Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I stand in the kiddie room waiting to be informed, holding him as though he’s sleeping, keeping the roughest parts of my palm away from his delicate scales. Waiting for resurrection. Waiting to be told what to do when he doesn’t rise up. What do you do with the dead? No answer.

And so I go to flush him down the toilet, but as soon as I open the lid, I know it’s wrong. I wrap him in a tissue and lay him on the counter. I stand back and wait — nothing. I hear Marco thump and start up the stairs. I pick up Thomas, skim quietly back to the bedroom, and shut off the light. Marco makes the landing, grunts, thumps over to the bathroom, pauses at the door, and then shuts off the light.

I don’t know where to go so I head for the river, Thomas in my coat pocket, my bag over my shoulder, and my mother in her urn — some ashen, petrified gourd. Don’t call her crazy even though I have before, more than once, to people I wish I never had. Lila never made excuses for herself, no matter how deep her sadness or her rage. No one knew that she’d died — early on a Friday evening, a warm stretch in December — so it took awhile before anyone looked for her. I’d just skipped Thanksgiving and was planning to do the same for Christmas. She was doing odd work — some cleaning here, some sewing there, even a bit of babysitting — but it was all irregular, so she had nowhere to report to on Monday, even Tuesday. And the phone went unanswered, the calls unreturned. She hadn’t taken her coat off, but she’d poured a drink — started in on it even. “I found her there,” the super had said to me, half looking to the spot on the floor where she’d lain, half examining me, somewhat in disbelief, wondering, waiting for some display of grief — anger even. I gave him nothing. I stayed unreadable until he left me alone in the strange apartment.

The housing authority had moved her into a smaller unit after I’d left, but there were the same linoleum floors throughout. No-name kitchen appliances and the electric baseboard heater pulling itself from the wall. The drink was on the table next to her chair and the record was still playing — Marvin, of course — fuzz and crackle in the speaker, the ghost voice, still echoing off the tiles and the blank dim walls. The man hadn’t even thought to pour out the booze, rinse the glass, or turn the music off.

I used to dream of her as if she had already died, not wishing that she had, but hoping somehow I suppose, to transform her, make her whole, stop the hissing, the fear, erase the underlying hurt and terror that seemed to be twisting her apart — as though every waiting insult had formed an invisible hand, twisting her one way, and every insult past was twisting her the other, leaving her a constantly wrung-dry rag. She really didn’t live that long. What I saw, I know now, was a vestige of her, a face from long ago, a voice exhorting from the gone past.

I tap the urn and rub it. I felt like this: a sudden weightlessness and quiet — not peace but a stillness that made me stop and listen. Her service was wrong — a strange pastor, a meaningless plot, and a generic, illegible stone, mumbling, distant cousins and neighbors. The few people who were there were at first respectful and then unsettled by my silence, but I had nothing for them other than: Minette Brown left the reservation. .

We didn’t sing “Jerusalem”—“Amazing Grace”—and it was fumbling, discordant, and without any of the revelation promised by the words, chanted emptily by those staring into darkness. And on the train back to New York I couldn’t help but try to reconstruct her up-south odyssey. It only came in flashes though. “My father’s name was Murphy, but he changed it to Watson — either he or his father, I don’t know. He worked in the Baltimore shipyards, like his father and his grandfather. It goes way back. His great great grandfather was one of those boys who taught Frederick Douglass to read.” She hissed and snickered. “And one of his cousins was who wound up jumping him later on. You can’t beat that — Finbar Murphy to Joseph Watson and then — I don’t know how he and my mother found each other, but they lost each other pretty quick.” I’d drawn the tree before, drew it then as the train hissed through the thin wild of southeastern New England. The dates and the ages have never aligned: her attempts to make herself whole, always wanting.

Now she is ash and I carry her and the dead fish along the Brooklyn side of the river. Not on its actual shores, but on the deserted streets that try to mirror its wind. Beside the lots and the warehouses, some in use, some not. I keep passing abandoned things, cans, bottles, clothes; the coveralls, the baseball jacket, the sock, a child’s sweater; resoaked heaps that look as though their wearers had suddenly been vaporized, or yanked down into darkness when they’d stopped for a moment. I feel the urge to stop and poke at each one — try to somehow discern their origins and therefore, by extension, recreate the moment when they lost their skin. Keep moving. Something seems to speak — perhaps the run of draining water, rooftop, street, and unseen eddies under the piers beyond the buildings. Maybe the trickle of the slowly draining river. Keep moving. Past sense and memory. Past shame to a place where there’s quiet — the emptied river, the dead star, follow the inexorable pull of the void.

I need a drink.

There are plans in the works to make all of the waterfront a great park — an expanse of green wrapping along the shore from Red Hook a mile or more to the Manhattan Bridge. Things are looking up for the old borough: new money, new construction, new names for neighborhoods soon to be gentrified. I’ve always hated groundbreaking ceremonies: They date you; they point to your demise. Some public servant with symbolic hardhat and shovel, flanked by those who make plans for others.

But it’s dark and empty now, and Water Street is nearly dry. And if you come this way, you’ll see how low the cobbled streets have sunk, their original high mark etched into the twisted curbs. The tarmac, peeled back from the stones like skin slowly shedding from some old, old lizard back. If you walked under the twist of road that connects the two bridges, you’d see that they are excavating the old city, readying it for destruction. There are gashes in earth and edifice left to be filled by the night. You can look back into time — the broken bricks, the bedrock, like fossil molars, useless, save for inaudible speech. They are digging toward the first order. The bridge hangs above — the underside of a ruined throat and belly. The missing scales are entries to its vacant core. Keep going. You’ll see the rusted freighter ties, like heads squeezed to the point of cracking. Hypaethral warehouses with empty arches and mortarless bricks pinned back by black iron stars: now a slave fort; now a slaughterhouse; an armory. Empty. The lightless night fills them with the backward breath of the void. Then warehouses — rotten-roofed with rusted shutters keeping things out or in. Keep on pushing.

I’m leaving New York. I hate this place. This stink and grime — the husks of dreamers, bought out, strung out, or broke down. Maybe Philadelphia, Quaker traditions — no, they bomb their own; Chicago’s lakes are far from oceans; and I don’t like the West Coast — one-hundred-million-year-old scorpions, the sun is strange, and the buildings are too new. Boston. I’ll start again in Boston, then, perhaps go backward, across the ocean — Eire. I wonder where Gavin is. Now that I’ve lost, his debt is erased, and I can think about him without resentment — for a moment at least — until I consider that he realized a while ago that he was forgotten, bridged over during some unknown transition. He always knew he was a dead man. Maybe that’s why he stayed unattached.