Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

There’s a light on at the corner. It’s a bodega — strange, isolated, like some remote trading post in the wilderness — the first tenant in a remodeled sweatshop. I try to go in, but the door’s locked. It rattles noisily. I try it again. Same thing. There aren’t any hours posted. I hear, from around the corner, someone rapping from inside. I peer around. There’s a man, perhaps my age, sitting at the counter. He’s dark-skinned. Mustached. He stares at me — expressionless. I point at the door. He waves his finger at me and points to the window between us. I shrug and point at the door again. He slides the window open a couple of inches.

“Yes?” He has a thick, quasi-British accent.

“Are you open?”

“Yes.”

We stare at each other, he waiting for me to do something I’m unaware of. He looks down and points quickly at the window. I point at the door. He points at the window, sliding it open an inch more. He nods this time and cocks his ear toward me as if to listen.

I point at the rack of cigarettes, then realize he’s not looking at me anymore.

“Pack of Luckies.”

He shoots a hand up and gropes for the pack without looking. He gets one, matches, too, and taps them on the counter.

“Yes?” he says, but looks down again — canid. At least, from behind his inch-thick acrylic, he could be polite enough to look at me. I look down at the cigarettes and all I can think of at the moment is the pleasure of smoking them in an open field somewhere away from the residue of halogen, neon, and fluorescent light. I know that I’ve made the right decision to leave this damned city. I hate the clipped, inelegant grunts that masquerade as speech. The rudeness and suspicion. I hate the eyeless stares, the look-aways, the pretense of service. I hate the absence of love.

I smack the glass hard with my knuckles. He startles but continues to look down.

“Yes?”

“Gimme a six of Bud.”

He spins off his chair and goes to the cooler. He gets the beer out. I smack the glass again. He looks up.

“Tall boys. Bottles.”

He waves, bending his head, and manages a shy little grin. He shuffles back to the counter, more puplike with each step. He sets the beer down carefully as though he were serving a table crystal glasses. He rolls his eyes up at me. I stare at him with a growing harshness. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the glass is there.

“How much?”

“Twelve dollars, sir.”

“Fuck.”

I peel the money off my roll and toss it at the opening. He opens it just wide enough to sneak his hand through. He counts it, bags my beer and cigarettes — far too slowly and carefully — slides open the larger door, places it in, closes it, then signals for me to open my side.

I take my package and leave, think about turning and flipping him off, but I keep on pushing instead, back to the river again. The street runs downhill to the banks and then opens up into a small park in a shallow cove. The first thing you see is a small, fenced-in playground. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to come this way. I try to ignore it, keep my head down and wind around it along the path — more of those hexagonal pavers. I follow the path around the low iron fence, past the grassy knoll. It ends at the top of massive granite stairs that descend into the water. The bank upriver, to the right, is a steeply sloped pile of rocks. To the left the stairs end abruptly and give way to pebbles, bleached and crushed oyster shells, and odd pieces of plywood. The path continues, downriver, the land curving westward — a concrete pier and a finger of land on which sits one last darkened warehouse and then the base of the bridge.

There is wind down here on the water, more than I thought. It blows strong and constant, moaning low upriver with stronger gusts, which rise in pitch to a wail and then disappear. I sit on a bench and look out across the river at the buildings framed by the two bridges and then below to FDR drive. I don’t know this city at all — hardly paused to look at anything, always fixed my eyes on something that wasn’t there and missed everything that was. What a city — even down here across the river with this limited view you get a sense of its volume, much more so than when you’re in it. This failure will go unnoticed, here, beyond the lights.

I light a cigarette, a pause before oblivion, and scan the scene again. The tide swirls here in the cove and you can hear it echo under the pier. There’s a young gull on the small beach picking at the rubble — dark-winged, awkward. “The sea is just around that corner,” I tell him, but he ignores me and keeps on with his search. Odd night bird. “Go bird.” I stop myself from throwing my butt at him. Now he responds — a flutter of wings on the dark air. And I wonder if that bird can discern anything from the time it takes for the waves to return. I wonder if one can snap one’s own string — test your own expansiveness and the void in which you live — a crooked soul finger plucking a busted instrument in a ghost jug band.

The gull warbles something unbirdlike. “Shaddup,” I tell him, but he speaks again, this time a moan as he hops up onto one of the boards. “This is not the ocean, you stupid bird.” He ignores me again and makes a sudden dash away from the tide. “I’d watch it, bird. You’re no plover.” He makes his way across the bank to me. “I’ve got nothing for you, bird.” I point out at the water. “‘ I don’t know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god. .’ Go to him.”

I don’t know much about my mother or this fish, either — other than they are dead. And I finally realize why she never really liked me — she refused to believe in ghosts. “You are the light of the world . .” She changed toward me — stopped her rages — as I grew older. I just thought that she was getting tired, but now, here, at the butt-end of the universe I realize that she just lost her faith, or, closer, that she never had one to begin with. She stopped believing that I was the one. Poor Lila. I stopped believing, too. And I know how much you hated when I would seem to turn my gaze inward to watch the dark reaches of interstellar space. What was it like, to watch the boy you let live be called to the dark dark dark? To you, a revoking of an inheritance of the earth. Conversely, that eased your mind. But you were wrong, Mama — and I know you’d hiss at me now if you caught me here, in the night, murmuring to ghosts — I am the one. And I don’t know much about ghosts after all, what their purpose is, if they have any at all. I don’t know much about sea birds, dead fish, what their moans, their silences signify. I don’t know why the water always sounds like it’s leaving. I don’t know much about rivers, but I think that I am a strong brown god. I am forgotten — seasons, rages, past covenants — unrecognized ritual and symbol, effects skinned from their purpose, strangely practiced and then, of course, discarded. Fuck.

I open a beer. It makes sense: the rush of escaping gas, the smell of earth — wheat, hops, and barley. The scents hover around the opening as more come rushing out, making the gas cloud spin and expand. I look down into the bottle to see how much is left. Light spins around its mouth, but I don’t know where from. There’s nothing here, not even an ambient glow. I go to stick my finger through the cloud to test if it’s really there — to test its density. I curse myself for caring. I go to take a sip. Not yet. I take a drag instead — exhale. The smoke mixes with the scent, folds and unfolds as it moves slowly up, a nebula of gas and matter: a galaxy in the making or one that’s already been destroyed. Interstellar seeds or interstellar wreckage — inanimate dust that won’t show me a sign, but only rises up, up. . It’s the beer — the beer’s calling. . and I listen, but nothing seems to be there.