Elijah Turan

The Moses of Cleveland

It was a dark night as I stood by the water, over looking the bay, and as I looked  out at the deserted harbor, I remembered how I had once, only a few years ago, worked on the dockyards of the now abandoned steel mill. I remembered how the crews of the incoming ships waved at me as I labored by the water.

They watched from the decks their industrial freighters, and they could see that I was tall with a solid frame, yet gaunt in a way. I was over fifty, and my long beard, once red, looked white as it blew in the wind. I wore old boots and fatigues for pants, and my long grey coat looked like the steam that rose from the pavement.

My hands were large and weathered; they engulfed the tools I wielded. They saw me stand straight in the slanting rain, and I looked strong, yet frail and gentle at the same time, as older men sometimes do.

They called me the Moses of Cleveland, and the title was fitting in a way; I never made it to the promised land: the land of milk and honey, thirty years and a pension. I wandered for forty years in a land of pay-cuts and forced overtime.

I was a unionist, a member of the masses, Rousseau’s noble savage in a barbarous civilization. I began work in my teens, far later than my father had, as the grandchild of Eastern-European peasantry. My family had made their way to Ellis Island like live-stock packed in steerage, deep in the hull of the trans-Atlantic ship.

Later, they were packed like animals in cattle cars, men, women and children, and shipped to the coal mines. There, the mine owners controlled them completely. My grandmother remembered how, when she was young, the boss would have his way with her when grandfather was away work.

The U.S. was the land of freedom; and freedom they found. Freedom to watch children starve, to perish in the coal shafts, freedom to die of black-lung disease after thirty-five years of labor. My grandfather had been broken by the mine shafts, and he watched as his own son went off to work in those same shafts. It was a cycle, but I promised myself that we would break that cycle; I wouldn’t allow us to be exploited the way that they had been.

I was only a boy when our family moved up North, to the city of Cleveland.

We went in search of a new future, but also to escape the past. Although conditions had greatly improved at the mines, my father had seen his friends killed by strike- breakers, and he promised himself that someday, when he had the money, he would leave that place.

It was there, in Cleveland, that I grew-up, alongside all the other boys and girls that would someday fill the city’s factories and stockrooms. We were laborers like our parents before us; but in a way, we were a new kind of worker. JFK,MLK, and RFK had changed things: Issues were not so much looked at in terms of blacks and whites, but rather, in terms of workers and owners.

I was part of a group, that graduating class, that hit the workforce at the tail-end of the Vietnam War. We had grown up in the shadow of Cleveland’s smoke towers; we were people of the machine. Our air was the smoke of the factory, and our water was the fuel of the engine; you could run a tank on the vodka we drank. Despite being part of the rich man’s machine, we knew that without us there would be no machine.

We didn’t believe God was a fat white man who wore a suit and worked on Wall Street. It was the mid-70s when I joined the union. And of course, society said, “he is a mobster” or “he is a Stalinist”. And of course, they said, “he hates to work” and “he is selfish.” And in a way, I was selfish. I was selfish enough to desire a future for my children. I was selfish to want to stand in the presence of my wife and not feel like a failure. Not that such things came easily. There was a strike in the late 1980s and another in the early 90s. Those were hard years; those were years without. And there was violence: fights with the strike-breakers, tear-gas and Molotov cocktails.

But despite those things, we had our time. I owned my own home, something father had never done. And I watched my children, my two girls, attend college, something that I had never done. When my wife became sick, I was able to afford her antibiotics.

We were proud, us unionists. But no one’s time lasts forever. It was just around the turn of the millennium that the factory owners began an exodus of their own.

First Ford closed, then LTV shut down, and Midland left the country. The fat-cats weren’t fat for nothing, they invented the meaning of “cut-and-run”. And ran they did, to places like Mexico, China and Saipan, places that never heard of OSHA, minimum wage and age restrictions.

After I lost my job of twenty years at the steel mill, I watched as my coworkers tried to start over. Many of them were old; they had only a few years left before they had planned to retire. Now they were back at square one. I saw fifty- year old men selling hamburgers, sixty-year-old women mopping bathroom floors. My friend Frank had a stroke while bagging groceries; he was eighty-one.

I remember visiting Frank at the hospital. I brought him his mail: two bills and an eviction notice. I looked down at my friend. Half of his face had been paralyzed; he couldn’t walk. Frank had fought on Guam and Bougainville. Now, he couldn’t even stand. He had sacrificed for society. Why would society not sacrifice for him?

It was then that my friends started retiring early, instant pension with a .38 special to the head. Not all of them, but some. There was that group, too young to retire but to old to start again, that couldn’t adjust. They were the lost tribes of Cleveland. But these tribes had not been scattered to the winds by the Assyrians; they blew their fucking brains out.

I wore my suit, the one from my wedding, to their funerals. Altogether, there were about ten of them that year. And for a time, I thought about killing myself as well. Certainly I spoke about it: to friends, at the bars, to my case workers on the phone. People smiled and looked the other way, not knowing quite what to say, not knowing how to sweep me under the rug. They changed the subject, spoke about the Dow and the NASDAQ, corporate growth and Pax-Americana.

My family tried to help me, to make things better. But how could they? How could they even approach such a situation? This man, who they loved, who had once been so alive, now lived on like a ghost. I walked through life with no hope for the future.

It was a dark night when I stood on the coast, overlooking the blackened waves. From where I stood, on a concrete pier jutting deep into the water, the tides left a froth against the shoreline.

I had lived my life by those waters, by the blue expanse of Lake Erie. As a boy, I had fished on her sands, and as a man, I had labored in her quarries. She had sent me my wife, as I labored in the dockyards, one clear Autumn day.

I was young then, and I loaded shipments of cargo under the watchful gaze of seagulls overhead. There was a chill in the air, and I wore a knit cap and flannel shirt.

My sleeves were rolled up along my strong arms, and my beard was short against the contours of my face. Despite the cold air, I had begun to sweat.

I remembered how she, Tabitha, had approached me. There was a cup of water in her hands, and she held it out. Her hair was auburn, and her eyes were like the face of the sea. She wore a home-made sweater, blue and white, and her hands were worn by the sun and the wind. I had smiled, reached out, and touched her fingers with mine while taking hold of the old tin cup.

But those were days long ago. Age had taken its toll on me, and, standing on the embankment, I drank from the flask that I kept in my coat. I could feel the clear vodka burn my lips as it flowed down the back of my throat. Twisting the cap, a sharp pain went down my hand. I had injured myself the year before I lost my job; a shattered nerve ran from my neck down the length of my arm. My fingertips throbbed in pain. Our family had no health insurance; we couldn’t afford medication. At one time, I used to drink to feel good. Now, I drank to feel nothing.

I just wanted it to end. There was a blackness in my heart. It was the blackness of the coal mines. Father had tried to save me from it, but I had carried that darkness with me and had kept it, deep inside, through all the years.

I looked out onto the water. For as long as anyone could remember, Lake Erie had cared for the city, like a mother to her children. We had taken everything from her, and she asked nothing in return. How fitting then, I thought, that my journey should end in her embrace.

In the distance, the light of a small cottage cut through the darkness. It was there, in that cottage, that Tabitha and I had stayed, just before our wedding. One night, in the Winter, we crept out of the bedroom and drank hot chocolate in the tiny kitchen.

From outside, you could see our naked silhouettes through the frosted glass. I remember how I, standing close to her, had asked about her dreams.

I wanted to know how, as her husband, I could make her happy. She smiled and spoke about a house in the country. We could have a pond and a little boat. A dog could run in the yard, and we could sit on the porch swing as the children played in the grass.

I imagined coming home after work, day by day, and spending my life with her. My needs would no longer matter, and I could dedicate myself to the good of her and the children. It was then, in the cottage, as we stared into each other’s eyes, that I felt as if we could do great things in life.

But we had not done great things. Every year, I had tried to make Tabitha’s dreams come true, and every year I had failed. A few years after our marriage, we took a loan out for a house in the city. It was small, and the neighborhood was run-down, but we told ourselves that it would be a starter home; we would only be there for a few years.

But we did not stay for only a few years; we stayed for nearly thirty years.

I had never been able to save the money for a down payment on the home we wanted. After the needs of the children, the bills, and the taxes, there was never anything left. There was a moment, a brief moment, when I thought that I would succeed; the economy was good and I was finally able to put some money away. But then, there was the strike, and I watched as our savings dwindled to nothing.

It didn’t have to be that way. I could have gone back to work. But I wouldn’t do that. I stood by my ideals: the few should never prosper at the expense of the many.

I knew that; I believed that.

After the economy went under and I lost my job, it was a struggle to keep hold of even the little that we had. Tabitha and I came home everyday with our tiny incomes. She never blamed me for losing my job, for not being rich, but, in her eyes, I couldn’t help but see a trace of disappointment.

Standing on the pier, I took another drink and thought about my wife. She had wasted her life with me. She had put her faith in me, and I had not been true. She deserved so much better. Some much greater man should have married her, a man with far more ability than me.

Perhaps, it was not too late to make it up. It would not be easy at first; she would miss me. She loved me, I knew that; I could see that. But there was the policy letter, and, in time, she could forget about me. She could finally have what she should have had so long ago.

I knelt down and picked up a brick from a pile that lay at my feet and looked down into the dark waters; it wouldn’t be so bad. Both the girls were married, and my father had passed on years ago. My mother suffered from Alzheimer’s; she couldn’t even remember my face. The world wouldn’t mourn the loss of an old cripple.

I placed the brick in my right cargo pocket. Another went into the left. Four of them fit into the pockets of my coat. And my hands, I held two more. There were eight bricks total.

I crept toward the front of the pier until my toes hung over the edge, and I looked down as the white foam cascaded against the embankment. Slowly, I inched forward; only my heels held on to the concrete.

I felt weighed down by the bricks and, for a second, lost my balance. It felt as if I would fall and plunge into the water head-first, so I swung my arms forward while shifting my weight back.

I regained myself, but my heart pounded after imagining crashing face-first against the surface of the water. I stood motionless while trying to compose myself and, for a moment, I thought myself funny. Why should it matter if I went in head first or feet first? What difference would it make in the end?

But in a way, it did matter. I wanted to feel, for the first time in a long time, as if I had control over my life, even if that life was about to end. I wanted to do it on my own accord.

I gathered myself. I had been thinking too much, and it was not about thinking; it was about acting. I took a deep breath, looked back to the skyline, said goodbye to my city, and jumped.

***

It was a peaceful suicide; I had expected much worse. In the weeks and days leading up to the act, I found myself obsessed with playing out the scenario in my mind. For an unexplainable reason, there had been a need to know exactly how I would die. Step by step, compulsively, I had envisioned the process of drowning.

First, my body would break the surface of the water. I did not imagine a clean break, like the silent cut of a knife. Rather, I foresaw a loud, intrusive splash.

My immediate reaction would be surprise at the cold water against my skin. It would not engulf my entire body at first; rather, it would take a few seconds to work through my boots and coat.

I would panic; the frigid, claustrophobic water would cause me to flail my arms and legs. I would change my mind, wish to turn back, but the weight of the bricks would drag me down.

Finally, probably before reaching the bottom, I would try to breathe. The water would enter my lungs, but it would not be a full breath. I imagined the pain from breathing water up my nose, as I had done while swimming on occasion, yet more so.

It would burn my chest and sinuses, and my body would reject it. I would cough violently, trying to expel the fluid. Without breathing in, I would gag the air out of my lungs, until only water remained, and it would trickle down to the bottom.

Still trying to cough, I would breathe in deeply, filling my entire chest cavity with water. There would be a terrible pain.

I would vomit. There would be an intense pressure, and the capillaries in my head would burst. The skin on my face would be blotched, and my eyes would become red, bloated orbs.

My body would writhe; it would convulse uncontrollably. My stomach would fill with water, and I would try to vomit again but fail; my diaphragm would be compressed.

During my last moments, I would see stars: bright white stars in the midnight water. My system would go into shock, and the pain would subside; my bloated body would roll over on the lake-floor, and I would slip into unconsciousness.

After that, who knew?

But this was not the case at all. I did not panic. The cold water felt good against my skin, and I descended tranquilly downward. My boots planted firmly against the bottom and nestled softly into the mud. I calmly held the air in my lungs.

All around me was darkness, and I wondered how deeply I had fallen. To my surprise, I was happy.

There was a satisfaction, a certain vindication in my spirit; I had acted properly.

My main fear up until that point had been that I would panic, breathe in, and die before I could remove the bricks from my pockets. Had that happened, I could only hope that my body would remain hidden at the bottom of the lake. If I were found, the life insurance company would record me as a suicide and cancel my policy.

But this was no longer a threat; I would remove the bricks at the last moment, my bloated body would float to the surface, and the coroner would detect alcohol in my system: just another drunk who had fallen in the bay.

I had always kept a sizable policy. Work was dangerous and accidents happened. As a boy, I had witnessed a blaze at the industrial park. The magnesium factory had went up in flames, and plumes of blue fire reached up into the night sky like the grotesque fingers of a deformed hand.

In the distance, I had seen the fire fighters scrambling on the ledges, trying to control the flames, trying to pull out the screaming workers. All of a sudden, I felt a wind at my back, and the plumes of fire retreated into the compound. The building sounded as if it had taken a breath, and there was a moment of silence.

Suddenly there was an explosion; the roof jumped off the building, and a cloud of fire engulfed the sky. I shielded my eyes from the heat, and the city was awash with light. The shadows of the on-lookers were stretched along the ground.

I remember seeing the tiny bodies of the fire fighters as they sailed through the air. They had been thrown into the sky, and looked like baby-dolls as they landed lifelessly on the ground. It was the first time I had seen death. It would not be the last, however.

Once, during the terrible winter of ’78, when I worked at the steel mill, I watched a scab traverse an icy catwalk over the molten steel. The scabs were often untrained, inexperienced workers, and I could see that he had not tied himself off.

The catwalk was slick and the worker lost his balance. He fell and grasped onto the ledge, and, as he clutched on with his fingers, I could see that he was very young. He looked as if he was just out of high school, and his voice cracked as he screamed for help.

The workers rushed to his aid, but it was too late; he lost his grip and fell towards the vat. In seconds, his body had turned into a ball of flame; there was nothing left when he reached the liquid metal. The boy had not been in the union; his family never received compensation. But all these memories were behind me now. I had raised my insurance policy last month; I was worth $150,000, and I felt a righteous satisfaction at the thought of them paying up.

I stood like a statue at the bottom of the harbor; I had done what I had to do. It had been over one minute now, and I wanted to see how long I could hold out. As teenagers, my friends and I would place bets on who could stay under the longest. The lake was a cesspool in those days, and we swam in the waste of the factories.

As I waited, it seemed odd how calm I was. I did not know what it would be like after death, but I was not afraid. Honestly, I had never worried much about hell. Even then, while committing suicide, the concept didn’t bother me. Rather, it was the possibility of no after-life at all that I found disturbing. For some reason, the idea of complete non-existence scared me more than the fear of eternal damnation. But then, upon reaching the end of life, even that did not matter.

“Let it be,” I thought. “Let it be.”

I relaxed my body, and my heart rate had become slow. I thought about my wife; my time was soon, and I wanted to die with her on my mind.

I remembered that night in the cottage, the night we had told each other our dreams. After drinking the hot chocolate, we crawled back into bed. She lay her body next to mine, and, beneath the weight of the quilt, I could feel her skin press against me. I could smell her hair, as she laid her head on his chest. Once again, I asked what would make her happy.

“Just you,” she said.

Beneath the water, those words stuck in my mind. “Just you,” I thought to myself.

And it was then that I marveled at how strange life could be. I thought it funny that I could spend nearly thirty years with my wife and never truly understand her. Yet now, as odd as it was, standing in the water, at the end of all things, I could see her clearly for the first time.

Her dreams: the house in the country, the pond and the porch swing, she had wanted those things for me. She had wanted those things with me. I understood then, that although I had failed to give her everything she deserved in life, she still admired me. I knew then, that despite the fact we had very little, it was ours to have together. Things were hard, they had always been hard, but they were not impossible; they were not without hope. Me, my family, the city, we had to go on together: we had to try, to persevere; we had to live.

I threw off my coat; it sank quickly to the bottom. I took the bricks out of my pockets and dropped them to the ground. I looked up and could see the stars through the top of the water. I reached my arms out: I wanted to strive for those stars, I wanted to touch them.

But I could not touch them; I had been rooted to the ground. My feet had worked into the mud, and I had been fixed in place. I strained his body upward: I wanted to ascend, to live, to escape the pressure that surrounded me, engulfed me, suffocated me. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I worked, I only descended deeper and deeper into the mire. I had been trapped in that mud my entire life.

My heart had begun to pound. I needed air, I needed to get out, I needed to breathe. There was only one chance and I knew it. Crouching low to the ground, I pressed my hands against the mud, and it felt cold against my skin. I positioned myself, struggled a bit, shifted my weight, and, with the arms that had once built the city, pushed away from the abyss that held me captive.

The nerves in my bad arm erupted in fire, and a shock of pain reverberated throughout my body. I screamed out into the void, and the air in my lungs exploded into a cloud of bubbles, as I exerted the last of my strength.

***

There was no more pain. There was no more suffering in my broken body. I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. I found myself in a great darkness.

I drifted and felt as if I were floating, though I knew not where. I was no longer trapped in my place; I no longer had a place. I could see all about myself, and I could see nothing all about myself.

And then, from the great distance, like a moth to the flame, I became transfixed. At last, I could see it, more clearly than ever now, the light. It was true; it was strong. I could feel its pull, and I drifted toward it. In the light, there were many things.

I could see my daughters. They would have children, and those children would never see the pain in my eyes; those children would never carry my burden. I was happy for that.

And there was my wife; she would live on, and every day would be a new day: every breath would be another moment of life. The pains, trials, and tribulations that had seemed so important before, that had weighed so heavily on our marriage, would be a thing of the past. She could once again live with a hope for the future.

Steadily now, all the things that I had seen, done and heard melted away. All the feelings of helplessness, loneliness and despair were lifted like a veil before me. I no longer felt the anger in my heart; I no longer felt forlorn in the face of my unanswered prayers: those prayers, the one recourse I had in a world in which the few held such power, such disregard, to the shattered hopes, dreams and desires of the many.

Over the years, I had come to believe that those prayers had went unheard, that they had been lost on the way to Heaven. But now, as I drifted forward in the darkness, I could see that they had not been lost; I could see them in the light.

All of these memories washed over my mind, as I struggled onward. The light was closer, stronger now, and I could see that it was not a single light. Rather, it was a great multitude. They shined like the wings of a thousand angels.

I was close. Reaching forward; it seemed as if I could feel them, touch them.

***

The air was cold against my skin as I broke through the surface of the lake. I coughed and gagged the water out of my system, breathed in, and felt the air, the air of life, in my body.

There was a peace, a tranquility in the night, as I stared off at the lights of the city: the lights of the buildings, the houses, the Terminal Tower; the glowing lights of the billboards and the blinking lights of the planes in flight. The cars shined like a river of red and white, as they flowed through the city streets.

And, as I bobbed peacefully in the drift, I was amazed at how beautiful the Cleveland skyline could be.

To old friends and new hopes