Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I go to the elevator and think about the elevator woman, elevator girl. What should I call her? I look at her door. What is she doing in there? Had she left for the day? Her elevator jerks up and then starts down — clanking. I sniff for her, but only for a second, then I’m ashamed — disgusted. I get out and go outside. It’s stopped raining. The air doesn’t feel like August. It’s more like October — cool and sharp in the nostrils. A leaf falls from somewhere onto my shoulder. Summer’s gone. It blew right through here, and I seem unable to recollect what happened. I don’t remember heat. I don’t remember long days or soft evenings. Soon the mornings will all be dark.

Across the street the jeans joint is jumping. People need pants, I suppose. I’d like to go in, but I don’t. I have a job to do, and as I walk west on Broome, I wonder if it’s more honorable to be a good lackey or a bad one. If anything can be claimed — any victory at all — in the fact that you’ve failed. Would a genius fail an errand for a fool? I have money. I have a list. But I have nowhere to go. I haven’t spent time in this neighborhood in years. Something tells me to walk away from SoHo and the absurdly priced muffin shops. I’d like for the elevator lady to appear, but what would I ask her: Excuse me, do you know where I could find an inexpensive muffin? There’s no reason it should, but the question sounds ridiculous in my head, and I push on. There must be a deli somewhere. It is after all New York City, where there seems to be one for every resident.

I turn south on West Broadway and stop at Canal. Nothing. I turn to face the east. The street is full of vendors and shoppers — carnival-like — the neon of the stereo stores, foam rubber stores, barkers with counterfeit Gucci and Prada and Chanel. The sidewalks are thick with people and carts, and the street is full of honking and lurching vehicles in perpetual and eternal gridlock. Potholes, sinkholes, tar patches, steel plates, and a traffic cop who stands just off the sidewalk at the corner of Church — white gloved, futile, full of bad faith. Nothing good can be had down that way.

I keep heading west — outpacing the tunnel-bound traffic. Every car seems to be honking. Traffic jams have always made me nervous, whether I’m in a car or not. I’m troubled by the origin of the stoppage or slow down. There’s a blockage somewhere, an accident perhaps, because of which, someone is dead or near death. And there are the obvious associations that come with blockage and death and the too close proximity of people and cars and carbon monoxide. My heart is about to explode. At the same time — and perhaps less reasonable — everything is too heavy. There’s too much weight. You can see it — the potholes, the sinkholes. Manhole covers under which there are tunnels, tubes, grooves for pipe and wire, sewers, and of course, subways. You can hear it in the hollow boom of the steel plates covering the faults. And this isn’t a strident judgment — not some puritanical metaphor. The city is, and I say it without humor, hollow at its core. There aren’t any insides. I count the cars, the trucks, the squat and the tall stone and steel buildings; it’s a wonder that it all doesn’t implode.

Get coffee! I scan west. There can’t be anything that way on Canal. I cross West Broadway and decide to look north up Hudson — nothing there, either. I stop and re-collect my thoughts — not that I’ve really been thinking about anything other than the tarmac folding in on itself and everyone and everything tumbling into the void. Not an apocalyptic vision, only an exercise in layman engineering.

A garbage truck bellows, and then I smell it — the stink — rotten chicken and ass. It goes right to my stomach and I gag, almost lose it right there. I hear a voice in my head say, “Claire, oh, Claire.” But she’d actually puked. She’d waded into traffic like she always did, and I, as always, had asked in the accusing and arrogant way appropriate for a rhetorical question, “What are you doing?” She’d stepped back onto the curb, made eye contact with the driver, and then retched into the gutter — shameless — like an old drunk. People watching had sidestepped her breakfast in disgust and the driver had looked down from his cab with the straight-faced Anglican disdain and horror reserved for use by her people. She apologized to me, but I was used to the puke of drunks and she was my wife. Within fifteen minutes we were home watching the dark blue line appear on the pregnancy test. She shrieked like someone who’d just seen a ghost or a rat and then realized that the haunt, the vermin would be back soon. And this was someone who’d believed she wanted children — an oddity, really, for her generation — her one ambition, becoming a comfortable housewife. And I don’t think that it was in reaction to her mother, who was of course, ambitious. Who at the time of her husband’s death, although already wealthy, started, then grew and sold her own business. She hadn’t been a bad mother. Claire had never accused her mother of not loving her. But she wasn’t, as Claire puts it, the nurturing kind.

So Claire in all her horror was pregnant with our first. And even though I couldn’t show it, I was horrified, as well — another in the line of Ham, the line of Brown. For some obnoxious reason I wished that, and then was convinced that, C was a girl. I joked, or pretended to be joking when I said, “I don’t know what to do with a boy.” Claire went along with that pretense, but of course we weren’t ready for him or her. We were still in the netherworld of postadolescence. I was just happy to be alive, and she was still dreaming like a child. She had plans for herself, plans for me: some amorphous blend of art and love and sex and race where money needn’t be discussed or considered; where the limitations of her inexperience would finally be realized, considered, felt; where the limitations of my experience. . I’d already considered my experience and already understood on some basic level that things weren’t going to work out, that I was, in every sense of the phrase, born to lose, that the day when people like me, whatever and whomever they may be, win wouldn’t be a good day for others. “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Dinner parties, cocktails. “What’s he singing about mommy?” I think it was the brownlike-poop kid who’d asked. His mother explained, quite well, I thought, what the song meant. But she couldn’t explain that when the revolution did come, it was coming for her and hers and everything she thought she knew and loved.

And Claire. We watched her belly grow — snapshots, narrated videos, sonograms, heartbeats, little feet kicking. I watched her change into a woman. I would spy on her talking to her baby. She’d wake me up every morning before dawn to put my hand on her tummy to feel him kick and stretch. And even in the dark I knew that on her long mouth was that crooked smile. “She’s perfect,” she’d whisper.

In another time or place C and Claire would’ve died. Her blood pressure began to creep up in the last three weeks of her pregnancy—140 over 85, 150 over 90. Then it jumped: 160 over 95, 165 over 100. Her womb began to calcify. C was slowly suffocating, slowly starving. Perfect to good to satisfactory to poor to the hospital — an emergency. Pitocin, blood pressure cuff, fetal heart monitor. The newly grave face of our midwife. The unfamiliar doctor. Every fifteen minutes the cuff would fill. There was the clicking, buzzing, the hiss of air and the velcro peel. Then the readout, always worsening. C’s heart rate dropping, leveling, rising, dropping. And since there had been no explanation for this condition, there needn’t be any explanation for anything else happening. She’d wanted to have him “naturally,” but there wasn’t anything natural about this: beeping, hissing machines; wires; strange technicians; institutional paint colors, the cold gurney rail; trying to hold her hand among the tubes and wires; trying to block her view of the monitors, which, had she been able to see would have read, “You are dying.” Our child was killing her; and my selfish indulgence — knowing what it meant to be born to lose.