When he remembered himself, the effect was jarring; Latif forgot everything he knew about descending and began to stumble, clubfooted. He clutched wildly at the dangling safety line of his opening riff, somewhat histrionic since it hadn't been heard for so long. Latif knew he had lost the moment and he wanted to close with a modicum of grace; he toyed briefly with the phrase, chopped it, bent it, played it straight, slowed it to halfspeed, and cut out, exhausted. He had blown for seven minutes and though frustrated, Latif ended his solo knowing he had held his own and also something else.
LAMENT | THE UNREQUITED | TRISTAN
My name is Tristan.
Latif started, opened his eyes and took the whitehaired white man's hand.
Tristan, he repeated, disoriented. They stood alone inside the guts of the city, waiting in an empty station for the uptown train. I must have dozed off, Latif thought. I didn't even hear footsteps.
That was some solo you played tonight, said Tristan. His eyes bounced with something Latif couldn't identify. I bet you waited a long time for that. An upturned eyebrow matched his mouth.
You were at Dutchman's? Latif asked. He was sure he'd never seen this cat before. He would have remembered such a face.
I was indeed. And for the first time in years. Tristan stared at him and smiled. I wish you luck. May you succeed where others fail. He shifted his weight slightly, left foot to the right, and something in the way he did it told Latif that he was drunk. Just then the train snaked into sight. Latif walked further down the tunnel, wanting to board a different car than Tristan. The doors parted, and he entered and sat down, leaning back and wrapping his legs around his horn case like a barbershop pole. He shut his eyes in a long blink.
Like for instance me, Latif heard at his ear, and there again stood Tristan, eschewing the empty seats of the unpopulated train to hold onto the metal overhead handrail. I wrote novels, he went on, oblivious to Latif's deliberate glaze-eyed stare. Tristan's body sagged, swayed as they moved over turbulence. You've got to be careful, boy—
I'm not a boy, Latif snapped.
Tristan gave him a withering look and waved his free hand: a slurred unapology. I don't mean it like that. I call my grandson boy. When Latif said nothing he resumed. You've got to understand the responsibility you have. Coltrane, rest his soul, he understood it. Albert understands it.
The heavy door to the next car opened and the mechanized scraping of metal wheels on metal tracks poisoned the air. Tristan and Latif both turned to watch a homeless couple shuffle through the car, the man hugging the woman to him, neither looking up. The man swung one leg in a half circle as he walked, as though he couldn't bend his knee.
Tristan sat down. I understand it, but it doesn't matter, he explained. Latif stifled the impulse to recoil from the liquor-wizened breath. There are no words for what makes my body shudder strangely after pissing and jerks me upright like a marionette in my bed in the chill in the night, and I want them. To scrawl them on the doors of my house and puke them out over the world. Tristan paused and Latif swallowed painfully. The old man's hand burrowed into his raincoat and reappeared with a halfpint of gin, empty save a swallow. I mix my own drinks, he disclosed. Damned if I'll pay seven dollars for a glass of tonic with a splash of gin. The slender bottle punctuated his speech.
We don't know what we think, my friend, because we don't know what we mean when we say what we say. Falling in love. We say falling in love and what in hell do we mean? Crude symbolism. A filthy agreement to pretend we understand each other. Latif nodded his head, oddly captivated. He had the sense that he was watching someone dangerous but that he himself was safe, that he was watching someone crazy who was making perfect sense.
War, Tristan whispered, fixing opaque, liquidy eyes on Latif and refusing to move them. What is your war? How goes the war? I believe this war must end. You believe the war is justified. I have seen a man in the war who has fallen in love and now is dying, melting into a soupy puddle of his own self with open casket eyes. We say love and war and think we know what we mean and we don't. And I will die soon, and smoke my cigars in purgatory. In the smoking section.
He shook the bottle by its top and liquid sloshed inside. He looked at it curiously, shrugged his lips, and drank it openthroated. Latif watched, waited. Tristan wiped his mouth on his sleeve and offered the empty bottle to Latif. Without thinking, Latif took it.
The artist, said Tristan, a wicked smile touching the corners of his mouth. Latif's heart played doubletime for a moment. Who is this cat? he wondered. If his goal of expression, flowing truth, comes to its impossible climax of synergetic clarity, then he has created heaven, and who needs art in heaven? Heaven casts out or castrates the artist, my friend. We are by nature self-destructive. Why then is the world surprised to see us kill ourselves and drink ourselves to death?
He snatched the bottle back and squinted through it, optimistic. Finding nothing, he cast it to the floor. Latif cringed and picked up his feet, but the old man hadn't thrown it hard enough to break. He turned back to Latif as if he had been interrupted, pulling his sleeve back and pointing a long well-manicured forefinger at the ceiling. Perhaps God is bored with man as we are bored with not being able to build a computer that can carry on a stimulating conversation. But if I died today I would face God empty-handed, with no truth to claim as my path to Him and no accounting for my wasted life of searching.
Wasted life of searching echoed through Latif. Perhaps only the belief that it would someday end made the search seem beautiful or even bearable. What if the search looped on forever without progress, a dusty parade over the same infertile arid grounds?
Tristan rose to retrieve the bottle and Latif said It's empty. The old man pocketed it anyway and stood with legs spread for balance, hands hanging by his sides, remarkably stable for an aged drunkard in a moving train. He pointed at Latif. My grandson is your age, he said. Nineteen. Tristan also; my namesake. I told him what I told you: that I have written all my life and told no truths. He led me out of my study and we took the subway out to Queens, to some goddamn abandoned trainyard, and he said Grandpa, I'm a writer too. I'll show you truth. We turned a corner and there it was: TRISTAN, it said, six feet tall in gold and silver and red letters on the side of a freight train, some kind of crazy script I could barely read, all sorts of arrows and curves flying off the thing. And Tris said This is all that anybody's ever written. The rest is just embellishment.
Tristan's face cracked in a wan smile. Something to consider, anyway. He rose. Good luck, kiddo. The doors clunked shut behind him.
Latif leaned forward and rode up to Harlem staring at the floor, cracking his knuckles with hungry hands, willing his heart calm. His stop came and he walked out onto his block and instead of latenight quiet Latif confronted earlymorning chaos, the wide street brimming with men and women milling in swirls and young hardrocks stalking back and forth in undirected longstride fury, lips pulled back and white teeth gleaming. A dissonant melange of highpitched agitation, baritone outrage, and moist sadness lingered like gunsmoke over the crowd. Hatchetfaced police hemmed everybody in, positioned in pairs every twenty feet with right hands resting inches from the arsenal of weapons strapped onto their belts. Beneath the arching streetlights, Harlem was writhing in pain and Teef gaped, aghast: What was this?
He walked slowly through the crowd and saw tears glistening in the stubble of men he'd only seen seated and impassive, hands crossed over their beerguts. Mothers hugged young men in doo rags, sobbing about justice, murder, cops. Groups of old men stood silently, hands pocketed and faces sallow, staring blankly at the ground. Twelve-year-olds sat on the concrete, knees tight to their chests, and watched their elders with upflickering eyes.
Spliff, Donald, and Equality stood apart from the crowd, passing a blunt beneath the awning of Good Buddy Chinese Takeout Kitchen. Latif spotted them and cut a wide-eyed beeline through the churling sea to find out what was going on.
Spliff looked at him incredulous. What fuckin planet
you been on, son? Kofi Ogunde cops acquitted on all counts.
Teef's mouth popped open. No.
Apparently, it was nobody's fault the nigga got shot, Equality said darkly.
Suddenly Latif's head ached. When did they announce it? he asked.
Four forty-five, said Donald. Cats been out here ever since.
Spliff poked his chin gruff at Latif. Nobody gave a fuck down at your little jazz club, did they?
Latif shook his head and looked at nothing. I never even would have known, he muttered. Two, three hundred people up in Dutchman's and every single one acting like it was business as usual. Motherfuckers must have known, Latif thought. They just didn't care. Goddamn.
That's what I thought, said Spliff. His finger sliced a downward arc, implicating the planet. We got to realize we at war. You wanna make some music, got to be something we can use. I love the nigga and I hate to say it, but fuck John Coltrane. Put a rifle in that nigga hand and then we'll talk. I know y'all looking at me like Why this drug-dealin motherfucker acting like he Huey Newton all of a moment, but I'm dead up. Anybody could be next. And if they find the crack rocks in my pocket, case won't even go to trial.
Latif took the blunt when Donald passed it.
How long you think folks will stay in the street? he wondered.
Donald curled his lip appraisingly. Not much longer, unless somebody sets it off.
Spliff shook his head authoritatively. Folks got to be shocked to riot, he said. Anybody shocked by this a damn fool.
HANG/OVER | PROPERTY | SILENCE
Latif woke in the sunshine, feeling like a tube of toothpaste squeezed to flatness. The long peppermint rope of his emotions was a dry, crusted mound lying in the sink; so much had happened yesterday that only his body felt anything: stiff, achy, hollowed, bleary. Outside, the street was as deserted as he'd ever seen it, everybody sleeping off the anger hangover. They'd wake up like people after one-night stands, sneaking glances at their bedfellows and wondering what came next.
Latif put on a sweater and his too-light jacket and ambled down the stairs to find some food, walk and eat, think, decompress. He bought a buttered bagel and a coffee at the bodega, glancing at the headlines. The trashy tabloids screamed Free! in huge letters, above smiling courtroom pictures of the exonerated cops, and Latif felt validated until he looked at a real paper. On the New York Times front page, the trial was just one of seven stories, pictureless. It would blow over like everything else.
I should be happy, he told himself. It mighta been a rough day for the bulletriddled ghost of Kofi Ogunde, but Latif James-Pearson's still alive and intact, dreams coming true. I should be popping champagne, fucking my girl. He breathed deep, trying to stir up enough wind to rouse the exhilaration lining the bottom of his stomach like a sheet of paper.
After “The Omen” and before the first set, Albert had invited Latif down to the Sunday Jam, a weekly session Van Horn hosted at his home. An ever-changing aggregate of young cats gathered there to soak up what they could, apprenticing themselves to an underspoken mentor. Van Horn didn't invite just anybody, and as word spread of Latif's performance, cats at Dutchman's lined up to slap him on the back—harder than necessary, some of them—and congratulate him as if he'd just won the Downbeat poll. The kind of guys who always had to answer somebody else's success with a tale of their own made sure to tell him they'd been to The Horn's house too. Other cats grinned with delight and told Latif they hadn't even known he played, were sorry they'd missed it, and had heard he'd killed. As if out of respect for his accomplishment, nobody purchased any dope.
Latif walked down to 110th Street and into Central Park, trying to shake off the clammy feeling and revel in his own badness, but simple sights hit him at symbolic angles, in soft spots free of callused flesh, and reminded Latif that there was trouble, sadness, horror in the world. He lingered at the edge of a sandlot playground and watched young children scream in glee and race in circles on their fat, still-clumsy legs and found himself abruptly and intensely saddened. He felt cowardly in his art, thinking of Spliff's words, pathetic for living in a timewarped jazzworld bubble and—as his trainride with Tristan, forgotten in the folds of the night, came back to him—foolish for thinking that a life of creativity could not itself leave him a broken man.
Here he stood on the brink of entering the world he'd watched so long from shadowed corners, and all Latif could think about was failure—not simply his own, but the larger tragedy of miscommunication, the impossibility of understanding, which seemed to suddenly surround him. It was a mindstate that fortified itself, this sudden helpless sensitivity, this feeling of impotence before the bittersweet embrace of life. Latif walked across the playground, averting his eyes from the small lake just past it on the left because he knew the profundity of glinting water would only deepen his despondence. He watched old folks shuffling along alone and others folded onto benches feeding birds, and his brain coded such pictures faster than he could stop it and translated them into an unknown dirge.
Soon he was thinking of his mother, of her face across from his at breakfast those last few weeks before he'd left, when he'd been nothing but a mask of restless ambition. He'd measured his growing resolve against the softness of his mother's eyes, trained himself for leaving by shutting her out bit by bit. Leda watched him sadly, not understanding why her son was treating her like this. Did he need an enemy so badly? He only answered her in monosyllables, scowled through Leda's attempts to talk until they waned, left her alone in his company.
Latif hunched over, elbows on knees on a park bench of his own, and imagined the tears his mother had shed behind the closed doors of her bedroom onto her queensized bed, asking God what she'd done to deserve such meanness.
He shuddered at his own callousness and pressed handheels against closed eyes, toes curling inside sneakers. How ridiculous was he for trying to pull emotions from an instrument when nothing in life seemed to pull any from him? Why the fuck should the human condition scroll forth from his horn? The only thing he understood was inarticulation, stuttering isolation, how to retreat into silence. Perhaps silence was the natural state of things and struggle was naive. Perhaps silence had been the prelude to his father's departure too. Perhaps that cat was somewhere crying over his lost wife and baby boy, looking at a picture he had taken with him to remember, or perhaps he'd died this very morning. Perhaps there was nothing much but silence and sadness in the world, and that was all there was to play.
The tears were forming. He could feel the water heavy in his eyes, and he blinked to try to make a drop fall, but none would. The moisture glazed his pupils, but Latif could not cry and instead loneliness spread over him in rivulets. Solitude had never scared him, but here in this park, on this gorgeous day, his own physical inarticulation, the sadness that wouldn't drip down his face and relieve him, made Latif feel supremely alone, unknown. He wanted Mona. He hoped to show her he could cry.
Hey, he said into a payphone.
Mona's voice was sprightly. Hey. How did it go last night?
Good. Real good. But I'm kind of sad. Can I come over?
He spent the uptown cab ride contrasting Mona's upbeat tone with last night's verdict. When he reached the top of her stairwell, Mona was standing in the apartment doorway smiling. She wore a paintsplattered buttondown man's shirt, not Latif's; robin's-egg-blue paint smeared her left cheek.
Come here, she said, grabbing his hand excitedly and leading him inside to the studio, I have something to show you. What do you think? Am I close?
You're very goddamn close, Latif muttered, not knowing what to say. Something in him felt violated, something else amazed. He stared at the canvas leaning on the easel: It was nothing like the way he'd drawn it, but somehow it was right. She's good, he thought. She's very good. It was all there, much more than he remembered telling her: the saxophonist, snakes floating from his horn, the sign, the chain, the stake.
Mona had painted the figure facing sideways and her sense of his bala
nce was perfect; he stood in a classic tenor superhero pose, feet planted shoulders' width apart and back bent slightly like the spine of a question mark, with the bell of his horn pointed almost straight back at him as if he were hitting the highest hardest note there ever was. He was all bubbles, as Latif had said, but Mona's bubbles touched each other, pressed one against the next, bent and shared edges as cells do beneath a microscope. The way Latif drew him they never touched; rather, they hovered near each other and approximated anatomical shapes: a globular hand, a long stretched artless tube of arm. His musician had been bubbles by default, because abstraction was the only way he could attempt to represent a figure. Mona had turned a figure into bubbles.
Latif always drew three snakes, forked tongues extended, facing out away from the musician. Mona, too, had depicted three: scaly, thick, and round. One, its tail cocked and body curled, faced the lefthand border of the painting. Another was just emerging from the horn, mouth wide and teeth sharp gleaming, and the third, his body curving sleek and fast, seemed to be flying straight at the musician. It shocked Latif, but the authority of Mona's work was such that he wondered whether he'd been drawing it wrong all these years. The stake, the sign, were perfectly rendered. The chain enclosed the saxophonist's ankle tightly, visibly squeezed it, but since the tenorman appeared so fluid, the effect was odd: the shackling of water. The colors surprised Latif most: here was his dream rendered in blues and angry rusted-metal browns, yellow snake eyes and green and silver glinting scaly snakeskin, Jazz Tonite misspelled as Jazz Tonight in bloodred writing on a white and deep-blue sign.
Mona stood carefully outside his line of vision and rubbed paint from her forearm. He knew she wanted him to speak; what could be say? What did the appropriation of his symbols mean? You had no right to do this snapped and hissed at thank you; they twisted like the serpents of the Hippocratic scepter.
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