Man Gone Down (46 page)

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” III

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.

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.

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.”