Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  He turns the corner, pretends not to see me, so that he can act surprised when he gets to his door.

  “So, I’m glad you came back.”

  I don’t answer him, but I get out a blank check to hasten the process.

  “So, you’re interested?”

  “You said to make an offer.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I write out the check for $6,300 and hand it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s to hold the apartment.”

  “But this isn’t the number we talked about before.”

  “You invited me to make an offer.”

  “How can you call this an offer?”

  “It’s what I’m offering you.”

  He rolls his eyes and tries to hand the check back to me. “It’s not enough.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s first, last, and security.”

  “But he wants three months.”

  “Well, he can go fuck himself, and I can call the housing authority to tell them about his discriminatory practices. And then I can go after your license.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  I point at the check. “That’s my offer.”

  He looks it over again, looks at me, for a moment like he’s thinking about screaming or throwing a punch. He thinks better of it, wipes his face, and tries another tact. “I asked for the security because of your employment status.”

  “I have a job.”

  He holds out his hand. “Pay stub? Letter?”

  I scan the room quickly. “I’ll fax it to you.”

  He nods skeptically. “When?”

  I look at the clock. “By the end of the day.”

  He takes a step back, nods once. “Okay, get it to me and I’ll run it by him.”

  I go to a live teller to deposit the money because I want to see someone react when I hand them all that cash, but she gives me nothing, not even a good-bye, just a receipt. On the way out I take my bank card out again, pinch it from each end between my thumb and index finger, raise it over my head and bend it in half. Then I stare at the balance as I make my way through the Heights, trying to reconcile the account—but I’m not really sure what I’m doing other than adding and subtracting arbitrary amounts. I bend the card in half a few times, tear it at the new seam, and throw it into the sewer.

  I reach the school and when I walk in on the assistant, she hardly looks up.

  “Would you like to see her?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’ll see if she’s in.”

  “Yes, thank you. She may have slipped by.”

  She shoots me a look before she dials, and I meet her with a diffident stare. She quickly looks back down and dials.

  “You can go right in,” she sings. Her attempt to look and sound pleasant is awful.

  Jean Ray pushes a pile of papers away and stands when I enter her office. She tries to lean across the desk, realizes she’s too short, and extends both hands instead—tiny, peach, freckled. I take one. She stares at the shake with a raised brow, perhaps wondering about her missing hand. I release her, and she relaxes her face when she sees it’s still there.

  “Good afternoon.”

  Before she can say anything else I hand her the check. She pretends to be confused—wrinkles her wrinkled brow again. She takes it from me but leaves it folded, places it on her desk and frowns at it, as though commanding it to stay. Then as she looks back up, her face goes light.

  She extends her hands again. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. And you?”

  “Me,” she touches her collarbones. “Thank you. I’m quite well—just the rush of the late summer, preparing for everyone’s return. I always forget how busy it is.”

  She looks to me for agreement.

  “Yes, well, you must be busy. Good afternoon.”

  She lets a smile grow wide. “I’m looking forward to seeing your children this year—really.” She extends one hand, palm down this time, as though I should kiss rather than shake it. I take it. Give it an awkward squeeze and wave. Her smile widens and she squints at me with approving eyes. Her face goes solemn. She closes her eyes and nods slowly. “Your mother would’ve been proud.”

  I drop her hand and go.

  18

  Pincus was always there waiting, sometimes trolling the pages of a book or scrutinizing a student, sometimes staring down the hallway, fixed on an idea. And he’s there when I come out of the elevator. He seems different than I remember—a bit lost and dreamy. His eyes look smaller. He’s smaller, having entered since I last saw him that period in a man’s life when things openly fall apart—once discreet failings now apparent. His lotion is accomplishing less. Gray hair and mustache—they’re still immaculate. It takes a little too long for him to see me, but when he does, he opens his arms and smiles broadly.

  “My boy. My boy.”

  He takes me gently by the wrist while slowly shaking his head and leads me into his office. He pauses in front of his assistant, almost introduces me, but inhales deeply instead. He wraps what he can of his arm around me, gives a squeeze and a chuckle. The assistant looks up—just enough to make her believe that she can pick me out of a police lineup.

  “Come in, son, come in. What brings you back?”

  He sits down at his desk and, annoyed that I’m still standing, motions for me to sit. His office clutter is the same—perhaps not the exact components, but there are still stacks of books and photocopies of essays. The photograph of him and King is gone, however—replaced by a small bust of DuBois and a smaller picture of an older man I don’t recognize.

  He catches me looking for the missing photo.

  “Stolen. Can you believe that? Well, I suppose it’s easy enough to believe that people steal.” He goes to pound one of the bare spots on his desk, but slaps it lightly instead—checks his nails by rubbing the meat of his thumb across them. Then he sets both hands down, as though he was about to begin a piano concerto. “I tell you, son, dark days have come down on us—dark days, indeed.” He points up at the drop ceiling. “They came in through there. They took a panel out in the hallway, slinked above, and then dropped down in my office.” He points down. “Just this past Christmas. There were footprints on my desk when I came in, footprints and that damned security force they keep around here—you know, the white shirts, the black shirts, the blue shirts. They even sent some suits up here, too. Here come I, with a poinsettia and a shoebox of cookies for everyone. Absurd. I thought of calling you for a moment there. I really did.” He gestures across the room with an opening then closing hand, as if to scoop a sample from the air. “No number for you, though, no e-mail, either—nothing. I bet those cookies are still here somewhere.” He brings his hand down on the desk, really hitting it this time, exhales, closes and opens his small eyes, and fixes them on me.

  “Still married, I hope. How’s your wife?” He points at me. “Claire, right?”

  “Yes. She’s well, thank you.”

  “I heard you were expecting a child—a while ago, I suppose?”

  “Yes, Cecil, he’s six now.”

  “Well, a belated congratulations to you. What are his interests?”

  “He loves soccer and is beginning to like baseball. He’s quite a painter.”

  “Really, any visual artists in the line?”

  “Yes, his maternal grandfather was.”

  “Well, a real art pedigree. Where do you have him enrolled?”

  “Saint George’s.”

  “Well, that’s a trick. Quite a school. I read about it—dragon-slaying artists. Are they teaching him draftsmanship—how to really draw—or do they let them muck about abstractly?”

  “Both. He has a good line.”

  “Excellent.” He checks his mustache. “Well, what else have you been doing for nigh a decade?”

  “I have two other children—another son, three and a half, and a daughter who’s eighteen months.”

  “Well,” he sits upright.
“You have been busy. I never thought of that strategy—overrun the planet with your progeny.” He lets out a low chuckle and smoothes the sides of his hair this time. He folds his hands, puts them in his lap. “But, what else, what else?” He unfolds his hands, puts his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands, and leans in.

  “I’ve been working.”

  “Working on what?”

  “Just working.”

  He smiles softly—unexpectedly—and almost whispers, “How’s the writing? What are you working on?”

  I feel a sudden jump of dull heat inside, as if someone tried to light a wet match in my throat. “I’ve been working, Doctor Pincus. I’ve been trying to stay afloat.”

  He loses his smile. “I don’t want to sound coarse, but—why are you here?”

  “I need a letter, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  His eyes widen. “A letter? No trouble, none at all.” He looks around the stacks on his desk as if one was already there. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll make some calls. Are you planning on coming back here? I can certainly squeeze you in, but the funding . . .”

  “No, sir.”

  He stops searching. He seems a little hurt and tries to hide it. “No, somewhere else.” He nods. Points. “That makes sense.” He cocks his head and drops his voice. “Ivy?”

  “I need proof of employment. I’m sorry I have to ask.”

  Now he looks confused. “You need a job,” he says unsurely. Then he brightens. “Did you finish your doctorate somewhere else and not tell me? I won’t have you be an adjunct any longer.”

  “No, sir, just the letter.”

  His face turns, and he leans back in his chair like someone slowly realizing he’s been insulted. He covers his mouth with his hand and looks away from me, out the window, down Lexington.

  He speaks through his fingers. “You know, since you left here, I’ve been keeping an eye and ear open for your name. Silly, I suppose, but I thought by now that I’d have seen you in print, or that you would come out of that elevator,” he gestures at the suit. “And you would be well.”

  “I am well.”

  He nods, unconvinced. He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “You know, after the break-in, I wracked my brain trying to understand why they chose to take what they took: the computer, the printer, a radio—I think I got it after you left; it was a good one—some other things, which strangely enough, I don’t recall ever having here, ever owning. So I know it was, and forgive me for saying this, someone I know. And I’m no amateur sleuth. I’ve never found that world intriguing. But I can’t help but think that whoever it was took all of the other things to get that picture. Every other item had value out there.” He points at the window, then waves at it. He covers his face, rubs his eyes, pushes away from the desk, and then resumes his watch over the avenue.

  “When I signed on to do what I was going to do, it was during a dark time. There existed in this country’s dominant class a horrifying mix of paranoia, cynicism, ignorance, amnesia, sadism, and base desire, and it was wrapped in a synthetic cloak of privilege and entitlement. Forgive me—I’m mixing metaphors, I know—but that collective was like a seed, and things grew from it: the white American middle class, the immigrant middle class. And like thorny, dense hedgerows grew barriers between the classes, barriers between the races, and barriers between the people and their government—between the people and themselves. Strange times. We were kids then, so we didn’t know, but we felt it. Well, I’ve lost my place—let me make it brief. I knew back then, we knew, that it was just a big lie—that it was all corrupt. From the military industrial complex to every untried lynching, our country had gone to shit—perhaps always had been shit since its inception.”

  He clears his throat with a sharp bark, focuses on my tie, and then goes back to the window. “I thought it could be, should be, had to be—different. So I tried, in my own way, to make it different.” He points at me but doesn’t look. “You were just a baby when we marched on Cicero. We thought every loud noise was a gunshot. Cicero, hah—an American town named Cicero, I never thought about it before. And that town—how rich.

  “I wasn’t in Memphis. I was here. I was ill with an extraordinary fever, so I remember it strangely. Bobby Kennedy told me, via the television, of course. I’m sure you’ve seen that footage. I thought I was going to die. I’d never been so scared in my life—not in Cicero, or anyplace else where they brought the guns and the gas and the dogs. Each time I exhaled I thought I’d never take another breath. I just lay there on the couch—that room was dark, man. And when I recovered and was up and about, I forgot all about my bout, until, of course, they killed Bobby. The same thing happened. I forgot, not the act, but that despair. I suppose that’s the mind coping.

  “But I’m older now, less prone to emotional swoons. Now I remember. I say it again, dark days are here, my boy. There’s hardly any—discrimination. True, no one’s getting their brains blown out—’round these parts, at least, but I see the darkness in the possibility that there aren’t any brains left to be splattered. Or perhaps I was wrong—perhaps we all were: black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, oppression and freedom. Did you know that I was the first black student to receive a doctorate in philosophy from my alma mater?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Ah, well, taking a dialectic approach to your potential and probable murderer. Synthesis during crisis—what would that look like? A man in the middle of a riot scratching his chin. At least, back then, only part of the world was mad. Nonetheless, someone’s got to know right from wrong, son. Someone has to weigh in.”

  He pushes a stack of papers to one side of his desk. “In my advancing years I’ve been known to prattle on to my semicaptive audience. Forgive me.” He sucks his teeth and focuses on a point just above my head. He grins broadly, inhales sharply, gestures grandly a few times in the air and makes his voice loud and bright.

  “Still the aesthete? Or have we dirtied our hands yet?”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You poets—practicing or not—you arbiters of taste, of morality, do you ever wonder who does the dirty work for you?” He brightens his tone even more, as though delivering a punch line. “Now you come to me for assistance. Where were you when we needed your help?

  “I’m sorry,” he taps the desk. “But I had plans for you.” He looks at me with a toothy smile and turns his palms up to the air in mock bafflement.

  “We all did.”

  “They had plans for me, too.” He looks down Lexington like it was a tunnel of memory that he wished to go down, knew he could not—and it gave him great sorrow as well as great relief. “There’s still something in the works for me, I believe.” He sighs. His breath seems to gently expel the vision. “Why do you need this letter? Wait—don’t answer that.”

  “It’s for my kids.”

  “Ah, a noble sentiment. Righting your ship at last, eh?”

  It strikes me as being particularly mean. I jab back.

  “Hegel missed the boat, you know.”

  He seems unfazed. “Didn’t everyone—you, too?”

  “Yeah, but no one’s building shrines to my miscalculations, least of all me.”

  “You sound embittered, my friend. What, did the aesthete take some real-world knocks?”

  “I’m not an aesthete. I never was.”

  “Really, what then?”

  “Just a man.”

  “Once again—how noble.”

  “Someone’s got to be.”

  He wrinkles his brow thoughtfully and points at me. “You know, when you came off the elevator, I thought that perhaps you’d struck gold—that we’d lost you to Wall Street or hip-hop. You know, sometimes when I walk through the mall down there and I hear the students and the music coming out of the idling cars . . . the clamor of and the clamor for lucre, I get so damn angry sometimes—sometimes just damn sad.” He shakes his head. “I can’t get through to them. ‘The gospel of work and money’
has taken hold of a new generation. A whole century later, they haven’t read it, so they don’t know it. And they think they’re being militant. They’re different from your generation. Then again, perhaps they’re not.” He makes a fist and taps the desk with it. “So, tell me, although I know you don’t want to, but there isn’t anyone else but the two of us here, and this won’t give you a leg up on another student. One, if I may, black man to another—tell me what you’re thinking about all this.”

  Now I lean back, exhale, and rub my face, too. I look up to the ceiling where the thieves dropped in and shudder with a wave of sleep.

  “I’ve never found it useful to talk to anyone other than myself about where I’m from. And I think it’s safe to say that most of the time, I don’t understand. Sometimes I make it simple, say straight up that I’m Lila and Marshall’s boy, that they were very different—wanted different things for themselves and for me and that really twisted me up, but that’s too easy, and it’s too late for simple rationalizations. I think I experienced most of what a black man—any man—can experience, late in America—the good and the bad, mostly the bad. And I think it’s useless to blame. I have had, in my whole life, one black friend—he’s now insane. They tried their best, all of them, whether they had the right or the power to do so, to make me assimilate, to ‘sivilize’ me. It never worked. That is the heart of resistance—holding out for the good: That is what I always thought it was to be black, other, or any different title I can paste on myself.”

  He looks sad. He puckers his lips and looks down as if to fight it off. “So, tell me, please. And I ask you this because I really am concerned, interested, and optimistic, and I do happen to have an excellent agent, what became of your dissertation—what was it called again?”