Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

She was the one of course. Perhaps I was not: love and demographics. She’s asked me about my poetry, but when I met her I had to throw out everything I’d ever written about Sally, because it seemed like boyish gibberish. She was politically radical, artistically progressive. And to others — whether or not they liked what she said or did — she made sense: the affect and content were whole. When I finally let her read the new poems I’d written, and she’d seen my confused reaction to her text-laden paintings; walked through the yard with her and felt the weight of observation on us — that we, as a couple, meant something — a burden we’d experienced alone, but as a couple, exponentially so; when I held her hand on Massachusetts Avenue after three coffee dates, when she kissed my neck that night to say goodbye, I could tell I was no good. I watched how she moved, with ease and elegance through different circles — so unlike my nervous skittering. I know she found that skittering taxing. She couldn’t understand why it was so hard for me to make it to classes, or sit on the grass in the green; why I never responded to invitations from instructors or the dean to “come chat.” And in that voice she’d say, “This place and these things are for you.” I still wonder if she believed that.

One night in her room she prepared for bed — moving things about, preparing for the next day — but after undressing she stopped, came to me and helped me take off my clothes. I had thought of us naked, but I could never get past the image of tracing the outline of her body with my palms, as though she was protected by an invisible field. “Such a strange boy.” She whispered with that voice in the near-dark, almost to herself. I wanted to say something back, but I didn’t and went cold. When we lay down kissing, I became metalled. And when I entered her, I pushed in a mechanical way. I didn’t move, I jerked in robotic spasm. And when I came, I finally felt our heat, my stillness. And I lay in the quiet horror of having been made flesh.

I did go see someone after that: Dean Richard Ray, and he shook his head faster and faster as if he was trying to give his words momentum before he threw them out at me. My collarbone was broken and I stared at his bloated turkey chin shaking to take my mind off the pain.

“You hit a police officer?”

I kept looking at his jowls as he kept shaking them. I didn’t remember. I wanted to tell him. He took his glasses off and rubbed his face while sighing. I’d expected him to be angry, but his expression was blank. He looked at my arm in the sling and then a painting above my head — Sargent, I think. He opened my file, pretended to look at it, scanning it with a pen to guide him.

“We can’t do anything for you.”

He closed my file and sat back in his chair. He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, went back to the painting.

“Do you have anything to say?”

I tried my memory one more time even though I knew it was pointless. All I could come up with was a rushing montage of faces: Kali, Sally, my mother, which then gave way to a dull hum. I remembered the sound of my voice reading the acceptance letter to my mother, and her uncharacteristically jumping and clapping like a little girl. I was late for my visit. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. They felt moldy. My mouth was hot and funky and I was trembling, clammy, itchy — worried that I was about to shit my pants with bile. The temperature in the room seemed to dip and rise.

“You don’t understand. .” was all that came out — and that, although not what he was looking for, was probably the truest thing I could’ve said. He didn’t understand. He concurred.

“No, I certainly do not.”

I left his office, left the building and the campus, and walked west along the Charles, growing angrier the whole way. Not that he’d kicked me out, not because he’d refused to understand, but that I had cried in front of him and he hadn’t cared. What was that look he’d given me, Dean Ray, the white-haired jowl-beast, when I searched for the words to begin, didn’t find them, and did nothing but huffed and wept? It wasn’t pity for one of his suffering students, and it wasn’t scorn. In the wood-paneled office, the old world had regarded the promise of the new — he looked at me like he had won. One more dumb nigger down.

“Baby, you don’t look so good. Is there something wrong?”

My mother had taken to calling me baby since I’d started college. I couldn’t let her know. Shake was waiting in the car outside. Most things in her life hadn’t gone as she’d planned them, but she believed that I had — or that at least I was on the way. She was sitting in her chair, a teacher’s wooden one that she’d gotten years before when one of the schools closed down. It was dark in the little room — winter dark of the late afternoon — but she left the light off, having her whiskey in the dimness. She’d been listening to Marvin Gaye. And I’d arrived in time to hear his last plaintive wail. The needle was running on the record’s blank spot, popping in the speakers. She reached out from her seat, across the room to my arm in the sling.

“Baby, what happened to you?”

“I was playing ball.”

“Well, you don’t need to be doing that.” She pulled her arm back, groped for her drink on the table beside her. She found it and took a sip. “You used to look like your father. Then you looked like me. Now. .,” she exhaled loudly, which made me question if she’d been breathing before. “You know your friend got back in town awhile ago. He’s been raising Cain.”

“I guess I’ll go find him.”

“Why you gonna do that?”

“He’s my friend.”

“Well, I guess that’s what you have, huh? Hah!” Her cackle cracked in the dark. Then she waited for a response from me. “What, baby? Ain’t you gonna sit — stay for a while?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “You know when you were young, a baby, you were so smiley.” She took another drink. “What happened?”

When I get to Starbucks, Kelly points at a table in the front by the window and mouths, “Sit,” to me. I do, bent over to relieve my stomach. I start to feel my body. I’m tired. My hands feel like they’re swollen, getting more so all the time, and they want to close into a fist on their own. I flatten them, palms down, on the table.

“You look even tireder.” She sets a coffee down. “Is that even a word?” I straighten up and think I feel my stomach lining tear. I suppose I grimace because she looks concerned.

“Baby, you all right?”

“Yeah. Just a little beat.”

She looks me over, my unwashed hands and arms and my filthy shirt.

“You’re dirty.”

“Yeah.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she shakes her head. Raises her voice a half octave. “You shouldn’t be out looking like you do.”

“I know.”

“Take a bath.”

“Yes.”

“Get a massage.”

“Okay.”

“Have a nice dinner.”

“Sure.”

“Then go to bed.” She says this while starting to walk away. She stops. “That’s for free — the advice, too.”

“Thank you.”

“You hungry? We have some muffins we’re just gonna throw away.”

“I’m good. Thank you.”

“Stop. You know I love you.”

She snaps her towel and leaves me. There’s a line forming. There always seems to be a four-thirty rush — postschool, postcamp, post-nanny. I remember this world, of strollers, cooing mothers, and sporadically employed fathers — alleged writers. I used to write in cafés before I had children.

Someone sneezes, and I sit up. There are two women seated in armchairs. Close to one is a small child sleeping in a stroller. The other woman has a toddler on her lap. He obviously has a cold. He has dried snot trails beneath his nostrils. She absentmindedly feeds him broccoli. He can’t breath through his nose, so he inhales deeply with his mouth while pulping the florets.