The Awkward Black Man

Between Storms

After the storm had passed, Michael Trey just didn’t want to leave his apartment anymore. There was something about the booming thunder and the dire news reports, the red line across the bottom of every TV show warning residents to stay inside and away from windows, even if they were closed and shaded. Subway tunnels were flooded, as were the streets. The airports would be closed for the next four days, and the Hudson had risen up over the West Side Highway, causing millions of dollars in damage in Lower Manhattan.

The mayor interrupted TV Land’s repeat of an old Married... with Children episode to report that the National Guard had been called out.

President Obama had taken a train (a train!) to Manhattan to address New Yorkers everywhere, telling one and all that he had declared them a disaster. He wore a white dress shirt with thin green and blue pinstripes. He didn’t wear a tie, because he was getting down to business — that’s what Michael thought. Even the president was afraid of the havoc that nature had wrought.

It didn’t matter that the sun was shining the next day or that the skies were blue and cloudless. The storm, Michael knew, was hiding behind the horizon. And there with it was a hothouse sun, crazed terrorist bombers, and women with HIV, hepatitis C, and thoughts of a brief marriage followed by a lifetime of support. In North Korea they were planning a nuclear attack, and there was probably some immigrant on the first plane after the storm infected with a strain of the Ebola virus that would show symptoms only after he had gotten past customs.

Michael didn’t go to work the next morning. The radio and TV said that most public transportation was moving normally. Traffic was congested, however. Three sidewalks in Manhattan had collapsed from water damage. Just walking down the street someone might get killed or paralyzed.

Europe’s economy had almost failed again, except that the Germans bailed out the Greeks with money that neither of them had. China was going to take over the American economy and make Michael and everyone he knew into Communist slaves living in dormitories and eating boiled rice.

But if no one could buy the goods, then China’s economy might fail, and it would engage its two-hundred-million-man army to reclaim all the money we borrowed to pay for the health insurance of undocumented, Spanish-speaking, job-stealing illegal immigrants.

There were microbes in the water after the storm. Militant Muslims had used the cover of the downpour to plant explosives under churches and big businesses. They weren’t afraid of the rain, like Michael and other poor Americans who just wanted to work until retirement... never came.

The phone rang on the morning of the third day that Michael had not gone in to work at Prospect, Farr, Grant, and Heldhammer.

Michael picked up the receiver but did not speak.

“Mike?” someone said. “Mike, is that you?”

“Michael is not here,” Michael heard himself say. Immediately he felt warm and safe behind the subterfuge of those words. He wasn’t at home and therefore couldn’t be reached, couldn’t be touched, burned, infected, blown up, or experimented upon by sales scientists working in subterranean desert laboratories for the superstores.

A lifetime of the nightly news and conspiracy theories woven into TV shows, movies, and even commercials; of the racist/sexist/classist schemes of Big Business and its political candidate shills; the private prisons, police, billionaires and millionaires, movie stars and pop stars and country stars and serial killers: all this came together in Michael’s mind in his apartment three days after the disaster that he finally understood would never end.

“Mike, it’s Finnmore, Ron Finnmore. Mr. Russell is wondering where you are.”

“I’ll leave Michael the message,” Mike said, and then he cradled the phone.

After hanging up, Michael had the urge to giggle but suppressed it. He knew that if he showed any emotion, soon they’d say he’d gone crazy and take him away.

“Yes,” he said, when the secretary answered the phone. “I’m calling for Mr. Trey. He’s not coming in today because of inclement weather.”

It was raining, and so Michael felt justified.

“It’s just a few showers,” Faye Lesser, Thomas Grant’s assistant’s secretary said.

“That’s how the last storm started. What if he got there and it came down like that again? Who would feed his cat?”

Michael didn’t have a cat. He didn’t have a fish or even a plant. If he had had a plant it would have died, because he hadn’t put up the shades since the storm.

The television spoke of conspiracies and of disasters both domestic and foreign that were increasing in severity, like the storm that had raged over New York. There were mad cows and rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. The Y chromosome in men had shrunk to the point that soon men might cease to be men and would have to learn how to be women-without-wombs.

There were prisons across the country that together released at least a hundred convicted killers every week and banks that created bad debt (Michael was never sure how they did this) and then sold the nonexistent interest to pension plans that subsequently failed.

Michael started taking notes. He had five folders that he had bought for his financial records but never used. He labeled these folders: diseases, natural disasters, man-made disasters, financial disasters, and human threats. Five folders were just right for the notes he needed to compile. He saw this as a sign that he was meant to stay in his fourteenth-floor apartment and study the truth that so many people missed because they went to work and therefore, somehow, inexplicably, betrayed themselves.

He spent whole days looking up fires, floods, serial killers, and food additives on his cell-phone IP. He ordered hundreds of cans of beans and tuna, concentrated orange juice, and powdered milk from grocery delivery services. He made the deliverymen leave the foods at the door and collected them only when he was sure that no one was lingering in the hall.

He used his phone to pay his bills until his accounts went low.

The super brought up his mail and left it at the threshold for him.

He had been fired, of course. His girlfriend, Melanie, told him that either he would meet her at the Starbucks on Forty-Second Street or she was breaking up with him. His mother called, but Michael fooled her by saying that Michael wasn’t home.

And he was getting somewhere with his research.

At first he thought that the problem was that there were too many people, but he gave up that theory when he realized that people working together would be benefited by great numbers. Finally he understood that it wasn’t the number of souls but the plethora of ideas that bogged down the world. It was like the old-time Polish parliament, in which nothing could be decided as long as anyone held a contrary point of view.

The problem with the world was a trick of consciousness: people believed in free will and independent thinking and were, therefore, dooming the world to the impossibility of choice. Yes. That was the problem. Together all the peoples of the world — Muslims, Hindus, and Jews; Christians, atheists, and Buddhists — would have to give up disagreements if they wanted the human race to survive the storm of incongruent consciousness that was even worse than the weather that had brought New York to its knees.

Michael felt that he was making great progress. He was beginning, he was sure, to articulate the prime issue at the base of all the bad news the New York Times had to print. He was trying to imagine what kind of blog or article he could author, when the eviction notice was shoved under his door. It had only been six weeks... no, no, nine... no, eleven. Just eleven weeks, but he was rent-stabilized, and the collusion of city government and greedy landlords made it possible for prompt evictions when there was potential for rent that could soar.

Working after midnight for days, Michael drilled forty-eight holes along the sides, top, and bottom of his door and similarly placed holes in the doorjamb and along the floor. He used a handheld cordless drill to do this work, and it took him seventy-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes. Through these connective cavities he looped twined wire hangers, two strands for each hole. This reinforcement, he figured, stood a chance of resisting a battering ram if it came to that.

He also used melted wax to seal the cracks at the sides of the door so that the police couldn’t force him out with tear gas.

His beard was filling in, and his hair had grown shaggy. He looked to himself like another man in the mirror: the man who answered the phone for the absent Michael.

He filled the bathtub to the overflow drain in case the super turned off the water.

On his iPhone he read the newspapers, studied the Middle East, Central America, and the Chinese, who, he believed, had gained control of capitalism without understanding its deteriorative quality.

Finally all those boring political-science courses that he took when he thought he might want to be a lawyer had some use.

He was well on his way to a breakthrough when the landline rang.

He always answered the phone because, in a discussion with the man in the mirror, he inferred that if no one answered, they might use the excuse that there was some kind of emergency behind his coat-hanger reinforced door.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Michael Trey, please?” a pleasant man’s voice asked.

“He’s not here.”

“Then to whom am I speaking?”

This was a new question, and it was very smart — very. This was not just some befuddled contrarian thinker but one of those unofficial agents that pretended to protect freedom while in reality achieving the opposite end.

“My name is X,” he replied, and suddenly, magically, Michael ceased to exist.

“X?”

“What do you want?”

“My name is Balkan, Bob Balkan. I’m an independent contractor working for the city to settle disputes.”

“I don’t have any disputes, Mr. Balkan Bob. As a matter of fact, I might be one of the few people in the world who does not disagree.”

“I don’t understand,” the independent contractor admitted.

“I have to go, Bob.”

“Can you tell me something first, Mr. X?”

“What’s that, Bob?”

“What do you want?”

The question threw X out of Michael’s mind. The man that was left felt confused, overwhelmed. The question was like a blank check, a hint to the solution of a primary conundrum from an alien, superior life-form. It had ecclesiastical echoes running down a corridor heretofore unexplored in Michael’s mind.

“What do I want?” Michael repeated the words but changed the intonation.

“Yes,” Balkan Bob said.

“I want,” Michael said. “I want people everywhere to stop for a minute and think about only the essential necessities of their lives. You know, air and water, food and friendship, shelter and laughing, disposal of waste and the continual need for all those things through all the days of their lives.”

Balkan Bob was quiet for half a minute, and so Michael, not X, continued. “If everybody everywhere had those thoughts in their minds, then they would realize that it’s not individuality or identity but being human, being the same that makes us strong. That’s what I’ve been thinking in here while the rain’s been falling and the landlord was trying to evict me.”

“But Michael hasn’t paid the rent, Mr. X.”

“I have to go, Bob,” X said, and then Michael hung up.

Eight days later the electricity was turned off. The grocery delivery service had brought him thirty fat, nine-inch wax candles, so he had light. It was all right to be in semidarkness, to be without TV, radio, or Internet. Michael had his five folders and the knowledge of a lifetime plus four years of college to filter through.

Two days after the electricity went off, it came back on. Michael wondered what bureaucratic and legal contortion had the man with his hand on the lever going back and forth with the power.

Just after the lights flickered back on, the phone rang.

When it sounded, Michael realized that there had been no calls for the past forty-eight hours — not his mother and not Melanie, who worried that her demands had brought him to this place.

He always answered the phone but rarely stayed on for more than a minute.

The phone didn’t depend on the power system. Maybe the phone company had cut him off for not paying his bill and then, at the behest of the city, had turned the service back on.

“Hello,” X said.

“Mr. X?”

“Bob?”

“How are you?”

“Things are becoming clearer all the time, Bob,” X said. “I just don’t understand why you cut off the power and then turned it back on again.”

“I didn’t do it,” he said.

“But you’re working for the people that did, or at least their friends and allies.”

“Do you feel that you are at war, Mr. X?”

“I’m just an innocent bystander who has made the mistake of witnessing the crime.” X was much more certain about things than Michael was.

“I recorded your statement about what you wanted. Someone in my office released the recording to the media. You have lots of friends out here, Mr. X. If you look out your window you’ll see them in the street.”

“I’d like to, but there might be something there I don’t want to see. And I don’t want anyone seeing me.”

“No one wants to hurt you,” Bob said in a very reassuring voice.

“No one wants to kill children in Afghanistan either, but it happens every day.”

“You haven’t come out of your apartment since we got hit by Hurricane Laura.”

“And here I don’t know anything about you.”

“What do you want to know?” Bob Balkan offered.

“You ask good questions, Bob.”

“And?”

“Do you think that we’re equal to our technology?”

“Maybe not.”

“So why are you on my ass? That’s all I’m saying.”

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. X.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you think that we’re equal to our biology?”

Neither Michael nor X was ready for that question. It got down to the crux of what they had been trying to figure out. If the human mind, Michael thought, was the subject of biological instinct, then there was no answer, no agreement, nor any exit from madness.

Stroking his beard, Michael forgot about the phone call and wondered if his own body was an unconscious plot against the idea of humanity, humanness. Machines and techniques could be torn down and abandoned, but what about blood and bone, nerves and hormones? Was he himself an aberrant machine set upon an impossible mission amid the indifferent materials of existence? Was his resistance futile?

While he was considering these questions, the phone went dead and the lights cut off. There came sounds of heavy footfalls in the hallway. Suddenly there was a great thumping wallop against his fireproofed, steel-reinforced, hanger-looped fire door. The police battering ram hit the door nineteen times by Michael’s count. The locks and hangers, doorjamb and metal infrastructure held. The pounding ceased, and voices sounded up and down the outside hall.

There were shouts and curses. One man suggested that they break through the wall.

Michael armed himself with a butcher’s knife and then put the cooking weapon down.

“I can’t hurt anybody,” he said to no one.

That night Michael slept on the living room floor in front of the door. His iPhone was dead and the lights were cut off, but under candlelight he read Man’s Fate by André Malraux. He felt for the characters in the novel, though for the most part he did not identify with them. Revolution, Michael thought, was both personal and shared, and everyone, and everything, had a part in it. His only affinity was with the feeling of doom and dread threaded throughout the book. He believed that soon he would be killed because he had decided to stop moving forward with the herd toward slow but certain slaughter.

“Mike. Hey, Mike,” a voice hissed.

Michael had fallen asleep. He believed that his name was part of a dream, but he didn’t know why someone calling out to him would be important.

He tried to lift his right hand, but it wouldn’t move.

“Mike!” The whisper became more plaintive.

Suddenly afraid that people had secretly come in and bound him, Michael lurched up, jerking his right hand from whatever held it.

His fingers were encased in wax. The candle had burned unevenly, and warm wax had pooled and dried around his hand. Michael laughed to himself, relieved that he was safe. He blew out the burning wick.

“Mike!”

The ventilation plate in the living room had a faint light glowing between its slats.

Michael’s first impulse was to cover that opening with plastic and masking tape, but he hesitated.

He pulled a chair to the wall and got up on it so that he could stand face-to-face with the brass plate.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Mike?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Tommy Rimes from the apartment next door.”

“The tall guy with the mustache?”

“No,” the voice said. “I’m the guy who goes bowling all the time.”

Michael remembered the squat middle-aged man with the potbelly and the red bowling-ball bag.

You wanna go run down some pins? he’d once asked Michael.

“What do you want, Mr. Rimes?”

“They got you all over the news, Mike. From Occupy Wall Street to the Wall Street Journal, they all been talkin’ about you. You went viral on the Internet now that the cops couldn’t beat down your door. Fisk, the guy with the mustache on the other side a’ you videoed it and put it up on YouTube. You’re a celebrity.”

Michael was peeling the wax from his fingers and wondering what notoriety would get him. Would it hold the hurricanes back or keep the Communists from conquering themselves with capitalism? Would it get Melanie to take him back?

“Mike?” Michael had all but forgotten that Tommy Rimes was there.

“What?” the newly minted celebrity asked.

“Can you take off the ventilation plate?”

“Why?”

“I’m gonna push through a power strip and this aquarium hose I got. That way you can have power again, and if they cut off your water you can have that.”

“Why?”

“This rich guy from uptown put what you said to the city psychologist up on a billboard down the street. I like it. I mean, I think you might got somethin’ there. And even if you’re wrong, I like it that you’re stickin’ it to the landlord.”

By morning Michael had light, and once he powered up his phone he found that it was still working. There was an e-mail from Melanie telling him that she had paid his phone bill. On his tiny phone screen he could see newscasts covering a thousand people in the streets outside of his apartment building protesting the police, the mayor, the landlord, and everyone that uses the law to keep people apart.

“I believe that Mr. Trey is trying to speak for all of us,” a young black woman with braids that stood out from her head like spikes said to an interviewer. “I mean, here we are working hard and barely able to live. We eat junk food and watch junk TV and our schools are being closed down because they’re so bad. The police will frisk anybody, except if they’re rich or something, and we’re fighting a war without a draft. Mr. Trey has just stopped. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to be a part of all this [bleep] and that we should all do the same.”

“I’m a conservative,” a white man in a dark blue suit told a camera. “I believe that we have to fight the war and bail out the banks, but I still wonder about what this guy says. I think he’s crazy, but you can’t deny that there’s something wrong with the world we’re living in.”

Both the liberal and conservative press praised Michael. They called him a people’s hero who was refusing to take one more step before the other side made changes. They bent his words, however — that’s what Michael thought. They didn’t understand that the whole idea was not to have a hero but to discover a natural credo to unite people and keep them from destroying themselves.

“We love Michael Trey!” two beautiful young women shouted at one camera.

The city or the landlord cut off his water; Tommy Rimes turned it back on through the aquarium hose.

The iPhone sounded.

“Melanie?” Michael said, after seeing the screen and answering.

“They’ve closed down the street in front of your building,” she said.

“The police?”

“No, the protesters. They want the city to leave you alone. One group is raising money for your rent, and four lawyers are working for injunctions against the landlord. Other tenants are making complaints against health and safety infractions. A journalist asked President Obama about you, but he refused to comment and it’s been all over the news.”

“What has?” Michael asked his ex.

“Obama not saying anything.”

Michael tried to remember why he had decided to stay in his apartment. It was the storm. He was just too afraid because of the threat the news media made out of the storm. He was afraid, not heroic.

“Michael?” Melanie said.

“Uh-huh?”

“Max Strummer, who owns Opal Internet Services, wants you to do a daily podcast from your phone. He wants me to be the producer. Isn’t that great? You could make enough money to pay your rent and lawyers. He said that if you couldn’t think of anything to say that we could send you text files that you could just read.”

“I have to go, Mel,” Michael said.

“What about Mr. Strummer?”

“I’ll call you later,” Michael uttered, and then he touched the disconnect icon.

After turning off the sound on his phone Michael went to sit in his favorite chair. It was extra wide, with foam-rubber cushions covered in white cotton brocade. There was a lamp that he’d plugged in to the power strip hanging halfway down his wall from the ventilation grate hole. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the whole room, just the area around his chair.

Reclining in the oasis of light, Michael tried to make sense of the storm and his street being closed down, and of the young women who loved a man they’d never met and Melanie who had changed from an ex-girlfriend to a maybe producer.

When no ideas came, he turned off the lamp, hoping that darkness would provide an answer. It didn’t. He was trying to recapture the moment when everything had made sense, when he took action without second-guessing his motives.

Feeling lost, he looked across the room and saw a blue luminescence. It was the phone trying to reach out to him.

Half an hour later he went to see who was calling. There had been a dozen calls. Most of the entries were unfamiliar, but one, instead of a number, was a name that he knew.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Balkan?”

“Mr. X?”

“No, no, this is Michael.”

“Oh.”

“Did you call me on city business?” Michael asked.

“They wanted me to call, but this is your nickel.”

“I’ve been looking at the Internet,” Michael said. “People all over the place want to protect me. They’re offering money and legal support. One guy named Strummer wants to hire me and my ex to do a podcast for him.”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“I thought you said that you wanted people to realize what they had in common.”

“But between them,” Michael said, “not through me.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Not like a natural disaster or some enemy,” the young bearded man replied. “I don’t want to be the discounted meal at the fast-food chain that you can buy in Anchorage or Dade County. I don’t want to be anything except an idea.”

“But you’re a man.”

“Thanks for that, Bob.”

“For what?”

“I needed to talk to somebody about these thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get them out if I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I know that you’re working for them, but right now they don’t know what to do. In that little window you helped me. You really did.”

“Helped you what?”

“I got to go, Bob.”

“Where can you go, Michael?”

“You always ask the best questions.”

The next morning Michael was standing in his kitchen eating from a can of pork and beans with a teaspoon when he noticed that the spigot had a slow drip. Michael wasn’t sure if it was the dripping or his talk with the city psychologist that made up his mind.

He tested the hot water and then called Melanie. She was surprised to hear from him and happy that he had decided to do his first podcast. He was careful, and she was too, not to talk about love.

At four in the afternoon Michael was ready. He had refused to allow Strummer to dictate what he said. He ignored the checklist of subjects his Internet listeners might want to hear about.

Michael had the bathtub draining when he started recording and had to close the bathroom door to keep out the noise.

“My name is Michael Trey,” he said into the receiver, with no notes or even a notion of what exactly he’d say. “I have lived in Manhattan for seven years, and I was scared about Hurricane Laura — so scared that I haven’t left my house since it broke. Because I wouldn’t go out, I lost my job and my girlfriend, and the landlord has been trying to evict me. I’m broke, and they keep turning my utilities on and off. I have hot water right now, and so I’m going to take my first real bath in weeks.

“My neighbor, Tommy Rimes, pushed a power strip and a little hose through the ventilation duct, and so I’ve been able to get by. I’ve seen videos of people down in the street supporting me. I like that, but it’s misguided. What they should do, I believe, is lock themselves into their own houses and turn off the world outside. I don’t know if this would be possible or if it would make any difference at all, but that’s all I’ve got.

“What I’m saying is that the president didn’t talk about me because there’s nothing to say. It is us that should be talking to him. It’s us that need to get the red lines out of the bottoms of our screens, because we’re in it together as far as we go. But maybe, maybe that’s impossible, because we do things primarily as mammals, not men and women.

“That’s really all I have to say. I know there are people out there that want a daily report from my musty apartment, but really all they have to do is listen to this, what I’m saying right now.

“Goodbye.”

Michael turned off his phone before running the hot bath in the deep iron tub. It was this tub that made him take the apartment in the first place. The hot water felt so good that he groaned when he first sat back. The stinging in his wrists subsided, and he wasn’t frightened except when he concentrated on the hue of the water.

He was exhilarated at first and then tired, in the way he used to be as a little boy getting in his bed. He wondered if anyone would ever make sense out of the fear-herding that all the people, and maybe all other creatures, of the world lived under.

He would have liked Melanie to say that she loved him, but only if he didn’t have to ask.