Shackling Water

by Adam Mansbach

  Sit down, Wess, said Leda. Take a load off. You look like you've got a bad flu, she told Latif. Have you seen a doctor down there in New York?

  Nah. I haven't even taken off from work. As far as Leda knew, he was a waiter at Dutchman's.

  Well, I'll call Doctor Wilson in the morning and make an appointment. You might need some antibiotics or something.

  Boy's probly working too hard, said Wess, and clapped him on the shoulder. Bedrest might do it.

  You're one to talk, smiled Leda. Up at the crack of dawn and out until all hours of the night. At your age.

  My age, frowned Wessel, twisting in his chair to face down Leda's teasing. Her back was to him by the time he swiveled, like she'd said nothing provocative. Shoot, Wess chuckled, you better hope you look this good at my age. He turned to Latif to cosign or undercut his jive and Wess's face fell as he remembered what was going on. The kitchensounds covered a momentary silence, and then Leda was at the table with them, pouring coffee into mugs and serving thick wedges of peach cobbler messy on dessert plates.

  I know I sound all mothery, but I bet you haven't had a decent meal in months, she said. Eating dinner at a nightclub. She tut-tutted and looked at Wess. He never did let me teach him how to cook.

  He shoulda, said Wess, chewing. His glance danced to Latif, whose head was bent over the plate. He was chopping the cobbler smaller and smaller with his fork and dreading the moment he'd have to put some in his mouth. He imagined it sitting gooey on his swollen tongue. Women love a man who can sling those pots.

  I broke up with Mona, said Latif abruptly.

  Oh, baby, I'm so sorry. Leda reached over and squeezed his arm. When did this happen?

  Latif could feel Wess staring at him, but he spoke looking at the table. Same old blue tablecloth. About a week ago. Probably why I got sick.

  Well, I'm sorry about Mona, said his mother. But I'm glad you're here.

  Latif gave her a sad, rueful smile and said nothing. He knew he was play-acting but he almost believed himself. To miss Mona was invigorating: a normal, human thing to feel, a pain he longed to deal with instead of what he faced.

  Is it something you want to talk about with your old mother? Leda asked, trying to make him laugh.

  Yes, but not right now. Right now I just want to sleep; I've been on the bus all day. He stretched and yawned. Unless anybody's got a bedtime story.

  Leda spooned more sugar into her coffee and smiled. She wanted to visit with her son a little longer. Wessel's got a new saxophone, she offered. Or did he already tell you about his latest feat of heroism?

  I don't believe he did, Latif said, turning to Wess. He wished he'd left for bed without providing a prolongation clause; there was no way he could leave now, with a story on the table. Not without appearing sicker or stranger than it was in his interest to look.

  Wess smiled humility. She's making something out of nothing. Do you remember a cat from the neighborhood name of Jajuan? Wess's cheek twitched. A junkie? Latif shook his head, wincing inside himself and wondering whether Wess had said the word with newfound sensitivity or venom. He used to hang out around Giant and buy fortified wine in there, that real sweet cheap shit the junkies like? He turned to Leda. Pardon my language.

  She touched four fingertips to her sternum and batted her eyelashes. I'm shocked.

  Wess smirked. Now, as you know, I do enjoy a little drink myself from time to time. And for years, every time I walked past him and into the store it was the same ritual; this cat would ask me if I had any change to contribute to the Save Jajuan Fund and I'd say I'll catch you on the way back out, Doctor, come back and sprinkle change over his tattered waxpaper cup, or maybe place a saggy bill in his hand. Cat had hands like catchers' mitts. Elvin Jones hands.

  Wess took a sip of coffee. I know I could put my money to better use, but I felt I was being kind of neighborly, you know? And then one day, maybe a month ago, after years of this, I was playing my horn on the street and—I say this with a lot of pride, I'm not embarrassed to admit—I moved Jajuan. Wess sat back and smiled. The soapbubble bluenotes had danced down the block in the wind, popped on Jajuan's grimy cheeks, and stood him up straight as a Sunday churchgoer. He'd loped on over, ass dragging like a skidrow pimp, and dropped all his money in the world into Wess's horn case. I'm telling you, Wess laughed, it might have been the greatest compliment I ever got.

  Anyway, a week later I was passing by the alley in back of Giant on my way home from a gig and I heard screams. I went back there and Jajuan was curled up on the ground, and two of these young around-the-way punks were kicking him and watching him spit blood. Neighborhood people and businesses and even Jesus Saves had chipped in money after that to help Wessel replace his sax, now dented from the fight and unplayable. He had been grateful and quiet in accepting the donations, really just itching to play his horn again.

  What else could I do? Wess asked, sticking a finger in his empty cup and licking thick coffeesugar from his fingertip. I don't like to put my hands on anyone, but I couldn't just walk by. Anyway, this new horn sounds sweeter than the old one ever did.

  Well, I can't wait to hear you play it said Latif, standing up. Leda glanced at his reconfigured peach cobbler and said nothing. He yawned again, demonstratively. I've got to catch some Zs, though.

  Things sure change, said Leda. She addressed Wess with a memory all three of them knew by heart. When he was younger, I couldn't pay him to sleep. He would say But I'm not tired, Mama, sitting there all cute and bright-eyed with that horn in his hands. I'd tell him he had school in the morning and turn out the lights, but I knew he'd be sitting up in bed until the sun came up no matter what I did.

  I got all the sleep I needed in science class Latif said, heading toward the kitchen door with a fake sleepy bedtime gait. I had a deal worked out with Mrs. Ames. She didn't call on me and I didn't ask why we had to do all those stupid experiments that didn't prove anything.

  Wise words from a scholar, said Wess.

  Latif chuckled. Goodnight, he said over his shoulder. I'm going to sleep for about fifty hours.

  Your bed is all made up, said Leda. Sweet dreams.

  MEASURES | MEDICATION | OUT

  Latif closed the door on silent hinges and faced the room in which he'd grown up. He felt strange in its doorway, as if the walls themselves were bitter over his absence and his presumption in returning, as if the bed might shrink from his body when he laid himself upon it. This room was pure, a place of dreams and childhood, and he was dirty, had betrayed it. The world's grime hung on him; the noxious stink of his armpits corroded gentle air. The care with which his mother had made the bed saddened Latif; the quilt was folded carefully and tucked under the mattress tightly, the way he'd liked it ever since he'd been tiny and had delighted in rolling off the bed into the sidepouch of quilt and hanging there, supported.

  Leda could have used his room: made herself a den or even taken on a boarder to help pay the bills. The meager salary she brought home compounded Latif's hatred of her job. He winced at the sight of Leda pushing a white baby's stroller, despised the fact that there were a hundred black women pushing white babies in strollers through the park on any given day—some of them pushing their own children in cheaper strollers alongside their charges. Leda could have rented the room and worked part time and gone to nursing school the way she'd always wanted to, but she'd preserved the bedroom for her son. She'd sounded hurt on the phone when Latif suggested renting it, although really he had said it just to hear But what if you want to come home? He was too selfish most of the time to think about what his mother did now that he was gone, and Leda was too supportive to ever mention loneliness, but now Latif began to think about his mother puttering through the empty apartment, singing church music softly to herself.

  He saw her sitting in the kitchen with his picture in her lap, a framed portrait from class photo day, crying silent tears that fell and splatted melodramatic on the glass frame. Latif imagined how she must have felt when he left, s
udden and stealthy like his father. Leda had known that it was coming; Latif's thirst for New York was all he'd talked about for months at breakfast, dinner, all the designated times when son and mother spoke. But still he'd left without goodbyes, denied her the ritual of seeing her son venture off into the world. Called her collect from a Manhattan payphone hours after she'd panicked.

  He had apologized on the phone, tried to explain the sudden explosion that had propelled him to the bus, the feeling that there would never be another chance, another moment as perfect as this one, and Leda said she understood he'd had to leave his way. But Latif's mother knew the maternal art of making her child question himself without her ever saying he was wrong, and when Latif got off the phone that day his stomach knew the truth. Most of the hurt he'd experienced in his life, Latif reflected, had ricocheted back at him off of other people; he'd been hurt by the realization that he was hurting someone else. As if only he could inflict injury.

  His head swam woozy, and he flushed his mind of thoughts and collapsed onto the bed, and for an instant the room felt right again. The view from the window hadn't changed. Nor had the feeling of the mattress. Then his body knotted. Cramps popped off like solar flares in places where there were no muscles and he knew his jones was coming down and it was tardy red and angry. A nightmare was beginning. Sweat trickled from from his temples, armpits, thighs; his stomach seethed and churned. If there had been a crowbar in the room he would have gladly knocked himself unconscious to avoid what was coming after him, rounding the corner and unhinging its slavering jaws, about to leap. He wondered if Wessel was still in the kitchen with his mother, but he didn't want to stand for fear of jogging his body into illness; Latif was horrified of what vomiting would feel like, afraid that the experience might kill him.

  The only thing he could think to try was smoking the pot he'd taken with him, in the hopes that it might calm him down. My dro is the illest, Spliff had bragged; maybe it would even knock him out. With shaking hands he pushed open the windowpane and lit a prerolled joint. The smoke hit the back of his throat and Latif almost threw up just from the contact, but his instinct was to gulp and he swallowed a cloud and coughed it all back up and out the window, then took a longer pull and forced himself to inhale, holding the smoke in his throat for as long as he could, imagining it seeping and wisping through his body and calming the tide of his blood, which seemed now to be crashing in sharp waves against the insides of his veins, rebelling, trying to pound through and saturate everything in him.

  He expelled the smoke from his body and felt a slight dullness creep over the pain, a teasing hint of relief, and frantically Latif smoked more, smoked deeper, felt the weed fumes twirling through his body, billowing inside him. He was past the point of worrying about discretion, about his mother smelling the herb and catching him smoking, but Latif was inhaling so deeply and exhaling so powerfully out the window that only a trace smokesquiggle from the joint itself calligraphed inside the room. He smoked until his thumb and finger burned and felt himself slip down into a muted haze. The beast was still there, ravenous, but it was trapped beneath a poreless thin net, snarling but not yet pouncing. He had bought himself an hour.

  But he could move now; in fact, it was more painful to stay still. Inertia allowed the nausea to triangulate his position and move in, but the combination of movement and a constant nicotine smokescreen threw its tracking system off. Latif lit another cigarette and knelt next to the stack of records he had left behind. He'd taken only a small portion of his collection to New York: albums he hadn't had a chance to study yet and a handful he'd already memorized but couldn't do without. Now he flipped nimblefingered through the LPs with a dexterity honed ransacking Boston's vinyl spots until he found a heavyweight first pressing from 1970, the cardboard cover bowed with water damage from some previous owner's unfathomable carelessness.

  Translucence, by the Albert Van Horn Quintet with Murray Higgins on drums, Trey Valenzuela on bass, Lonnie Liston Smith on piano, and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. Latif leaned against the speaker, legs tucked to his chin and left hand covering his face like a huge spider as the music—what? It didn't begin as much as suddenly exist, spring battle-ready from the womb like Latif's mythological homegirl Athena, goddess of war and wisdom. The record caught the band somewhere on the turbulent road between point A and what they were trying to become, Albert's horn careening and caroming like a rubberroom inmate trying to wrench himself out of his straitjacket, slamming against padded drumwalls and leaping wildeyed at the unreachable pianochord ceiling and falling hard and sweaty on ungiving bassline floorboards. This was Van Horn as pure unruly energy, rogue scientific madman: Van Horn as Latif had first fallen in love with him. Now Albert's sizzling red-blue revolution cries were an absorbent soundtrack, articulating and thus soaking up the pain Latif felt, diverting him even as he wondered whether the fight against dope was exactly what the song was about. He counted backward on his fingers to the time when it was Albert sitting somewhere wracked with torment, waging this same battle.

  Suddenly Latif felt part of things again; the tradition slithered toward him, a lethargic black snake, and let him pet its slick head. He thought of all the cats who'd rolled dice with the same demon he was squaring off against: the few who'd hit a lucky seven and found God and jetted with their now-skinny billfolds tucked into a sweatsock, and the many who'd crapped out. And Van Horn blared and jarred, pulling the world apart and holding Teef together. Latif smiled with wet eyes, ear against the speaker, mind floating in a tiny salty warm oasis. Van Horn dipped like a kite in sudden heavy wind and hit a breathy low whole note and Latif bent his head, anticipating the upswing he knew was coming, the hint of resolution in the next strangely pretty sound.

  It never came. The stylus jumped the groove like a derailing train, screeched across the vinyl til the needle snapped. The record continued turning, silent, ruined, a scar etched across its face. The broken stylus surfed the platter, detritus on a placid sea. Latif jumped up, teeth grinding, eyes darting raccoonlike. Holes opened in the floor around him; the black snake slithered into one and disappeared with a pop like a spaghetti strand slurped into a child's mouth. The oasis drained away and the rawrubbed holes in his arm, no longer balmed with music, moaned anew. Latif blinked back reality like teardrops and retreated from the room as if it had a gun on him.

  He climbed out the window one gangled leg after the other, refusing to let his mind in on what his body was doing for fear that it might try to stop him. It was not yet midnight and there would be cats out, cornermen; he knew where to find them quite nearby. Thoughts ran across the bottom of his brain like film subtitles, free to be horrific because they were ignored. Acts he'd heard of junkies perpetrating to get dope flashed spastic through his brainpan: desperate panicked thieveries, inept robberies, abhorrent acts of prostitution, degradations of all kinds. Latif discounted them and walked until he heard the guttural slogan, so familiar, so revolting, once so intriguing and mysterious, now so hatefully coercive.

  Got coke, got dope, got smoke, spoken low without the expectation of response. Got coke, got dope, got smoke: words he had never uttered or answered, the lowliest refrain of the dope game. He leered toward the words, toward two dark figures in the shadows of the awning of the closed corner bodega. His eyes keened wildly as Latif tried to decide what he could say.

  Whatchu need, man, what's the deal, talk to me, the shadow rapped. A match flared and a cigarette crackled. C'mon, c'mon, let's take this walk, and Latif followed, a cigarette dangling from his own lips, as the man looked over both shoulders and sauntered purposefully towards the streetlight. He stopped and stared down the block, standing sideways to Latif, deliberately not looking at his face. Whatchu need? Dope, smoke, or coke?

  Dope, choked Latif.

  The light hit the dealer's face and Latif's cigarette fell from his lips. He gaped in surprise, relief, and dismay.

  Shane?

  The cornerman scowled and turned; he grabbed Latif by the coll
ar, pulled him into the light, and recognized him.

  Latif? Oh shit! Mike, come here! It's T.T.! What's up, baby? He laughed and pulled Latif into a bearhug.

  T.T.! The second shadow stepped into the light and became White Boy Mike.

  Whatchu doin back from NYC, man? Latif gave Shane a look unguarded in its fear, a look one only dares give family. He covered it expertly, so fast that no one but family would have seen it to begin with, but that instant was enough. Shane's joy at the reunion vanished. Please tell me you were joking, he said, somber.

  I wish I was, Latif said, eyes flickering shame. I'm caught up in some shit, man. He scratched fitfully at his arm. My jones is coming down, Shane.

  Shane narrowed his eyes, cutting out unnecessary portions of the world. What happened to you? He took Latif's face in his hands like a doctor. You're not supposed to be here. Not like this.

  Latif said nothing; his countenance pled mercy. Shane stared at him for a long moment. Mike stared at Shane. All three waited for Shane to come to a decision, and Fuck that said Shane, you come with us. He grabbed Latif's elbow and pulled him in the right direction, gathered him in and threw an arm around his shoulders. I'm taking you to my crib. He walked faster, elbow locked around Latif's neck in an almost-headlock. This Shane talkin at you, nigga. We done been through a lot of shit together, and I want you to know that it's been many a night we've sat around and wondered what old Rabbitsfoot was up to down in The Apple. We all knew one of these days you'd be sending us tickets to come and see you play down at the Blue Note or the Vanguard or somewhere. And I don't doubt it to this moment, T.T. You gonna pull through this. Latif concentrated on walking.

  You know why you'll pull through this? Shane asked him a few minutes later, as they sat in Shane's murky secondhand living room and Shane passed him joint and sipped a beer, the walk and whatever explanation Latif could stammer out over and done with, the time line and the mission clear and the process of keeping him sedated underway, Do you know why you're gonna be back at Dutchman's with Van Horn before you know it?