. It was a bleak November afternoon—straining, futile sun—and I was skipping another class, not wanting to hear the mumbling TA paraphrase someone else’s thought about Joyce. She appeared on the corner. I saw the blood-red wool hat first, then the long, dark coat, then her face—dark brown and regal. I knew I could never speak to her, or get near her because I would die, but I followed her down the side street and into a coffee house. I sat, waited, and tried not to stare, but she caught me, twice. And the third time she waved me over. “Sit down,” she said—liquid alto and quiet. Her chiseled, dark face and wine lips made me float.

  She was the one of course. Perhaps I was not: love and demographics. She’s asked me about my poetry, but when I met her I had to throw out everything I’d ever written about Sally, because it seemed like boyish gibberish. She was politically radical, artistically progressive. And to others—whether or not they liked what she said or did—she made sense: the affect and content were whole. When I finally let her read the new poems I’d written, and she’d seen my confused reaction to her text-laden paintings; walked through the yard with her and felt the weight of observation on us—that we, as a couple, meant something—a burden we’d experienced alone, but as a couple, exponentially so; when I held her hand on Massachusetts Avenue after three coffee dates, when she kissed my neck that night to say goodbye, I could tell I was no good. I watched how she moved, with ease and elegance through different circles—so unlike my nervous skittering. I know she found that skittering taxing. She couldn’t understand why it was so hard for me to make it to classes, or sit on the grass in the green; why I never responded to invitations from instructors or the dean to “come chat.” And in that voice she’d say, “This place and these things are for you.” I still wonder if she believed that.

  One night in her room she prepared for bed—moving things about, preparing for the next day—but after undressing she stopped, came to me and helped me take off my clothes. I had thought of us naked, but I could never get past the image of tracing the outline of her body with my palms, as though she was protected by an invisible field. “Such a strange boy.” She whispered with that voice in the near-dark, almost to herself. I wanted to say something back, but I didn’t and went cold. When we lay down kissing, I became metalled. And when I entered her, I pushed in a mechanical way. I didn’t move, I jerked in robotic spasm. And when I came, I finally felt our heat, my stillness. And I lay in the quiet horror of having been made flesh.

  I did go see someone after that: Dean Richard Ray, and he shook his head faster and faster as if he was trying to give his words momentum before he threw them out at me. My collarbone was broken and I stared at his bloated turkey chin shaking to take my mind off the pain.

  “You hit a police officer?”

  I kept looking at his jowls as he kept shaking them. I didn’t remember. I wanted to tell him. He took his glasses off and rubbed his face while sighing. I’d expected him to be angry, but his expression was blank. He looked at my arm in the sling and then a painting above my head—Sargent, I think. He opened my file, pretended to look at it, scanning it with a pen to guide him.

  “We can’t do anything for you.”

  He closed my file and sat back in his chair. He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, went back to the painting.

  “Do you have anything to say?”

  I tried my memory one more time even though I knew it was pointless. All I could come up with was a rushing montage of faces: Kali, Sally, my mother, which then gave way to a dull hum. I remembered the sound of my voice reading the acceptance letter to my mother, and her uncharacteristically jumping and clapping like a little girl. I was late for my visit. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. They felt moldy. My mouth was hot and funky and I was trembling, clammy, itchy—worried that I was about to shit my pants with bile. The temperature in the room seemed to dip and rise.

  “You don’t understand . . .” was all that came out—and that, although not what he was looking for, was probably the truest thing I could’ve said. He didn’t understand. He concurred.

  “No, I certainly do not.”

  I left his office, left the building and the campus, and walked west along the Charles, growing angrier the whole way. Not that he’d kicked me out, not because he’d refused to understand, but that I had cried in front of him and he hadn’t cared. What was that look he’d given me, Dean Ray, the white-haired jowl-beast, when I searched for the words to begin, didn’t find them, and did nothing but huffed and wept? It wasn’t pity for one of his suffering students, and it wasn’t scorn. In the wood-paneled office, the old world had regarded the promise of the new—he looked at me like he had won. One more dumb nigger down.

  “Baby, you don’t look so good. Is there something wrong?”

  My mother had taken to calling me baby since I’d started college. I couldn’t let her know. Shake was waiting in the car outside. Most things in her life hadn’t gone as she’d planned them, but she believed that I had—or that at least I was on the way. She was sitting in her chair, a teacher’s wooden one that she’d gotten years before when one of the schools closed down. It was dark in the little room—winter dark of the late afternoon—but she left the light off, having her whiskey in the dimness. She’d been listening to Marvin Gaye. And I’d arrived in time to hear his last plaintive wail. The needle was running on the record’s blank spot, popping in the speakers. She reached out from her seat, across the room to my arm in the sling.

  “Baby, what happened to you?”

  “I was playing ball.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be doing that.” She pulled her arm back, groped for her drink on the table beside her. She found it and took a sip. “You used to look like your father. Then you looked like me. Now . . . ,” she exhaled loudly, which made me question if she’d been breathing before. “You know your friend got back in town awhile ago. He’s been raising Cain.”

  “I guess I’ll go find him.”

  “Why you gonna do that?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Well, I guess that’s what you have, huh? Hah!” Her cackle cracked in the dark. Then she waited for a response from me. “What, baby? Ain’t you gonna sit—stay for a while?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “You know when you were young, a baby, you were so smiley.” She took another drink. “What happened?”

  When I get to Starbucks, Kell
y points at a table in the front by the window and mouths, “Sit,” to me. I do, bent over to relieve my stomach. I start to feel my body. I’m tired. My hands feel like they’re swollen, getting more so all the time, and they want to close into a fist on their own. I flatten them, palms down, on the table.

  “You look even tireder.” She sets a coffee down. “Is that even a word?” I straighten up and think I feel my stomach lining tear. I suppose I grimace because she looks concerned.

  “Baby, you all right?”

  “Yeah. Just a little beat.”

  She looks me over, my unwashed hands and arms and my filthy shirt.

  “You’re dirty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she shakes her head. Raises her voice a half octave. “You shouldn’t be out looking like you do.”

  “I know.”

  “Take a bath.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get a massage.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have a nice dinner.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then go to bed.” She says this while starting to walk away. She stops. “That’s for free—the advice, too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You hungry? We have some muffins we’re just gonna throw away.”

  “I’m good. Thank you.”

  “Stop. You know I love you.”

  She snaps her towel and leaves me. There’s a line forming. There always seems to be a four-thirty rush—postschool, postcamp, post-nanny. I remember this world, of strollers, cooing mothers, and sporadically employed fathers—alleged writers. I used to write in cafés before I had children.

  Someone sneezes, and I sit up. There are two women seated in armchairs. Close to one is a small child sleeping in a stroller. The other woman has a toddler on her lap. He obviously has a cold. He has dried snot trails beneath his nostrils. She absentmindedly feeds him broccoli. He can’t breath through his nose, so he inhales deeply with his mouth while pulping the florets.

  I turn away. His mother says something that sounds like “There’s a lot of reciprocity in our relationship.” I look out the big window to Dean Street, then to the corner of Court and beyond, to the south, across the dogleg intersection. There’s a minivan waiting at the light. I can tell it’s going to make the illegal dash, the wrong way across the intersection instead of turning right. “Yeah,” responds the first mother, “I know exactly what you mean.” I wonder if it’s possible to quantify reciprocity—love. You either give back or you don’t. You love or you don’t. You drink or you don’t. And that’s the rub—the either or. I hope her partner excuses her abuse of language, the intellectual masquerade, the self-help quackery. What doesn’t she give back? What is she capable of giving other than a limp screw and nonsense. Nonsense.

  Her kid has climbed off her lap, blown a snot bubble, and now stumbles toward me. He waves at me. She beams as though he’s achieved something. She warbles something, and he waddles back to her. She produces a bottle of juice and again is amazed when he takes hold of it and drinks.

  “Is it good juice?” she asks, high-pitched and far too loud. He takes a break, nods, and then continues with his snuffle-sucking.

  Sometimes my mother had to take me to work. She would put me in a chair, give me a book, and tell me not to move, not to make a sound. She’d do the same in stores and on buses. I listened to her, not because I was scared of being punished; it just always seemed the right thing to do—to make us both okay. Lila’s wrath was terrible, but death was even worse, and a failure of wits, of equipoise, of dignity, a lack of quality was death: Keep your black ass still or thou shalt die and not live. I wonder if I’ve been too hard on my boys, especially C: having him sit up straight, chew with his mouth closed, and display a certain amount of dignity—as though he was going to face German shepherds and batons in Selma or cops behind Faneuil Hall. The stakes weren’t that high anymore. How had it been passed on? I certainly was proud of him, privately, perhaps too much so—the privacy. They would sit and sip their hot chocolate, but is their fight mine? Was mine my parents? Was there really any fight at all save the fight against throwing oneself in? Claire would always try to intervene—when I’d be demanding that he swing the bat correctly, that he answer my questions clearly in both thought and diction—try to tell me that he was just a little boy. Brown boy, I’d grumble in my head. Sometimes he’d weep, and she’d ask me why I needed to drill him so and say this would come back to haunt me. “He’s just a little boy. You’re probably halting his progress.” And I’d say it—unrelenting—“There is no dignity in progress. The dignity is the progress.” And C is a good boy—a sweet boy. Content with whatever comes his way, which seems to me a fatal flaw. Brown boys have to be more—smarter, tougher, and possess a dignified tenacity.

  The boy is back. He’s pointing the broccoli-flecked nipple at me as an offering—the viscous trail on his lip. He grunts at me belligerently and makes a face like he’s trying to pinch a hard one off. His mother isn’t watching. I could probably get four blocks with him before she realized he was gone. I want to speak—Madam, the boy needs discipline. So do you. You are cruel to the boy, and when he comes to adulthood, he’ll realize that you robbed him of his chance to walk with dignity. He’ll be snot-faced and wanting, needing to fudge all his data to convince himself he’s not—that he is good. And where’s the quality in that? No wonder the White House is full of cretins. There’s no discipline, no dignity. We welcome the inept. We celebrate the mediocre and run in horror when we realize the effort required to be good and stay good—fuck!

  I’ll give the little snot-faced kid this: He’s tenacious, still hovering by my table, still pinch faced, waiting for my acknowledgment.

  “Hey, kid,” I grunt like an old salt. The women, in unison, coo.

  I look up. There’s a woman on the corner. There’s no traffic, but she’s waiting to cross. The light changes. The minivan makes its move—diagonally across Court. When it reaches the opposite crosswalk, she steps off the curb and throws herself over the hood. The van stops. The driver gets out—a little man. Then I see Shaky. He’s across the street, in front of the corner pub. He watches the driver with a flat affect. He rubs his hands together, points a finger in the air, and then sprints off the curb toward the scene. He looks like he’s screaming, “Hey, you!” Now he’s pointing at the man, who fearfully shifts from his victim to Shaky to the gathering Samaritans, who will claim that they saw everything. Shaky traps him against the van and starts screaming in his face. The women in the easy chairs finally notice. “What happened?” they ask each other, and then shake their heads in tandem. They look at me but don’t ask—content to stare outside ignorantly.

  Two firemen run up the hill and tend to the downed woman. A police car comes and stops in the middle of Court Street. The Samaritans recreate the crime with arm gestures. Now Shaky’s just nodding—cooled off. The mother of the sleeping child mutters to her friend, “Wrong way. What an asshole.” Then tries to apologize for cursing with a shrug and a sheepish look.

  I shoulder my bag and leave. I cross behind the scene and try to catch Shaky’s eye. He doesn’t look at me. I keep going.

  7

  I hover over the change bowl in the kitchen. Marco has replenished it—dimes and nickels. I take a dollar seventy-five, enough for a slice or a sport bar. I go upstairs. On the desk are two cigars and a note.

  Meet me at 57th and 5th, 8:00. Bring the cigars.

  —Happy Birthday,

  M.

  p.s.

  If you don’t mind, would you drive the car in? It’s

  in the garage on Pacific. They’re expecting you.

  Thanks,

  p.p.s.

  Claire called.

  I’m ashamed for a moment because I’m excited, like a kid promised fast food. I get over it quickly. I shower, shampoo, shave, and leave the bathroom still wet, letting the water drops slowly evaporate in the air conditioning. I wouldn’t walk around nude in my own house, but
I’m naked in Marco’s, naked and dripping water on the hardwood floor, on the wool throw rugs. I search through my bag, knowing I won’t find anything. My good clothes are in the basement.

  I go downstairs and begin rummaging through our belongings. There are boxes full of crap—notebooks. I pick up an old one, begin to open it, and think better of it. There are photo albums that Claire has put together—the annals of our life together and apart sit contained in boxes. Thirty-two square feet of memory on pallets. There’s the warranty for my laptop, disks that are unlabeled. Claire, of course, packed everything according to some kind of organizational logic: computer disks with notebooks and gift pens; our library, sectioned by what appears to be race, then gender, then genre; my old stuff, when I used to buy expensive sketch books to write in; music books; record albums; CDs, which I decide I’ll bring upstairs. There are some loose photos, a recent one of Edith holding my girl. Edith looks pained. My girl’s about to cry, trying to get free from her grandmother, do anything to get to her mother, who’s taking the picture.

  There’s a box of pillows and towels, at the center of which is a bundle of newspaper. I take it out and unwrap it. It’s the urn containing my mother’s ashes. It’s a simple design, U-shaped, black with a matte finish. I didn’t get to pick it. I thought I would’ve, but they’d handed it to me already done. And I would’ve spread them out immediately but I hadn’t known where. Boston wasn’t right, since it had seemed for her to be only a kind of purgatory, one she never made it out of. I thought about Virginia and then Oklahoma and then Dublin or Dingle. Then I thought that I could divide her among all three. I didn’t do anything. When I met Claire, she suggested that when I had a permanent home of my own, I could make a little flower bed of Lila’s favorite flower and put them there. I thought that sounded like a good idea, perhaps only because Claire had said it.