Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Three straight balls.”

“What did he say afterward?”

“Nothing.”

“Never?”

“Never. He’s never mentioned it.”

“How’s your guilt?”

He pats the brief. “I mastered English and became a lawyer.” He flings the paper off the table. It tries to do a loop on the way down but runs out of time and lands splayed open on the sisal. “What’s a steelworker need fingers for anyway?” He leans back. “A wop one anyway.”

“He can’t lose him here — the A.L. RBI leader’s on deck.”

Marco looks back into the bowl — ashamed. “Sorry.”

“Hey, man. It’s all right. What would Romulus say?”

He snorts a laugh. “Just call me Lucan. Fuck.”

The screen has gone blank. A message appears in the bottom left-hand corner: “Searching for satellite signal. Please stand by.”

“Fuck. I forgot to tighten the nuts. The dish probably moved.”

“I’ll do it.”

“No. Sit. Stay.”

“I need to go upstairs. I want to change. I’m going to run.”

Marco starts to get up. He doesn’t like for me to do things, as though helping out around the house is beneath me. In his head he calculates which will be worse, stopping me or letting me go. He concedes.

“I left the wrench and compass up there. Take my cell phone. I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

Thomas Strawberry is at the bottom of the bowl — still alive, fishily breathing, in fish sleep or a fish torpor. The room is too warm for him. I think it promotes algae growth, and makes him lazy. The overhead light must be like a sun to him. It must be confusing to be forever directed to, for whatever reason, a false point of origin, but I can’t tell Thomas anything. He arrived one wintry afternoon in a baggie, and now he lives on a desk. He’d been the last thing I moved from the old place. Marta had put on a sad face for me when I gave her the keys. She’d given Thomas a little pout, as well. He used to swim more at the old place. Perhaps the trip here stunned him, aged him, or stunted him. No. He was well into his gravy years before I walked with him down Court Street in the early evening. People had briefcases and shopping bags and strollers. I carried a fishbowl. And I thought I did well to keep the water still. Maybe he’d been a magic fish and I’d not realized it — that he came with instructions that I hadn’t followed or a pact that I’d unknowingly broken. Thomas is dying. I can tell. I lost his magic for him. I tap the bowl. He doesn’t notice.

I start changing to go run, but I get caught up while sitting on the floor changing my shoes. I kind of silently spit-curse my helplessness. It comes out as a hiss. I yawn, deeply, as though I’d forgotten for a while about breathing. And then I kind of drift for a moment, wondering if there’s anything to be done for the fish, wondering if I’ll sleep tonight, how long, caffeine and anxiety considered, I can stay awake.

“This is my son,” my father had said to the doctor with a sudden shot of energy. His loose teeth had rattled in his mouth from the sudden rush of breath.

“Nice to meet you.”

“He’s an artist,” he said with a wink to her and a thumb to me.

“Do you paint?”

“No.” She seemed startled by my terseness next to her chatty patient. He tried to do some damage control.

“No. He’s a poet and he’s a musician.”

She picked up his chart and studied it. “What instrument do you play?”

“He plays guitar and piano and saxophone — and a few others, right? Never could make up his mind.”

“That’s impressive. Do you play around here?”

“He just moved to New York.”

“Well, good luck.” She rehung the chart. “I’ll be back later.” She went to the door. “Nice to meet you,” she said without turning.

My father watched her go and continued to look out the door as though he could see her in the hallway and then the elevator.

“She’s something, huh?”

Marco is waiting. I have to go through his bedroom to get to the roof. Even though the lights are on, I pause in the doorway as though he and his wife are sleeping inside. It’s a big room with a master bath hidden behind a wall of paneling. Marco’s left it open. They have a tiled shower, a separate bathtub, and two sinks. On the south wall there’s more glass and a cedar deck beyond. There’s a concrete planter built into it. It leaks. You can follow the water stains all the way down the east wall to the cellar.

I slide along the wall to the walk-in closet. I’ve always wondered how many suits one needs to have if one has a job. My father had two — both brown — both, though I hadn’t known it at the time, polyester. I remember smelling him in them — his smoke, his rotting-gums breath. He’d hang them on the bathroom doorknob. Marco’s suits and jackets and shirts and slacks take up an entire wall, then meet his belts and shoes and three pairs of suspenders on the adjacent wall. She has dresses and jackets and pants, all of similar fabric and dark hued. They’re here for good — not running — Marco is present for his wife, for his son, his parents, his neighbors. His memory drives him. It’s fuel for ambition; two fingers on a concrete slab, gangster movies, and acetylene torches. I’ve heard other parents at school functions butcher his name, “Maar-coh!” as though they were proclaiming to him his perceived exoticism. Marco is driven, his memory neatly apportioned and in support of his plan. A plan. That’s all she asked me to do, make a plan. I should’ve been honest. I should’ve asked her, what — suicide or flight? I pull the ladder down and go up the hatch.

The moon has shrunk, risen, and dimmed to a cool yellow. The sky has lost its depth of blue. It’s gone whitish, tinted by the clouds, once thick and heavy, now stretched and almost sheer, making the night lilac and yellow with pink highlights — the source of which I can’t discern — maybe natural, maybe not. The Manhattan skyline is obscured by the taller buildings on Court Street, but in the northeast I can see the Chase Building, odd in its aloneness, too big for lower Flatbush and its car washes and bodegas.

It’s about twenty feet to the parapet, but the roof is pitched back, away from the street. It would be difficult to make it seem as though I stumbled uphill and fell. Marco’s building is only thirty-five feet to the top of the cornice — perhaps not a lethal height. There’s a good chance that things wouldn’t work out. Or, have they not worked out already. I may have reached my terminus — an unknown destination. I have a million-dollar term life insurance policy. I don’t think it’s lapsed. I don’t remember what the policy says, who the carrier is.

Claire and I decided that the two of us needed to be covered after C was born, because while looking at our newborn lying between us on the bed, we both considered our deaths. A nurse came to visit us at home and took various samples. Claire had been preeclamptic in the last two weeks of her pregnancy and her pressure hadn’t gone down. “Relax, hon,” the nurse had said. “This ain’t nothing.” Claire was nervous. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

I pressed our agent as to what a preexisting condition was, but in the end, Claire’s premium was too much. He suggested that we double mine — because I was the man. At the time his idea made sense. Because I was making money — at least what we thought to be money. I was in school and it seemed that I was destined to make more.

And it seemed to make sense now, to me at least, to have paid out all that money in premiums. The transition had occurred, quick and silent — savings turned into debt. Claire and I sat at the kitchen table one night this past spring with the credit card statements and Marta’s new lease and the boys’ tuition bills. Over the course of an hour she went from pragmatic to desperate — pushing the papers around the table as though rearranging them would make them read benevolent and new — then from desperate to sorrowful. She tried to stop her tears by curling her long lips in, but that made her look angry, which made me defensive, which made me angry.