by Ronald Malfi
“Isabella,” he began, “I don’t—”
“Shhhh,” she said.
A steely bleat from Claxton’s horn…
The fermented triad chorused, in unison, “Go, man, go!”
A second raking, brilliant spark of sound from Claxton’s saxophone…
“Go, man, go!”
A third…
“Go, man, go!”
A fourth…and this time, Claxton let it bleed into the chorus, held it, let it bleed a second time, a third, bleeding out like a suicide…
“Go, man, go!”
“He’s great!” Nick shouted across the table.
“Yes, he is!” Isabella, still watching the band, shouted back.
“He’s so young!”
“Wait for the end,” she said. “Can you hear? Wait for it…wait for it…”
“I can hear…”
“Wait for the end,” she said again. “Wait for it. The whole thing is eighteen carat, man! He is too much!” The bebop slang sounded funny coming from her, spoken in her faint Spanish accent.
“What?” he shouted back.
“He is too much!” she yelled back, not taking her eyes off the stage. “Much-much-much-much-much!”
The band rattled, shook like a roller-coaster. Claxton’s horn was like the single bleating of an angel’s trumpet, sighted to burst all the hearts of humanity at once and to kill everyone dead and allow God, once again, to start anew. Nick could hear the downbeats in his head: one-two, one-two, one-two. The band thumped and beat, and Nick could feel them in their entirety reverberating in his chest now. And then, just like that, the music ceased. It hit a wall and died on impact. The sound was like cottony silence after an explosion. Then the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Many stood, still clapping. The cheering was like music unto itself. On stage, instruments clattered down. With some effort, the backup band achieved a uniform bow. Nick sat watching, rapt. Claxton dripped off the stage, some creature having just shrugged off a dead layer of scales, and was followed with almost comic obedience by the three wizened myrmidons, each with their heads down and their bald white pates reflecting the pink-orange fluorescent lights housed in the tracks along the ceiling.
“Are they done?” Nick was still shouting. His ears had heartbeats. “Is Claxton done? Is he done?”
“Mercy,” Isabella breathed. “They played that son of a bitch longhaired.”
“Is he done?”
“Hey,” Isabella said, looking at him for the first time that evening. He was taken aback by the stark, refreshed youthfulness of her features. “Do something for me.” She looked darker, deeper, more intense than he remembered her looking. “Can you stand?”
“Stand what?”
“Stand,” she said. “On your feet. Can you stand?”
“Why couldn’t I stand?”
“Because you look drunk,” Isabella said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No. No. I, uh…no…” It seemed all he could say. He felt like an ass. “No,” he said again. Then: “What? What is it?”
Claxton’s backup band had congregated together at one table; Nick could see the old-timers smoking cigarettes and drinking pints of black petrol. Claxton lit his own cigarette at the foot of the stage. He cupped the flame in two enormous black hands, the spit of the flame reflecting orange on his face. He looked like the devil. Then he turned and vanished through a narrow, curtained archway just beyond the stage.
“Here,” Isabella said, sliding a small Ziploc bag across the table to him. It was empty.
“What’s this?”
“You’re closer than I am,” she said. “Can you stand up and go to the stage and pick up the cigarette butts that are on the floor?”
“What?”
“They’re Claxton’s cigarette butts,” she said.
“Are you serious?”
“The greatest things in history were accomplished just sheer seconds after the asking of that very question, Nicholas,” she proclaimed, and something about it sounded a bit rehearsed.
“But isn’t that sort of excessive?” he said.
Isabella fluttered her eyelids and looked away. Nick could not tell if she was being playful or if he had annoyed her with his insolence. “Principles, principles,” she half sang, confusing him further.
Nick stood, grabbing the Ziploc bag off the table. “You must be a huge fan,” he said, and moved toward the stage. There were perhaps half a dozen little white twists of tobacco-filled paper scattered constellation-like around the pulpit. Opening the bag, he proceeded to peck at them with his fingers, jabbing at them like a bird would crumbs of bread on the sidewalk, and stuffing them into the plastic Ziploc bag. Once, he glanced over his shoulder, anticipating security or Claxton himself at his back wondering just what the hell he was doing, but there was no one there. In fact, no one in the club—with the exception of Isabella Rosales—was paying any attention to him. He grinned and executed a half-nod at her. Maybe the alcohol was taking its hold after all. She lifted something from her lap—a camera—and snapped a succession of photographs. He lifted his left hand to block the flash from his eyes. Still no one looked in his direction. He was invisible.
When he finished collecting Claxton’s cigarette butts from the stage floor, he turned to see Isabella rising from her table and moving across the club. She paused against one wall, very close to the curtained doorway through which Claxton had just recently vanished. Nick went over to her.
“Your souvenirs, madam,” he said, handing her the Ziploc baggie.
“Muchas gracias,” she said, and stuffed the baggie down into the cleavage of her dress. There was much cleavage, Nick noted.
“Are you working tonight?” he asked her.
“We are shooting after the gig, yes,” she said.
“He’s very good. I don’t know anything about jazz, but he’s good. How does he…?” And he brought his hands up and feigned fingering an invisible saxophone.
“Two notes at once?” Isabella said. “That’s his big secret. That’s what makes him supernatural. His music is real good, and that’s what makes him real good. The way he blows, though—that’s what makes him sublime.”
“Are you shooting here in the club?”
Isabella said, “Shouldn’t you be with your wife, Nicky-Nicholas?”
Against the wall, the curtain shushed open. A hard-faced, beer-gutted Hispanic stood on the other side of the doorway, his eyes dark and too close together in his skull. To Isabella he said, “His chops is hurting. Said to wait an hour.”
“Tell him to go to the site when he’s ready. I’ll wait there.”
“He knows the site?”
“Just tell him to go,” Isabella said, and walked away while the hardfaced Hispanic continued to stare at her. He seemed content, though, to watch her walk away. Then he turned to Nick. “You press?”
“Press?”
“Press,” the man said again, tone unchanged.
“I’m with her,” he said quickly, nodding to the place against the wall where Isabella had been standing just a moment ago.
The man laughed. Or coughed or growled or something: it was an action yet to be catalogued by the human condition. Nick could smell his breath, too, and it smelled like the stuffing in an old recliner. “Yeah, crumb,” the man said. “Shit, yeah. Ever’body with her.”
Isabella had relocated to the bar. She ordered a gin and tonic as Nick approached, and did not look at him. She had her elbows resting on the bar and her arms crossed over one another. With some intensity, she watched the bartender fix her drink.
“I was working in Pamplona two years ago,” she said from nowhere. “I was at a fairly famous café that doubles as an even more famous nightclub and occasional discotheque at night and on the weekends. It was an after-hours shoot. It was me, the band, the club’s—what is the word?—the club’s bouncer, and the man tending bar and cleaning up the bar counter. I remember watching him pull stacks of money from under the counter and run his fat,
brown fingers through the stacks, then push the stacks into his pants. I remember wishing I’d taken a picture of him stuffing the money in his pants like that because it just looked so honest. We all continued drinking very late into the night. The bartender, or someone else, maybe, put something into my drink, Nicholas, and I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in the rectory of a Catholic church at the far end of town, half-undressed, with the inside of my mouth tasting like artichokes and cigarette ash and the lower half of my body feeling as if it had been laid out on smoldering coals while I slept. Luckily, my equipment hadn’t been stolen—someone had stashed it under a pew. I do not know why they left it, but they did. And for a while I had no inkling as to what had happened to me while I was unconscious. And for a brief time, I was thankful I could not remember. Then I developed the film in my camera, and it was all right there and there could be no mistaking any of it.”
The bartender set her drink down in front of her.
“Pamplona is a wonderful place,” she said, and downed half her drink in a single gulp. “I suppose in my own way I have run with my share of the bulls.”
“Where’s the site?” he asked.
“What site?”
“The site of the shoot. Where are you shooting tonight?”
“You do not even like jazz, Nicholas,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I like it fine. Really. I said I didn’t know it, but now that I know it, I like it a lot.”
“Ahhh,” Isabella said. “Now that you know it.”
“Well, I could learn it.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling, “yes. Oh, yes. I can see that.”
“I even have some Glenn Miller albums at home.”
She laughed at him.
“What?” Her smile forced a smile on him, too.
“What, what?” she said, mocking him. “Como?” Then: “Nothing. Just—nothing. Nada. It is only that you are just like a man.”
“How’s that?”
“Trying so hard,” she said.
“Trying?”
“Trying so hard, just like a man.”
“What I meant was—”
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping with your wife right now?”
He watched her and felt himself turn away from her and look out across the club. He said, “I don’t want to go back.”
“Ever?” she said.
“I don’t know about ever,” he said. “I just know about now, right now. And I don’t want to go back right now.” He looked at her. Said, “I can’t.”
Isabella said, “Tell me about the war.”
—Chapter VII—
There was a steep hill behind the Club Potemkin that climbed to the black sky brilliant with stars and overlooked, precipitously, the endless band of ocean. Nick walked, Isabella’s camera case around one shoulder and an accompaniment of battery-powered lights strapped together over his other shoulder. Along with the lighting equipment, Isabella had packed a portable CD player. Now, the volume turned low, the body of the CD player thumping discretely against Nick’s left thigh with every other step he took, they listened to Claxton’s latest album, Mephistopheles, as they walked. Beside him, Isabella moved quietly through the wet grass in her bare feet, carrying nothing except a small black purse and the hem of her dress.
He said, “Iraq was desolate and like an abortion. Which was good, I guess. It’s easier to fight on ground that isn’t alive. You don’t feel as responsible.”
“For what?”
“For everything,” he said. “For anything.” He found her questions to be nearly childlike, but also something of an insincere nature, as if she were really only playing with him, prodding him, seeing which way he would go. And this was something that had registered with him in the first few minutes of their initial encounter that day at the hotel café.
“Then what do you feel like?”
“Nothing much,” he said.
“That is the bullshit, Nicholas.”
“It’s just hard.”
“Hard how? What do you mean?”
“Hard,” he said, and found he could only repeat it: “Hard. To talk about, I mean.” And he considered. “You feel like you’re in some sort of purgatory. You feel humbled and weakened by your humility. Oddly enough, you feel peaceful but sad, too, and all at the same time. In some ways it’s like being trapped in an everlasting imperfection—a purgatory. There isn’t the intensity that everyone assumes with war. I mean, there are times like that, yeah, sure, but overall, you’re just lulled by this sense of powerlessness. Like a child being coaxed to sleep in the middle of a house-fire. And for whatever reason, you’re okay with it.”
“Because it’s too much power to have,” Isabella spoke up. “Yes? And you are glad you do not have it, or at least you do not have all of it. To hell with it. Yes? Let someone else have it. Let someone else worry about it.”
“Yes. To hell with it.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, yes.” And he felt himself start to smile.
“Well, for someone so lulled by it all, you certainly do not like talking about it.”
“I have my reasons.”
“What are they?”
“They’re complicated.”
“I can see that. That is what makes me want to know all the more. Those are the best kinds of reasons.”
“But it’s too complicated to put into words. That’s the other thing about war—it’s all so damned complicated. You feel a certain way and you’re confused by it, which is probably the most complicated thing of all. Too often you don’t know how to feel, and when you do feel something—anything—you don’t know why you feel it, which is too confusing to even explain. I mean, I can’t anyway. And it drives you mad, trying to understand the un-understandable.”
They crested the hill. Nick paused, looking out over the black sea speckled with the reflection of a million stars, and could not move. For whatever reason (although he thought he knew the reason; thought he always knew the reason), his mind slipped back to Emma. He recalled coming home from Iraq, and that second night in bed with her. The first night in bed with her she had said nothing and had only wept, and it had been like a session, some session, and something that hurt him too much to ever recall, as she had thought him dead and his return to her had been nearly a miracle, like sleeping with a ghost. He remembered how she had looked at him in the dark and how she had talked to him, half-whispering, every word borne on a wave of a preternatural intensity. We won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby? she had said, her words now eerily prophetic. Of course not, sweet, he’d told her. Of course not. And what could ruin them? Love—honest, true, genuine love—could not be ruined. Hands, he understood, could be ruined. But love could not be ruined. And nothing would ruin them.
“What are you thinking?” Isabella asked him. She had stepped to the edge of the cliff. Her hair, long and dark, billowed out behind her. Her skin looked white and ghostly against the canopy of night.
“The war,” he said, and it wasn’t a total lie. Since his return, everything he thought about had something to do with the war. He and Emma were no different. Even now, with everything as it was, he found he still loved Emma and still wanted to belong to her. He wanted to belong to Emma and he wanted to belong to himself, too, but he found that, with all things beyond his mortal control, he belonged only to the war. And the war belonged to him. It was as sinful an affair in which one could engage.
“Has it changed you?” she asked.
He set the equipment down in the damp grass. “In some ways. Not all around, but in some ways.” After a pause, he added, “I used to have certain beliefs before the war. Then, after the war, some changed. Some stayed the same, though,” he said quickly, “but some changed, too. And then, since the change, it seems like I can’t lock on anything. Everything seems to change, to shift, over and over again. I find I trust nothing. And sometimes I’m not even entirely sure what I believe in.”
“And your hand,” she said.<
br />
“What about it?”
“Your hand has changed, too. It is perhaps the most obvious change.”
“Yes, well—I thought you meant, like—as in—”
“You talk very ambiguous,” she said, cutting him off. “If someone told me to shoot a picture of your words, I would not know what to shoot. You give me nothing to shoot, Nicholas. It is like shooting the wind. Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give me something substantial. Something solid. Something to shoot.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is the truth and the reality are in the details of what you saw and what you did and, really, in what happened.” She said, “What happened?” She said, “Tell me something that happened.”
He thought for some time. He thought eventually of the city. There had been a sadness to the old, broken city. He remembered moving toward the center of the city and into a tiny nameless village and bursting through a wooden doorway, and how the frame of the arch crumbled down, and how the gray-blue dust billowed out in a cough. There had been seven or eight flights of stairs slinking down into the suffocating earth. Endless stairs. The risers themselves were made of wood, suspended by railings bolted to the walls, and were sodden and bloated with water. In the dark, the smell was intolerable. The air was stifling and oppressive, like being trapped in the trunk of a car. How many tunnels did they traverse? Back above ground, and in the too-bright daylight, shooting erupted. They had dropped their rifles into their hands and began firing on a tight wedge of insurgents across the empty marketplace. You could never see the details of their faces. They were dark faces, very dark and almost smeared-looking, and it was as if they had no features. (That was how he had dreamed of them each night, too: smeared and slightly out of focus, like a photograph of someone taken just as they moved their head. All of them—they were phantoms, were ghosts. Ironically, it would be the way he would remember Myles Granger to look on his deathbed, too—smeared, out-of-focus, and not wholly there.) They continued to fire and the rattle of machine guns clattered off. Something on the other side of the village exploded in a dry crunch of smoke and debris. The dust was so thick it was a moving, living thing.