Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I cross the hall and go to the job site, creep along the walls in the low light collecting supplies — cement board, screws, mesh tape, joint compound, plaster, and primer. I bring them back to her place and rebuild the wall, mixing a lot of plaster in with the compound so it will dry quickly. While I wait for it to dry, I salvage the sink bowl and fixtures, break the cabinet down, and stuff it, along with the other trash I’ve made, into the mix in Johnny’s rolling dumpsters.

The place is too quiet without my moving about. The wind picks up outside, making the skylights creak; light rain, a soft tapping on the wire glass. I dust myself off and sit on her bedroom couch. Across the room, on either side of the bed, are two windows, the same size as the ones I’d sanded, but these frames are covered in thick coats of glossy gray paint. They seem to look out onto nothing — tunnels to the dark. There can’t be anything out there other than an airshaft or solid wall. The dim orange lamplight seems pulled to them as does everything else they’ve caught to reflect.

The couch is comfortable, soft, and smells faintly of lilac, but those windows make me get up, check the plaster that I know isn’t dry, stir the primer once more, and decide if she really did mean for me to “make myself at home.” I look through the crates; she has records and CDs — The Animals, Robert Johnson, Coltrane. I take them out, find the stereo around the corner in the big room, load them up, and wait for them to shuffle. I stand over the table and eat a pineapple slice and a strawberry, but they turn my stomach.

“Me and the Devil Blues” comes on. I go to the kitchen counter and fumble with the kettle as though I’m going to put it on. I see the wine she referred to — three bottles of red, two of which are open, one corkless. There’s a partially drunk bottle of mezcal — dirty rocks glasses on the edge of the sink.

“Johnson claims he’s going to beat his woman.”

I don’t want to acknowledge the line so I get out a piece of paper and start to make an invoice — the specs for both jobs — but it’s difficult to consider. She’s got money, but that’s not the point. How do you bill for this — hourly? By the scope of the job? I can’t charge her ten grand, but I can’t be here for a couple of hundred bucks either, and that notion makes me ball up the paper and lob it into the trash. It’s not about the money. It never has been, which, I suppose, is why I need so much, but that so much can’t be gotten here — anywhere on this or any other night. So why are you here?

I look at the bag of Lucky Jeans. What will I say to Claire? These jeans mean I’m leaving, baby. How do you go? My father seemed to rehearse it — softly closing the door, the light click of the latch. To me it always sounded like he was just going out for a moment — taking out the trash or having a smoke in the cooler summer evening. He made it sound like he was coming right back. She must know it’s coming — shaky breaths or silence on the telephone. We’ve got nowhere else to go, nowhere else but down. And I don’t want it, another generation of inscrutable hisses and diametrically opposed truths. I was a husband and I’m not anymore. I was a father, now I’m not— It is undone! How will I watch those green eyes melt and that crooked mouth fall? But how on earth can a man just disappear? Gavin’s ma used to plead with us not to be swallowed by the bottle. And Lila used to terrorize me with stories about uncles who’d vanished in the Virginia night. And I suppose that I’ve already disappeared from myself — that boy who was so full of light. That man who promised so much.

The wine. She said to “help yourself.” That’s not the way I want to go out, but it’s better than some idiotic mumbling about the past and future and— sorry. Claire’s never seen me drunk, never seen me trying to make myself uncrooked. Then she could go, vindicated, have some story to make sense of it all— it was the wine, not him, not me. The wine. A man could disappear into a bottle. I can’t really remember what it feels like to be drunk. Only before — dread and dislocation — and after — dread and sorrow. I think I have enough of that, without having to add the insult of retching into some gutter. Don’t call for the wine because the wine might answer and then what do you do?

The music shuffles in the player. I step back from the wine. The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” begins. I’d forgotten I’d put them on. They always have seemed to me to be one of the mystery bands that only exist in the radio. The picked, trembling arpeggio on the electric guitar sounds both sinister and wounded, then Eric Burdon’s husky baritone — funny fuckin’ white boy — but he seems to feel it. It’s so clear on her stereo. I’m only used to hearing it on the AM dial. He growls: “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the risin’ sun . .” I turn it up and go into the bedroom, half dancing, half stumbling, and I remember the photographs on the board. They’re all four-by-six, black-and-white, arms and legs and necks seemingly disconnected from their bodies, but not violently. She’s faded out the joints — elbows, knees, shoulders — so that they seem to float in space, nerveless, bloodless.

The demonic organ solo starts, and it sounds like a plea either to deliver the player from evil or to speed him through it, and causes me to sway about the bedroom to the makeshift bookcase. She’s sectioned it by genre — several art history books, photography, poetry: Neruda, Wordsworth, Hughes, Blake, Plath, Dickinson. Yes. Eliot. Four Quartets. I think the cover page of my dissertation is down in Marco’s basement: “Eliot, Modernism, and Metaphysics.” I’d typed it proudly, looked at it from many different angles, and after leaving it on display for almost a week, filed it in the oblivion section. “Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.” I look to the windows. “The vacant, interstellar spaces. The vacant into the vacant.” I know it by heart, but I take it out anyway and open it to the section. There’s something about seeing the words that alternately concretizes them and explodes them off the page into abstraction. “What do you think?” I’d paced slowly in front of my students, every once in a while peering over the top of the thin book and leaning toward them. I’d stand there, in the full force of their stupefied silence.

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors

A noble sentiment, old man, lovely even, but I don’t think I’m one of those listed. Where do I go: Into the ground beside an all-but-forgotten skull, or perhaps I’m future clay for patching holes? They won’t be burying me in Westminster Abbey for calling the cognoscenti out into the “dark dark dark.” No. You can bury my body — by the highway too. . Mr. Eliot. . Mr. Johnson. Well met. Well met. Burdon starts screaming, “. . one foot on the platform. The other foot on the train . .” I drop the book on the couch and think to turn off the music, but it’s too late: Delta morning, dark, bloody horizon, and you are, in every consideration, of two minds.

I go back into the bathroom, sand and prime the wall, then install the cabinets. I reconnect the fixtures and drop in the sink bowl. Her tiles need regrouting. I feel a drip from above — another skylight. The rain is getting heavier outside.