Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I don’t know why I’m running: I’ve got nothing. The sky up here is azure, slick, as though all the stars have coalesced to form an almost transparent yellow glow atop the blue. But it’s just the electric lights below. I look north, up the river to the other bridges, the replicating strings with their own evenly spaced lights. I wonder where Claire is tonight — how those damned mojitos were, how the children fell asleep, if they’re sleeping at all. There’s no one there. Edith, but Edith doesn’t count — never has. What will she do when they tell her they’re afraid of the dark, especially there — the unfamiliar noises and the impenetrable dark of the moonless rural night? Whip-poor-wills are whip-poor-wills; coyotes are coyotes —cold comfort for a terrified child. What did she say to my girl — such a bad sleeper? What did she say to her namesake— little Edy? It’s always made me gag when people have called her that— but what’s in a name? Edith wasn’t there when she was born: a month early and undersized for that. She came out with her umbilical in a tight knot. It seemed that we all just stood there staring — trying to understand who could’ve possibly tied it. The fact that she wasn’t crying, wasn’t doing much of anything, snapped me out of my shock. She was barely breathing. I had to let them take her. Claire was seizing from preeclampsia, bleeding from her torn uterus. Claire doesn’t know how bad it was — for both the girl and her. And it wasn’t because no one told her. I did. She switched between pain, blank-faced stoicism, and narcotic sleep. And I alternated between her and our girl. Claire had only the IV drip, but the girl, she was tangled in tubes, monitor wires, breathing apparatus. There in the incubator, naked except for the tiny diaper and the striped cotton knit cap — seemingly always with her eyes closed. I fit my hand through the twist of wires to rub her belly, hoping that she’d open her eyes, just once, for me. When she finally did wake, when I finally did get to lift her out of that antiseptic plastic cage, she opened only one eye at first — the coal-black pupil circled by the ring of earthen brown, circled again by an indigo halo. I thought I was looking into the eye of God. I went to see Claire, who had awakened finally, too, and the two of us waited, it seemed through the night, for that other eye to open.

If you come this way, hear your heavy feet on the path, you’ll see that the wood planks are weathered and thin and that there’s nothing below — only the dark river. You run slowly up the ascent, watching the giant cables rise to meet the granite towers; the great blocks of soot-darkened stone, the line of the hundred-year-old mortar, and the strength they convey make sense. Their dual pointed arches — like the start of a great throat. The cable pairs rise up from the planks, like nerve bundles. The steel beams are close enough to touch — the giant, riveted girders, the cables holding the suspension line in place. The steel beams are disintegrating along with the putty-colored paint. It all seems to sway impossibly in the wind. The cross-hatched smaller lines are sheathed by the night and the artificial lights.

The benches invite you to sit and stare in either direction: north to watch the garbage scows, the bridges beyond; south — the docked clipper ship, the dinosaur cranes on the other shore. Most of Brooklyn is dark, save for the electric clock, high atop the watchtower. If it weren’t so hazy, you’d see the islands, the statue, the narrows, and the promise of open sea.

I look down at the roadway and along the beams. Some are rigged with floodlights; others have side rails and function as catwalks, offering passage to the edge. I follow them out, watch the water twist northward.

I take the bait, sit, get out the notebook, and write:

Notes —

Big Nig climbs the cable. Saurian, simian. Bag full of money over his shoulder. It’s a long way down to the water. He thinks about dropping the bag down, let the evidence disappear in the river — but they’ve seen him. They know who he is. So the way out or the way through is not to be taken alive. Courage, he thinks, would never lead a man to build a bridge. Courage would lead you in — unknowing as to whether you’d been buoyed or swallowed. Fuck you Thomas Kinsella.

I start running again. It’s amazing how much the bridge shakes, even when a lone biker rides by. You can see it in the electrical wires that run along the sides of the walkway. It’s not the wind. The moving wires match the motion of the bridge, not the blowing flags, so you know it’s the bridge’s rhythm.

You can hear them — their footsteps — lovers on the boardwalk, making vows, holding hands, sneaking kisses, or kissing unabashed. Their voices carry this way and that, beyond where they stand. You can hear them. Remember them, every evening, echoes of promises made.

I wonder if the children are sleeping, how the dark in their rooms collects and moves within itself, what flesh its given, what teeth and claws. Where is Claire sleeping? Where is the moon? Why do they have lights on the beams over the roadway — pointing up to bounce against that hazy damn sky? — illuminating some triumph of man’s reason, the ability to cross the deep dark. Look what we have done! We’ve spanned the sullen brown god —with bone-steel, with sinew cable and stretched over it all a skin of light and shadow. And the bridge flexes and shimmers, not in the wind but with an internal motion of its own. It pulses, the motion complex, unharmonic, retching, shuddering sea beast. I am the howl of the sea belly, the echoing wail of its remains, the living memory of all the swallowed faces. Inside, now I’m out. But not for love or valor, not for the good fight — two dukes up for a fallen friend. What would Lila have said? Into the toilet with you — out, get out. A river is a good place for ghosts, but only because they are deep, dark, and old.

When I realize that I’ve left the lucky jeans behind, I have to stop and laugh. I take out the money she paid me and count it: one-fifty — a wash. The cosmos has no sense of humor, so it shouldn’t play jokes on a soul, but I have to laugh again. I start to trot. When I hit the down slope, I break into a run. The paired suspension cables end, bury themselves under the planks. I’m off the water, over the first knuckle of Brooklyn, descending into its topography. Cars speed by. Their headlights connect this bridge to the other. No more water. No more sky. One last elevated look over Brooklyn’s grid — empty dark centers with points of light streaking around their edges. A new wave of fish rot drifts up mixed with exhaust fumes, just in time to make me remember that I should feel like shit — a strange, clammy sweat on me and inside, the burn of pure shame. “You’re so good in a crisis,” Claire used to say. I have to laugh again. The crisis is over. I come off the heaving bridge, turn back once to the electric lights, then into Brooklyn, contemplating the life of an imploded star.

Thomas Strawberry is dead. I know it before I enter the room. I had foreseen it on the stairs leading up, before that even — the early dark outside, the gloom of the bridge, empty windows and echoing bras. In Edith’s voice. In Claire’s absence. In all the days leading up to this: There is no light in this world. If there ever had been, it is out. He floats, head just beneath the surface. That elaborate tail folded. The bright scales are dim. The overhead light gathers and spins around the edge of his bowl. I wonder how long he’s been floating here. I scoop him out with my hand. He’s warmer than I thought he’d be, smaller. He fits in my cupped hand as though he was made to be there.