Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  If you come this way and leave the absolutely defined sign behind, resist the urge to look at the enormous structure that is One Centre Street, not consider the concrete barricades positioned on the sidewalk to discourage vans traveling toward the walls at ramming speed in an attempt to blow the whole thing down, you’ll see that the rats use the gutter like an expressway, scampering to and from the grease spots left behind from the vending carts that line the sidewalk during the day. The way the cars dismounting the bridge seem to want you to stray off the curb and step into the end of their blind turn. The bush, the flower patch, the bench, and the plaque:

  When the perfected bridge shall permanently and uninterruptedly connect the cities of New York and Brooklyn, the daily thousands who cross it will consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon, such as the rising and setting of the sun. When they will unconsciously overlook the difficulties surmounted before the structure spans the stream and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage, absolute faith, the consummate genius which assured the engineer’s triumph.

  —Thomas Kinsella, Brooklyn Eagle, 1872

  Gaining the bridge is different from the Manhattan side. The incline is steeper and the traffic rises with you. I’m troubled by the flatness of things: the dull thud of my boots on the concrete; my uneven breaths; the couple—the girl who pretends there’s nothing odd about what she sees, the boy faking bravery. I thud past them, up the incline. The lights are electric, overhead and out of sight. To the left the projects rise up, framing quick views of the Manhattan Bridge beyond. To the right is the ancient swamp, built over by tanneries, then towers. There’s the river—snatches of it between the still existing tenements and saloons. The wind picks up, snaps the flag, and seems to rock the cables. Swirling wind—it seems to blow simultaneously on each side. At first it drowns out all the sounds you might hear, but if you concentrate, you can feel that it blows only from the south. You know the tide is going out because you can hear the gusts pull against the surface of the river, twist it into superficial eddies, making the sound of water trickling down a drain.

  I don’t know why I’m running: I’ve got nothing. The sky up here is azure, slick, as though all the stars have coalesced to form an almost transparent yellow glow atop the blue. But it’s just the electric lights below. I look north, up the river to the other bridges, the replicating strings with their own evenly spaced lights. I wonder where Claire is tonight—how those damned mojitos were, how the children fell asleep, if they’re sleeping at all. There’s no one there. Edith, but Edith doesn’t count—never has. What will she do when they tell her they’re afraid of the dark, especially there—the unfamiliar noises and the impenetrable dark of the moonless rural night? Whip-poor-wills are whip-poor-wills; coyotes are coyotes—cold comfort for a terrified child. What did she say to my girl—such a bad sleeper? What did she say to her namesake—little Edy? It’s always made me gag when people have called her that—but what’s in a name? Edith wasn’t there when she was born: a month early and undersized for that. She came out with her umbilical in a tight knot. It seemed that we all just stood there staring—trying to understand who could’ve possibly tied it. The fact that she wasn’t crying, wasn’t doing much of anything, snapped me out of my shock. She was barely breathing. I had to let them take her. Claire was seizing from preeclampsia, bleeding from her torn uterus. Claire doesn’t know how bad it was—for both the girl and her. And it wasn’t because no one told her. I did. She switched between pain, blank-faced stoicism, and narcotic sleep. And I alternated between her and our girl. Claire had only the IV drip, but the girl, she was tangled in tubes, monitor wires, breathing apparatus. There in the incubator, naked except for the tiny diaper and the striped cotton knit cap—seemingly always with her eyes closed. I fit my hand through the twist of wires to rub her belly, hoping that she’d open her eyes, just once, for me. When she finally did wake, when I finally did get to lift her out of that antiseptic plastic cage, she opened only one eye at first—the coal-black pupil circled by the ring of earthen brown, circled again by an indigo halo. I thought I was looking into the eye of God. I went to see Claire, who had awakened finally, too, and the two of us waited, it seemed through the night, for that other eye to open.

  If you come this way, hear your heavy feet on the path, you’ll see that the wood planks are weathered and thin and that there’s nothing below—only the dark river. You run slowly up the ascent, watching the giant cables rise to meet the granite towers; the great blocks of soot-darkened stone, the line of the hundred-year-old mortar, and the strength they convey make sense. Their dual pointed arches—like the start of a great throat. The cable pairs rise up from the planks, like nerve bundles. The steel beams are close enough to touch—the giant, riveted girders, the cables holding the suspension line in place. The steel beams are disintegrating along with the putty-colored paint. It all seems to sway impossibly in the wind. The cross-hatched smaller lines are sheathed by the night and the artificial lights.

  The benches invite you to sit and stare in either direction: north to watch the garbage scows, the bridges beyond; south—the docked clipper ship, the dinosaur cranes on the other shore. Most of Brooklyn is dark, save for the electric clock, high atop the watchtower. If it weren’t so hazy, you’d see the islands, the statue, the narrows, and the promise of open sea.

  I look down at the roadway and along the beams. Some are rigged with floodlights; others have side rails and function as catwalks, offering passage to the edge. I follow them out, watch the water twist northward.

  I take the bait, sit, get out the notebook, and write:

  Notes—

  Big Nig climbs the cable. Saurian, simian. Bag full of money over his shoulder. It’s a long way down to the water. He thinks about dropping the bag down, let the evidence disappear in the river—but they’ve seen him. They know who he is. So the way out or the way through is not to be taken alive. Courage, he thinks, would never lead a man to build a bridge. Courage would lead you in—unknowing as to whether you’d been buoyed or swallowed. Fuck you Thomas Kinsella.

  I start running again. It’s amazing how much the bridge shakes, even when a lone biker rides by. You can see it in the electrical wires that run along the sides of the walkway. It’s not the wind. The moving wires match the motion of the bridge, not the blowing flags, so you know it’s the bridge’s rhythm.

  You can hear them—their footsteps—lovers on the boardwalk, making vows, holding hands, sneaking kisses, or kissing unabashed. Their voices carry this way and that, beyond where they stand. You can hear them. Remember them, every evening, echoes of promises made.

  I wonder if the children are sleeping, how the dark in their rooms collects and moves within itself, what flesh its given, what teeth and claws. Where is Claire sleeping? Where is the moon? Why do they have lights on the beams over the roadway—pointing up to bounce against that hazy damn sky?—illuminating some triumph of man’s reason, the ability to cross the deep dark. Look what we have done! We’ve spanned the sullen brown god—with bone-steel, with sinew cable and stretched over it all a skin of light and shadow. And the bridge flexes and shimmers, not in the wind but with an internal motion of its own. It pulses, the motion complex, unharmonic, retching, shuddering sea beast. I am the howl of the sea belly, the echoing wail of its remains, the living memory of all the swallowed faces. Inside, now I’m out. But not for love or valor, not for the good fight—two dukes up for a fallen friend. What would Lila have said? Into the toilet with you—out, get out. A river is a good place for ghosts, but only because they are deep, dark, and old.

  When I realize that I’ve left the lucky jeans behind, I have to stop and laugh. I take out the money she paid me and count it: one-fifty—a wash. The cosmos has no sense of humor, so it shouldn’t play jokes on a soul, but I have to laugh again. I start to trot. When I hit the down slope, I break into a run. The paired suspension cables end, bury themselves under the planks. I’m off the water, over the first knuckle of Br
ooklyn, descending into its topography. Cars speed by. Their headlights connect this bridge to the other. No more water. No more sky. One last elevated look over Brooklyn’s grid—empty dark centers with points of light streaking around their edges. A new wave of fish rot drifts up mixed with exhaust fumes, just in time to make me remember that I should feel like shit—a strange, clammy sweat on me and inside, the burn of pure shame. “You’re so good in a crisis,” Claire used to say. I have to laugh again. The crisis is over. I come off the heaving bridge, turn back once to the electric lights, then into Brooklyn, contemplating the life of an imploded star.

  III

  Evening’s Empire

  You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,

  That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

  —T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” III

  15

  Thomas Strawberry is dead. I know it before I enter the room. I had foreseen it on the stairs leading up, before that even—the early dark outside, the gloom of the bridge, empty windows and echoing bras. In Edith’s voice. In Claire’s absence. In all the days leading up to this: There is no light in this world. If there ever had been, it is out. He floats, head just beneath the surface. That elaborate tail folded. The bright scales are dim. The overhead light gathers and spins around the edge of his bowl. I wonder how long he’s been floating here. I scoop him out with my hand. He’s warmer than I thought he’d be, smaller. He fits in my cupped hand as though he was made to be there.

  I stand in the kiddie room waiting to be informed, holding him as though he’s sleeping, keeping the roughest parts of my palm away from his delicate scales. Waiting for resurrection. Waiting to be told what to do when he doesn’t rise up. What do you do with the dead? No answer.

  And so I go to flush him down the toilet, but as soon as I open the lid, I know it’s wrong. I wrap him in a tissue and lay him on the counter. I stand back and wait—nothing. I hear Marco thump and start up the stairs. I pick up Thomas, skim quietly back to the bedroom, and shut off the light. Marco makes the landing, grunts, thumps over to the bathroom, pauses at the door, and then shuts off the light.

  I don’t know where to go so I head for the river, Thomas in my coat pocket, my bag over my shoulder, and my mother in her urn—some ashen, petrified gourd. Don’t call her crazy even though I have before, more than once, to people I wish I never had. Lila never made excuses for herself, no matter how deep her sadness or her rage. No one knew that she’d died—early on a Friday evening, a warm stretch in December—so it took awhile before anyone looked for her. I’d just skipped Thanksgiving and was planning to do the same for Christmas. She was doing odd work—some cleaning here, some sewing there, even a bit of babysitting—but it was all irregular, so she had nowhere to report to on Monday, even Tuesday. And the phone went unanswered, the calls unreturned. She hadn’t taken her coat off, but she’d poured a drink—started in on it even. “I found her there,” the super had said to me, half looking to the spot on the floor where she’d lain, half examining me, somewhat in disbelief, wondering, waiting for some display of grief—anger even. I gave him nothing. I stayed unreadable until he left me alone in the strange apartment.

  The housing authority had moved her into a smaller unit after I’d left, but there were the same linoleum floors throughout. No-name kitchen appliances and the electric baseboard heater pulling itself from the wall. The drink was on the table next to her chair and the record was still playing—Marvin, of course—fuzz and crackle in the speaker, the ghost voice, still echoing off the tiles and the blank dim walls. The man hadn’t even thought to pour out the booze, rinse the glass, or turn the music off.

  I used to dream of her as if she had already died, not wishing that she had, but hoping somehow I suppose, to transform her, make her whole, stop the hissing, the fear, erase the underlying hurt and terror that seemed to be twisting her apart—as though every waiting insult had formed an invisible hand, twisting her one way, and every insult past was twisting her the other, leaving her a constantly wrung-dry rag. She really didn’t live that long. What I saw, I know now, was a vestige of her, a face from long ago, a voice exhorting from the gone past.

  I tap the urn and rub it. I felt like this: a sudden weightlessness and quiet—not peace but a stillness that made me stop and listen. Her service was wrong—a strange pastor, a meaningless plot, and a generic, illegible stone, mumbling, distant cousins and neighbors. The few people who were there were at first respectful and then unsettled by my silence, but I had nothing for them other than: Minette Brown left the reservation . . .

  We didn’t sing “Jerusalem”—“Amazing Grace”—and it was fumbling, discordant, and without any of the revelation promised by the words, chanted emptily by those staring into darkness. And on the train back to New York I couldn’t help but try to reconstruct her up-south odyssey. It only came in flashes though. “My father’s name was Murphy, but he changed it to Watson—either he or his father, I don’t know. He worked in the Baltimore shipyards, like his father and his grandfather. It goes way back. His great great grandfather was one of those boys who taught Frederick Douglass to read.” She hissed and snickered. “And one of his cousins was who wound up jumping him later on. You can’t beat that—Finbar Murphy to Joseph Watson and then—I don’t know how he and my mother found each other, but they lost each other pretty quick.” I’d drawn the tree before, drew it then as the train hissed through the thin wild of southeastern New England. The dates and the ages have never aligned: her attempts to make herself whole, always wanting.

  Now she is ash and I carry her and the dead fish along the Brooklyn side of the river. Not on its actual shores, but on the deserted streets that try to mirror its wind. Beside the lots and the warehouses, some in use, some not. I keep passing abandoned things, cans, bottles, clothes; the coveralls, the baseball jacket, the sock, a child’s sweater; resoaked heaps that look as though their wearers had suddenly been vaporized, or yanked down into darkness when they’d stopped for a moment. I feel the urge to stop and poke at each one—try to somehow discern their origins and therefore, by extension, recreate the moment when they lost their skin. Keep moving. Something seems to speak—perhaps the run of draining water, rooftop, street, and unseen eddies under the piers beyond the buildings. Maybe the trickle of the slowly draining river. Keep moving. Past sense and memory. Past shame to a place where there’s quiet—the emptied river, the dead star, follow the inexorable pull of the void.

  I need a drink.

  There are plans in the works to make all of the waterfront a great park—an expanse of green wrapping along the shore from Red Hook a mile or more to the Manhattan Bridge. Things are looking up for the old borough: new money, new construction, new names for neighborhoods soon to be gentrified. I’ve always hated groundbreaking ceremonies: They date you; they point to your demise. Some public servant with symbolic hardhat and shovel, flanked by those who make plans for others.

  But it’s dark and empty now, and Water Street is nearly dry. And if you come this way, you’ll see how low the cobbled streets have sunk, their original high mark etched into the twisted curbs. The tarmac, peeled back from the stones like skin slowly shedding from some old, old lizard back. If you walked under the twist of road that connects the two bridges, you’d see that they are excavating the old city, readying it for destruction. There are gashes in earth and edifice left to be filled by the night. You can look back into time—the broken bricks, the bedrock, like fossil molars, useless, save for inaudible speech. They are digging toward the first order. The bridge hangs above—the underside of a ruined throat and belly. The missing scales are entries to its vacant core. Keep going. You’ll see the rusted freighter ties, like heads squeezed to the point of cracking. Hypaethral warehouses with empty arches and mortarless bricks pinned back by black iron stars: now a slave fort; now a slaughterhouse; an armory. Empty. The lightless night fills them with the backward breath of the void. Then warehouses—rotten-roofed with ruste
d shutters keeping things out or in. Keep on pushing.

  I’m leaving New York. I hate this place. This stink and grime—the husks of dreamers, bought out, strung out, or broke down. Maybe Philadelphia, Quaker traditions—no, they bomb their own; Chicago’s lakes are far from oceans; and I don’t like the West Coast—one-hundred-million-year-old scorpions, the sun is strange, and the buildings are too new. Boston. I’ll start again in Boston, then, perhaps go backward, across the ocean—Eire. I wonder where Gavin is. Now that I’ve lost, his debt is erased, and I can think about him without resentment—for a moment at least—until I consider that he realized a while ago that he was forgotten, bridged over during some unknown transition. He always knew he was a dead man. Maybe that’s why he stayed unattached.

  There’s a light on at the corner. It’s a bodega—strange, isolated, like some remote trading post in the wilderness—the first tenant in a remodeled sweatshop. I try to go in, but the door’s locked. It rattles noisily. I try it again. Same thing. There aren’t any hours posted. I hear, from around the corner, someone rapping from inside. I peer around. There’s a man, perhaps my age, sitting at the counter. He’s dark-skinned. Mustached. He stares at me—expressionless. I point at the door. He waves his finger at me and points to the window between us. I shrug and point at the door again. He slides the window open a couple of inches.

  “Yes?” He has a thick, quasi-British accent.

  “Are you open?”

  “Yes.”

  We stare at each other, he waiting for me to do something I’m unaware of. He looks down and points quickly at the window. I point at the door. He points at the window, sliding it open an inch more. He nods this time and cocks his ear toward me as if to listen.