Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I hear someone inhale sharply. I turn to the stairs. It’s Laura, Marco’s wife. She’s staring, frozen by my nakedness. She manages to raise an arm to the stairs, a stop command, but James, her son, walks through it. They both look at me in the center of the cellar. I step behind the boxes.

“Hello, Laura. Hello, James.”

“Hello.” She takes him by the arm. They both look down. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no.” I shuffle behind the boxes. “Don’t be. It’s my fault.”

“I came down to look for something. I didn’t think anyone was here.”

“Just pretend that there isn’t.”

She laughs, a bit nervously, but better than she was before.

“I was just looking for some clothes.”

“Oh.” She finally looks up. He doesn’t. “It’s your birthday. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry about this.”

“Oh, don’t worry. We don’t use this space for anything.” She pauses for a moment, perhaps wondering if we’re talking about the same thing. She points at the urn. “What’s that?”

I hold it away from me. “This is my mother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Quite all right.”

“How long. .”

“Sixteen years.” She looks confused. “I need to spread them someplace else. How are you? How’s your summer been?”

“Great, thanks. It’s great to get out of the city. Claire and the kids must be happy.”

“Very.”

“Well, see you after Labor Day.”

I wait to hear the door close, and then I count to two hundred before I start searching again. I find a suit — my father-in-law’s, actually: three piece, wool but thin, dark blue with pinstripes. There’s a periwinkle shirt and a medium blue tie tucked into it — a ready-made outfit. I find my shoes but no dress socks. I listen for Laura in case I missed her coming back for something. I sprint up the stairs to the kiddie room with the clothes and Lila.

I set her down next to Thomas, who, although he still hasn’t eaten his food, looks more alert than this morning. I give him three more pellets. He ignores them. I think that beside him is a bad spot for her. I move her to the bookcase. I rarely saw her before she died. She was living alone, emaciated, bitter, and, unlike my father, completely lucid — her senses, at least. And unlike his medicinal six-pack, she was drinking hard stuff all the time. The last day I saw her alive had begun with wine at lunch and ended with her calling me a useless mongrel bastard while whipping an empty pint at my head — a microcosm for our legacy. Whatever the case, she is, after all, still my mother and deserves better than being a bookend in a stranger’s home.

I get dressed quickly and look at myself in the mirror. I hate to think it, but I look pretty good. The suit — the pattern, color, and cut — is conservative enough to keep me from looking like a pimp, my face and hands de-automatic enough to keep me from looking like a stiff. Why can’t I be successful? I look successful. I leave the mirror before I can change my mind. I collect the cigars, my CD fold, and leave.

It’s still hot. I consider taking off my jacket and throwing it over my shoulder, but it would seem a bit too jaunty so I leave it on. I pass all the shops. Kelly whistles from the doorway as I go by.

“You clean up good, Papi.” I wave back to her, jog across the street to the garage.

“Can I help you?” asks the attendant.

“Andolini, please.” He looks at me like a bird regarding something shiny and new.

“Right. Just a moment.” He picks up a walkie-talkie. “Send down eighty-nine.” He looks up at me, smiling. “Sorry. I’m new.” He looks at the clock. “You’re early.”

“I’ll be back.” I wander outside. Away from the oil and gas smells and away from the tinny echo of AM talk radio. I stand in the spot where I first saw Shake earlier. I wish he’d spoken to me. I wanted to hear his voice — anything familiar now — however strange it might be. It’s been years since we’ve all been together, years of him passing me, sometimes speaking, sometimes ignoring me. Gavin used to say that he and Shake were the manifestations of my split psyche, and when I wasn’t around, they couldn’t communicate with each other. I don’t know. Shake and me — the bused urban black boy and the newly suburbanized black boy — vying for the spoils of a wrecked kingdom.

The bookstore is full of people browsing. In the window is How the Hammer Did Fall by my mentor, the Reverend Dr. A. Jasper Pincus. Next to it, No More Auction Block: The Repossession of the African American Body and Mind by Karl Nometheus. Both books have spare covers: Pincus’s courier type superimposed over railroad tracks, Nometheus a dark face and a dollar bill blown up to near the point of abstraction. Two black cultural criticism books prominently displayed, and it’s not even February. I know what Pincus would say if I saw him now—“Your work should be in this window.”

Pincus of the little mustache. I’d been sent to him, as he was the chair of the philosophy department at City. “Sisyphean Dilemmas — Among Other Things: Marriage, the Gun, and the Black Aesthete” was the paper my instructor had accused me of plagiarizing. He’d been waiting for me outside his office, so casually that it seemed he didn’t belong there. Dressed more like a stylish preacher than an academic, the Hegel scholar turned civil rights leader, turned man of God and professor. He had close-cropped hair, medium brown, medium height. Stocky but with delicate features, lotioned hands and neat nails, the crisp chin and that damn little mustache — groomed like a vain lady’s eyebrow.

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

“I’m sorry. .”

“No need to apologize, man.”

He led me into his cramped office, made smaller by the lone institutional window, the three walls of books around his metal desk, and his presence, there behind the desk, looking out at me as though I was some favorite nephew of a childless man.

“About the paper, sir. .”

He waved me off. “Stop, stop, I know it’s yours. Papers that contain ideas and are for the most part free of grammatical errors are rare birds in these parts. The alarm went off.” He looked out the window, clad in brown anodized aluminum, south down Lexington Avenue, and watched the cars rushing downtown. I took the chance to scan his desk, the room. High up on a shelf was a framed photo of what looked to be a very young Pincus sitting in a diner booth with King, Andrew Young, and someone I couldn’t recognize. There were empty plates and coffee mugs on the table. They looked tired — powerful tired, like they’d just finished something they’d been working hard at — the tired of the satisfied.

He cleared his throat. “Sometimes,” he began with a light preacher lilt, pointing out at the cars. “Sometimes on a wet night the taillights blur together and from up here that road looks like a red stream — like what I imagine a blood vessel to be like. The headlamps’ yellow and the red circles, like blood cells, you know.” He opened a file. “But I see here that you’re a poet? You’re probably offended by my metaphorical stew, eh?”

“No, sir.”

“I used to dabble in the fine arts, too, but I had no skill and it was a different time.” He ran a finger across the mustache. “What are your plans?”

“My major?”

“No, son, your plans.”

“Well, I’m just trying to, I suppose, right the ship.”

“Fine. Fine. We all stray off course a bit.” He leaned in to make the point. “All of us.”

“I suppose I’d like to get my degree, perhaps teach.”

“Continue writing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“To what end?” He opened my paper and pretended to read it. “You’ve touched on some interesting points in here. Subversive, but interesting.” He tapped the sheets, then handed it to me. “I’m curious; you said something about righting the ship?”