Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  She starts for the living area, and I almost grab her arm. It stops her. She cocks her head to the side and studies my hand and raises an eyebrow.

  “Yes?”

  I pull my hand back, crack my knuckles rudely. “What do you need for me to do?”

  She nods as though considering a request, rubs her hands together, then pushes her palms at the kitchen.

  “Okay, what I wanted to have you do was build the kitchen, but it didn’t get here. They sent the bathroom instead.” She shortens her nod, puckers, and looks at me as if I know what she’s talking about. “So, can you do the bathroom tonight, and maybe the kitchen when it gets here?”

  I confess. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh,” her eyes widen in realization. “Of course you don’t.” She turns and half shuffles, half skips to the door on the far right. “Come on,” she waves when she realizes I’m not following. She opens the door, reaches around and turns on the light. She pokes her head in as though she was exploring something new and then turns back to me with a little, fake grin. “Come on.” She goes inside. I stand in the doorway. It’s a small, square bathroom with a large, claw-footed iron tub on the opposite wall, a cracked pedestal sink and no mirror to the right. Next to the sink is a worn laminate vanity with a small drop-in sink. Running up the tub wall to about eight feet are four-by-four-inch white institutional tiles. To my left is a blank wall with a doorless opening. The space beyond is dark.

  “Okay, the plan.” Her voice rises, gains energy. I can’t tell if it’s out of nervousness or a growing mania. She does a few quick turns in the center of the room, gesturing at the walls and fixtures. She finally settles on the vanity. “Okay, this—out. The new one goes in. But I want to keep the sink—the old one.”

  “You want me to build a vanity?”

  “Yeah.”

  I look around the bathroom. “Tonight?”

  “Sure. If you can.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Oh,” she covers her mouth, turns, and walks into the dark space. “Just a second.” The lights come on, orange and low. “It’s in here.”

  I stand in the opening, the entrance to her bedroom.

  “Come in.”

  It’s a fifteen-by-fifteen square. On the opposite wall are stacked milk crates filled with books, clothes, and random possessions—an old, medium-format camera. To the left is a couch covered by a light blue bedsheet. On the wall above the couch is a large corkboard; several photographs—too small to make out—are tacked onto it.

  “Come in.”

  She’s to the right, next to her bed—a boxspring and mattress on the floor with a balled-up comforter in the middle. On the floor beside the bed are two large, flat boxes, with what looks to be warnings written across them in some Scandinavian tongue.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. I completely went against my better judgment and designed a kitchen online. I try to stay away from that whole world—technology—but it just seemed so easy.” She taps one of the boxes with her foot. “So easy. I measure everything, I study all these kitchens in magazines. I go to all the expensive design shops around here—you know them?—And I chat up all the salespeople for hours, like I’m going to drop eighty thousand dollars on a kitchen. I get it all done, send it out, and they send me back a bathroom.”

  She waits for me to comment, but I have nothing to say. She wraps her hands around her neck and sighs, exasperated. She releases her neck, stretches up toward the ceiling, exhales then quickly bends and stretches to the floor. She holds her pose for a moment, relaxes, and drops somewhat awkwardly onto the edge of the bed.

  “So somehow I wind up with a bathroom and a kitchen. For a substantial discount, so they say. All I know is I spent more than I wanted to. They’re supposed to be good, better than that Ikea stuff. But I’ve been too scared to open it. It’s a vanity and a medicine cabinet. They look pretty good, pretty simple in the pictures, but I don’t even know if they’re going to fit in there.” She goes to run her fingers through her hair but remembers that it’s tied up. She sighs. “What should I do?”

  “Send it back.”

  “I can’t,” she whines.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not a good consumer. I can’t complain.”

  “Okay,” I point at the boxes. “Let’s see what’s in there.”

  “Wait,” she shoots a hand up. “I don’t want to see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to be here when they’re opened. I think my presence will jinx it. My luck kind of runs that way. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so take the old cabinet out, just leave it outside the door. We can sneak it down later.” I question her with a wrinkled brow. She leans forward. “They have a trash pickup every Friday,” she almost whispers. “Did you see the containers?”

  “No.”

  “They must have come after you left. They’re just inside the door.” She looks through the bathroom opening. “We can break it into pieces and kind of slip it in under their stuff. Beth won’t mind.”

  “Then why do we need to hide it?”

  “Oh, come on. After what happened today—with you?”

  “All right,” I nod. “I guess I should get started.”

  “Right,” she jumps up. “Let me leave first.” She skips across the room looking for something she can’t find. She stands for a moment by the door, then opens it and jogs out into the living area. I follow her to the door. She senses that I’m there and calls out from behind the mudroom wall. “I have to do a bunch of things I forgot to do, before everything closes.” She rustles through the coats and shoes. I hear her keys jangle. She pokes her head around. “Help yourself to whatever you need. There isn’t much in the fridge, I’m sorry.” She steps into full view. “There’s wine—somewhere—there,” she points at three bottles by the sink. “But I don’t think you should drink and use power tools.” She reaches behind her and puts on her transparent coat. Thinks better of it and drops it on the floor. “I can pick up food for later—yes?” I don’t answer, and it slows her, makes her listen to herself. She exhales, kicks at the floor, and twirls her keys around her fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m crazed. I’ll stop.”

  “It’s okay. I’m all set. I’ll be fine.”

  “So you’re okay with being left alone. I won’t lock you in—in case there’s a fire or something.”

  “Or something,” I mumble, but she hears it. It makes her laugh.

  “Remember, help yourself to what you need—music,” she points in the direction of where the stereo is. “Okay, I’m gone.”

  “It’s colder than that,” I gesture at her clothes.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  All I need for the prefab units are pliers, a screwdriver, and a set of Allen wrenches—all of which she has laid out on the floor. The cabinets simple—white laminate, predrilled holes for everything. The vanity has three slide-in glass shelves and a ready-to-hang mirror door. I ignore the rebuslike instructions and put them together by sight. It only takes about fifteen minutes each. I go back in the bathroom, eyeball the size of the vanity and find the studs in the wall above. I shut off the water, disconnect the supply and drain, and pull the cabinet away from the wall. There’s a lot of water damage—mold, stains—on the exposed wall. It has to go. I cut it out.

  I cross the hall and go to the job site, creep along the walls in the low light collecting supplies—cement board, screws, mesh tape, joint compound, plaster, and primer. I bring them back to her place and rebuild the wall, mixing a lot of plaster in with the compound so it will dry quickly. While I wait for it to dry, I salvage the sink bowl and fixtures, break the cabinet down, and stuff it, along with the other trash I’ve made, into the mix in Johnny’s rolling dumpsters.

  The place is too quiet without my moving about. The wind picks up outside, making the skylights creak; light rain, a soft tapping on the wire glass. I dust myself off and sit on her bedroom couch. Acr
oss the room, on either side of the bed, are two windows, the same size as the ones I’d sanded, but these frames are covered in thick coats of glossy gray paint. They seem to look out onto nothing—tunnels to the dark. There can’t be anything out there other than an airshaft or solid wall. The dim orange lamplight seems pulled to them as does everything else they’ve caught to reflect.

  The couch is comfortable, soft, and smells faintly of lilac, but those windows make me get up, check the plaster that I know isn’t dry, stir the primer once more, and decide if she really did mean for me to “make myself at home.” I look through the crates; she has records and CDs—The Animals, Robert Johnson, Coltrane. I take them out, find the stereo around the corner in the big room, load them up, and wait for them to shuffle. I stand over the table and eat a pineapple slice and a strawberry, but they turn my stomach.

  “Me and the Devil Blues” comes on. I go to the kitchen counter and fumble with the kettle as though I’m going to put it on. I see the wine she referred to—three bottles of red, two of which are open, one corkless. There’s a partially drunk bottle of mezcal—dirty rocks glasses on the edge of the sink.

  “Johnson claims he’s going to beat his woman.”

  I don’t want to acknowledge the line so I get out a piece of paper and start to make an invoice—the specs for both jobs—but it’s difficult to consider. She’s got money, but that’s not the point. How do you bill for this—hourly? By the scope of the job? I can’t charge her ten grand, but I can’t be here for a couple of hundred bucks either, and that notion makes me ball up the paper and lob it into the trash. It’s not about the money. It never has been, which, I suppose, is why I need so much, but that so much can’t be gotten here—anywhere on this or any other night. So why are you here?

  I look at the bag of Lucky Jeans. What will I say to Claire? These jeans mean I’m leaving, baby. How do you go? My father seemed to rehearse it—softly closing the door, the light click of the latch. To me it always sounded like he was just going out for a moment—taking out the trash or having a smoke in the cooler summer evening. He made it sound like he was coming right back. She must know it’s coming—shaky breaths or silence on the telephone. We’ve got nowhere else to go, nowhere else but down. And I don’t want it, another generation of inscrutable hisses and diametrically opposed truths. I was a husband and I’m not anymore. I was a father, now I’m not—It is undone! How will I watch those green eyes melt and that crooked mouth fall? But how on earth can a man just disappear? Gavin’s ma used to plead with us not to be swallowed by the bottle. And Lila used to terrorize me with stories about uncles who’d vanished in the Virginia night. And I suppose that I’ve already disappeared from myself—that boy who was so full of light. That man who promised so much.

  The wine. She said to “help yourself.” That’s not the way I want to go out, but it’s better than some idiotic mumbling about the past and future and—sorry. Claire’s never seen me drunk, never seen me trying to make myself uncrooked. Then she could go, vindicated, have some story to make sense of it all—it was the wine, not him, not me. The wine. A man could disappear into a bottle. I can’t really remember what it feels like to be drunk. Only before—dread and dislocation—and after—dread and sorrow. I think I have enough of that, without having to add the insult of retching into some gutter. Don’t call for the wine because the wine might answer and then what do you do?

  The music shuffles in the player. I step back from the wine. The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” begins. I’d forgotten I’d put them on. They always have seemed to me to be one of the mystery bands that only exist in the radio. The picked, trembling arpeggio on the electric guitar sounds both sinister and wounded, then Eric Burdon’s husky baritone—funny fuckin’ white boy—but he seems to feel it. It’s so clear on her stereo. I’m only used to hearing it on the AM dial. He growls: “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the risin’ sun . . .” I turn it up and go into the bedroom, half dancing, half stumbling, and I remember the photographs on the board. They’re all four-by-six, black-and-white, arms and legs and necks seemingly disconnected from their bodies, but not violently. She’s faded out the joints—elbows, knees, shoulders—so that they seem to float in space, nerveless, bloodless.

  The demonic organ solo starts, and it sounds like a plea either to deliver the player from evil or to speed him through it, and causes me to sway about the bedroom to the makeshift bookcase. She’s sectioned it by genre—several art history books, photography, poetry: Neruda, Wordsworth, Hughes, Blake, Plath, Dickinson. Yes. Eliot. Four Quartets. I think the cover page of my dissertation is down in Marco’s basement: “Eliot, Modernism, and Metaphysics.” I’d typed it proudly, looked at it from many different angles, and after leaving it on display for almost a week, filed it in the oblivion section. “Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.” I look to the windows. “The vacant, interstellar spaces. The vacant into the vacant.” I know it by heart, but I take it out anyway and open it to the section. There’s something about seeing the words that alternately concretizes them and explodes them off the page into abstraction. “What do you think?” I’d paced slowly in front of my students, every once in a while peering over the top of the thin book and leaning toward them. I’d stand there, in the full force of their stupefied silence.

  The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

  The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

  Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

  Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

  And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

  And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors

  A noble sentiment, old man, lovely even, but I don’t think I’m one of those listed. Where do I go: Into the ground beside an all-but-forgotten skull, or perhaps I’m future clay for patching holes? They won’t be burying me in Westminster Abbey for calling the cognoscenti out into the “dark dark dark.” No. You can bury my body—by the highway too . . . Mr. Eliot . . . Mr. Johnson. Well met. Well met. Burdon starts screaming, “. . . one foot on the platform. The other foot on the train . . .” I drop the book on the couch and think to turn off the music, but it’s too late: Delta morning, dark, bloody horizon, and you are, in every consideration, of two minds.

  I go back into the bathroom, sand and prime the wall, then install the cabinets. I reconnect the fixtures and drop in the sink bowl. Her tiles need regrouting. I feel a drip from above—another skylight. The rain is getting heavier outside.

  I try a bedroom window to see if it opens. It does. I close it quickly and think about finding some way to screw them shut—angle irons perhaps, screwed into the frame and sill. I shake that notion off, go sit on the couch and look back at them, try to see through—the imagined sway of the outer wall in the wind. The airshaft is the space between the stars, seemingly nothing, but a place, space—darkness upon the deep. No thing—a mask upon the abyss. When I was a boy, I already knew of that double-dark, so I wondered what starlight was—an ancient message of good beamed from somewhere so far away it could only be measured in time. But stars burn out, explode, or collapse inward—everything near pulled into absence. Darkness on the deep: the temporary and ancient light—its death, the hole from its implosion, deeper than any interstellar shroud.

  I put Eliot away and browse through the rest of her books. There’s a compilation of early Superman comics. I start to take it out but then remember that I never liked him—the lost son of doomsday prophets, rocketed away as an infant just before his planet was destroyed. I always thought that he was too smug for that amount of grief.

  Time passes. It’s late. I don’t know if I’ve been sleeping. I don’t think so. When I sleep, I have nightmares and I wake up screaming. I don’t think I ever convinced Claire that my inability to put myself in bed and then to sleep had anything to do with her. And when we had kids, each one spent a good amount of tim
e in that bed. I’d roam from kitchen to couch, waiting to shut down—a small death—not sleep but a place before or beyond it where nothing happens, where you’re safe from a cumulative history represented by some toothy demon calling for your blood. Even if I do sleep and don’t remember the dream, I still can feel when I awake that I’ve been attacked.

  The door clicks. There’s a rustle of bags and keys jangle. I shoot to my feet, move quickly to the stereo, and turn it down.

  She’s soaked. Her stretched-out curls are matted to her long neck and face. She seems disoriented, looking down at the floor, holding a bag in either hand. Finally, she looks up with a start, sees me, and tries to smile. The little forced grin doesn’t last for long. From across the room and because of the rain I can’t tell, but it looks like she’s been crying, as recently as the elevator ride up.

  She puts both bags in one hand and drops her keys onto the floor. “You were right,” she chirps, still trying to cover the sadness. She looks over at the spread on the table for some cheer, but I’ve disappointed her there. She exhales, lets her shoulders drop, then fills herself up again. Such a beautiful woman. The cold rain has washed all the red from her cheeks, and those strange brown freckles twinkle on her. For a moment I forget that she’s studying me, too.

  I gesture, dumbly, back through the doorway. She remembers the bags, bounces forward as though to jump-start a lighter mood in herself. She sets one bag on the table, stops, and seems to be locked there for a moment. She empties her pockets—some paper scraps, bills and change, then shakes her head like a child responding to a hurtful question.

  “I hate myself when I do this”—she remembers me, looks up, and tries to spin it as a joke. “I’m so unorganized.”

  She walks to the counter in a way I didn’t think she could—heavily, tired—takes the open bottle of wine and loops her fingers through two mug handles.