Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. Who’s that other fool? I never heard of him.”

  “I suppose he’s the heir apparent.”

  “What the fuck is he inheriting, the right to talk bullshit?”

  “I don’t know, Shake.” He jab-steps at me again, glaring, as though a punch will follow. I go to slip it, but he slides back to his original motion, retaining the glare.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So that’s your boy? So this fool is your replacement—that’s funny.”

  “Not really.”

  “Hey man, take it easy. Why don’t you give the man a call?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Why? His book’s in every motherfucking store window, big and small, and it ain’t even February. He’s gotta have something for you, you know?”

  “No.”

  “No he doesn’t?”

  “No. I’m not going to.”

  “Well why not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Fuck you then, be a fool. Walk these streets all hangdog dog-raggedy.”

  “It’s out of my hands now.”

  “So put it in his. Make that call.”

  “No.”

  He shakes his head, stops, then pats his coat pocket like he’s looking for a cigarette.

  “You smoke now, Shake?”

  “No. Don’t call me that. Nobody out here knows me like that—Donovan, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Donovan.” It feels so strange to say it.

  He nods, loses the glare. “What’s the matter with you anyway?”

  I kick stupidly at the slab. “I’m broke.”

  “Broke,” he jumps back then starts waltzing again. “Shame on you. And you used to call yourself a metaphysician.”

  “I did?”

  “Well, I called you one. I guess I still do.”

  “Aren’t you one?”

  “Me, no. I’m insane.” He cackles. It’s sharp. It seems that it would have cut him on the way up, but he stands there, unscathed. Right before he was committed he applied to the NEA for a grant to enslave three white people for thirty years and study the effects chattel slavery had on them. He was going to write a play based on the results.

  I try not to, but I can’t help but watch him be yanked back into the spastic steps. Now he adds a hand to the sequence—waist to nose and back again—and each pass seems to create and build nervous energy in him.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he snaps, springing forward—still not punching.

  I try to cover. “Like what?”

  “Like you’re angry or you pity me—whatever—you don’t know.”

  “Covering all possibilities with that, huh?”

  “Well, I have to.”

  I look up into the night sky and wait for it to do something, it’s crisp azure—autumnal—the stars are bright yellow. Shake grunts like he doesn’t want the silence. I want him to go away. He resumes his dance.

  “What’s the matter, nothing to say?”

  “You know what,” I kick at the sidewalk again. “Forget it.”

  “Forget what? You didn’t say nothing.” He turns, walks in a tight circle and then is yanked back to the square. “Damn, man. You’re fucked up.” He starts shaking his head violently, raises his hand to speak, aborts the attempt, and drops it. Then, like the gesture was a feint, he mumbles, “I didn’t tell you to marry a white woman.”

  I step back, shoot a hand up. “Good night, Shake.”

  He stops. “Donovan,” he says quietly, with a tremble. It stops me. “My name is Donovan.” He waits until he’s sure I won’t leave and then exhales fully. The pent-up energy seems to go out with his breath. He closes his eyes, either trying to see something inside or to focus on keeping his feet still. He starts swaying his shoulders, moving through the sequence, but slowly and on a smaller scale. He opens his eyes and looks down at his feet to make sure that his near stillness is real.

  “I didn’t tell you to marry her, but I never said it was wrong. It’s not something I would do, but I’m not paying your bills, taking out your trash—whatever. Come on. I’m just saying that if you were with a black woman, she could tell you something. When you stand in the dark with that question on your face, she’d at least know there was something on your mind—right? And she knows, maybe not innately or anything, but it’s something she saw in her daddy’s face when he didn’t know she was looking. It’s on her brother’s now, too. And she’s not gonna hesitate, you know, she’s going to, on her terms, know. She might be completely wrong—hell—she might be just a fool,” he slaps his cheek violently twice, “but she won’t be locked out by this. There are so many other barriers in place, but not this one, your color. Your wife doesn’t have that. She probably looks at you and thinks, ‘I don’t know that.’ But she thinks, everybody thinks, whether they admit it or not, that the skin is the thing. At least with a black woman you could hunker down together and start something—start hurling assumptions at the world. What happened to that painter you were with back home?”

  “She’s famous.”

  “No, what happened to you two?”

  “She stopped calling.”

  “Why—you wouldn’t fuck her, would you?”

  I think about hitting him, but I hold back because there doesn’t seem to be any malice in his voice. I exhale, too. My hand probably wouldn’t close anyway. “She didn’t like my poems.”

  He grins and then shakes his head violently to erase it. “At least you would have someone you could talk about them with. Someone you could lie with. But with you, you look and all you can see is her white face—everything it stands for, all the ways it rejects you: Your wife’s white face. And you’re locked out. It can’t tell you true, not a damn thing, except maybe how far out you really are. That’s lonely. And then where do you go—for comfort—huh? Maybe you have that moment when you dare to say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ or ‘I’m beyond that.’ You may not say it in words, but you act it. But what does your boy say—“. . . redeemed from fire by fire.” You’ll forgive him his abstract crimes against humanity . . . what about her? But I don’t know why any brown person on this here earth in their right mind would pass through fire of any kind for someone white. I mean, why would you do that?” He shrugs his shoulders. “Miles and miles of bad motherfuckin’ road. No road, sometimes.

  “I don’t know, my friend, my brother. I don’t know if I’ve said it or only thought it. You’re either brilliant or you’re a fool, out here in the night, unseasonably cold, all by your broke self. No allies to call on.” He points at the books in the window. “What have you been doing, my brother, while everyone else was building networks, consensus, shared ideology?” He cackles again. It rips the night.

  “No allies?”

  “Well you can count me in, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “I will.”

  “I will.” He mocks. “G’wan claat! How goes the rest of the crew?”

  “Gav’s back in.”

  He winces, as though the news physically hurts him.

  “That boy never met a fight he didn’t want. By the way, that was Gladys—yesterday.” He jerks his head back as though she’s behind him. He shoots the imagined woman down with a sharp, quick stare. “She ain’t mine”—he leans in as though this is a secret he needs to keep from her. “I’m just looking out for her, till she gets on her feet.” He cracks his knuckles. “Where’d you get that suit you were wearing?”

  “Had it awhile.”

  “You a banker now, too?”

  “No.”

  He shakes his head again, closes his eyes, frustrated, as though he’s trying to remember something he had to tell me. “Looking at you helps me remember. Sometimes that’s not so good, you know.” He springs forward, catching me with that old quickness, and hugs me. He rocks us back and forth. I smell sweat and pharmaceuticals—rubbing alcohol. He lets me go.

  “What’s up, man?�
� I sigh.

  He smiles, gently puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey baby, gut me then haruspicate: Extrapolate from my viscera.” He bends, covers his mouth, and laughs to himself. He straightens but still smiles. “I can tell you what’s going to happen. I just can’t tell you how. I don’t know. Not a living ass can. Hell, the dead can’t probably either. I’ve been outside a long time now—way outside—but when I see you, I think of things I saw when I was in. I think it might be worse, being in, looking for something, seeing all the faces, the places that you’re locked out of, while they demand that you behave like they’re going to let you in. But I praise my psychophar-macologist: I haven’t spun completely out. I take my pills, try not to bust anyone in the head, and wait for my inheritance of the earth. Now that’s a plan. Hope to see you there.”

  “What about now?”

  “What about now?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What, you got a plan? You want to raise an army and take the capital—shit—nothing but mercenaries out there anyway. And how you gonna trust them?” He looks at his wrist, but he doesn’t have a watch. He lowers his arm, looks down, and goes back to the Thorazine shuffle. For a moment I wish I had the switch to shut him off. He looks up and jumps back, breaking the prescribed pattern. I can see the fight in him, trying to make his movements fluid, resisting being locked into a new box step.

  He tries to shake his head, the effort to keep it slow requires him to turn his body in tandem as if it were all one piece. He whispers.

  “I gotta go.”

  I nod. We both exhale together. He spreads his arms, palms up, and waves them slowly, up and down.

  “This collective consciousness ain’t big enough for the two of us—remember?” He stops his arms in midair. “That’s your fight—so I’m off.” He turns, wades into the street, and starts across.

  “Donovan?”

  He cuts me off—a hand raised into the air. He doesn’t turn, so I can’t see his mouth move but it sounds like his voice.

  “Not fare well, but fare forward.”

  And he’s off into the night.

  Marco’s asleep on the couch again—having tried again and failed to make it to the end of Cool Hand Luke. He rouses at my presence and looks up blankly from the depths. I leave him alone, go upstairs, sit on the bed, and stare at a blank sheet of paper.

  “Hey.” He’s snuck up on me again.

  “How are you?”

  “Wiped. Hey, I have a question.” He lets it hang out there for a while, but not long enough for me to begin asking myself what it is. “Are you around on Friday?”

  “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Are those your clubs in the basement?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Feel like playing?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Come on. Take a day off.”

  “I can’t.” I must have bent the last refusal—blue. He gets it. He loses the playfulness, puts on a face I haven’t seen before.

  “You’re pretty good.”

  I shrug.

  “Listen, it might be worth taking a day off for this.” This time he lets it hang long enough for me to grab.

  “I can’t.”

  “Friday morning. First thing. Think about it.”

  Marco leaves. Thomas bloops, demanding a song I can’t give him. It’s quiet time in the house of Andolini, time for all good lawyers to sleep. Tomorrow I will scrape more paint and row that much closer to failure. Donovan once said that our action is our choice, our fate made by our own hands. I choose not to be me. I choose not to be afflicted, not to bear witness. Not to be wed to notions of transcendence—as if they were real. I choose not to be a postmodern loser—a fool. Real. I choose to be real, whole and solid—deaf to the wail of the haunt, mute for all future incantation. Dead to the wind. I call:

  “Seawrack and seatangle.”

  But I am not transformed.

  12

  I seen the morning light

  I seen the morning light

  It’s not because I’m an early riser

  I didn’t go to sleep last night

  I am desperate for all the wrong reasons. It occurs to me now, sitting on the bed in the dim room with a legal pad on my lap, that this has always been so. Claire thinks I’m desperate to receive a six-figure book deal. Over the years she’s woken up late at night and found me churning out pages and she’s smiled. Even C has been afflicted by the notion that a finished manuscript means a contract and a contract means a new silver minivan. So my words, in a sense, are written to that automobile, calling for it to show itself to me.

  I don’t remember all of my desperations: desperate to publish before this author died; desperate to record before that singer passed—either to have them validate me or for me to tell them that they were wrong. I don’t know when everything got so turned around. I once was desperate to have writing do things, to contain transformative powers, but writing has never done anything for me. It has never been cathartic or therapeutic. It names things, locates them, or at least when I’m writing, I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds. I start with a feeling, perhaps even more substantial—an image attached to that feeling. I write something, even finish. Sometimes I think it is good. But the feeling is still there, unchanged, but now with a name and a reason for being, legitimized and calling for a permanent place in me. I can’t do this. I am desperate because I know rage is still rage, sorrow still sorrow, and the only actions that can give them the voice each demands is to destroy and to wail. I am desperate because I write to the minivan and all that lies between it and me. I push a pen across a page, gesturing at symbol, metaphor—pasting a collage of willfully mute and deaf images beside each other within some self-conscious vehicle that masquerades as story. But I get sidetracked in the production, ambushed in my own head. I trick myself for a moment, believe the words arranged just so will metamorphose into a balm. Part of me doesn’t believe. It tries to conceive the minds of unknown agents, faceless editors, and book review consumers. But part of me goes with it, chasing the words that follow the image as it moves up like braiding smoke offerings of ritualistic purification. It will never sell. I scribble a line across the page beneath the last jumble of words to signal I am done.

  When I leave, I wear the grim face—the face of a man who wants to get this done, who’ll brook no nonsense, not from conductors, commuters, or silly leaves that have fallen too early and lie drowning in gutter pools. It seems as though August is waging a war against the oncoming season. Since it can’t be hot, it rains. Not the great near-tropical cloudbursts. This is constant, cold, and unspectacular. I leave earlier this morning and take the A-train—the brown people’s train—to Canal Street and walk north from there, but I wait around the corner from the entrance until someone from the crew shows up. I want a cigarette for the waiting. They are good for marking time. They are good when you are enraged; you can drag hard on them and throw them into the street—quickly light another.

  Chris approaches from the west. He’s wearing headphones, nodding to some private beat. He nears me, as though he doesn’t see, then a few strides away, without breaking step he looks up.

  “S’up, dude?”

  He walks past me. I turn and follow. He unlocks the door, calls for the elevator. It clangs open. We get in. Chris is handsome, but he’s lost his boyishness, as though since I saw him last he witnessed something that has aged him internally, some premonition—twenty years down the road and still banging nails. He’d fancied himself a poet, now it looks as though he won’t ever write again—perhaps even forgot that he once had.

  We get upstairs. He utters his obligatory curse to the darkness, heads for the circuit breaker. After he turns the lights on he goes to his sill and produces his breakfast.

  The others straggle in, as distant with me as they were yesterday. I wait for the others to eat and drink and change before I start gathering my things. I roll the scaffold to where I lef
t off. KC drifts by.

  Chris reenters the room and issues a proclamation.

  “Feeney and Johnny are gonna be here later so keep your shit together ’cause I don’t want to hear none of their shit. All right?”

  The crew collectively moans. Chris goes to his spot.

  KC glides up to me quietly like he has a secret.

  “Hey, mon, na more dat fuckin’ stuff.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The smell, man—the smell. There ain’t enough air in here for that.” He points at the metal. “Use the sandpaper like I showed you, the sandpaper and the oil. It’s faster anyway.”

  “Actually, KC, I think stripping is quicker.”

  “Yeah, but it give me a headache. Dat shit rot yer brains, too. Don’t you need your brains?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You still funny, mon. Yer still funny.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, mon. Dat’s why I was glad ta hear you comin’ back. Not for you—’cause when you gotta leave ya gotta leave and you probably didn’t want ta come back. But it’s good for me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Look at these motherfuckers here, mon. They don’t know nothing.”

  I get up on the Baker with sandpaper and oil, in part for KC, in part for me. I don’t know what my next task will be—it could be worse, more tedious—the outside of the windows perhaps. This job isn’t about productivity, it’s about being here, gesturing at competence and effort. There really isn’t any incentive to be good.

  The pace of work seems to pick up just before break. Somehow the crew has sensed it. Nancyboy comes in with a big ex-marine-looking lug in tow. I suppose this is Feeney. They stop in the middle of the room and don’t pay me any mind. I pretend to work and watch them from the scaffold. He’s ruddy faced and sports a nose that looks like part of it might have gotten lopped off awhile back. His eyes are pleasant, though, and even though he only seems to grunt short answers back at Johnny, they twinkle each time.

  Nancyboy waves at the entire space as though he’s grandly concluding something. He’s ready to go, but Feeney lingers around the Baker. He steps forward, picks at the clean metal, rubs his fingers, and seems satisfied. I suppose I should stop and wait for his approval, some sort of wink or nod, but anyone who’s partnered with Johnny probably doesn’t know what he’s doing. I can tell that my continuing to sand annoys him, but he slaps Johnny on the arm and points to the back.