Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

He loses his smile. “I don’t want to sound coarse, but — why are you here?”

“I need a letter, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

His eyes widen. “A letter? No trouble, none at all.” He looks around the stacks on his desk as if one was already there. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll make some calls. Are you planning on coming back here? I can certainly squeeze you in, but the funding. .”

“No, sir.”

He stops searching. He seems a little hurt and tries to hide it. “No, somewhere else.” He nods. Points. “That makes sense.” He cocks his head and drops his voice. “Ivy?”

“I need proof of employment. I’m sorry I have to ask.”

Now he looks confused. “You need a job,” he says unsurely. Then he brightens. “Did you finish your doctorate somewhere else and not tell me? I won’t have you be an adjunct any longer.”

“No, sir, just the letter.”

His face turns, and he leans back in his chair like someone slowly realizing he’s been insulted. He covers his mouth with his hand and looks away from me, out the window, down Lexington.

He speaks through his fingers. “You know, since you left here, I’ve been keeping an eye and ear open for your name. Silly, I suppose, but I thought by now that I’d have seen you in print, or that you would come out of that elevator,” he gestures at the suit. “And you would be well.”

“I am well.”

He nods, unconvinced. He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “You know, after the break-in, I wracked my brain trying to understand why they chose to take what they took: the computer, the printer, a radio — I think I got it after you left; it was a good one — some other things, which strangely enough, I don’t recall ever having here, ever owning. So I know it was, and forgive me for saying this, someone I know. And I’m no amateur sleuth. I’ve never found that world intriguing. But I can’t help but think that whoever it was took all of the other things to get that picture. Every other item had value out there.” He points at the window, then waves at it. He covers his face, rubs his eyes, pushes away from the desk, and then resumes his watch over the avenue.

“When I signed on to do what I was going to do, it was during a dark time. There existed in this country’s dominant class a horrifying mix of paranoia, cynicism, ignorance, amnesia, sadism, and base desire, and it was wrapped in a synthetic cloak of privilege and entitlement. Forgive me — I’m mixing metaphors, I know — but that collective was like a seed, and things grew from it: the white American middle class, the immigrant middle class. And like thorny, dense hedgerows grew barriers between the classes, barriers between the races, and barriers between the people and their government — between the people and themselves. Strange times. We were kids then, so we didn’t know, but we felt it. Well, I’ve lost my place — let me make it brief. I knew back then, we knew, that it was just a big lie — that it was all corrupt. From the military industrial complex to every untried lynching, our country had gone to shit — perhaps always had been shit since its inception.”

He clears his throat with a sharp bark, focuses on my tie, and then goes back to the window. “I thought it could be, should be, had to be —different. So I tried, in my own way, to make it different.” He points at me but doesn’t look. “You were just a baby when we marched on Cicero. We thought every loud noise was a gunshot. Cicero, hah —an American town named Cicero, I never thought about it before. And that town — how rich.

“I wasn’t in Memphis. I was here. I was ill with an extraordinary fever, so I remember it strangely. Bobby Kennedy told me, via the television, of course. I’m sure you’ve seen that footage. I thought I was going to die. I’d never been so scared in my life — not in Cicero, or anyplace else where they brought the guns and the gas and the dogs. Each time I exhaled I thought I’d never take another breath. I just lay there on the couch— that room was dark, man. And when I recovered and was up and about, I forgot all about my bout, until, of course, they killed Bobby. The same thing happened. I forgot, not the act, but that despair. I suppose that’s the mind coping.

“But I’m older now, less prone to emotional swoons. Now I remember. I say it again, dark days are here, my boy. There’s hardly any— discrimination. True, no one’s getting their brains blown out—’round these parts, at least, but I see the darkness in the possibility that there aren’t any brains left to be splattered. Or perhaps I was wrong — perhaps we all were: black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, oppression and freedom. Did you know that I was the first black student to receive a doctorate in philosophy from my alma mater?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Ah, well, taking a dialectic approach to your potential and probable murderer. Synthesis during crisis — what would that look like? A man in the middle of a riot scratching his chin. At least, back then, only part of the world was mad. Nonetheless, someone’s got to know right from wrong, son. Someone has to weigh in.”

He pushes a stack of papers to one side of his desk. “In my advancing years I’ve been known to prattle on to my semicaptive audience. Forgive me.” He sucks his teeth and focuses on a point just above my head. He grins broadly, inhales sharply, gestures grandly a few times in the air and makes his voice loud and bright.

“Still the aesthete? Or have we dirtied our hands yet?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You poets — practicing or not — you arbiters of taste, of morality, do you ever wonder who does the dirty work for you?” He brightens his tone even more, as though delivering a punch line. “Now you come to me for assistance. Where were you when we needed your help?

“I’m sorry,” he taps the desk. “But I had plans for you.” He looks at me with a toothy smile and turns his palms up to the air in mock bafflement.

“We all did.”

“They had plans for me, too.” He looks down Lexington like it was a tunnel of memory that he wished to go down, knew he could not — and it gave him great sorrow as well as great relief. “There’s still something in the works for me, I believe.” He sighs. His breath seems to gently expel the vision. “Why do you need this letter? Wait — don’t answer that.”

“It’s for my kids.”

“Ah, a noble sentiment. Righting your ship at last, eh?”

It strikes me as being particularly mean. I jab back.

“Hegel missed the boat, you know.”

He seems unfazed. “Didn’t everyone — you, too?”

“Yeah, but no one’s building shrines to my miscalculations, least of all me.”

“You sound embittered, my friend. What, did the aesthete take some real-world knocks?”

“I’m not an aesthete. I never was.”

“Really, what then?”

“Just a man.”

“Once again — how noble.”

“Someone’s got to be.”

He wrinkles his brow thoughtfully and points at me. “You know, when you came off the elevator, I thought that perhaps you’d struck gold — that we’d lost you to Wall Street or hip-hop. You know, sometimes when I walk through the mall down there and I hear the students and the music coming out of the idling cars. . the clamor of and the clamor for lucre, I get so damn angry sometimes — sometimes just damn sad.” He shakes his head. “I can’t get through to them. ‘The gospel of work and money’ has taken hold of a new generation. A whole century later, they haven’t read it, so they don’t know it. And they think they’re being militant. They’re different from your generation. Then again, perhaps they’re not.” He makes a fist and taps the desk with it. “So, tell me, although I know you don’t want to, but there isn’t anyone else but the two of us here, and this won’t give you a leg up on another student. One, if I may, black man to another — tell me what you’re thinking about all this.”