Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“You are the light of the world. .” She shook her head, “But you can’t let anyone know — not yet.”

“Why not?” I asked. I flinched too — just a hair — but enough for her to see, because you didn’t question Lila, especially when she was like that, all grave and steely, set to tell you true. But my flinch hurt her and she dropped her head in shame. “I won’t ever hit you anymore.” She sighed and looked at me as though asking my forgiveness. She started gathering the pieces of plate, trying to cobble together one out of the broken many.

“I’d been living in Richmond, but I came up and found your grandfather in Baltimore,” she said. “He had a wife and a girl. And I got a little job, and I started spending some time with him. He was my father.” She looked at me as though she’d seen something of him flash in my face and then disappear — something she wanted to come back.

“After a little while, his wife didn’t like it — told him to tell me to stop.” She pawed at the plated fragments. “So I stopped. I came here.” She finished repiecing the plate, brushed away the dust and hopeless fragments.

“You’re a good boy.”

* * *

Lila had said there was light, and therefore, love. And Claire had said she loved me — on street corners, in rental cars, on stairways. Claire didn’t get it — perhaps still doesn’t. Standing before me at the altar, in her vows she’d said she loved me, but she hadn’t seen — the line of Ham, the line of Brown. I must have appeared to her to have been divorced from time and context — just a man, nothing but a man. Or, perhaps, a formless creature. I thought it was the wilderness that we were both about to step into — faithless, ruthless, perhaps even loveless. If love was the light and the light revealed all — how couldn’t she see me? If she had, would she still say she loved — some postmodern Desdemona — in spite of the shroud that enveloped my alleged light, my love.

Edith doesn’t love me. That’s obvious. She’s always thought that I was crazy — impractical. I’ve always made her nervous — talking about ridiculous things like art and freedom. But I’d done the bootstrap jig, bused tables, torn down walls, learned a trade, became — by some accounts — skilled at it. I’d sobered up and gone back to school, where some people believed I still had promise and made new promises to and for me. But Claire, her friends thought about sex — our sex — my biceps and balls. And after a while I came to think that that was where she was at. But she stuck around too long for that. I was too difficult for that. There was always some happy jigaboo she could’ve found for that. Sullen McBastard, Gavin had told her to call me, or Stoic Mombassa. But she wouldn’t. She just blushed. He made her nervous in the same way I did Edith. No, Claire wanted to stay for the long haul. Silly girl.

I’m glad my mother is dead. She would be angry, with Claire, with me on the scaffold sanding scum off metal. “You are the light of this world . .” I’m glad she never found out she was wrong.

The drums come back — the drums and KC.

“That’s looking good, man.”

I nod a thanks, abbreviated somewhat because I really don’t want to take credit for it. KC and I used to get along well — trade off buying coffee and such. I wonder if he still has the nail gun he borrowed. I don’t care. It has been a while, which makes me think that there would be, even between two fairly stoic men, some nod to friendship. And true, we hadn’t kept in touch since that time, but aren’t friendships like that? KC seems to be feeling me out all over again, as though I’d hurt him before. Maybe he’s high. I thought he wasn’t into that — at least not on the job. “Hey, man, what’s up?” as though I’d just seen him the day before. Maybe he had recognized the past — things were still cool and seeing me was no big deal. “Take it easy,” he says as he backs away, wiping at the frame. He looks down at his shoes and I think I catch it coming off him — shame. KC feels sorry for me. I turn back to the window, back to the rasping, the polyrhythm, with the drums. More screaming wood on the saw. I look beyond the stops — outside. They’ve got the countertop on. The white man runs his fingertips along the top. I follow the exterior wall down. Two women moving in the street catch my eye. They disappear into the jeans joint. Because of the double-height storefront, I can see over the first racks of pants and shirts, which bear the company logo. Beyond them are racks with belts and shelves with sweaters — all monochrome but rich hued. They look, on this gray day, juxtaposed to my still-damp clothes, to be warm and comfortable. Claire would like these things. I wonder what she’d say if I were to show up with a pair of Lucky Jeans and a monochrome sweater. “How did you do that?” But she wouldn’t be angry. She wouldn’t be suspicious. I think she would be happy. She needs new clothes — nice casual clothes. And a guy, even a broke one, needs to be able to buy his girl a nice little something every once in a while. It’s good for the both of them. Young girls shouldn’t get weary. Tenderness would be expressed in the fact that somehow, someway, you came up with the dough. You went through whatever it was you went through to get it, and in the end you were still thinking about her. I find it somewhat amazing, ridiculous, that I’ve never thought of a present as a symbol. Love manifested in the material, or better yet, the thought behind the material: These jeans mean I’m thinking of you, baby.

I have one small patch left to clean and I realize that I don’t know what I’m being paid — if I’m being paid at all. How many passes over engraved dirty daisies equals one pair of designer jeans. Finally, the jackass on the saw stops ruining wood.

Everyone begins drifting — shifting around their stations.

“Break,” says KC, sneaking up from behind. He clangs his putty knife against one of the Baker’s verticals. I drop my piece of sandpaper.

I climb down. Now everyone is mulling and going into their pockets for money. Chris waves me over. Now that the first stage of morning gruntiness is over, he seems a bit warmer. I join the gathering. Chris beckons me closer with a head nod.

“Yo, man, what’s up?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Got a pencil?”

I produce one and he passes me a small piece of cardboard. I take it and try to decipher it. I’m puzzled — lost for a moment in its blankness.

“Regular coffee. Buttered roll. Thanks.” He says it all without looking at me, only at the cardboard, waiting for me to do something. I don’t know what.

“You get that?” He gives me an eyeball — quick and lewd — like he’s an impatient flasher and his eyelids are overcoats. I connect the blank slate with the pencil: Write. I write. I’m taking orders. I do it somehow: coffee, tea, biscuits, cigarettes. I do it. Somehow. Then I pretend to segregate the money they give me — discreet folds, mental notes. They each come in turn, Magi-like in their solemnity, as though each is making an offering. “Banana, too. .,” sings the Dubliner. He’s not a bad chap, I suppose, but now, of course, I despise him. He slips me his prefolded dollars. “Thank you,” he says. Now Bing Bing. “J’wan caffee — b’yan butta, na de toata — a’heet?” And there’s apology in his voice, too, but what he should be sorry for is the brutality of the sameness and disparity between Kingston and Dublin. Shake’s maternal grandfather was an Anglo-Irish missionary to Antigua. He found a wife there and then brought her to Jamaica. They had a daughter, who living on that island of “rough people” with all her island haughtiness married herself a rough Jamaican countryman. Shake was fucked from jump — split in two at least — but he tried to create some bastard language that pointed at where he’d been, where he liked to think he was going. These two bastards refused to even be American — to assimilate.