God's Gym (20 page)

That's why the fallen one must lie so still. With far to go, much to carry, a body must rest and rest. Where I stand, I can see myself watching. Not here. Not there. Not me. Not the one down. I'm present and absent. Motionless though time never stops. Falling. Falling slowly and everyone watching me fall, but I'll be the last to know. My scribbled words in the wrong language alongside ribbons, a bloody bandage, a lock of hair, salt, wildflowers, the leg of a toad, a crow's feather, bee's wing, leaves and sticks and stones others have smoothed, tucked, sprinkled, spit, rubbed on the winding cloth, our good news and bad news mailed home for eyes we'll never see, hands never touch, voices never hear.

Goody-bye, goody-bye.
I see fish swimming across a plowed field. A pale worm sprouting wings and rising. Birdfish, fish-birds leaping, bodies arched like rainbows, their feathers or gills or hide or shell, whatever you'd call their wrappings for which there are no words, glisten, shimmer like metal, like wind, like water, thousands of messages, thousands of tiny faces climbing, row after row, from courtside to rafters, tiers of eyes circling the arena.

I'm catching on at last. In this unfolding space nothing stays what it appears to be. What happens is a door into itself, through itself, to something else. Like the hip clothes we profile sauntering into the arena. Like our flashy uniforms. Like our steaming, naked skin after we peel off sweaty gear, toss it on a pile for someone to wash whiter than snow. Like the dead. Like the fallen one we cover with our messages, our chanting. Dressing him, hiding him.

I'm no less a stranger here even though I can account for some of the strangeness. Not the mixed blessing of déjà vu. More like I've been prepared by voices that know how to grab my attention, even though, like my grandfather, they speak barely above a whisper and not often. The scene's not exactly meaningless, not quite crazy: the fallen one could be Sat or Sat in drag or a stranger wearing a Sat mask calling me, teasing me, C'mon, Negro, the night's still young. Sat hesitates at the locker room doorway. I can't not look. He starts to lift his mask and I cringe. Expect a horror show of bloody meat, drool, pus, veins, sinews. What I get is Sat's voice: Maybe it's me, bro, maybe not, but your boon coon Sat's with you, bro, part of this shit,
always, don't you forget. Then I see past whatever Sat's pretending to be, see Sat's hidden features pressed up against the back of the mask, breathing through nose holes, mouth hole, hear him suck his teeth, watch the big, bald, bowling ball head wagging Sat's wag.

One by one, my brother, Sat says. Going down one by one. Faster and faster. Soon won't be none us leff. Nobody speaking de ole language. Nobody wit de ole moves. Going down one by one, baby. Poor baby.
Goody-bye, goody-bye.
Ain't it what dese funny-looking niggers, I mean African sisters and brothers, be saying.
Goody-bye.
Won't be none us leff in a minute.

Sweat darkens Sat's uniform. A puddle spreading under him, a black hole he's dived in and ain't never coming back.

Here comes the little rooster of a referee with the basketball tucked tight under his wing so nobody will run up behind him and pull one of those corny old Globetrotter reams—steal the ball and eat it or change it to a bucketful of water and douse the fans with confetti. He squeezes through the circle, whispers in the coach's ear. Coach nods and the ref in his zebra shirt and last season's black stretch pants with not enough stretch for this year's butt and belly heads for the official's table to make sure no one cheats up the score during the break. Or maybe this once he'll blim-blim, bling-bling over to the scorekeeper and order more time on the clock, or less time, whatever it takes to erase the terrible fall.

Tomorrow everybody will say they knew it was coming, but nobody knew shit till the moment Sat landed. Still don't know shit. Hear people tell the story you'd think Sat's fall a replay. Like been there, done that. Like no big thing, seen it a hundred times before. Like they're connected and get the news beforehand so nothing surprises them. But the game goes on and on, not one game repeated—more game, different game, always. Always news. No playback or fast-forward or time out. Game doesn't end when somebody falls. For a moment you might
think so and study the one who's down. Could be you, but you still won't know shit.

My grandfather had a shotgun and hunted birds and that's what I thought of when Sat fell. A bird high up flying fast and then
pow,
bird drops like a stone. Knuckle crack of bone split on the shiny floor. Sat's long, dark body not moving. Damn.
Didn't believe the old boy could still hop that high.
Sat's glazed eyes staring at nothing we're able to see. The hushed arena kneels, leans in closer for a peek, for a listen.

We tighten our circle, seal the gap where the ref slipped through. Part of our job. We're pros, paid for holding on and letting go, winning and losing, good news and bad news. Who cares. Just as long as we get paid. Just so everybody feels safe. And for the moment everybody is, except the one down. Who we love because we're not him. And love standing around for a couple of minutes with nothing harder to do than worry about how we look, wishing our big shorts had pockets to hide our big hands.

In the same fat book where I read about slave burials I learned
down
is not necessarily bad. Some Africans believe down's holy, one of the Four Kingdoms of the Sun. Without down no up, no world. The sun must rest every day so these African people carve fancy stools for kneeling and watching the sun drop into the sea. Double sun for a while, one in the sky, its twin shining on the water, then half a sun as it sinks, then no sun it seems, just brightness bleeding, spreading, blinding you, scaring you because the sun might not rise again, and for a heartbeat the gold fire really does seem to die. You can almost hear the sizzle. You worry that the sun's too heavy, heavier even than the steel-boned arena kneeling behind our backs, so how will it get its big self up off the floor. The sun will drown. Night never end. But down's not out, the Africans say. Sun sleeps faster than the speed of light. Shoots through the thick earth, pops out the other side still burning if you're awake next morning to see it. So down can't be all bad. The sun bends down and warms water swallowing it. People bend their knees to pray, to dance, to jump up and fly. To get down.

How long. How long will this stranger, this messenger dropped from the sky, stay down. We don't know the answer, can't set our faces right. How long will he cover for us. When will our safe moment end. Who goes down next. If the teammate stretched out on the floor doesn't answer these questions we load on him, who will. How long will it take our messages to cross the sea. How long before play starts up again. All the things we wish to know swirl in the chanting. All we can't know thickens it.

In my fat book, on one of the back pages lined with four columns of tiny print describing full-page illustrations, I found some information about Plate 124, a human figure carved from ebony, a person who could have been normal-sized once, maybe even taller than a basketball player, but some god or devil had sneaked up behind the guy and dumped the whole world's weight on him, squashed him so he looked like three blubbery lips, pancaked one on top the other. Head, belly, and butt blobs you could tell because arrowheads of braid zippered the head blob, a navel poked in the belly blob, elephant toes etched on the bubble-butt blob which rested on the ground.

Talk about a brother being down. Talk about burdens bowing a bro's shoulders. This African man or woman, both since anything anybody could be all squeezed together, glowed black on the white page, smooth, shiny as a bowling ball. Could be a bowling ball. Just needed finger holes, a little more rounding, squashing, to be perfect for bowling. And you know you can always find people willing and happy to do the dirty work. Turn us into something useful. Squeeze some more. Peel our skin, burn it black. Bore holes. Ask Emmett Till. Ask James Byrd, Malcolm, Martin. Check out your children. Check around your own body, sisters and brothers, for fingerprints. For work-in-progress.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
The other afternoon walking into work I glanced up and noticed some Spiderman terrorist had climbed the arena and tagged the dome's brow. Somebody must believe the building's dead. Wants to launch the big, dumb, flying-saucer arena back to sender, back to outer space, with a warning from the Book of Daniel:
The days of the empire are numbered. Mene. Mene. Tekel.
Aramaic from the Old Testament. The strange words spray-painted up there sounded like music when I tried them out loud. Many, many tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. A bouncy pop tune. The kind of ear worm you keep hearing over and over in your mind even when you don't want to. Like a headache, like tinnitis.
Mene, tekel.
Like turnstiles clicking. Money. Money. Fans piling in to watch us play. Tinkle, tinkly music blasting through the PA system before a game. Tekel of turnstiles clicking. Shiny shekels piling up. Tonight's gimmick a bar of Ivory soap with each ticket purchased. Our team's going to
clean up
this season. Clean up our act and go straight to the top. Number one. Ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure like the Deep Throat Ivory Soap lady says. A promotion to end all promotions. Bring the whole family. If you buy enough tickets, soap forever. Clean forever. Step right up to the shower. Who doesn't want to be pure and clean clear through. Who doesn't want to win and win.

Beware, beware the gulf of Benin /Few come out /Many go in.
Sailors sang that sea shanty, but nobody listened.

I watch old Sat-the-Bench, tipsy, sore with arthritis, rise and leave the circle. Below the string tied round his neck Sat ain't got no secrets as he hobbles away from us, hospital gown flapping open around his hips, billowing up to his armpits, gone with the wind. He gingerly steps into a puddle of sea a wave's left behind, another wave on its way. Oh my, my. Like old, blind Oedipus, Sat's not the strength he once was. Thin shanks, scored behind, bent back. Seeking sanctuary. Oh shit, Sat. Did you just wiggle your sorry booty. Did you flash your middle finger or was it two fingers signing V. Is that loose skin, dem dry
bones just another disguise. Are you still playing games. Messing wit my head.

Sea rises to Sat's crusty ankles. Don't go. Don't go, I holler, loud as I can into the wind. The circle breaks up. My words splash like they hit a wall and rebound icy, salty in my face.

Never again.
The first words a player says when we notice there's no one in the space we've been guarding.

Never again.
Our messages, buzzing and swarming like flies above the damp spot where Sat hit, look at us like we're crazy. Like they just might change their minds and go nowhere. Like we should know better than to speak the two words they've just heard.
Never again.
Roll their eyes as if to say, Right. Tell me about it. Play on.

T
HE FIRST TIME
it happened I could forgive myself for being confused. Cutting across the hall from my office into the departmental office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored, rolled-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, busy with files he was returning or extricating from a chin-high bank of beige metal cabinets lining the wall to my right, just inside the departmental office ... nothing unforgivable about being confused a split second by the sight of someone I knew was dead, dead a good long while, dead and buried two thousand miles away in cold, high Wyoming, the dead man Roger Wilson's office down and across from mine, fourth floor Bardett Hall, the dozen years I'd taught at UW, so countless times I'd caught him hunched over his desk under a window opposite the door he always left slightly ajar or him standing, puttering in his share of the ubiquitous metal file cabinets that graced Bartlett and also preside here in this English department located in a building I find myself sometimes calling Bardett, or rather find myself unable to recall this building's name once Bardett pops into my head, even after ten years of coming and going through this building's glass vestibule and thick double doors, one with a push button and ramp for handicap access, nothing unusual or shameful about seeing dead Roger Wilson and silently calling out his name, surprised, hopeful, though I knew better than to believe I'd actually seen him, so I could easily forgive myself for being lost in space and spacing out a present colleague's name, turning
him into a ghost too, who floated invisible above the figure in round bifocals, manila folders in hand, crouching over an open file drawer, my present colleague a phantom whose name I could not say though I struggled like a stutterer to push his name out, it wouldn't descend from the shelf in my brain where it was stored, technical difficulties, transmission temporarily interrupted, the flesh-and-bone body I was staring at could not belong to dead Roger Wilson who'd canceled his claim to a body long ago with a shotgun blast and become a lost soul, visible in this office only to me unless someone could enter my skull, pick their way through the mess of overflowing drawers, files, stacked newspapers, bags of trash, like after a foul odor summons cops to bust through a locked door and they find a recluse rotting on a mattress walled in by debris in a corner of his flat, if you could reach the place in my mind from which Roger Wilson had suddenly appeared, you wouldn't blame me, might forgive me as easily as I forgive myself for mixing up names, places, the living and dead, because it could happen to anyone, happens frequently and usually passes without comment, it's so ordinary and startling at the same time, people figure it's not worth mentioning, who else would want to hear about such an inconsequential moment of slippage, who will attend your funeral, the party for your retirement or publication of your first novel, let alone care whether you are mixed up an instant about the identity of a man you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, a split second of confusion leading nowhere except in a heartbeat back to the commonplace reality of a Tuesday, late in the afternoon, post-seminar, post a dawn commute from New York City to the university in Massachusetts where I've landed and stuck since leaving the mountain West, obviously exhausted and stressed from the long day of travel and teaching when I step cattycorner across the hall and there's old schoolmarm lean and severe, great white hunter and sorry-ass alcoholic, my buddy Roger, wasting his good mind and precious time as usual futzing with files, documenting the shamefully low graduation rate of minority student athletes or serving as liaison between physical sciences and humanities for an interdisciplinary, crosscultural project of team teaching or organizing a new, socially relevant concentration perhaps one day a major, a department where now there is none, its absence or presence a ghost agitating the fertile, slightly hungover brain of my former colleague who's risen from the grave to occupy—yes, yes, I'm able to say the name now—a place here in
Logan Hall,
then just as quickly relinquishes it, fades, and that's
Charley
staring at me, Charley Morin, puzzled because he's caught me staring, an unconventionally long and thus suspect pause, our eyes locked and neither of us offering an explanation, an awkward silence I interrupt finally to clear the air, to sweep away the indecision that must have emptied my gaze of expression and caused Charley perhaps to feel vaguely responsible, perhaps challenged, minding his own business, then sensing the weight of eyes on his bony shoulders, he turns, meets an undecipherable look with a quizzical tilt of his head, his eyes invisible behind thick lenses whose steel rims catch fire as he straightens, shoot a silver tracer to the ceiling, the crimson afterimage slowly deforming in the air, and I recall the words
pillars of light
I heard first coming from the mouth of a physicist and vice president at the University of Wyoming who was attempting to explain to me during intermission at a lunch meeting something beautiful and eerie I reported observing one night camped out in the Snowies, a mountain range with year-round white peaks thirty miles or so east of Laramie, same mountains where Roger Wilson was discovered splattered inside the locked cab of his red pickup after he'd been missing six days,
pillars of light
a nice, evocative phrase I'd thought for the effect produced by rare, spectacular conspiracies of light, temperature, moisture, and wind above high plains plateaus like the one Laramie rests upon,
pillars of light
a poetic image startling me in the faculty dining room nearly as much as I'd been startled by vertical shafts of oscillating brightness striating the night horizon, especially since the vice president who said
pillars of light
usually spoke in a bluff, clipped fashion, pedestrian to a notorious extreme, but as I crunched on my chicken salad sandwich, recalling a time when I couldn't stomach chicken or tuna salad with celery in it, recalling torrents of unsatisfactory words running through my head that night in the mountains, pretending to listen to my colleagues, you know, the way you can look and not look, the phrase
pillars of light
continued to echo and I became less grateful for the vice president's assistance, then his figure of speech collapsed and I saw poor bloody Samson, heard the temple crashing down around his shoulders after he snapped its marble columns, but I wasn't blind, I watched the words
pillars of light
disintegrate, or rather the letters lifting and reshuffling themselves, each letter like a person unshackled from an old life, letters quivering in a kind of jerky, cartoony dance, funny almost, like Molly described letters and numbers detaching from license plates, scrambled letters hanging in the air, jiggly, silly, she said, if you didn't know what the letters would do next, snap into place abrupt as a door slamming to spell out a command she must follow, she said, no matter how stupid or dangerous or humiliating she must do what the letters ordered and
Gawd,
she said, you can't imagine the godawfixl trouble I'd get into, the trouble afterward trying to explain crazy stuff to myself or explain it to my mom or Sarah or the shrink or any stranger who'd listen, she said, smiling, the worst once when my job sent me to Africa to sell barbed wire and steel fenceposts and I loved Africa, loved the people, really enjoying myself over there and learning so much, then I wake up in a cruddy hotel in Ouagadougou, I found out later, in a bed in some dark little hot smelly room, no idea how I got there, where I was, who I was, how long, just lying there bareass naked remembering one sweaty black guy after another pounding away inside me, no faces, no names, just hands pulling and poking and pinching, it could have been going on for days, I stunk like a skunk, man, drugged probably, hurt so badly I'd stopped feeling pain, fear, anything, blacked out I guess, didn't even know my name till I heard Mom's voice Molly Molly like she used to whisper tickling and shaking my shoulder,
Molly, dear, it's time for school,
that hotel room the worst, man, she said, smiling, the two of us in Boston at an outdoor Au Bon Pain table, craziness a different planet she visited occasionally, once upon a time, okay, many times, she smiled again, a faraway place, like not plugged into this one, she says, her bare arms opening wide to embrace sunny afternoon streets busy with shoppers, blond, hard-bodied Molly, bright-eyed, tan that last day I'd see her before she too killed herself, her hands betrayed only the vaguest tremor performing the magic of transforming water to tea, safe because she'd been taking her medicine daily, not skipping doses though the poison zombied her some days, enough good days, clear hours like this one I'd caught her in so she continues to pop a purple, elephant-sized pill each morning, See, she says, holding up one extricated from a small deerskin purse lavishly fringed like the deerskin jacket I'd passed down to her, unstylishly tight on me, tons too large for Molly but she loved it, her trademark a fringed teepee draping her from early adolescence through her teens till it just about fit her broad swim-team shoulders, Look how big, and I'm naked again in the ruins, a huge black Wyoming sky over my head, a sky filled with streamers of bright blood, the wakes of slow-motion falling stars, funnels of pale fire wavering above a bombed-out city burning just beyond the next mountain's dark crest, no words, no made-up names would do, each time I looked up I was stunned by distance, by silence, no words for the raw power destabilizing me. Was order or chaos striping the sky. Neither. Both. Why did beauty scare me, why does strangeness threaten, hello-goodbye, dead Roger Wilson, goodbye,
hi, Charley, excuse me for staring, man, but when I bopped through the door I had a flashback, you know, a weird kind of time wobble and it wasn't you in the corner of my eye over there but some other guy in another place another time, and damn, for a second it had me going, very real, real and very odd, you know what I mean, it shook me up, and Charley's face crinkles, no more needs to be said by either of us, just a minute's worth of wannabe super-witty and hip banter, spread like thick, gooey icing over a hopeless cake, like exchanges with Roger if he responded to the silence of my footsteps stopping or the stealth of my glance trespassing the space he'd left open for just that purpose or when we'd bump into each other in the hall,
bump
a foolish word like
jump,
as in
jump
in the shower, both words untrue, their embedded metaphors describing events that don't occur, acts unperformed, fictions, as in I was
touched
by his gentleness, or
ran into
an old friend, or
touched
by the pain of his wife and kids,
moved
by her struggle,
touched
by a sudden, senseless suicide.