Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I turn away. His mother says something that sounds like “There’s a lot of reciprocity in our relationship.” I look out the big window to Dean Street, then to the corner of Court and beyond, to the south, across the dogleg intersection. There’s a minivan waiting at the light. I can tell it’s going to make the illegal dash, the wrong way across the intersection instead of turning right. “Yeah,” responds the first mother, “I know exactly what you mean.” I wonder if it’s possible to quantify reciprocity — love. You either give back or you don’t. You love or you don’t. You drink or you don’t. And that’s the rub — the either or. I hope her partner excuses her abuse of language, the intellectual masquerade, the self-help quackery. What doesn’t she give back? What is she capable of giving other than a limp screw and nonsense. Nonsense.

Her kid has climbed off her lap, blown a snot bubble, and now stumbles toward me. He waves at me. She beams as though he’s achieved something. She warbles something, and he waddles back to her. She produces a bottle of juice and again is amazed when he takes hold of it and drinks.

“Is it good juice?” she asks, high-pitched and far too loud. He takes a break, nods, and then continues with his snuffle-sucking.

Sometimes my mother had to take me to work. She would put me in a chair, give me a book, and tell me not to move, not to make a sound. She’d do the same in stores and on buses. I listened to her, not because I was scared of being punished; it just always seemed the right thing to do — to make us both okay. Lila’s wrath was terrible, but death was even worse, and a failure of wits, of equipoise, of dignity, a lack of quality was death: Keep your black ass still or thou shalt die and not live. I wonder if I’ve been too hard on my boys, especially C: having him sit up straight, chew with his mouth closed, and display a certain amount of dignity — as though he was going to face German shepherds and batons in Selma or cops behind Faneuil Hall. The stakes weren’t that high anymore. How had it been passed on? I certainly was proud of him, privately, perhaps too much so — the privacy. They would sit and sip their hot chocolate, but is their fight mine? Was mine my parents? Was there really any fight at all save the fight against throwing oneself in? Claire would always try to intervene — when I’d be demanding that he swing the bat correctly, that he answer my questions clearly in both thought and diction — try to tell me that he was just a little boy. Brown boy, I’d grumble in my head. Sometimes he’d weep, and she’d ask me why I needed to drill him so and say this would come back to haunt me. “He’s just a little boy. You’re probably halting his progress.” And I’d say it — unrelenting— “There is no dignity in progress. The dignity is the progress.” And C is a good boy — a sweet boy. Content with whatever comes his way, which seems to me a fatal flaw. Brown boys have to be more — smarter, tougher, and possess a dignified tenacity.

The boy is back. He’s pointing the broccoli-flecked nipple at me as an offering — the viscous trail on his lip. He grunts at me belligerently and makes a face like he’s trying to pinch a hard one off. His mother isn’t watching. I could probably get four blocks with him before she realized he was gone. I want to speak— Madam, the boy needs discipline. So do you. You are cruel to the boy, and when he comes to adulthood, he’ll realize that you robbed him of his chance to walk with dignity. He’ll be snot-faced and wanting, needing to fudge all his data to convince himself he’s not — that he is good. And where’s the quality in that? No wonder the White House is full of cretins. There’s no discipline, no dignity. We welcome the inept. We celebrate the mediocre and run in horror when we realize the effort required to be good and stay good — fuck!

I’ll give the little snot-faced kid this: He’s tenacious, still hovering by my table, still pinch faced, waiting for my acknowledgment.

“Hey, kid,” I grunt like an old salt. The women, in unison, coo.

I look up. There’s a woman on the corner. There’s no traffic, but she’s waiting to cross. The light changes. The minivan makes its move — diagonally across Court. When it reaches the opposite crosswalk, she steps off the curb and throws herself over the hood. The van stops. The driver gets out — a little man. Then I see Shaky. He’s across the street, in front of the corner pub. He watches the driver with a flat affect. He rubs his hands together, points a finger in the air, and then sprints off the curb toward the scene. He looks like he’s screaming, “Hey, you!” Now he’s pointing at the man, who fearfully shifts from his victim to Shaky to the gathering Samaritans, who will claim that they saw everything. Shaky traps him against the van and starts screaming in his face. The women in the easy chairs finally notice. “What happened?” they ask each other, and then shake their heads in tandem. They look at me but don’t ask — content to stare outside ignorantly.

Two firemen run up the hill and tend to the downed woman. A police car comes and stops in the middle of Court Street. The Samaritans recreate the crime with arm gestures. Now Shaky’s just nodding — cooled off. The mother of the sleeping child mutters to her friend, “Wrong way. What an asshole.” Then tries to apologize for cursing with a shrug and a sheepish look.

I shoulder my bag and leave. I cross behind the scene and try to catch Shaky’s eye. He doesn’t look at me. I keep going.

I hover over the change bowl in the kitchen. Marco has replenished it — dimes and nickels. I take a dollar seventy-five, enough for a slice or a sport bar. I go upstairs. On the desk are two cigars and a note.

Meet me at 57th and 5th, 8:00. Bring the cigars.

— Happy Birthday,

M.

p. s.

If you don’t mind, would you drive the car in? It’s

in the garage on Pacific. They’re expecting you.

Thanks,

p. p.s.

Claire called.

I’m ashamed for a moment because I’m excited, like a kid promised fast food. I get over it quickly. I shower, shampoo, shave, and leave the bathroom still wet, letting the water drops slowly evaporate in the air conditioning. I wouldn’t walk around nude in my own house, but I’m naked in Marco’s, naked and dripping water on the hardwood floor, on the wool throw rugs. I search through my bag, knowing I won’t find anything. My good clothes are in the basement.

I go downstairs and begin rummaging through our belongings. There are boxes full of crap — notebooks. I pick up an old one, begin to open it, and think better of it. There are photo albums that Claire has put together — the annals of our life together and apart sit contained in boxes. Thirty-two square feet of memory on pallets. There’s the warranty for my laptop, disks that are unlabeled. Claire, of course, packed everything according to some kind of organizational logic: computer disks with notebooks and gift pens; our library, sectioned by what appears to be race, then gender, then genre; my old stuff, when I used to buy expensive sketch books to write in; music books; record albums; CDs, which I decide I’ll bring upstairs. There are some loose photos, a recent one of Edith holding my girl. Edith looks pained. My girl’s about to cry, trying to get free from her grandmother, do anything to get to her mother, who’s taking the picture.

There’s a box of pillows and towels, at the center of which is a bundle of newspaper. I take it out and unwrap it. It’s the urn containing my mother’s ashes. It’s a simple design, U-shaped, black with a matte finish. I didn’t get to pick it. I thought I would’ve, but they’d handed it to me already done. And I would’ve spread them out immediately but I hadn’t known where. Boston wasn’t right, since it had seemed for her to be only a kind of purgatory, one she never made it out of. I thought about Virginia and then Oklahoma and then Dublin or Dingle. Then I thought that I could divide her among all three. I didn’t do anything. When I met Claire, she suggested that when I had a permanent home of my own, I could make a little flower bed of Lila’s favorite flower and put them there. I thought that sounded like a good idea, perhaps only because Claire had said it.