Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I listen, now more trying to remember the vapor’s initial rush. What was that sound? No sound. And its inverse — all sound, which is compressed into the wind across the water. A gust peels off from the main wind, swirls around the cove, builds in speed, works its voice up to a wail, then shatters against the pillars of the bridge. It recollects and does it again — all sound and its multifaceted voice: birth’s cry, death’s rattle, and the awful wail of resurrection. Disparate, therefore discordant— but listen —there’s a wholeness to that clamor, the hiss in memory of the vanished smoke and the river’s applause, soft against itself, hard against the stone. And I still don’t know much about rivers, but I think that I am a strong, brown god: “sullen, untamed and intractable . .” no longer patient, as there is nothing left to wait for. A frontier, but only one in the distance, something forgotten when out of view, and when visible, suitable only to be projected upon, a future conquest, a longing, something to consider crossing, or a marker — reminder of all that remains undone. Utile and useless at once, so then something to co-opt with suspicion, as it threatens to twist its shape beyond meaning and recognition. And so misquoted, misappropriated, jailed, humiliated, rendered a cliché, an anachronism, and finally forgotten.

The gull finally behaves. He moans and I turn to watch him rising slowly above the shattered beach. And he’s just a gull — hovering on dark wings. Calling out, seemingly to me, over and over. There’s nothing behind that bird, nothing to the swirl of wind or water. And I don’t know much about gods except that if the one or the many do exist, it must be a terrible thing to be prayed to — your perpetually multiplying charges calling out in their perpetually expanding voice to be heard and for you to make yourself known by infusing yourself in everything — but as a mystery, because the choice of a god revealing itself is to either perplex or overwhelm. So you come shrouded or in flashes — something moving quickly past the senses. But there is something — that dark twist in the water; the vanished river in the rubble shore; that bird, fixed in the air, betraying this planet’s wobble — that I hold on to, something that enters me then transforms, like the way the smell of salt in the air flattens and extends the promontory, and I see from inside the river’s mouth open. And once inside me it moves — that fusion of sense, memory, and promise — between the poles of doubt and faith, feeling and logic. And those poles suggest other ones that have gone unnamed, whose distances between remain unexplored. It must be awful to be a god — the voice of and the ear to all that wailing. Prayed to and rejected.

Another wailing gust, but this time inscrutable. This world is charged and then not. A rush of sudden meaning, then nothing, but the absence of meaning is meaning in itself. And so this landscape is recharged, either by a revisitation or by my wondering where it all went, how long it’s been gone, and if it ever was.

I hold the bottle under my nose. So this is how it ends — no bang, no whimper —just the hiss and scent of escaping gas. I blow more smoke into the scent cloud, but it’s gone. The wind is voiceless, the river flat black. A perpetual nostalgia charges this world — nothing more — a memory of a collapsed dream. And its pull is inexorable.

I wonder how I’ll say good-bye — call each child into a quiet room, or take them all out to the beach. I should do it at sunset, when, if you look west, the rich, muted light draws all the late summer’s colors of the grass, the sand, and the water to their surfaces like blood to sun-warmed skin. And if you look east, the world is sheathed in a translucent skin of flint and azure. I shouldn’t say a thing, just walk with them quietly and let them remember it as they will, if they remember it at all.

I raise the bottle of beer — one last chance. It is brown, sullen, and intractable —deceptively translucent — but there’s no light for it to bend and not the slightest hint of a trembling.

I go to wordlessly toast the gull. He’s gone, but I catch a line of headlights moving quickly, Manhattan-bound across the bridge. They span the dark water, connect to the roadway, more lights speeding northbound on the drive, to the Manhattan Bridge, east and up, then down and gone. But I know that beyond the vanishing point the circle is completed. I follow the loop around again and again — blur my vision to make the many seem to be one streak lashing around the edge of darkness. They’re all there — faces, anthems, vows, frantic dreams glowing with super speed before they vanish into the dark dark dark. What is their last prayer — or plea? Can it be heard, or does it disappear as well — indistinguishable, lost in the clamor? I look and listen to the other systems: the wind between the bridges, the twisting water in the cove, the tide into the banks. I can see if you were a lost bird, how you could mistake this little cove for a beach, the river for the ocean, but maybe when you found only synthetic drift and meatless shells, you’d despair. And maybe, seeing me perched at the top of the granite steps, you’d call out. What does the dark gull say? Perhaps we are all in service to our own local god — each system with its own prayers or incantations. Listen: The wind’s prayer to the bridges, the water’s prayer to the cove, the speeding light’s prayer to the dark says, “Release me.” That’s why it sounds all a part when I listen: It’s all one prayer— “Let me go.” My local gods are here: this fish, this woman, this bottle. I call: “Let go.” I wait. Nothing. The water, the wind keep their futile twist. The light rips around the void — unentering. “Let me go.” Nothing is swallowed, but nothing is released.

I smell the beer again, and the image that follows is me, dead by the river. I don’t want to die. I know there’s no freedom there. The bone’s prayer to god is death — release me. And I don’t know what that release is, but I know it’s more than fossilization, disintegration, or reanimation. It wants to disappear but also never to have been — carry no memory and leave none, either. But the bone isn’t heard, or maybe it is, but perhaps there’s no power that can do this. Maybe its god doesn’t know it — doesn’t see it. Does my maker remember me, and how do I move under that scrutiny? I watch the things I’ve charged, the residue of their movement, and then try to fill the empty wake. We are not moved by the epiphany but moved by the nostalgia. The movement gone, I get left with the vexing memory.

I have a beer in my hand and I know it will kill me, but I can’t not drink now. I feel its pull. Perhaps I’ll sit here through the night and speed around its emptiness. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. I toast with two voices: “To oblivion” and “Godspeed.” I stand up and heave the bottle as hard as I can out to the river. It carries far and the sound it makes when it finally meets the water is more like a deep gulp than a splash.

I turn back to the bench and the five remaining beers. I don’t want them. I pick up the urn instead and my bag, turn away, cross the path, and step down to the beach. I pull the largest section of ply away from the water’s edge and set it at the top of the rise. I take the newspaper out of the bag, separate the pages, and spread it out on the board, adding layers until the dampness stops bleeding through. I get the notebook and tear the pages from the binding and lay them on the newspaper in four overlapping rows, five sheets long and three layers deep. I fold the edges of that rectangle into inch-high walls — repeating the fold until they’re thick enough to stand on their own. I reinforce them around the outside with masking tape.