Man Gone Down (15 page)

There must be wind down on the river, too. The dark water has low crests, which reflect the dim light they gather. They look like hands, and the lapping of the river against the stone pilings sounds like slow claps. Above, the D-train wheels spark against their track, lighting up the Manhattan Bridge's steel. And after the light there is shadow, dark forms of ghost welders on the beams, and the memory of the train wheels' spark allows me to see their old torches. The steel, the stone
pilings, the dark water all know their own stories, and they reveal them in their own way, the bridges through their solidness, the river with its ceaseless motion—lapping. But also, they are in audience.

A river is a good place for ghosts. Perhaps ghosts believe they are like rivers. Or perhaps they feel they're like bridges, that they are useful in that way. My mother is a ghost and I hope for both our sakes she finds a river to haunt. I think she may have made some ghosts of her own, flushed some babies down before me, and perhaps some after, and I think, now, I know why. It wasn't because she didn't want children, but because her children would never be children. In the end, they would fail, and so would she. So standing at the top of her diasporic arc, she flushed. I wave out to the dark water, if she is there, to tell her I'm okay.

It's a strange thing, indeed, to go through life as a social experiment. I've been to Dublin and London, walked in tobacco and cotton fields. I've been to the Oklahoma reservation Minette walked away from, and I've seen the Mississippi dump into the Gulf. And I've seen a faded rainbow, like the parabolic wake of an arrow, shot through the center of them all. Ellis Island is to my left, and I scan back, south to north from the mouth of the river to the Empire State, red, white, and blue, and back again then up the rising central tower of the bridge to Old Glory. I'm on the flat now, around the back of the tower.

When you do something three hundred times a year for a decade, it becomes, even for me, habitual. So when I look down to where the towers should be, the cognitive dissonance hits me like a punch to the inner ear. I go down as though someone has taken my legs, and then my body, and I'm only a head that drops. Then I'm up again—vain, a cosmic vanity because no one's there to see it. There's blood in my mouth.

Brian is buried in a mass grave down there. I know it. Incinerated in an enormous oven. I feel I should call out to him but I know he won't respond. Just as he never called—returned my stupid message on his machine:
How are you doing?
—
“Not well. I'm dead.”
I see him with his shaved head and eyebrows, his saffron robes and alms bowl. He's sitting at his desk next to the window. I see him on the soccer field, on the baseball field—awkward—then leaning
against a locker, talking close and cool with yet another girl. His hair was black, thick and loopy then. I remember him watching
Dirty Harry
and thinking he could fight and then getting his ass beat. I wonder what the woman he'd told me about, when he first disrobed and moved back, was doing. Did they stay together? Was she dead, too? I wonder what he'd say to me. Do the dead cry out for retribution? Some said they do—but did they really ask the dead?

The television, the radio, the newspaper—I heard and read that there were no words to describe what had happened. It was said that it was tragic. It was said that the people who had died were heroes. And I heard some try to evoke the spirit of the heroes by speaking their names, as though their evocation would, in turn, make them heroic, too. I don't know what happened on that day, at his desk. I don't know if he was buying or selling puts or calls. I don't know who he saved or who he may have abandoned before he was crushed or burned. I do know that if I call his name into the air, it does not imbue me with his spirit, nor absolve me of the guilt I feel: Ass and fool that he was, I didn't mourn my old friend. I know that when I heard the corporate-speak, the market-speak, the military-speak, the politico-speak—I know that when I heard all the speak and watched the markets tank while people spoke of patriotism and unity, it made me lonely. It made me sad. It made me seethe.

Beyond my arm extended is a mass grave. Why is it that those least equipped to speak, speak—the most, the loudest, in sound-bite, reductive, in attempts to name and dichotomize, to clarify with words that are general and misused, with phrases that are hackneyed? With anthemic statements that do little to cloak the next agenda—more death. Why more death? I don't recall any symbols or ideas buried under the debris—just people. Mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, lovers and beloved, who were caught in the whirl of the bartering and the bloodshed of nations—the ill will of men. Men who have claimed the position of God, to deal death with impunity: their people, asleep or tranquil and full of their opiates. Yes, in some way complicit in their own slaughter, but how could they have known? How could anyone have known that one morning they'd awake to be ripped by fire?

And the leaders call to the dead. They call on the dead, and then say the dead call out for retribution. It all seems too convenient—that the chorus from a mass grave would rise up and sing for another and another and another. Genocide wrapped in some rationalization that someone is owed something. The continued body count, millennia old and miles long. My old friend Brian is ash. Fuck you.

And then it was time to get past it—move on. I hadn't gotten past the last slaughter or the one before it. And I knew I was wrong, because I crashed around, ranting and angry when I knew I was just sad, just a sad coward. Too scared to mourn, to deal with grief, so I took it out on my children. I made sure that they were okay. I made sure that they were healing, all the while knowing that my motives were flawed. Premeditated acts of heroism usually are.

I turned off the radio and the television for a long time. I stopped reading the newspaper. I missed the war. When I thought it was safe to tune back in—back to those who'd moved on—I found that it wasn't. It was back to the same old shit—bulldozers and human bombs, corporate scandals—people advancing what they thought they deserved. Racial ideology. One day I heard a man posit the same tired argument promoting
black entrepreneurship:
Money. Power. It's always struck me as odd—turning one's back on resistance. If you and yours have been exploited for capital, then why, in turn, would you covet that capital?

I used to sit on the curb on hot summer days, music on the transistor radio hung on the cyclone fence. The singers would preach the gospel of love and redemption—like a sermon on the slab. Even the teenagers, the junior pimps and loan sharks, would stop and listen. And when the cops would cruise up looking for someone's brother or someone's daddy, or the owner of the fence, and would threaten to “smash that damn thing” if we didn't shut it off and move, we'd all quietly stand and stare and turn off the radio and take it off the fence. I don't know, but to me, even as a small boy, I thought we'd done something. I thought we'd won. And some of those boys are dead now, some are locked up and some made money and bought houses with fences to remind a new
generation about property. But the caller on the radio, a doctor, successful, he claimed, was angry—his Hippocratic oath lost in some cellar box. He shouted that the last thing
we
needed to be was spiritual. Would that be changing the system from within—buying your freedom? As though freedom had a price that could be expressed monetarily. The man gives you a dollar and a title and everything's cool, or on the way to being cool, or cool enough for you. But what would I know? My father is toothless and impotent. My mother died broke and alone, listening to yet another soul single. Looks like I will, too.

There's a noise on the bridge. There's something up here with me and for an instant I let myself think it's something evil, something after me. I jump and I run. I'm gone, downhill—as though Mrs. McDougal's sicced her Doberman on me and I'm just trying to make it to my door, but I'm running the wrong way, into Manhattan and I don't know what's behind: dog, dog pack, bike gang. All I can hear is my breathing, my feet on the planks. There's no cover downtown, nothing until Tribeca or Chinatown. I'm on the concrete. The descent flattens. I tear through the turn at the bottom and try to sneak a look. There's something behind me, just far enough away to be a blob, but still menacing. The whole bridge seems to move. The air around it, the glossy, blue starless night separates from itself: great blue body, great blue sea. I search for another gear as I zig off Centre to Duane—it's not there.

I turn up Church. My spit tastes bitter and I'm beginning to feel my body, its limits. My legs will cover only so much ground. My feet will turn over only so fast and it doesn't seem fast enough. Gavin's father had always drilled us never to look back, that looking back robs you of your inertia.
“Be like Lot.”
I start seeing colors in the periphery at Spring Street. The streetlights blur and form permanent dots in the air. I'm going catabolic. Protein is shitty fuel but I suck on my bleeding lip anyway, trying to recycle something.

It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment. Mama never told me there'd be days like this, that the God she'd evoked would
be gone, his disciples dead, mad, vanished, or corrupted, that those who were left would be running for their lives. I wonder if God stayed my mother's hand above the toilet bowl. I see me swirling down. A sheet of lightning blows up Sixth Avenue. It's outflanked me. I turn east on Houston. Two women at the corner clap as I go by. The blocks seem to elongate and then suddenly I'm at the end of them. More lightning over the river. I run south down Lafayette. There's still a chance. Somewhere on a side street a truck runs over a steel plate. The thunder responds. Then the sky explodes with noise and light and water. The rain on my face mixes with my sweat and I taste brine and blood on my lips. The wind throws garbage at me. My heart thumps like a manic donkey's hoof against my chest. It too will explode soon. I'm still three miles away from Marco's.

I make the bridge. I watch it rise, long and steadily and I realize I've been running downhill for the last mile. I make it halfway up the wood and the bile comes—an olive green blast that cuts through the wind. I stumble forward, still puking, and then I go down. My gagging is so loud and so external I can't believe it's me.

Finally I stop. The rain may have stopped before, I don't know. I'm on my knees, the last wave of heaves gone. The bridge cables rise and seem to bend over me like ribs. I'm inside a mile of skeleton. Inside. I've been inside all along. Swallowed long ago. I never knew. I never wanted to know. I've been dumb and wanting inside a giant sea belly. The sky is calm. The world has cooled because I'm inside—no weather. The city sprawls endlessly in every direction.

There's someone ahead of me on the bridge, not too far away. Close enough to see the bob-bob of her ponytail as she ascends. She runs like Claire. She looks as though she's moving quickly, but she isn't covering much ground at all. She must have been close when I went down. It's too late for her to be alone on the bridge. It's not safe. I stand up and start running again—just fast enough to close the gap a bit. Just close enough to keep an eye on her.

I close on her quickly. She bounces up and down, going through the motions of running without really doing so. Black sport bra. Black
short shorts. Blonde hair. She's long legged, and as I close I see her hamstrings and calves contract and release.

I'm on her hip and she turns. She doesn't startle. She smiles and waves in time with her gait. She speeds up and tries to stay with me. We run together, make the plateau and wind around the center pillar, me every few steps pushing the pace just a hint. She breathes heavily and lengthens her stride—less bounce. She exhales through her mouth, pursing her lips as if to focus her overall effort. We hit the downhill. She shakes her head, whipping her hair across her face like a horsetail.

“Go.”

She waves toward Brooklyn. She pats her sternum and feigns a wheeze.

“I'm okay. Go.”

She waves again. I find a new gear, and then another. And I'm fast again. But now I feel solid, like one muscle exerting one effort with no memory of the effort before. I make a promise, out loud, to whoever may be listening.
“I will do it. I will get the money. Then I will go. I swear it.”

Tomorrow I will go to work and do whatever it is I need to do. The vertical iron rails flash by quickly, giving fleeting glimpses of the road below and the river beyond. I remember riding the streetcars with my mother after work and how the fences would start to blur as the train gathered speed. The metal would flicker with light and the images of the world beyond as though I was looking into the lens of some old, dimmed projector. She'd shift her legs and the grocery bags at her feet would complain. And not knowing I was watching her, she'd sigh, and her miles and her age would show in her face and sit on her shoulders. She'd involuntarily start to hum or even sing,
“People get Ready.”
The memory fades back to the black water, the rails—so real that I reach out for them. And it's just me going fast and the bridge and the water, sleeping Brooklyn in front and tomorrow in my head. The dead are quiet now, soon they will be gone, for that is the price of empire.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.