Man Gone Down (37 page)

I stand, ready to go.

“Are you going to stay for a drink?” She thumbs at Ed and Peter's table.

“Thank you, no. I have to be going.”

“Teddy?” she cranes her neck and points. I nod. She straightens quickly and throws that hair behind her. “Are you gonna be around next week?”

“I don't think so. I'm not sure.”

“See you around.” She holds her hand up but doesn't wave.

“Good night.”

I'm drawn to the bookstore window, how the light falls on the covers. I can't make them out from across the street, but I know what titles they are. They've been there all summer. And while I can honestly say that I've never tried to picture my own book on display, I have imagined the window with these books gone, not
no books,
just not these books, although I can't picture the ones I'd want there. I've been inside, spent strange late morning and twilight hours when I should have been doing God knows what but something other than skimming through pages of nonfiction that read like the liner note text for cookbooks and fiction that read like lists—random and disparate images; loose, frayed metaphors used to stitch litanies of random, mundane events together written by brick-dry white people with polished syntax, sniping at dead poets, complaining that the dead folk had lived too much—tried to do too much. And the ethnics,
whoring out their otherness, pretending to be true to some alleged mother tongue or pretending that the language of the brick-dry will speak true—verisimilitude via assimilation. I get confused. They all seem to be exactly right. Their stories are so clean, so free of bafflement, stink, or cosmic funk—cosmic affliction. Their words shrink the world down, down, tapering to a point, as though they'd followed the line of a table leg down through the cellar floor to its subatomic origin, then claimed—
that's enough!

And I've seen the larger in the microcosmic, but that has never been the end for me. When I find the pointed end of the tapered leg in the center of the earth, I get blown out the other side into space, yanked into orbit, and then slingshot out. The cosmic affliction faces me every day. And it may be hubris to believe your own trouble has enormous weight—your trouble is another's—but I think of the old Negro spirituals, their birth: Trouble is unavoidable, undeniable. It's in your face and seems to stretch for as far as eyes can see. The only end to it is a dream, a song. And so when I read about flaking skin, microscopic annoyances—whose panties to pull off—I am troubled enormously. It goes on and on, the complement to the rock of my alleged soul.

So now I prepare to enter the trance, out of which will come the incantation to dissolve this corner scene—the shrine to the
hard and dry.
And it's so predictable; the asphalt ripples like a lazy, black river. The night sky responds—
Amen.
The plate glass shatters noiselessly. The pieces vanish before they fall—
And the urbanness de-coalesced.
Now the reshaping: street and slab and stars to suit me. The cars are cat-eyed and quiet as leaves riding downstream.
Magic?
—or just some more blah-fuckity-blah, more yip-dipity-yip. There's a reason the sidewalk is cast in concrete.

I count the hat money—forty-three dollars, not even bus fare these days. I realize how nervous I was, playing in the bar, the cool air makes me feel my sweat on my shirt. I put the money away, scan across the glass, and catch my reflection in the dark part. I feel compelled to speak to it.
“Loser.”
It surprises me, the way it comes out:
a sharp hiss. I shake my head, raise a finger to my lips, and shush myself. I step out of the picture but leave the finger there, flexing and extending it slowly—my soul finger.

I make a fist and wonder if I'm capable of vengeance—the payback of the spade. The dark fist could be useful to me, symbolically and concretely. But the wind blows through my thin coat and across my damp shirt. I shiver and my hand opens. I start to sing and shiver again, wondering if anyone I knew was in there listening. I hear my voice come back to me, not singing, not even exhorting, but whining. Me, up there on the makeshift stage, limp and slumped; big, brown, and whining, with the alms bowl going round.
I'll give you two bits if you shake your ass up there.
I go to close my fist again as if to squeeze out the image, it complies grudgingly. Who can blame it? It probably wants to belong to someone who'll swing it. I'm not up to speed—not fully evolved. There was a time when memory was an asset: which root to pick, which route to walk, where the lair of the death beast was, poisonous fruits and blossoms. Then over time, as memory became collective and things to eat were packaged, routes mapped and laminated, it became a vestige, an appendix waiting to burst and spread the horrors of the ancient world—the mammoth stomping and the saber tooth creeping through your guts. Death by spear or weapon of stone. But there weren't the millions to kill, or the technology to do so. Now, when there is time, when we neither follow the herds nor smear their images on our walls, when we have time for real intimacy, time and ability to listen and hear the voices of the lonely—panties, blood and semen, and a blank-faced woman-girl; twenty-thousand pink slips; clipper ships; Calcutta; barren potato fields; Geronimo; panzer tanks; napalm. We pay a price to have it all somehow neatly extracted, separated, named, reduced, and thinly rendered then served back to us with a pinch of wit and trope. It seems better to just forget.

Shake's reflection looks at me from the window. He can appear like this, on your doorstep after work, while you're going down into the subway, or packing the kids into a car—the wraith of transition.

“Why are you looking at that? There's nothing for you there.” He dismisses the books with a sweeping wave. “Fucking trembling Anglicans, telling me about the nature of death and God.”

I wave, more like a gesture of benediction than a greeting,
“Between the idea and the reality. Between the emotion and the act falls the shadow—for life is very long.”

He waves back. “Between my foot and your head sits your ass—
for my boot is very big.”
He jab-steps at me. I jump back then gather myself, embarrassed that he startled me. He doesn't seem to have noticed any of it. We shake. He pulls his hand back, then steps away—right and forward and left then back—with an unrealized desperation, like a broken toy robot, forgotten, trapped in its last command.

“No seriously,” he nods, still moving. “You look good, man. Real good.”

“Thanks, Shake.” He's wrapped his long dreads under a dirty turban. Through the graying beard, he's very handsome—strong-jawed. His eyes are slightly sunken. His dark skin, even though wet with sweat, is a bit ashy. His lips are thin, and his eyes look out like those of someone who hasn't completely woken up from a horrible dream. And although these aren't necessarily signs of age, they act in concert to connote miles, experience, hardship—a great weight hauled.

“Please don't call me that anymore.”

I watch him move. He's still well muscled and looks as if he could spring up and dunk a basketball or dribble past a defender with ease, but those muscles that used to move him in such an elegant way now seem to jerk him from corner to corner of his little box.

“Don't mind this. It's just the psychotropic waltz. It's nothing.” He looks at the books in the window, pushes his chin at one. “Ain't that your boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Who's that other fool? I never heard of him.”

“I suppose he's the heir apparent.”

“What the fuck is he inheriting, the right to talk bullshit?”

“I don't know, Shake.” He jab-steps at me again, glaring, as though a punch will follow. I go to slip it, but he slides back to his original motion, retaining the glare.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“So that's your boy? So this fool is your replacement—that's funny.”

“Not really.”

“Hey man, take it easy. Why don't you give the man a call?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Why? His book's in every motherfucking store window, big and small, and it ain't even February. He's gotta have something for you, you know?”

“No.”

“No he doesn't?”

“No. I'm not going to.”

“Well why not?”

“It's complicated.”

“Fuck you then, be a fool. Walk these streets all hangdog dog-raggedy.”

“It's out of my hands now.”

“So put it in his. Make that call.”

“No.”

He shakes his head, stops, then pats his coat pocket like he's looking for a cigarette.

“You smoke now, Shake?”

“No. Don't call me that. Nobody out here knows me like that—Donovan, remember?”

“I'm sorry, Donovan.” It feels so strange to say it.

He nods, loses the glare. “What's the matter with you anyway?”

I kick stupidly at the slab. “I'm broke.”

“Broke,” he jumps back then starts waltzing again. “Shame on you. And you used to call yourself a metaphysician.”

“I did?”

“Well, I called you one. I guess I still do.”

“Aren't you one?”

“Me, no. I'm insane.” He cackles. It's sharp. It seems that it would have cut him on the way up, but he stands there, unscathed. Right before he was committed he applied to the NEA for a grant to enslave three white people for thirty years and study the effects chattel slavery had on them. He was going to write a play based on the results.

I try not to, but I can't help but watch him be yanked back into the spastic steps. Now he adds a hand to the sequence—waist to nose and back again—and each pass seems to create and build nervous energy in him.

“Don't look at me like that,” he snaps, springing forward—still not punching.

I try to cover. “Like what?”

“Like you're angry or you pity me—whatever—you don't know.”

“Covering all possibilities with that, huh?”

“Well, I have to.”

I look up into the night sky and wait for it to do something, it's crisp azure—autumnal—the stars are bright yellow. Shake grunts like he doesn't want the silence. I want him to go away. He resumes his dance.

“What's the matter, nothing to say?”

“You know what,” I kick at the sidewalk again. “Forget it.”

“Forget what? You didn't say nothing.” He turns, walks in a tight circle and then is yanked back to the square. “Damn, man. You're fucked up.” He starts shaking his head violently, raises his hand to speak, aborts the attempt, and drops it. Then, like the gesture was a feint, he mumbles, “I didn't tell you to marry a white woman.”

I step back, shoot a hand up. “Good night, Shake.”

He stops. “Donovan,” he says quietly, with a tremble. It stops me. “My name is Donovan.” He waits until he's sure I won't leave and then exhales fully. The pent-up energy seems to go out with his breath. He closes his eyes, either trying to see something inside or to focus on keeping his feet still. He starts swaying his shoulders, moving through the
sequence, but slowly and on a smaller scale. He opens his eyes and looks down at his feet to make sure that his near stillness is real.

“I didn't tell you to marry her, but I never said it was wrong. It's not something I would do, but I'm not paying your bills, taking out your trash—whatever. Come on. I'm just saying that if you were with a black woman, she could tell you something. When you stand in the dark with that question on your face, she'd at least know there was something on your mind—right? And she knows, maybe not innately or anything, but it's something she saw in her daddy's face when he didn't know she was looking. It's on her brother's now, too. And she's not gonna hesitate, you know, she's going to, on her terms, know. She might be completely wrong—hell—she might be just a fool,” he slaps his cheek violently twice, “but she won't be locked out by this. There are so many other barriers in place, but not this one, your color. Your wife doesn't have that. She probably looks at you and thinks, ‘I don't know that.' But she thinks, everybody thinks, whether they admit it or not, that the skin is the thing. At least with a black woman you could hunker down together and start something—start hurling assumptions at the world. What happened to that painter you were with back home?”

“She's famous.”

“No, what happened to you two?”

“She stopped calling.”

“Why—you wouldn't fuck her, would you?”

I think about hitting him, but I hold back because there doesn't seem to be any malice in his voice. I exhale, too. My hand probably wouldn't close anyway. “She didn't like my poems.”

He grins and then shakes his head violently to erase it. “At least you would have someone you could talk about them with. Someone you could lie with. But with you, you look and all you can see is her white face—everything it stands for, all the ways it rejects you:
Your wife's white face.
And you're locked out. It can't tell you true, not a damn thing, except maybe how far out you really are. That's lonely. And then where do you go—for comfort—huh? Maybe you have that moment when you dare to say, ‘It doesn't matter,' or ‘I'm
beyond that.' You may not say it in words, but you act it. But what does your boy say—“. . . redeemed from fire by fire.” You'll forgive him his abstract crimes against humanity . . . what about her? But I don't know why any brown person on this here earth in their right mind would pass through fire of any kind for someone white. I mean, why would you do that?” He shrugs his shoulders. “Miles and miles of bad motherfuckin' road. No road, sometimes.

“I don't know, my friend, my brother. I don't know if I've said it or only thought it. You're either brilliant or you're a fool, out here in the night, unseasonably cold, all by your broke self. No allies to call on.” He points at the books in the window. “What have you been doing, my brother, while everyone else was building networks, consensus, shared ideology?” He cackles again. It rips the night.