Читать книгу But Beautiful - Geoff Dyer - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIt was the quiet time of the evening, between the day people heading home from work and the night people arriving at Birdland. From his hotel window he watched Broadway grow dark and greasy with halfhearted rain. He poured a drink, piled a stack of Sinatra records on the turntable . . . touched the unringing phone and drifted back to the window. Soon the view fogged over with his breath. Touching the hazy reflection like it was a painting, his finger traced wet lines around his eyes, mouth, and head until he saw it turning into a drippy skull-shaped thing that he wiped clear with the heel of his hand.
He lay down on the bed, making only a slight dip in the soft mattress, convinced he could feel himself shrinking, fading to nothing. Scattered over the floor were plates of food he had pecked at and left. He’d take a bite of this, a little of that and then head back to the window. He ate almost nothing but he still had his preferences when it came to food: Chinese was his favourite, that was the food he didn’t eat most of. For a long time he’d lived on buttermilk and Cracker Jack but he’d even lost his taste for these. As he ate less he drank more: gin with a sherry chaser, Courvoisier and beer. He drank to dilute himself, to thin himself down even more. A few days ago he’d cut his finger on an edge of paper and was surprised how red and rich his blood was, expecting it to be silver as gin, flecked with red, or pale, pinkish. That same day he’d been fired from a gig in Harlem because he hadn’t had the strength to stand. Now even lifting the horn exhausted him; it felt like it weighed more than him. Even his clothes did probably.
Hawk went the same way eventually. It was Hawk who made the tenor into a jazz instrument, defined the way it had to sound: big-bellied, full-throated, huge. Either you sounded like him or you sounded like nothing – which is exactly how folks thought Lester sounded with his wispy skating-on-air tone. Everybody bullied him to sound like Hawk or swap over to alto but he just tapped his head and said,
—There’s things going on up here, man. Some of you guys are all belly.
When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas in ’34 they played right through the morning, Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours’ playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St Louis for that night’s gig.
Lester’s sound was soft and lazy but there was always an edge in it somewhere. Sounding like he was always about to cut loose, knowing he never would: that was where the tension came from. He played with the sax tilted off to one side and as he got deeper into his solo the horn moved a few degrees further from the vertical until he was playing it horizontally, like a flute. You never got the impression he was lifting it up; it was more like the horn was getting lighter and lighter, floating away from him – and if that was what it wanted to do he wouldn’t try to hold it down.
Soon it was a straight choice: Pres or Hawk, Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins – two approaches. They couldn’t have sounded or looked more different but they ended up the same way: swilled out and fading away. Hawk lived on lentils, booze, and Chinese food and wasted away, just like Pres was doing now.
He was disappearing, fading into the tradition before he was even dead. So many other players had taken from him that he had nothing left. When he played now cats said he limped along after himself, a pale imitation of those who played like him. At a gig where he’d played badly a guy came up to him and said, ‘You’re not you, I’m you.’ Everywhere he went he heard people sounding like him. He called everyone else Pres because he saw himself everywhere. He’d been thrown out of the Fletcher Henderson band for not sounding enough like Hawk. Now he was being thrown out of his own life for not sounding enough like himself.
Nobody could sing a song or tell a story on the horn the way he could. Except there was only one story he played now and that was the story of how he couldn’t play anymore, how everyone else was telling his story for him, the story of how he’d ended up here in the Alvin, looking out the window at Birdland, wondering when he was going to die. It was a story he didn’t quite understand and one he wasn’t even that motherfuckin interested in anymore except to say it began with the army. Either it began with the army or it began with Basie and ended with the army. Same either way. He’d ignored his draft papers for years, relying on the band’s zigzagging itinerary to keep him five or six steps ahead of the military. Then, as he was walking off the stand one night, an army official with a sharkskin face and aviator shades came up to him like a fan asking for his autograph and handed him his call-up papers.
He’d turned up to his induction board so wasted the walls of the room shivered with fever. He sat opposite three grim military officials, one of whom never raised his eyes from the files in front of him. Knuckle-faced men who each day subjected their jaws to shaving as though they were boots to be polished. Smelling sweetly of cologne, Pres stretched out his long legs, assuming a position as close to horizontal as the hard chair permitted, looking as though he might at any moment rest his dainty shoes on the desk facing him. His answers danced around their questions, nimble and slurred at the same time. He took a pint of gin from an inside pocket of his double-breasted jacket and one of the officers snatched it from him, blaring angrily as Pres, serene and bewildered, waved slowly:
—Hey, lady, take it easy, there’s plenty for everyone.
Tests showed he had syphilis; he was drunk, stoned, so wired on amphetamines his heart was ticking like a watch – and yet somehow he passed the medical. It seemed they were determined to waive everything in order to get him into the army.
Jazz was about making your own sound, finding a way to be different from everybody else, never playing the same thing two nights running. The army wanted everyone to be the same, identical, indistinguishable, looking alike, thinking alike, everything remaining the same day after day, nothing changing. Everything had to form right angles and sharp edges. The sheets of his bed were folded hard as the metal angles of his locker. They shaved your head like a carpenter planing a block of wood, trying to make it absolutely square. Even the uniforms were designed to remold the body, to make square people. Nothing curved or soft, no colours, no silence. It seemed almost unbelievable that in the space of a fortnight the same person could suddenly find himself in so totally different a world.
He had a slack, drawling walk and here he was expected to march, to tramp up and down the parade ground in boots heavy as a ball and chain. Marching until his head felt brittle as glass.
—Swing those arms, Young. Swing those arms.
Telling him to swing.
He hated everything hard, even shoes with leather soles. He had eyes for pretty things, flowers and the smell they left in a room, soft cotton and silk next to his skin, shoes that hugged his feet: slippers, moccasins. If he’d been born thirty years later he’d have been camp, thirty years earlier he’d have been an aesthete. In nineteenth-century Paris he could have been an effete fin de siècle character but here he was, landlocked in the middle of a century, forced to be a soldier.
When he woke the room was filled with the green haze of a neon sign outside that had blinked to life while he slept. He slept so lightly it hardly even merited the name of sleep, just a change in the pace of things, everything floating away from everything else. When he was awake he sometimes wondered if he was just dozing, dreaming he was here, dying in a hotel room . . .
His horn lay next to him on the bed. On a bedside cabinet were a picture of his parents, bottles of cologne, and his porkpie hat. He’d seen a photograph of Victorian girls wearing hats like that, ribbons hanging down. Nice, pretty, he thought, and had worn one ever since. Herman Leonard had come to photograph him once but ended up leaving him out of the picture altogether, preferring a still life of the hat, his sax case, and cigarette smoke ascending to heaven. That was years ago but the photo was like a premonition that came closer to being fulfilled with each day that passed as he dissolved into the bits and pieces people remembered him by.
He cracked the seal of a new bottle and walked back to the window, one side of his face dyed green in the neon glow. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared. A cold moon hung low over the street. Cats were turning up at Birdland, shaking hands and carrying instrument cases. Sometimes they looked up toward his window and he wondered if they saw him there, one hand waving condensation from the pane.
He went over to the wardrobe, empty except for a few suits and shirts and the jangle of hangers. He took off his trousers, hung them up carefully, and lay back on the bed in his shorts, green-tinged walls crawling with the shadow angles of passing cars.
—Inspection!
Lieutenant Ryan flung open his locker, peered inside, jabbed with his swagger stick – his wand, Pres always called it – at the picture taped to the inside of the door: a woman’s face smiling out.
—Is this your locker, Young?
—Yes, sir.
—And did you pin this picture up, Young?
—Yes, sir.
—Notice anything about that woman, Young?
—Sir?
—Does anything strike you about that woman, Young?
—She has a flower in her hair, sir, yes.
—Nothing else?
—Sir?
—She looks to me like a white woman, Young, a young white woman, Young. Is that how she looks to you?
—Yes, sir.
—And you think it’s right for a nigger private to have a picture of a white woman in his locker like that?
His eyes touched the floor. Saw Ryan’s boots move even closer to him, touching his toes. A blast of breath in his nostrils again.
—You hear me, Young?
—Sir.
—You married, Young?
—Sir.
—But instead of a picture of your wife you want to have a picture of a white woman so you can think of her when you jerk off at night.
—She is my wife.
He said it as soft as possible, hoping to strip the statement of offence, but the weight of the fact gave it the defiance of contempt.
—She is my wife, sir.
—She is my wife, sir.
—Take it down, Young.
—Sir.
—Now, Young.
Ryan stood where he was. To get to the locker Lester walked around him like a pillar, grasped his wife’s face by the ear, pulled the tape free of the gray metal until the image tore, becoming a paper bridge between his fingers and the locker. Then held it limply in his hand.
—Crumple it up . . . Now throw it in the bin.
—Yes, sir.
Instead of the adrenaline surge of power he normally experienced when humiliating recruits Ryan felt the opposite: that he had humiliated himself in front of the whole company. Young’s face had been so empty of self-respect and pride, devoid of anything except hurt, that Ryan suddenly wondered if even the abject obedience of slaves was a form of protest, of defiance. He felt ugly and for that reason he hated Young more than ever. He felt something similar with women: when they began to cry, that was when the urge to hit was strongest. Earlier, humiliating Young would have satisfied him – now he wanted to destroy him. He’d never encountered a man more lacking in strength, but he made the whole idea of strength and all the things associated with it seem irrelevant, silly. Rebels, ringleaders, and mutineers – they could all be countered: they met the army head-on, played by its rules. However strong you were the army could break you – but weakness, that was something the army was powerless to oppose because it did away with the whole idea of opposition on which force depends. All you could do with the weak was cause them pain – and Young was going to get plenty of that.
He dreamed he was on a beach, a tide of booze advancing toward him, waves of clear alcohol breaking over him, sizzling into the sand.
In the morning he looked out at a sky colourless as a window-pane. A bird fluttered by and he strained his eyes to keep track of its flight before it disappeared over adjacent roofs. He’d once found a bird on a windowsill, wounded in some way he couldn’t establish: something wrong with its wing. Cupping it in his hands, he’d felt the flutter-warmth of its heart and nursed it back to health, keeping it warm and feeding it grains of rice. When it showed no sign of getting its strength back he filled a saucer with bourbon and that must have done the trick – after dipping its beak in the saucer for a few days it flew away. Now whenever he saw a bird he always hoped it would be the one he had taken care of.
How long ago was it that he’d found the bird? Two weeks? Two months? It seemed like he’d been here at the Alvin for ten years or more, ever since he got out of the stockade and out of the army. Everything had happened so gradually that it was difficult to establish the point at which this phase of his life had begun. He’d once said that there were three phases in his playing. First he’d concentrated on the upper range of the horn, what he called alto tenor. Then the middle range – tenor tenor – before moving down to baritone tenor. He remembered saying that but he couldn’t fix in his mind when the various phases had been because the periods of his life they coincided with were also a blur. The baritone phase coincided with his withdrawal from the world, but when had that begun? Gradually he’d stopped hanging out with the guys he played with, had taken to eating food in his room. Then he had stopped eating altogether, seeing practically no one and hardly leaving his room unless he had to. With every word addressed to him he shrank from the world a little further until the isolation went from being circumstantial to something he had internalized – but once that happened he realized it had always been there, the loneliness thing: in his playing it had always been there.
Nineteen fifty-seven, that was when he’d gone to pieces completely and ended up in Kings County Hospital. After that he’d come here to the Alvin and abandoned interest in everything except gazing out of the window and thinking how the world was too dirty, hard, noisy, and harsh for him. And booze, booze at least made the world glisten at the edges a little. He’d been in Bellevue in ’55 for his drinking but he remembered little about either Bellevue or Kings apart from a vague feeling that hospitals were like the army except you didn’t have to do all the work. Even so there was something nice about lying around feeling weak and having no urge to get up. Oh yeah, and one other thing. It was in Kings that a young doctor from Oxford, England, had read him a poem, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, about some cats who roll up at this island and decide to stay there getting high and doing nothing. He’d dug its dreamy cadences, the slow and lazy feel it had, the river drifting like smoke. The guy who wrote it had the same sound that he had. He couldn’t remember his name but if anybody had ever wanted to record it, he’d have dug playing on it, playing solos between the verses. He thought of it a lot, that poem, but couldn’t remember the words, just the feel of it, like someone humming a song without really remembering how it went.
That was in 1957. He remembered the date but that got him nowhere. The problem was remembering how long ago 1957 was. Anyway, it was all very simple really: there was life before the army, which was sweet, then there was the army, a nightmare from which he’d never woken up.
Exercises in the daybreak cold, men shitting in front of each other, food that made his stomach heave before he even tasted it. Two guys fighting at the foot of his bed, one of them pounding the others’ head on the floor until blood spotted his sheets, the rest of the barracks going wild around them. Cleaning out the rust-coloured latrine, the smell of other men’s shit on his hands, retching into the bowl as he cleaned it.
—It’s not clean, Young, lick it clean.
—Yes, sir.
At night he flopped into bed exhausted but unable to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, the aches in his body leaving splotches of purple and red in his eyes. When he slept he dreamed he was back on the parade ground, marching through what remained of the night until the clang of the noncom’s swagger stick against the foot of his bed split his sleep like an axe.
He got loaded as often as he could: homemade alcohol, pills, grass, anything he could get his hands on. If he got high first thing in the morning the day slurred past like some whitewater dream that was over before he knew what had happened. Sometimes he almost wanted to laugh in spite of his fear: grown men acting out the fantasies of little boys, men who hated the fact the war was over and were determined to carry it on any way they could.
—Young!
—Yes, sir.
—You ignorant nigger cocksucker bastard.
—Yes, sir.
Oh, it was so ridiculous. However hard he tried he couldn’t fathom what purpose it was meant to serve, this being shouted at continuously . . .
—Is that a smile, Young?
—No, sir.
—Tell me something, Young. You a nigger or you just bruise easy?
—Sir?
Yelling, orders, commands, insults, and threats – delirium of open mouths and raised voices. Everywhere you looked there was a yelling mouth, a huge pink tongue flexing in it like a python, sparks of saliva flying everywhere. He liked long, tulip-stemmed phrases and in the army it was all short-back-and-sides shouts. Voices approached the condition of a baton rapped against metal. Words bunched themselves into fists, knuckle-vowels thudded into his ears: even speech was a form of bullying. When you were not marching there was the sound of others marching. At night his ears rang with the memory of slammed doors and stamping heels. Everything he heard was like a form of pain. The army was a denial of melody and he found himself thinking what a relief it would be to be deaf, to hear nothing, to be blind, numb. Senseless.
Outside his unit’s quarters were tiny strips of garden where nothing grew. Everywhere was concrete except for these narrow strips of stony soil and they existed only to be kept absolutely free of any kind of plant life. To grow here a flower would have to be ugly and hard as old metal. He began to think of a weed as something beautiful as a sunflower.
Tin skies, asbestos clouds. Birds avoided flying over the barracks. Once he saw a butterfly and wondered about it.
He left the hotel and walked to a cinema where She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was playing. He had already seen it but that made no difference – he had probably seen every Western ever made. The afternoon was the worst part of the day and a movie swallowed up a good part of it in one gulp. At the same time he didn’t want to spend the afternoon in the dark watching movies set at night, gangster movies or horror films. In Westerns it was always afternoon, so he was able to avoid the afternoon and get a nice helping of it at the same time. He liked to get high and let the images float before his eyes like the nonsense they were. He’d sit with the old and the infirm, unsure of who were deputies and who were outlaws, indifferent to everything on the screen except for the bleached landscape and stagecoach clouds hauling their way across sand-blue skies. He couldn’t have made it through the day without Westerns but all the time he was watching them he was eager for them to end, impatient for the whole charade of settled scores to be over with so that he could emerge again into the fading daylight.
It was raining when the film ended. As he walked slowly back to the Alvin, he saw a newspaper in the gutter, his picture on one of the pages. It soaked up rain like a sponge, the paper drifting apart from itself, his picture bloating with damp, words showing through his face until it turned to gray mush.
In the hospital after injuring himself during training he was interviewed by the head of neuropsychology: a doctor but a soldier too, used to dealing with boys whose brains had been blasted apart by what they’d seen in combat, his sympathy severely curtailed when it came to noncombat problems. He listened curtly to Young’s shambolic, nonsensical answers, convinced he was a homosexual but offering a more complex diagnosis in his report: ‘Constitutional psychopathic state manifested by drug addiction (marijuana, barbiturates), chronic alcoholism, and nomadism . . . A purely disciplinary problem.’
As an afterthought, as if in summary, he added: ‘Jazz’.
They walked out of the bar together, Lady in her white fur, clutching his arm like a cane. She was living in a place on Central Park, alone except for her dog, the blinds closed so only filtered daylight could get through. One time he had been there and watched her feed her dog from a baby’s bottle. He watched her with tears in his eyes, not because he felt sorry for her, but because he felt sorry for himself and the bird that had flown away and left him. She listened to her old records to hear Lester, just as Lester played them to hear her.
Tonight was the first time he had seen anyone in he didn’t know how long. No one spoke to him anymore, no one understood what he said except Lady. He’d invented his own language in which words were just a tune, speech a kind of singing – a syrup language that sweetened the world but which was powerless to keep it at bay. The harder the world appeared, the softer his language became, until his words were like beautifully cadenced nonsense, a gorgeous song that only Lady had the ears to hear.
They stood at the street corner, waiting for a taxi. Taxis – she and Lester had probably spent more of their lives in taxis and buses than most people spent in their homes. The traffic lights hung like beautiful Christmas lanterns: perfect red, perfect green in a blue sky. She pulled him closer until her face was shadowed by the brim of his hat and her lips touched the side of his face. Their relationship depended on these little touches: lips pecking each other, a hand on the other’s elbow, holding his fingers in her hands as if they were no longer substantial enough to risk firmer contact. Pres was the gentlest man she had ever known, his sound was like a stole wrapped around bare shoulders, weighing nothing. She’d loved his playing more than anyone else’s and probably she loved him more than anyone. Perhaps you always loved people you never fucked more purely than anyone else. They never promised you anything but every moment was like a promise about to be made. She looked at his face, spongelike and gray-tinged from drink, and wondered if their lives had had the seeds of ruin in them from birth, a ruin they had cheated for a few years but could never evade. Booze, junk, prison. It wasn’t that jazz musicians died young, they just got older quicker. She’d lived a thousand years in the songs she had sung, songs of bruised women and the men they loved.
A cop walked by and then a plump tourist who hesitated, stared again, made up his mind to speak, and asked her in a German accent if she was Billie Holiday.
—You are one of the two greatest singers of this century, he announced.
—Oh, only one of two? Who’s the other?
—Maria Callas. It is a tragedy that you have not sung together.
—Why, thank you.
—And you must be the great Lester Young, he said, turning to Lester. The President, the man who learned to whisper on the tenor when everyone wanted to shout.
—Ding-dong, ding-dong, said Lester, smiling.
The man looked at him for a second, cleared his throat, and produced an airmail envelope on which they both scribbled their names. Beaming, he shook their hands, wrote his address on another envelope, and told them they were always welcome in Hamburg.
—Europe, said Billie, watching him waddle down the street.
—Europe, said Lester.
A taxi pulled up just as it began to rain. Lester kissed Lady and helped her inside, waving to her as the taxi moved out again into the moving lights of traffic.
A few blocks from the hotel he stepped out into the road and cars swarmed through him like he was a ghost. As it was happening he had no idea of what was going on but, once he had reached the opposite side-walk, he remembered the driver’s eyes widened in horror, screaming brakes, a hand wedged on the horn until the car sailed through him as if he were not there at all.
At the court-martial he felt relaxed: whatever happened could not be worse than what he had already experienced – if he was such a problem why not just boot him out? A dishonourable discharge would be fine by him. A psychiatrist described him as a constitutional psychopath, unlikely ever to become a satisfactory soldier. Lester found himself nodding, almost smiling: oh yes he had eyes, big eyes for that.
Then it was Ryan’s turn in the witness box, standing like he had a rifle and bayonet up his ass, detailing the circumstances of Young’s arrest. Lester didn’t bother listening: his own recollection of events was clear as moonlight gin. It was after an assignment at battalion headquarters and he was delirious with tiredness, indifferent to everything, so worn out and wasted he was filled with a hopelessness that came close to elation. Even when he glanced up at the bloodshot walls and saw Ryan standing over him he barely took any notice, hardly even blinked, not giving a motherfuckin damn about anything.
—You look ill, Young.
—Oh, I’m just high.
—High?
—I smoked a little pot, took some uppers.
—You’ve got drugs on you?
—Oh yes.
—Can I see them?
—Sure. Take a helping if you like.
Clutching his papers, the lawyer for the defence heard out Ryan’s story and asked,
—When did you first become aware that the defendant was under the influence of something like narcotics?
—I had suspicioned it when he first came into the company.
—What made you suspect?
—Well, his colour, sir, and the fact that his eyes seemed bloodshot and he didn’t react to training as he should.
Pres drifted off again. He thought of yellow light pouring into a field, blood poppies nodding in a breeze.
Next thing he knew he was in the witness box himself, standing there in his shit-coloured uniform, clutching a dark Bible in his hand.
—How old are you, Young?
—I am thirty-five, sir.
His voice floated across the courtroom like a child’s yacht on a blue lake.
—You are a musician by profession?
—Yes, sir.
—Had you played in a band or orchestra in California?
—Count Basie. I played with him for ten years.
To their surprise all members of the court were mesmerized by the voice, eager to hear his story.
—Had you been taking narcotics for some time?
—For ten years. This is my eleventh.
—Why did you start taking them?
—Well, sir, playing in the band we would play a lot of one-nighters. I would stay up and play another dance and leave and that is the only way I could keep up.
—Did any other musicians take them?
—Yes, all that I knew . . .
Taking the stand to give evidence – it was like taking the stand to play a solo. Call and response. He could tell he had the attention of this small, sparsely populated court – a real crowd of stiffs but they were hanging on his every word. Just like a solo, you had to tell a story, sing them a song they wanted to hear. Everyone in the court was looking at him. The harder they concentrated on what he was saying, the slower and more quietly he spoke, leaving words hanging, pausing in mid-sentence, the singsong of his voice charming them, holding them. Their attention suddenly seemed so familiar he expected to hear the clunk of glasses, the scrunch of ice scooped from a bucket, the swirl of smoke and talk . . .
The army lawyer was asking him now if they knew about his drug addiction when he went before the board.
—Well, I’m pretty sure they did, sir, because before I went to join the army I had to take a spinal and I didn’t want to take it. When I went down I was very high and they put me in jail and I was so high they took the whiskey away from me and put me in a padded cell, and they searched my clothes while I was in the cell.
The pauses between phrases, the connections not quite there, the voice always just behind the sense of what he was saying. Pain and sweet bewilderment in every word. No matter what he said, just the sound, the way the words shaped themselves around each other, made each member of the court feel as though he were being spoken to privately.
—When you say you were pretty high, what do you mean by that? Do you mean the whiskey?
—The whiskey and the marijuana and the barbiturates, yes, sir.
—When you refer to being high, could you explain that?
—Well, that’s the only way I know to explain myself.
—When you are not high, does it affect you physically?
—Oh yes, sir. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t care to blow my horn and I don’t care to be around anybody . . .
—It affects you badly?
—Just nervous.
His voice like a breeze looking for the wind.
Seduced by the voice and then hating themselves for succumbing to it, they sentenced him to a year in the stockade at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Worse than the army even. When you were in the army being free meant getting out of the army; here freedom meant being back in the army. Concrete floor, iron door, metal bunk beds suspended from the wall by thick chains. Even the blankets – coarse, gray – felt like they had been woven from iron filings swept off the floor of the stockade workshop. Everything about the place seemed designed to remind you of how easy it would be to dash your brains out. The human skull felt delicate as tissue in comparison.
Slamming doors, clanging voices. The only way he could stop himself from screaming was to cry and to stop himself from crying he had to scream. Everything you did made things worse. He couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t bear it – but there was nothing to do but bear it. He couldn’t bear it – but even saying that was a way of bearing it. He became quieter, looked no one in the eyes, tried to find places to hide but there was nowhere, so he took to trying to stay inside of himself, eyes peeping out of his face like an old man’s face through the gap between curtains.
At night he lay on his bunk and looked at the fragment of night sky that angled through the tiny prison window. He heard the guy in the next bunk turn toward him, his face flaring yellow in the light of a match.
—Young? . . . Young?
—Yeah . . .
—You looking at them stars?
—Yeah.
—They ain’t there.
He said nothing.
—You hear what I’m saying? They ain’t there.
He reached across for the proffered cigarette, pulled deeply on it.
—They’re all dead. Takes so long for the light to get from there to here by the time it does they’re finished. Burnt out. You’re looking at somethin that ain’t there, Lester. The ones that are there, you can’t see ’em yet.
He blew smoke toward the window. The dead stars hazed for a second and then brightened again.
He stacked records on the turntable and walked to the window, watching the low moon slip behind an abandoned building. The interior walls had been knocked down and within a few minutes he could see the moon clear through the broken windows at the front of the building. It was framed so perfectly by the window that it seemed as if the moon was actually in the building: a mottled silver planet trapped in a brick universe. As he continued watching it moved from the window as slowly as a fish – only to reappear again in another window a few minutes later, roaming slowly around the empty house, gazing out of each window as it went.
A gust of wind hunted around the room for him, the curtains pointing in his direction. He walked across the creaking floor and emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass. He lay on the bed again, gazing at the cloud-coloured ceiling.
He waited for the phone to ring, expecting to hear someone break the news to him that he had died in his sleep. He woke with a jolt and snatched up the silent phone. The receiver swallowed his words in two gulps like a snake. The sheets were wet as seaweed, the room full of the ocean mist of green neon.
Daylight and then night again, each day a season. Had he gone to Paris yet or was that just his plan? Either it was next month or he’d already been there and come back. He thought back to a time in Paris, years ago, when he’d seen the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, the inscription 1914–18 – how sad it still made him feel, the thought of someone dying as young as that.
Death wasn’t even a frontier anymore, just something he drifted across in the course of walking from his bed to the window, something he did so often he didn’t know which side of it he was on. Sometimes, like someone who pinches himself to see if he is dreaming, he felt his own pulse to see if he was still alive. Usually he couldn’t find any pulse at all, not in his wrist, chest, or neck; if he listened hard he thought he could hear a dull slow beat, like a muffled drum at a funeral in the distance or like someone buried underground, thumping the damp earth.
The colours were slipping from things, even the sign outside was a pale residue of green. Everything was turning white. Then he realized: it was snow, falling to the sidewalk in huge flakes, hugging the branches of trees, laying a white blanket over parked cars. There was no traffic, no one out walking, no noise at all. Every city has silences like this, intervals of repose when – if only for one moment in a century – no one is speaking, no telephones are ringing, when no TVs are on and no cars are moving.
As the hum of traffic resumed he played the same stack of records and returned to the window. Sinatra and Lady Day: his life was a song coming to an end. He pressed his face against the cold of the windowpane and shut his eyes. When he opened them again the street was a dark river, its banks lined with snow.
