I point at the rack of cigarettes, then realize he’s not looking at me anymore.
“Pack of Luckies.”
He shoots a hand up and gropes for the pack without looking. He gets one, matches, too, and taps them on the counter.
“Yes?” he says, but looks down again—canid. At least, from behind his inch-thick acrylic, he could be polite enough to look at me. I look down at the cigarettes and all I can think of at the moment is the pleasure of smoking them in an open field somewhere away from the residue of halogen, neon, and fluorescent light. I know that I’ve made the right decision to leave this damned city. I hate the clipped, inelegant grunts that masquerade as speech. The rudeness and suspicion. I hate the eyeless stares, the look-aways, the pretense of service. I hate the absence of love.
I smack the glass hard with my knuckles. He startles but continues to look down.
“Yes?”
“Gimme a six of Bud.”
He spins off his chair and goes to the cooler. He gets the beer out. I smack the glass again. He looks up.
“Tall boys. Bottles.”
He waves, bending his head, and manages a shy little grin. He shuffles back to the counter, more puplike with each step. He sets the beer down carefully as though he were serving a table crystal glasses. He rolls his eyes up at me. I stare at him with a growing harshness. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the glass is there.
“How much?”
“Twelve dollars, sir.”
“Fuck.”
I peel the money off my roll and toss it at the opening. He opens it just wide enough to sneak his hand through. He counts it, bags my beer and cigarettes—far too slowly and carefully—slides open the larger door, places it in, closes it, then signals for me to open my side.
I take my package and leave, think about turning and flipping him off, but I keep on pushing instead, back to the river again. The street runs downhill to the banks and then opens up into a small park in a shallow cove. The first thing you see is a small, fenced-in playground. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to come this way. I try to ignore it, keep my head down and wind around it along the path—more of those hexagonal pavers. I follow the path around the low iron fence, past the grassy knoll. It ends at the top of massive granite stairs that descend into the water. The bank upriver, to the right, is a steeply sloped pile of rocks. To the left the stairs end abruptly and give way to pebbles, bleached and crushed oyster shells, and odd pieces of plywood. The path continues, downriver, the land curving westward—a concrete pier and a finger of land on which sits one last darkened warehouse and then the base of the bridge.
There is wind down here on the water, more than I thought. It blows strong and constant, moaning low upriver with stronger gusts, which rise in pitch to a wail and then disappear. I sit on a bench and look out across the river at the buildings framed by the two bridges and then below to FDR drive. I don’t know this city at all—hardly paused to look at anything, always fixed my eyes on something that wasn’t there and missed everything that was. What a city—even down here across the river with this limited view you get a sense of its volume, much more so than when you’re in it. This failure will go unnoticed, here, beyond the lights.
I light a cigarette, a pause before oblivion, and scan the scene again. The tide swirls here in the cove and you can hear it echo under the pier. There’s a young gull on the small beach picking at the rubble—dark-winged, awkward. “The sea is just around that corner,” I tell him, but he ignores me and keeps on with his search. Odd night bird. “Go bird.” I stop myself from throwing my butt at him. Now he responds—a flutter of wings on the dark air. And I wonder if that bird can discern anything from the time it takes for the waves to return. I wonder if one can snap one’s own string—test your own expansiveness and the void in which you live—a crooked soul finger plucking a busted instrument in a ghost jug band.
The gull warbles something unbirdlike. “Shaddup,” I tell him, but he speaks again, this time a moan as he hops up onto one of the boards. “This is not the ocean, you stupid bird.” He ignores me again and makes a sudden dash away from the tide. “I’d watch it, bird. You’re no plover.” He makes his way across the bank to me. “I’ve got nothing for you, bird.” I point out at the water. “‘I don’t know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god . . .’ Go to him.”
I don’t know much about my mother or this fish, either—other than they are dead. And I finally realize why she never really liked me—she refused to believe in ghosts. “You are the light of the world . . .” She changed toward me—stopped her rages—as I grew older. I just thought that she was getting tired, but now, here, at the butt-end of the universe I realize that she just lost her faith, or, closer, that she never had one to begin with. She stopped believing that I was the one. Poor Lila. I stopped believing, too. And I know how much you hated when I would seem to turn my gaze inward to watch the dark reaches of interstellar space. What was it like, to watch the boy you let live be called to the dark dark dark? To you, a revoking of an inheritance of the earth. Conversely, that eased your mind. But you were wrong, Mama—and I know you’d hiss at me now if you caught me here, in the night, murmuring to ghosts—I am the one. And I don’t know much about ghosts after all, what their purpose is, if they have any at all. I don’t know much about sea birds, dead fish, what their moans, their silences signify. I don’t know why the water always sounds like it’s leaving. I don’t know much about rivers, but I think that I am a strong brown god. I am forgotten—seasons, rages, past covenants—unrecognized ritual and symbol, effects skinned from their purpose, strangely practiced and then, of course, discarded. Fuck.
I open a beer. It makes sense: the rush of escaping gas, the smell of earth—wheat, hops, and barley. The scents hover around the opening as more come rushing out, making the gas cloud spin and expand. I look down into the bottle to see how much is left. Light spins around its mouth, but I don’t know where from. There’s nothing here, not even an ambient glow. I go to stick my finger through the cloud to test if it’s really there—to test its density. I curse myself for caring. I go to take a sip. Not yet. I take a drag instead—exhale. The smoke mixes with the scent, folds and unfolds as it moves slowly up, a nebula of gas and matter: a galaxy in the making or one that’s already been destroyed. Interstellar seeds or interstellar wreckage—inanimate dust that won’t show me a sign, but only rises up, up . . . It’s the beer—the beer’s calling . . . and I listen, but nothing seems to be there.
I listen, now more trying to remember the vapor’s initial rush. What was that sound? No sound. And its inverse—all sound, which is compressed into the wind across the water. A gust peels off from the main wind, swirls around the cove, builds in speed, works its voice up to a wail, then shatters against the pillars of the bridge. It recollects and does it again—all sound and its multifaceted voice: birth’s cry, death’s rattle, and the awful wail of resurrection. Disparate, therefore discordant—but listen—there’s a wholeness to that clamor, the hiss in memory of the vanished smoke and the river’s applause, soft against itself, hard against the stone. And I still don’t know much about rivers, but I think that I am a strong, brown god: “sullen, untamed and intractable . . .” no longer patient, as there is nothing left to wait for. A frontier, but only one in the distance, something forgotten when out of view, and when visible, suitable only to be projected upon, a future conquest, a longing, something to consider crossing, or a marker—reminder of all that remains undone. Utile and useless at once, so then something to co-opt with suspicion, as it threatens to twist its shape beyond meaning and recognition. And so misquoted, misappropriated, jailed, humiliated, rendered a cliché, an anachronism, and finally forgotten.
The gull finally behaves. He moans and I turn to watch him rising slowly above the shattered beach. And he’s just a gull—hovering on dark wings. Calling out, seemingly to me, over and over. There’s nothing behind that bird, nothing to the swirl of wind or water. And I don�
��t know much about gods except that if the one or the many do exist, it must be a terrible thing to be prayed to—your perpetually multiplying charges calling out in their perpetually expanding voice to be heard and for you to make yourself known by infusing yourself in everything—but as a mystery, because the choice of a god revealing itself is to either perplex or overwhelm. So you come shrouded or in flashes—something moving quickly past the senses. But there is something—that dark twist in the water; the vanished river in the rubble shore; that bird, fixed in the air, betraying this planet’s wobble—that I hold on to, something that enters me then transforms, like the way the smell of salt in the air flattens and extends the promontory, and I see from inside the river’s mouth open. And once inside me it moves—that fusion of sense, memory, and promise—between the poles of doubt and faith, feeling and logic. And those poles suggest other ones that have gone unnamed, whose distances between remain unexplored. It must be awful to be a god—the voice of and the ear to all that wailing. Prayed to and rejected.
Another wailing gust, but this time inscrutable. This world is charged and then not. A rush of sudden meaning, then nothing, but the absence of meaning is meaning in itself. And so this landscape is recharged, either by a revisitation or by my wondering where it all went, how long it’s been gone, and if it ever was.
I hold the bottle under my nose. So this is how it ends—no bang, no whimper—just the hiss and scent of escaping gas. I blow more smoke into the scent cloud, but it’s gone. The wind is voiceless, the river flat black. A perpetual nostalgia charges this world—nothing more—a memory of a collapsed dream. And its pull is inexorable.
I wonder how I’ll say good-bye—call each child into a quiet room, or take them all out to the beach. I should do it at sunset, when, if you look west, the rich, muted light draws all the late summer’s colors of the grass, the sand, and the water to their surfaces like blood to sun-warmed skin. And if you look east, the world is sheathed in a translucent skin of flint and azure. I shouldn’t say a thing, just walk with them quietly and let them remember it as they will, if they remember it at all.
I raise the bottle of beer—one last chance. It is brown, sullen, and intractable—deceptively translucent—but there’s no light for it to bend and not the slightest hint of a trembling.
I go to wordlessly toast the gull. He’s gone, but I catch a line of headlights moving quickly, Manhattan-bound across the bridge. They span the dark water, connect to the roadway, more lights speeding northbound on the drive, to the Manhattan Bridge, east and up, then down and gone. But I know that beyond the vanishing point the circle is completed. I follow the loop around again and again—blur my vision to make the many seem to be one streak lashing around the edge of darkness. They’re all there—faces, anthems, vows, frantic dreams glowing with super speed before they vanish into the dark dark dark. What is their last prayer—or plea? Can it be heard, or does it disappear as well—indistinguishable, lost in the clamor? I look and listen to the other systems: the wind between the bridges, the twisting water in the cove, the tide into the banks. I can see if you were a lost bird, how you could mistake this little cove for a beach, the river for the ocean, but maybe when you found only synthetic drift and meatless shells, you’d despair. And maybe, seeing me perched at the top of the granite steps, you’d call out. What does the dark gull say? Perhaps we are all in service to our own local god—each system with its own prayers or incantations. Listen: The wind’s prayer to the bridges, the water’s prayer to the cove, the speeding light’s prayer to the dark says, “Release me.” That’s why it sounds all a part when I listen: It’s all one prayer—“Let me go.” My local gods are here: this fish, this woman, this bottle. I call: “Let go.” I wait. Nothing. The water, the wind keep their futile twist. The light rips around the void—unentering. “Let me go.” Nothing is swallowed, but nothing is released.
I smell the beer again, and the image that follows is me, dead by the river. I don’t want to die. I know there’s no freedom there. The bone’s prayer to god is death—release me. And I don’t know what that release is, but I know it’s more than fossilization, disintegration, or reanimation. It wants to disappear but also never to have been—carry no memory and leave none, either. But the bone isn’t heard, or maybe it is, but perhaps there’s no power that can do this. Maybe its god doesn’t know it—doesn’t see it. Does my maker remember me, and how do I move under that scrutiny? I watch the things I’ve charged, the residue of their movement, and then try to fill the empty wake. We are not moved by the epiphany but moved by the nostalgia. The movement gone, I get left with the vexing memory.
I have a beer in my hand and I know it will kill me, but I can’t not drink now. I feel its pull. Perhaps I’ll sit here through the night and speed around its emptiness. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. I toast with two voices: “To oblivion” and “Godspeed.” I stand up and heave the bottle as hard as I can out to the river. It carries far and the sound it makes when it finally meets the water is more like a deep gulp than a splash.
I turn back to the bench and the five remaining beers. I don’t want them. I pick up the urn instead and my bag, turn away, cross the path, and step down to the beach. I pull the largest section of ply away from the water’s edge and set it at the top of the rise. I take the newspaper out of the bag, separate the pages, and spread it out on the board, adding layers until the dampness stops bleeding through. I get the notebook and tear the pages from the binding and lay them on the newspaper in four overlapping rows, five sheets long and three layers deep. I fold the edges of that rectangle into inch-high walls—repeating the fold until they’re thick enough to stand on their own. I reinforce them around the outside with masking tape.
I open the urn and pour the ashes in. They almost fill up the vessel—charcoal flakes and tiny white pieces of bone, the inverse of the shell-and-gravel beach. I ball up the napkins and partially sink them in the ash so they don’t blow away. I take Thomas out of my pocket, unwrap him, and lay him in the center on the tissue. It’s hard to tell here in the dark, but he seems to have shrunken and gone dry—most of his orange is gone.
I drop the book of matches in, take off my coat and boots, and wade into. The pebbles and shells end quickly after the waterline and give way to silt, large stones, and broken things. I move slowly, trying to feel my way across the uneven muck-bottom—expecting any second to rip my foot open on a busted pipe or bottle. I stop when the water reaches my thighs and bend into it. Now it feels cold, viscous; it clings to my skin. I push the raft with one hand and half paddle, half scuttle across the bottom with the other until I reach the deeper water and can swim—sidestroke. The water and wind sound different here, more apiece—hypnagogic—now combined with the faint splash of my strokes. I upset the water, but the wave and wake I create will be erased. But what of the river—its memory? On the one hand each rip is irreversible; on the other, it never was. And so each stroke is just that, infinite and never, infinite and never, until I go beyond the cove, past the eddies, to the center of the river.
I stop and tread water. No big boats above. No great fish below. I steady myself, then bob high out of the water, take the matches with my free hand and hold them above my head. I try to light one—nothing. Then another—it flames but is blown out immediately. I lower the book, shelter it between my head and one of the paper walls, and try again. The match lights, but I don’t move quickly enough and the others catch, too. The sudden flame burns my fingers, but I hold on, move it slowly to the pyre and light the wall, then one of the napkins, and drop the burning book in. I sink my burnt hand into the river; the oily water cools it. I tread water for a moment, and the current begins to pull the raft away. I catch it in two strokes and hold it still. And I almost ask something for forgiveness, but I bite down on that urge, drift a moment with the current, pull the raft back to me, feel the heat of the small rapid blaze, and call, “Godspeed.”
I send them away and they move with the water, quicke
r than I thought. The pyre burns quickly, too. And along with the increasing distance and the wind twisting the flame, it loses its form. Then it’s out—just as it makes the bridge—a dark form with an orange glow and an imagined wisp of smoke. Then just the raft—“darkness upon darkness.” It passes from sight, under the bridge, into memory, through imagination, and back into sight—there—making the straits beyond the bridge and out the mouth of the river.
I look up at the bridge, then above to its cables, stretched and slack across the river—parallel strings, each with its own clusters of light and the darkness between them. These lights are still—fiery birds on wires. I reach out—a giant hand in the night: Snap. They rise, scatter, and then resettle. Snap.
I swim back to the cove but stay out in the water, turn onto my back and float, spinning slowly, just out of the pull of the current. The cables seem to sway, the lights flutter, rise, and settle and remember nothing. I see it in the air and I feel it in the water: The vision moves in time with the dark waves. The artificial lights are reflected in them, reflected and disfigured, until the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be—moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds.
I right myself and look under the bridge for the raft. I know there would be, outside of this place, this moment, no way to track its progress across the gloom or for anything to hear my call, “Godspeed.” But this isn’t a place of men and empire, this is my kingdom, where I belong, awake inside a dream.
There aren’t any promises made on the dark side of the river, but if you catch the current right, it all goes out to sea. Four a.m.: All is well.
I wring out my shirt, put my boots and coat back on, shoulder my bag, and climb back to the path. I’m shivering. The wind seems to have picked up, blowing as hard now as the gusts were. I clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. Something moves near the bench.
Man Gone Down Page 36
