Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I stay away from the fumes until it’s time to go. No one lingers. They move quickly, putting things away, going to wash in the slop sink. Chris points out a broom and gestures at the floor. The poison taste and the tingling are gone, but I’m still woozy, out of sync. The broom handle feels wrong and the floor farther away than it actually is. When I finish, I pack up and meet the others at the elevator. Chris frowns at my bag.

“I left the gang box open for you.”

I don’t understand him.

“You comin’ back tomorrow?”

I nod.

“Then put that shit away — lock it up!”

I nod again, cross the room to the box, but I don’t put my bag in. I close the lid and try to lock it. My fingers feel dull and jointless. I fumble with the padlocks.

“You all right in there?”

I get it locked and walk back to the elevator, where the crew waits, Chris leaning in the doorway. I step in and he closes the gate. He looks at my bag again — shakes his head.

“Suit yourself.”

Outside everyone says good-bye with quick, silent waves. KC looks back one time to see what I’m doing, then Bing Bing turns to see why. They both turn again and accelerate north up the block.

I drift across the street and find myself at the doorway of Lucky Jeans. An angry-looking man in a suit comes out carrying two large shopping bags. Music trails him, “Got My Mojo Workin’.” He strides past me without a look. He smells like lavender. I try to picture myself in there buying jeans and a sweater, being predisposed to conceive of, pursue, and achieve one end: If you’re horny, buy her a present. If you’re full of guilt and shame . . I used to be good at problem solving. Claire always admired how unflappable I was in a crisis. I don’t know what makes me do it, but I jingle the change I pinched from Marco while staring at the door. Perhaps some unconscious aesthetic sensibility in me demands a particular tableau: I stand on the corner in the drizzle and put off going underground.

More free coffee. The Sox are on a streak — so the newspaper says. It’s silly, the Times doing a puff piece on the Olde Towne Team. The columnist has tried to spin it a few ways: detached interest, low-brow sarcasm masquerading as irony. He writes, without knowledge or history or context, the reasons this year’s team is different. Gone are the days of twenty-five cabs for twenty-five players — which, of course, would indict a century of baseball with the characteristics of one group of players: New York trying to spin Boston via the story of a group of millionaire athletes as a folksy, blue-collar town.

They’ve cut the Yankee lead in half — three games with twenty-two left to play. They’ll be in town this weekend to play four. Solid, fundamental baseball. No heroics. Good pitching and defense combined with timely hitting. It’s insulting reading it, really, hurtful, like overhearing an acquaintance telling people at a party about the girl who broke your heart. Sally being watched by some bug-eyed teen jackass who thinks he knows her just because they share a locker row. It’s ridiculous to be afflicted by some freckly moon-eyed girl still, but every good haunt must transcend its origin — grow and deform as time passes. Like addiction. Last time I checked, I had a drinking problem. Right now it seems worse than ever — having grown, deformed. I hear Sally married her college boyfriend and they’ve got one kid, living in L.A., rich off TV scripts and jingles. I knock back the end of my coffee and it just doesn’t taste right. Not that it’s tepid or bitter — it isn’t a beer. I see the can I bought the junkie, empty by now but so what. I close my eyes and try to picture it: red and blue on white, the baroque lettering — the testament to quality. The pop-hiss when I pull the tab—“. . and the wilderness coalesced. .”

A girl of about sixteen walks by the window and I feel as though I might implode with grief. I don’t know why. Over the speakers Miles bleeds through his horn, introducing the idea of an entirely different kind of judgment day — junk and funk, Big Muddy and Harlem. The gaps he leaves in the notes sound like distant wails — wailing souls from long ago. Perhaps it isn’t that way. Perhaps it’s the dead that allow room for the music to come through. Armageddon — sweet and cool and mellow. The girl, who is lovely, is joined by a black boy. They somehow manage to show their teeth through tight-lipped smiles. Their eyes close to slits. On most other people their expressions would seem hideous, sinister, but they’re young and they don’t know and they truly believe they care — for one another, for everyone else.

I know what day it is, but I look at the corner of the paper anyway: August twenty-second. One day after my birthday, six days before our anniversary and the march on Washington. We planned it that way. We asked everyone to hold hands — the bridal party, the congregation — a ridiculous mélange of the American gene pool. Together. Windswept. Marriage, for almost any couple, must be a rough road to hoe. And now, as well as then, I can name the reasons we shouldn’t have tried. There hasn’t been any progress made in closing the gap between black and white, rich and poor, insider and outsider, the damaged and the well. Claire still, up to at least the last time she saw me, looks at me in two ways: one that says she knows me and one that says she doesn’t. And in the time we’ve been together I’ve never been able to span that gap — not with touch, not with words — for her or for me. That gap is a world unto itself in which there are battles over the validity of a cucumber and watercress sandwich, what box to check on some form you fill out for your children. Who is right? We both can’t be. “. . when the fire and the rose are one.” She believes, and I suppose most believe, her to be the rose. But I, to her, to them, am not the fire. I don’t figure in.

It’s a strange thing indeed to attempt to fit the forgotten social experiment into the equation. There are white models of morality, rich models of morality, and enfranchised models of it, as well. Nobody wants mine, this I am sure of — this one thing. What was it her aunt had said to me after the cellist had packed her things up, but I still heard her — Bach. Still saw Claire — my Claire behind her veil, which was pressed close to her face by the squalwind. Her cheeks, bright through the pale. My Claire. My love. My bride. She seemed to glide across the lawn to me like some ivory spirit, both angelic and terrible. Angelic, not because of the white, but because she was beautiful. And the August trimmed lawn and the periwinkle sky. Seabirds. But if there are angels, they are not innocent. They have seen too much: fallen brethren, fallen man. Terrible. Claire was gliding into awareness — into the wake of the slaughter. Coming to me. And the congregation said, “Amen,” on the historic day. And they “reckoned that she would sivilize me.” She stood beside me in the span of the fieldstone wall as though she was whole, and now I would be, too, and “all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.” And we said, “I do. I do.” The red-haired girl played her cello and the rain came. And in the receiving line people blessed us. And her aunt, whoever she was, took her by the hand, smiling, but speaking with a gravity reserved for funerals, said, “Beautiful just beautiful. The day, the music.” Then to me, “Congratulations. Welcome to the family.” Then back to Claire, “ We’ll teach him about classical music now.” And then she was gone. And Claire looked at me with two eyes: one as though I had an open head wound, the other as though I had just stepped onto the line. And that was the eye she chose, dispelling the first. The band set up under the big tent and, as I had instructed, played Miles—“Yer Blues.” And as man and wife we walked into the chatter and cocktailing. And the people — both lines — clapped. But they didn’t know. Outside came the rain’s end — the double rainbow and the rosy sky. Champagne, cigarettes, and levity. Inside I heard the muted horn of judgment day.