Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“I’m bleeding.

I took too long to respond. She wailed.

“I’m bleeding!”

When I got home, Claire was in an almost unreachable panic bunker. There it was, on the bedsheets, small stains on the bathroom floor whose pattern made me think that something had dropped and shattered there. I had to lie to her. I told her everything was going to be all right. She had to believe it. What else could we do — accept that our baby was dead?

But it was dead. They vacuumed it from her the next day while I held C on my lap in the waiting room and lied to him. And looking out the taxi window on the way home we knew that New York City was too brutal for us. Edith was away, so I got a car, sped us north through rain, got to her house at night and broke in. C was asleep, but Claire wouldn’t let me carry him in. He was almost too long for her to carry, but she wrapped his legs around her, pressed him to her chest, and buried her face in his crazy wave of hair.

She didn’t say anything, just got in bed and closed her eyes. The room was dark, cold, and haunted. In the darkness her sorrow, which was darker still, hovered around her like a deep, vague shadow cut loose from its tether. Inside it she seemed safe. Outside it, in the other rooms, ghosts of all different attitudes spoke. So I went out. I turned on every light in the house to dispel them, send them out to the woods, to the beach, the ocean, or the lonely country road. It didn’t work. I went back into the dark room, sat on the edge of the bed — C and his mother in a weepy, sleep embrace. And in the mess of sound, all the ghost voices, the clicking of forceps, the whoosh of the vacuum hose, and the footsteps of rain on the roof — I listened for my dead child’s voice.

“Did you want this baby?” Edith had asked me in a private moment when she returned from her trip and found us there. I knew she was trying to be kind. But it was then that I gave myself full permission to hate her: because she was white; because she always had money; because she seemed incapable of mourning — becoming damaged or recognizing that there are some people who truly are and will always be “out in the wind.”

It was six months before Claire would undress in front of me and six more until I could look at her naked, and then, immediately, she was pregnant. And it happened again. She bled at night. She called me. We stayed up, this time, mourning. We went to the doctor, but everything was fine. X was the miracle baby, the fetus who had bled from her but somehow reconstituted himself in her. Instantaneous resurrection. So when he came out, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and oversized — two pounds heavier and two inches longer than any educated guess — we were both awed and terrified. Claire went into emergency surgery to repair her torn uterus, and they wanted to take him — put him under the lamps because they thought he looked a bit “jaundiced.” No one got the joke. I said no and kept my little ether baby with me.

As much as I fear for C, I believe that X will be all right. I don’t drill him like C, don’t obsess about his safety, his toughness, his manners. I haven’t tried to teach him five different sports, read him dense poems or scrutinized the quality of his draftsmanship. Some say that it’s because C is the firstborn, my parental training began with him. Claire thinks it’s because X is almost unreachable — the boy does what he wants, hears what he wants, seems nearly immune to any threat of discipline or punishment, and none of it seems willful; he seems built that way. I think it’s because he’s white. There are the other factors, but I know that when I look at the boy who looks exactly like me, I don’t know who or what it is I’m seeing. There’s no history or experience within me to project onto him. He’s a complete mystery to me. I can neither demand anything of him nor predict anything for him. This doesn’t mean I don’t love my boy. He’s my boy —I know that. But just as he moves so strangely in my mind, he moves, will move in the world outside me — freely. I can extrapolate, I can theorize, cite examples — my best friend is white; I know what has happened to him, I know his story, and although in parks and train yards he has told me true — his story, bruises, tears, laughter — I still do not know his mind. All I have are reports, euphonic and cacophonic, from the interior. My boy is only three. I can’t see him as a man. His doctor swears he’ll be at least six-foot-six. I can’t see it. What does that mean? Somehow I helped produce an Aryan-looking giant — a testosterone-filled encyclopedia I will never understand. So what do you do? — Say he’ll be just fine.

The school is being renovated — the main building, at least. They’ve had a scaffolding up for the last several years — since before we had kids, though no work seems to be getting done. I go inside and at once see one of C’s old teachers. She smiles and waves by bending her fingers in unison. She scurries off. It’ll supposedly be a new building for him — a big building. First grade — serious stuff. I wait for a while in the foyer and remember dropping him off and picking him up in the midst of the other parents and brown and black nannies. More eyeballing. If you’re brown and in a place you’re not expected to be, you’d better have public documented credentials regarding why you can be there.

“May I help you?”

“I’m here to see Jean Ray.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

She picks up her phone and dials the extension.

“What’s this about?”

“Tuition.”

As soon as I say it, I become conscious of my filth. It does matter, if not to her, then to me. She looks me over, trying and failing to be covert. Perhaps the rumpled, addled look is the one to sport here. Me in a suit, me in something clean and casual might not be believable. I’d look like a con or, worse still, a fool. Better to be a bum who’s trying. I speak again.

“Tuition for my sons.”

“Your sons are enrolled for September?”

“Yes.”

“What grades?”

“First and preschool — threes.” She keeps holding the receiver, looking me over as though she needs more information. “Am I in the right place?”

“Yes.” She answers as though it’s a stupid question. I decide that I have enough evidence to dislike her. She’s mean, and, worse, she’s a bureaucrat, drunk with wee power. She dials. I straighten, almost regally.

“You can have a seat.”

“No, thanks.” I rise to my full height, rigid, as though prepared to address a mob or take a bullet. She speaks into the receiver. It’s amazing that I can’t discern what she’s saying. Her lips barely move. Unable to eavesdrop, I look out the window behind her as though I’m surveying my empire.

“She’ll see you now.”

“Thank you.”

I walk into her office — still regal. She doesn’t stand, but she gestures for me to sit. I ignore it and choose a far-off point beyond the walls to stare at.

“How can I help you?”

Her voice is high and raspy, daemonic, as though the sweet-faced person has been possessed. Nevertheless, I stand my ground, staying fixed on that distant point.

“My boys”—I find myself calling on the Brahmin tone, but it’s ridiculous, me aping Gavin, aping his old man, aping someone like Edith. She snaps her head up, startled by my voice.

“My boys, well, my eldest, has enjoyed his time here.”

I let it hang there. And then I have nothing to say, so my statement hangs some more and I listen to it bounce off the plaster, the windows, ricochet around the room until it sits on its own, disconnected from me. It would be easier for her to digest, I assume, not coming from raggedy black me. But after her initial start she seems unmoved, perhaps because she’s waiting to hear from, needs to hear from, raggedy black me. I scroll through my voice bank, hoping to find the one that will, for her, match the man. Down in the quagmire of assumption and stereotype — to find a model of her mind. Nothing. It’s been too long. I stick with my triple-adulterated Edith.