Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Donovan?”

He cuts me off — a hand raised into the air. He doesn’t turn, so I can’t see his mouth move but it sounds like his voice.

“Not fare well, but fare forward.”

And he’s off into the night.

Marco’s asleep on the couch again — having tried again and failed to make it to the end of Cool Hand Luke. He rouses at my presence and looks up blankly from the depths. I leave him alone, go upstairs, sit on the bed, and stare at a blank sheet of paper.

“Hey.” He’s snuck up on me again.

“How are you?”

“Wiped. Hey, I have a question.” He lets it hang out there for a while, but not long enough for me to begin asking myself what it is. “Are you around on Friday?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“Are those your clubs in the basement?”

“Yeah.”

“Feel like playing?”

“I can’t.”

“Come on. Take a day off.”

“I can’t.” I must have bent the last refusal — blue. He gets it. He loses the playfulness, puts on a face I haven’t seen before.

“You’re pretty good.”

I shrug.

“Listen, it might be worth taking a day off for this.” This time he lets it hang long enough for me to grab.

“I can’t.”

“Friday morning. First thing. Think about it.”

Marco leaves. Thomas bloops, demanding a song I can’t give him. It’s quiet time in the house of Andolini, time for all good lawyers to sleep. Tomorrow I will scrape more paint and row that much closer to failure. Donovan once said that our action is our choice, our fate made by our own hands. I choose not to be me. I choose not to be afflicted, not to bear witness. Not to be wed to notions of transcendence— as if they were real. I choose not to be a postmodern loser — a fool. Real. I choose to be real, whole and solid — deaf to the wail of the haunt, mute for all future incantation. Dead to the wind. I call:

“Seawrack and seatangle.”

But I am not transformed.

I am desperate for all the wrong reasons. It occurs to me now, sitting on the bed in the dim room with a legal pad on my lap, that this has always been so. Claire thinks I’m desperate to receive a six-figure book deal. Over the years she’s woken up late at night and found me churning out pages and she’s smiled. Even C has been afflicted by the notion that a finished manuscript means a contract and a contract means a new silver minivan. So my words, in a sense, are written to that automobile, calling for it to show itself to me.

I don’t remember all of my desperations: desperate to publish before this author died; desperate to record before that singer passed — either to have them validate me or for me to tell them that they were wrong. I don’t know when everything got so turned around. I once was desperate to have writing do things, to contain transformative powers, but writing has never done anything for me. It has never been cathartic or therapeutic. It names things, locates them, or at least when I’m writing, I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds. I start with a feeling, perhaps even more substantial — an image attached to that feeling. I write something, even finish. Sometimes I think it is good. But the feeling is still there, unchanged, but now with a name and a reason for being, legitimized and calling for a permanent place in me. I can’t do this. I am desperate because I know rage is still rage, sorrow still sorrow, and the only actions that can give them the voice each demands is to destroy and to wail. I am desperate because I write to the minivan and all that lies between it and me. I push a pen across a page, gesturing at symbol, metaphor — pasting a collage of willfully mute and deaf images beside each other within some self-conscious vehicle that masquerades as story. But I get sidetracked in the production, ambushed in my own head. I trick myself for a moment, believe the words arranged just so will metamorphose into a balm. Part of me doesn’t believe. It tries to conceive the minds of unknown agents, faceless editors, and book review consumers. But part of me goes with it, chasing the words that follow the image as it moves up like braiding smoke offerings of ritualistic purification. It will never sell. I scribble a line across the page beneath the last jumble of words to signal I am done.

When I leave, I wear the grim face — the face of a man who wants to get this done, who’ll brook no nonsense, not from conductors, commuters, or silly leaves that have fallen too early and lie drowning in gutter pools. It seems as though August is waging a war against the oncoming season. Since it can’t be hot, it rains. Not the great near-tropical cloudbursts. This is constant, cold, and unspectacular. I leave earlier this morning and take the A-train — the brown people’s train — to Canal Street and walk north from there, but I wait around the corner from the entrance until someone from the crew shows up. I want a cigarette for the waiting. They are good for marking time. They are good when you are enraged; you can drag hard on them and throw them into the street — quickly light another.

Chris approaches from the west. He’s wearing headphones, nodding to some private beat. He nears me, as though he doesn’t see, then a few strides away, without breaking step he looks up.

“S’up, dude?”

He walks past me. I turn and follow. He unlocks the door, calls for the elevator. It clangs open. We get in. Chris is handsome, but he’s lost his boyishness, as though since I saw him last he witnessed something that has aged him internally, some premonition — twenty years down the road and still banging nails. He’d fancied himself a poet, now it looks as though he won’t ever write again — perhaps even forgot that he once had.

We get upstairs. He utters his obligatory curse to the darkness, heads for the circuit breaker. After he turns the lights on he goes to his sill and produces his breakfast.

The others straggle in, as distant with me as they were yesterday. I wait for the others to eat and drink and change before I start gathering my things. I roll the scaffold to where I left off. KC drifts by.

Chris reenters the room and issues a proclamation.

“Feeney and Johnny are gonna be here later so keep your shit together ’cause I don’t want to hear none of their shit. All right?”

The crew collectively moans. Chris goes to his spot.

KC glides up to me quietly like he has a secret.

“Hey, mon, na more dat fuckin’ stuff.”

“Excuse me?”

“The smell, man — the smell. There ain’t enough air in here for that.” He points at the metal. “Use the sandpaper like I showed you, the sandpaper and the oil. It’s faster anyway.”

“Actually, KC, I think stripping is quicker.”

“Yeah, but it give me a headache. Dat shit rot yer brains, too. Don’t you need your brains?”

“Apparently not.”

“You still funny, mon. Yer still funny.”

“I am?”

“Yeah, mon. Dat’s why I was glad ta hear you comin’ back. Not for you—’cause when you gotta leave ya gotta leave and you probably didn’t want ta come back. But it’s good for me.”

“How’s that?”

“Look at these motherfuckers here, mon. They don’t know nothing.”

I get up on the Baker with sandpaper and oil, in part for KC, in part for me. I don’t know what my next task will be — it could be worse, more tedious — the outside of the windows perhaps. This job isn’t about productivity, it’s about being here, gesturing at competence and effort. There really isn’t any incentive to be good.