In a tone somewhere between reluctant truth-teller and weary victim, Mona went on. That horn is a cop-out, baby. Your father's gone, you've spoken to your mother what, twice, since you moved, you hate your sleazy job and you think your biggest problem is your horn? That's an effect, Latif; that's not a cause.
Mona sat still on the bed, tucked her hands under her thighs and watched him. Latif was silent, standing awkwardly with one arm bent behind his back and his stare frozen to the floor. He was listening and he was hurt, she thought; he might crumple into a pile of limbs or reanimate and scream. Mona hated when things got loud, and so she spoke like people walked on frozen ponds.
You're fighting so hard not to need anybody, Latif. He didn't move. You think if you stay closed off, bad things can't get in. But how will good things? She bent a little bit, trying to duck into his line of vision, but he refused to look at her. From the day we met, you've been giving me reasons why I can't be close to you. I'm white. I'm not a musician. She gestured at the painting. I'm overstepping my bounds when I try to reach out to you. Well then, why are we trying?
She stopped and felt tears welling unexpectedly, wiped a wrist below her watery nose and smeared a tear into her ear and felt the tiny drop incavernate there. Latif looked up and blinked; the sight of tears always muted his feelings, directed them outward, melted them into remorse. He hoped, suddenly and desperately, that Mona had a reason.
I don't know, Latif said in a small, choked voice. Why are we trying?
Because we're people, Mona said through trembling lips. People need each other. We're the same.
Latif craned his neck to the ceiling, pressed his eyes with his handheels until his mind danced with colordots; he watched them dissipate and thought about her words. How come white people were always the ones coming with that we're-the-same rap? Did they want to let you know you were as good as they were, or reassure themselves they were as good as you despite their cruelty? How dare Mona tear him apart like that, tell him he was boring and self-deluded and rigid, a total fuck-up, and then try to make up? Why did she want to worm her way into his life if he was so terrible? Maybe Mona was just weak and needy and wanted everybody else to be too—didn't have a tradition to hold up and aspire to and chase after, nothing of grandeur and nobility to enliven and torture her and so she wanted to tear at the only thing he had of meaning and—
We're not the same. He looked at her with bleary eyes and Mona was stunned at how mean Latif suddenly looked, how hunted. He pounded his chest twice with his right fist. This is my life, he seethed. I've got nowhere else to go; I've got to deal with this or it will kill me. He stopped and looked at her, eyes wild hard, then sneered I'm not painting my fucking mother here.
Mona shook her head in slow shock that Latif would lunge so viciously, hurt her so deliberately. She stepped toward him: Fuck you, Mona spit, then slapped him hard across the face and gasped and stepped back quickly in surprise and fear, the hand that did it pressed now disbelieving to her mouth.
She gaped at him with naked fright, and her expression made Latif angrier than the fact that she had hit him. His words had beckoned violence and he knew it, perhaps even wanted it, but this look was something else: Mona thought that he would hit her back. She looked at him like he was an animal, Latif thought, a goddamn wild animal. He stepped toward her and she flinched, and seeing it Latif snatched up the closest thing to him, an alarm clock, and raised it behind his head.
You think I'm gonna hit you, Mona? That what you're waiting for? He whirled the other way and heaved the clock at the open window. It punched a jagged hole through Mona's painting, through the saxophonist's chest. The canvas toppled and fell upside down onto the floor, the huge tear flapping.
Both of them stared at it. I'm sorry, said Latif, hardbreathing through his nose bull-like. I didn't mean to do that. Mona stared furious, sharks cutting through the blueness straight at him, then darted her eyes at his horn lying in the corner.
No, he said. Uh-uh. Not in your life. I ain't Smiley. I'll put my foot dead deep up in your ass.
I learn from my mistakes, said Mona, recoiling bitter, angry that he knew. At least I thought I did.
Better write it down this time so you remember, said Latif. No more nigger boyfriends.
I didn't say that! Mona screamed. You said that!
Latif walked to the window and looked out at the alarm clock lying lonely in the street. Yeah, he admitted. I did.
His anger was gone; he looked at Mona now and saw a distant symbol, saw himself one in the convex mirror of her eyes. It was simple that way. Simpler. He wiped sweat from his brow onto his pants and collapsed into an Indian-sit on the floor, arms dangling loose over his knees, head bent forward.
This isn't me, Latif said. He sighed and the breath shuddered out of him. I'm sorry. I'm just so fucked up right now . . . He looked at the floor. They were silent. Finally, Latif heard Mona walk toward him.
I'm sorry too, she said. But I'm sick of playing missionary to the dark fucking continent. When you understand yourself a little better, give me a call. And the door slammed behind her.
Latif stayed where he was and nausea rumbled his stomach, threatened to rend his guts and the day's nourishment and leave him as empty as he felt. He looked around for something to puke into and found himself wondering what it would feel like to throw up in his hornbell, defile it with what was inside him. Soon, though, the nausea ebbed and a new urge asserted itself, one he couldn't identify, a craving which contradicted the compulsion to purge. He touched his shirtpocket and felt the pack of cigarettes but knew that wasn't it. Touching the cigarettes was an associative gesture, a reminder of the moment outside Dutchman's when he had first needed a smoke although he'd never had one. Latif felt his heart bang beneath the menthol softpack and panicked when he realized that his body was asking him for heroin.
SOUND BLOCKS | BINGE | THE BECKONING
Latif sat on the floor of his room, under the mirror, and did it without flinching, casually precise like it wasn't his body. And it wasn't as the surge of warm electrics radiated through him, coloring his thinking; he knew how he must look and wanted to laugh at finally being inside the joke of what's really going on while all the world sees nothing but a stoned musician nodding vagrant rhythms. The tuning fork vibrations of every muscular decussitation, heartbeat, and neurological pinprick tingled and resounded through his body; it was an ecstasy so self-contained that even the slightest movement might have pushed him over the edge of sensory overstimulation; lifting his leg or brushing a palm against the hardwood was unthinkable. Everything was unthinkable; the only data pulsing in the blunted clot of Latif's brain was an unassimilated unreadable appreciation of a universe in which one could breathe this slow and feel this good.
Three hours later he twitched an eyelid, blinked though a crust of snot and tearsalt at a gleaming point of light across the room, dim through his undilated eyes but steady glowing. It was a refracted sunbeam dancing on the fingerpedal of his horn, and from this northstar Latif mapped out the constellation of his instrument, squinted it into focus and snaked mind tentacles around it and squeezed forth a sound, a rustybrown flat tone sheet that hummed toward him in a straight slow line, cleaving through space shedding a halflife vapor trail. He held it, amazed, afraid that if he looked away, unclenched his jaw, blinked, it would vanish. When the tone had almost reached him, Latif scraped up the courage to try altering it; his next thought made it dip into a lower register and fatten to a deeper chocolate brown, and Latif watched, listened, euphoric. These sounds were purer than any he had ever heard. They were whole. He willed a simple melody into existence and watched it chase its tail, then blinked and made another sound dive through it like a ring of fire—orchestrated an array of interplays until the room dizzied with multicolored ribbons of music rippling together and apart, dancing to his thoughts. It was a feeling greater than any music he had ever played, an apex of expression so innate and natural and affirming that Latif couldn't imagine the anxiet
y of separation, the fear of inarticulation, that had plagued him for so long. Thoughts and music were the same; it was merely a question of bypassing translation, automating the conversion as he just had.
Blocks of sound: All of a moment, Teef understood what Sonny meant. Before the miosis into bass saxophone piano drum there was a solid chunk of music like a sculptor's uncut stone. The musician found the form and fault lines, chiseled the block into a statue. Until now Latif had been trying to build a statue from the ground, piling up rocks instead of chipping at the block to shape the space around it. He lifted his hand to his head to rub in the epiphany and found his domepiece wet with sweat. His joints hurt; he felt achy and crawled shivering to bed. Smoking a cigarette calmed him. Latif slept.
He dreamed that some musicians were time bombs, strategically developed secret cyborgs built by the conspiracy and programmed to play jazz, to be heroic blowers of the now. And after years, recording dates, world tours, interviews, band breakups and re-formations, innovations and compositions, when the club was packed with as many of the kind of people who found hope and validation in the music as could fit inside, the kind of people the conspiracy wanted dead, the musicians would explode in flame and razor shrapnel, killing everyone.
There was no way of telling which musician, which genius of the form, might be a killer. There was speculation; some music buffs claimed they could discern a hallmark timbre in the cyborgs' playing, a certain commonality of phrasing, but men who claimed this had been known to die like all the rest. People knew that it might happen but they sat in jazz clubs all the same; they chanced it and they listened. Musicians took the biggest risks of all, spent half their lives at ground zero and never knew which of their bandmates might explode. Latif ran from Wessel Gates to Van Horn to Sonny Burma and suddenly each one had a serial number on his wrist, each one clicked mechanically from the neck and hummed suddenly electric, and he ran from all of them, barefoot through an endless tunnel washed in dull fluorescence, but the humming wouldn't stop. He threw a hammer through the ceiling and the lighting died. He stopped and saw the nightsky glinting through the hole and heard birds twitter but the humming was still there. Latif realized he was a timebomb too and woke up screaming.
He never stopped. His body shrieked with pain and need if he ignored the dripping nose and eyes, the sudden sweating hotness and shivery yawns and clenching stomach which meant it was time to fix himself another hit. The kid got bad so fast. Cats said it took a month or more of dabbling before your body fully forgot how to function without regular infusions of poison, and as day one blurred into day two and then day three Latif told himself he was only fucking around. There was still time to pull out, write up this binge as an experiment and let the results, the revelations, reinvigorate his music. Latif had no point of comparison for his consumption, no way to know if he was going overboard. The facts he could recall were masquerading anecdotes he bent to serve his need to feel alright. Sonny had told him that what did most cats in, made their habits balloon until unmanageable, was hanging out with other users. Just hearing cats discuss their need to score could have you salivating for a fix, even if you knew you didn't need one.
Latif took solace in the knowledge that he was alone; no fraternal aggregate of laughing musicians was here to glamorize the act, to normalize a physical process which still partly horrified Latif even as he performed it on himself. He latched onto Sonny's words and squinted until he could not see past them and the reassurance they provided, and five days passed in a constipated binge of sensory pingpong, Latif bouncing between bliss and anguish without once leaving his room. He had so much smack that it seemed for a while as if his reserve would last forever.
The insight he'd glimpsed after his first hit still filled Latif with hope; he'd found what he'd set out in pursuit of, and he wanted to return to that place of discovery. He knew addicts were forever trying to recapture the magic of their first time, but Latif pursued it nonethless, with the same single-minded rigor, the same sense of purpose, with which he'd hefted his horn those first few silent weeks in New York. He was back in the woodshed.
Murray Higgins had nothing on this drug as far as time went. It borrowed without returning, burrowed without surfacing. Latif and his horn and the objects in his room became a still life, forms on which the changing light played as the sun rose, peaked, waned, set.
Latif ate only once, on the second day, couldn't keep the food down and never had the urge to try again; an almost full styrofoam container of Szechuan chicken and vegetable fried rice sat rotting on the floor and so did he. Don't get high on your own supply. The back of Latif's mind generated dull thoughts; they floated unnoticed for hours before osmosing into his consciousness and taking root: Say Brother must be looking for me. I have to get my shit together. I'm almost out of smack.
Only Sonny Burma knew where he lived, and Burma had come knocking on the door a day ago. Latif had heard his own name vaguely through the haze of mellow madness and thought at first he was hallucinating. When he realized it was Sonny, Latif had wanted nothing more than to explain what he'd done and ask for help, to tell Sonny that he knew now how to play and couldn't even lift his horn, that he had driven himself to the brink of insanity in desperation and discovered what he'd been in search of, a master key that unlocked the relationship of mind to music and erased time space and saxophones, but it had trapped him. It had been a trick. He was entombed now in a one-room purgatory world, diluting his blood with a drug so insidious that it prevented him from putting any use to what it taught him.
He wanted to tell Sonny but he feared what Sonny might say, who he might tell, what a cat like him whose own habit never seemed to fuck him up at all might think. Teef couldn't move to let him in regardless; he sat on the floor holding his mirror in his lap and closed his eyes to Sonny's banging, eyelids humming, afraid to get up. The imaginary breeze against his skin was almost more than he could bear; it whistled evilly against the holes in his arm. The tickling was maddening, and finally Latif gave in, raised a shaking hand and scratched and couldn't stop. He tore himself apart for hours in a steady absentminded clawing rhythm until his flesh was red, sticky, and raw, and blood was caked beneath his nails.
What could pull him out of this, and would he let it? Behind his humming eyelids Latif saw the black cord of the tradition coiling around him like a python, squeezing him until his bones snapped and his lungs popped, unhinging its agate mouth and swallowing him whole, forcing him in lumpy peristalsis gulps into its gullet to the rhythm of Sonny Burma's fist against the door.
Sonny was gone when he got up, had been gone forever. The sickly coldness of the window's light told Latif that it was early morning, six or seven. He must have zoned out wild long; the last image pasted in the scrapbook of his brain was the glow of a sunset, set to sounds of dusktime double Dutch. Latif felt strangely normal, hollow and crampy but sturdy on his legs. Perhaps the storm was over, he thought. But the eeriness of his own bodycalm told him this was more likely the hurricane's eye.
Latif stood and walked a slow stiff-legged loop around the room, stretching arms and back. He scratched his head and dandruff fecundated his shoulders. Latif loped to the sink, washed his arm and dried it delicately with a towel. He settled in a catcher's crouch in the bedroom's center, poised on the balls of his feet with his lefthand fingers splayed against the floor for balance.
He blinked in the light, trying to acclimate to his sudden lucidity. Latif didn't trust himself right now; he had to keep watch to ensure that the orders he gave his body were carried out, had to keep himself too busy to get high and hope he remained steady. The best thing to do would be rejoin the world outside, he thought, assuming it was still there. He nodded an affirmation of this plan, adopting a military curtness with himself. Shower. Get dressed. He tried to do some pushups but found himself too weak and ended up lying facedown on the hardwood with his palms pressed flat and elbows pointing in the air, smelling the stale sourness of his body through the soapsmell of th
e shower. He could feel the soreness in his arms, the rawness from scratching covering a deeper, sharper pain. He rolled over and looked at his watch: nine-thirty. Hours to fill before the club opened.
He would tell Say Brother that a family illness had called him out of town without warning, that he had been in Boston at his mother's bedside all week long, and he would apologize and eat the loss, pay Say Bro's cut out of his own bank account and continue to do business as usual. Part of him knew this was a fantastic idea, to do business as usual once the vendor had become a customer, jumped the million-volt electric fence and landed on the junkies' side amidst discarded needles and the bootlegged economics of dependence, but he let himself believe it all the same. Business as usual. Business before pleasure. Business never personal.
Latif bolted his horn case and picked it up, then changed his mind and set it down. He put the rest of the skag in his coat pocket and shut the door behind him. The routine competence of his body was a sudden marvel to Latif; the graceful independent way his feet shimmied down flights of stairs, the balance with which he swung open the building's door and slipped outside before it swung back shut.
Spliff was standing by the payphone with his pager in his hand. Yo, your girl was looking for you, b.
Latif visored his eyes with the flat of his hand and glared. She was? When?
Yesterday, like in the afternoon. Told me to tell you call her.
Thanks. Hey. Three long strides and he was next to Spliff. Here. Put this in your pocket. He closedfist-passed the bag of smack. It's already cut but you could step on it again. I can't be holding it right now.
Spliff screwfaced him, perplexed, but Latif just walked away, moving fast now, strength returning. He felt like a man making arrangements for his own funeral, and thought suddenly of a werewolf in a movie he'd once seen who chained himself down frantically as the full moon rose, knowing he would soon become a killer. Time was limited; soon Latif's body would claw and wrack, knot and twist in hunger. Until that happened this was nothing: empty rhetoric, meaningless charity. He was a Sunday morning sinner sitting in a church; the question was where he would be once Saturday night rolled back around on goldrimmed tires screaming whiskey.
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