Shackling Water

by Adam Mansbach

  Latif inhaled the smoke sharply, winced, and shook his head. Why? he croaked, holding his lungs full as he spoke, feeling the cannabis drift through him. Shane had weed for days; We'll burn trees all night if that's what it takes, he'd vowed on the way over.

  You know why? Because I put years into you, nigga, and I want a return on my investment. I saved your ass from having to go through a lot of shit, and you know why? Because I knew you were talented. I'm smart, but you're talented. You got something, and it didn't just disappear all of a moment like a magic rabbit. That's bullshit. You're gonna get straight and go back and use that blocks of sound shit you were talking about plus everything you already knew, which is plenty, and you're gonna make good on my investment, and Mike's investment, and all your peeps' investment, and that crazy nigga Wess's investment, and your mama's.

  Do you know what she told me last time I stopped in to see her? Shane asked, effortlessly keeping both ends of the conversation going. I go by there every once in a while, because she likes to talk to somebody about you, and she told me a story about when your ass was seven years old and she took you and Rook to see the circus. She said soon as you found the band, some ol greasy no-music-playing circus pit band, that was all you watched the whole damn time, and she couldn't get you to look at the clowns or the lions or the tightropes or any of that shit. Do you remember that?

  Latif fluttered his eyelids and tried to answer Shane. He could see the tent now, the huge fat mustachioed white tuba player and the mammoth mounds of dank elephant shit. And here was Shane, leaning forward in his chair elbows on knees, benevolently and firmly in control. He had always been this way, and Latif wanted more than anything to tell Shane how important he was. Latif struggled to sit up; the chair was overstuffed and cushy and Latif's muscles felt like limp spaghetti ropes; his brain floated in beer and clouds of smoke and pulsed with torments, but he had to muster speech.

  The whole time we were growing up, he said slowly, looking at Shane from beneath half-drawn eyelids, what I wanted most was your respect. He turned his head to look at White Boy Mike and felt his sinuses screech an objection. Mike knows what I'm saying. I always wanted to feel like you thought I was legit. I used to wish I would get jumped just so you would jump in to help me and I'd know for sure. I always wondered if you'd fight for me.

  I'm fighting for you now, said Shane, and I would've fought for you back then.

  We used to talk a lot about respect, me and T. T., said Mike, trying to catch Latif's eyes. They were closed. I guess because we wanted it so bad. Remember when I first moved to this neighborhood, when I was thirteen? Cats used to let me slide during the daytime, but once the sun went down it was like Yo, where that nigga Mike at? Cats was beating my ass every night. You remember that, Shane. I had to fight mad dudes just to get back in my building, and if I knocked one cat out, the next one would step up like Yo, you knocked out my man, let's go. That shit went on every day for months before cats was like Yo, that nigga cool. I went through mad drama. Running away from cats on my own block.

  I remember you used to tell us you weren't really white, that your father was Puerto Rican, said Latif with his eyes closed, leaning back and smiling despite it all.

  Ahhh, screamed Shane, laughing and pointing at Latif, that's right! I forgot! He used to say that shit!

  Mike laughed. Only for a hot second. I ain know no Spanish except puta.

  Who was it started calling you White Boy Mike?

  It was everybody. There was Black Mike who lived in Jay's building, remember?

  Jay Fox, said Latif, and poured the sudsy remainder of his beer onto the rug.

  Hey, what the fuck you doing, man? Watch my fuckin rug.

  Latif opened his eyes and stared groggily at Shane. Jay Fox, he repeated, louder.

  Jay Fox, said Shane, solemnly, and wet the rug with his own brew.

  Jay Fox. Mike followed suit.

  They sat and smoked, and the pauses between words stretched longer and longer until finally they snapped and snores replaced them. Shane and Mike dropped where they lay, Mike with his feet up on the couch and Shane twisted into the narrow wicker chair frame. Latif drifted off to the muted sounds of A Tribe Called Quest. Shane had thrown The Low End Theory on the stereo: implicit tribute to a moment he and Latif had shared years ago, when the album dropped. Latif had hipped Shane to Miles' late sixties quintet only days before, and when Q-Tip, grinning on the outro vamp to “Vibes and Stuff,” announced Yes, my man Ron Carter, is on the bass, Latif and Shane stood up like Oh, shit!

  Listen to the way he says it, Latif had insisted, rewinding the tape to re-peep Tip's intonation. He's wild happy. He knows it's some historic shit. He and Shane basked all afternoon in the casual alliance of musics, traditions, generations that too often seemed at odds, that came together awkwardly when they were forced to hang out at family reunions. Latif still got heart surges when he heard the joint.

  He fell asleep halfway through the next song and woke with a start in total silence, rubbing dreams out of his eyes. An untextured hazy presence, like something from a dream which had followed him back into life, rose and hovered above Latif as he stood up on wobbly legs and pressed a hand against his lurching stomach. He felt watched, oppressed and mocked and haunted by something unidentifiable, something that controlled him that he hated: maybe God and maybe not, maybe the toxin he needed to course through his system that had slowed instead now to an insufferably delicate and sluggish trickle.

  His legs were not seaworthy, and the apartment rocked like a schooner in a maelstrom, throwing him off balance. Reluctantly, Latif abandoned the failing dignity of walking and lowered himself to the floor. He shuffle-crawled toward the bathroom, raised his head and twisted it to look behind him at nothing, nobody, flung it back on his neck to stare up at the rainclouds that shadowed his aching trip across the floor, purgatory rainclouds drenching him in nothing.

  You got me staggering lopsided through your sketched-in vaguely outlined world, Latif's mind mumbleranted. Frankenstein Godzilla hobo scratchin out my eyes: Johnny five deuce uno, if thine eyes offend thee pluck them out. Can't go to heaven, you won't allow me to believe. If you don't believe in heaven you'll believe . . . in hell. Why don't you just kill me, you incompetent cruel bastard? You call this a life? Does this look like life to you? You made me razor jagged so I claw at you in screams and begging: Do I have a father? Have I been abandoned? Do I pray? Eat? Can I love? Am I you? Is that it? Why do I deserve this? I'm so thin wind whips right through me, or it would if there was wind. I can't think at all: I'm a slapdash vagrant bundle of half-truths anecdotes pisswater scripture and feelings lost in the translation, stabbing myself just to see if I have blood. Unequipt to live but neither is my so-called world yet vigorous enough to kill me: it too is shapeless warmish embryonic mass, and so I huddle with your other failed experiments, clasp my rickety malformed enormous knuckle hands and pray, for what I can't imagine and to who I can't be sure.

  He was almost to the bathroom, pulling himself hand over hand across the floor like a mountain climber battling a sheer cliff face. He sunk his fingers into Shane's grey carpet like pickaxes and saw yellow fluorescence flickering beacon-like ahead. If he dared look behind him Latif knew he'd see a trail of slime such as a slug leaves, a heavy mucus ribbon oozing from his body and clinging to the floor, things inside him that were seeping through his pores. Finally, Latif's hand touched the cool white bathroom tile and he pulled himself all on it and pressed his cheek against the cool, lifted his shirt and slapped his belly down against the cool, flayed open his palms against the cool and lay breathing long and slow and regular.

  And when he had composed himself Latif opened the cabinet below the sink, from which Shane had removed the bag of herb. He looked inside and saw three large plastic bags lined up against the wall: got smoke, got coke, got dope. There was a box of smaller bags there too, and Latif filled one with smack, pouring from the big bag to the small, replacing everything and pocketing his prize, sn
orting what he spilled up off his hand. He flopped back over on his stomach and began the long crawl back to his chair as the sun started to creep above the filth-covered windows.

  WAKING | LIFELINES | REQUIEM

  Good morning, Ms. J-P., this is Shane . . . Yes, ma'am, that's just why I was calling. Latif saw me going past your building last night and the two of us went for a walk. He didn't want to wake you by coming back in, so he crashed here . . . Well, he's still asleep and . . . Alright, hold on . . .

  It was a shame to wake him, Shane thought, looking at Latif's slack face, mouth open in deep sleep despite the sunshine slashed across his face. The cat so clearly needed rest. He shook Latif's arm, eliciting only an unconscious groan. Latif pulled away and shifted his position.

  Yo, T.T. Wake up, man. Your mother's on the phone. Latif!

  Latif brought his hand up to his face. What?

  Phone. It's your mother.

  How'd she know I was here? he mumbled, rubbing his head.

  Because I called her. Here. Latif was too fucked up to stand and Shane half-lifted him on to his feet. Latif stumbled over to the kitchenette and leaned over on Shane's counter, twisting left and right to pop his vertebra. His legs came slightly into focus underneath him, and he picked up the phone and wrapped the cord around his wrist.

  Hello?

  Latif, you've got to come home immediately. Leda was rushed, hard, shaky all at once; he'd never heard his mother's voice like this. His first thought was that she had found something in his room that had revealed him, or that Wess had told her. Can you do that? Can you come home now?

  What's wrong, Mom?

  Leda's voice faltered. Here, talk to Wess, she said. Latif heard her pass the phone, imagined his mother reaching for a tissue. He braced himself.

  Hello, Latif. Wess was sedate, controlled. Are you alright?

  I'm fine. Shane and Mike took care of me. What's going on? What did you tell her?

  Latif . . . Wess paused. Sonny Burma called early this morning. Albert is dead.

  What? Latif had never thought that people's knees buckled in real life, but he had to grab Shane's counter to keep himself from falling to the floor. What happened? Horror pooled up in him like oil, black heavy and thick. Latif's vision exploded starry and he felt his stomach fold in on itself. The room, the world, went slack. Colors were being sucked out of the universe forever: blue had evaporated into empty space and red was burning its fierce self to nothingness like some distant quasar. Without Van Horn to conjure them into fullness blue and red didn't exist, and yet how could Albert any more be dead than color itself? How could simple neurons firing or not, crude blood pumping or stagnating, how could these horrid scabid earthly technicalities apply to Albert? Van Horn must have died in his sleep; death would never have dared face him with his saxophone in hand.

  Latif? Are you still there?

  How did it happen? he asked again, not having heard the answer. The words were gray leaving his mouth, as gray as his hand on the phone and the brain clodding in his head. He was surprised they traveled as far as the mouthpiece without disintegrating and scattering in the grayish wind like chalk dust.

  They found his body in the East River in Harlem. There was a bullet in his head.

  Oh, Latif said dully. That made as much sense as anything. It was no more or less abhorrent than an overdose or heart attack, no more or less surprising than if Wess had told him that the Sun God had swooped down on his chariot of flame and scooped Van Horn up in his arms and carried him away into the skies. The grayness engulfed Latif and he felt nothing, only despair, which was not a feeling but an unfeeling, a numbness predicated on the certainty that hope was gone. He found himself quite capable of speaking calmly, because he gave not a fuck about anything that he or Wess or anyone could say or play or think.

  Do they know how it happened? he inquired.

  Wess didn't know what to make of the flatline of Latif's voice. Are you high, Latif? he whispered.

  If there's anything I'm not, Latif said cold, it's high.

  I'm sorry. It's just that you sound so calm.

  Mmm, Latif responded, waiting for an answer.

  Wess sighed. The main rumor is that Albert was cheating with somebody's wife and the dude popped him. People are saying all kinds of shit, though, everything from Van Horn owing money to the mob to drugs to the whole thing being just a stickup that went wrong. Sonny said there's even a rumor that Van Horn took his own life.

  Albert would never do that. Latif felt a tiny bit of color returning to his cheeks, to the world, indignation that anyone had the audacity to think Van Horn would kill himself. He should have died on stage, Latif said after a moment, then wondered why he'd said it. What good was it to die on stage? What empty romance, what solace, could be squeezed from the circumstance of any death? Latif found himself wondering what Van Horn's final song had been, what melody had run the final lap around his mind, what thought or color or vibration he'd last released into the air, and soon he found himself in tears. Shame overwhelmed Latif and he slid down the counter and sat crosslegged on the floor.

  The music is gonna get played with or without you, Van Horn had told him the second day Latif had shown up on his doorstep, nervous and overeager, a shaky-handed wannabe torchbearer. Albert had tapped him on the knee, smiled; So just relax and let it happen. Latif wondered how the music would get played without Van Horn, through whom it would now gust and whip and bellow.

  Despair was melting little by little, and the heat of desperation was the cause. Albert had protected him somehow; how and from what he didn't know, but Latif felt the particular fear that the death of leaders brings, whether they be kings or warriors, gangsters or judges. Such men are not mourned with tenderness and reflection, as men, until the void has been filled either by the emergence of a new leader or by the realization that life can proceed without one. People quaver with self-discovery as the search runs its panicked course, realizing I must catch the torch before it lies in smolder on the ground, or I am not the one, or I must now look within because what's without is gone.

  All three awarenesses rumbled in Latif, tremoring his hands. He remembered the day of Jay Fox's funeral; after the service all of them had left their families and walked quietly together to the woods behind Rook's house, twelve darksuited boys of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They stood in a circle on the sparsely stubbled ground, inventing the ceremony as they performed it. Shane had been the speaker because only Shane dared speak. Perhaps he dared speak because the others looked to him to speak, and perhaps they looked to him because he had almost died with Jay himself, and would have missed the funeral if he had not left the hospital's recovery ward against a doctor's orders to be there. Latif remembered what Shane had said then: All the things that made up Jay were in the air now, floating, and it was up to each of his boys to claim them, pull them in, give them a home. That was what it meant to keep Jay Fox alive.

  The image had disturbed Latif at the time; he'd pictured them in their dark suits as vultures, hunched together, sharp beaks picking at the dead. But the longer he thought about it, the more comfort Latif culled from this idea of repossession, until he came to think of it as a spiritual will, the passing down of whatever was good, sweet, useful to live on, and the death only of what was nothing, bitter, rotten in a man.

  Van Horn was a man, Latif reminded himself, sitting on the floor with his head cradled in the L of his thumb and first finger. Van Horn was a man and he deserved to be mourned as one. The world would mourn him as a genius, a conduit of truth, love, fire, future, history. It was for Latif to remember his cooking, the warmth with which he joked, the walk they'd taken once along the water, around the reservoir in Central Park without speaking, each one lost in his own contemplation yet connected. Like two astronauts floating through space inside their suits but holding hands.

  Wordlessly, Shane offered Teef a cigarette. He took it and a light, nodded thank you, puffed, and wondered momentarily why it was that Shane had be
en by his side for both of the deaths he had experienced. Shane made himself scarce and Latif tried to concentrate on his memories of Albert, to catalog them in some meaningful way, to remember all the crucial moments. Every moment had been crucial; they blurred and vanished and Latif flashed back to one of his arguments with Mona: You can love more than one thing at a time, she'd told him. You can be a musician and a man. But what would Van Horn have been to him, to anyone, if he wasn't a musician? Would he have been a great man still if he had never played a note?

  For the first time Latif wanted to answer yes, but he could not make himself think so. Albert had found truth in music and music in the truth. Music had made Albert what he was, pushed him into what he had become, brought the love out of him because it allowed him to proclaim and probe it. This was how Albert had grown. Just as a plant can only grow as big as the flowerpot in which it lives, a man can only grow as big, as wise, as loving, as the means through which he finds expression. Without the infinity of music Albert would have withered and atrophied.

  But by the same nickel, Latif reminded himself, there had to exist some seed of greatness to begin with. A plant destined to be small will not grow simply because it is transplanted to a bigger pot. That he was such a plant was a life-threatening fear only because Latif aspired to hugeness, understood the size of the pot and yearned to fill it with himself. No plant would try to be what it was not, he thought, and hoped he was so wise.

  ROUND TRIP | WILL | BIOGRAPHY

  Sonny had offered to drive to Boston and pick Latif up for the funeral, saying he might as well be on the road as anywhere and besides, being confined to the cockpit universe of his whip tended to help clear his head. Wessel had accepted on Latif's behalf. The service was the next morning and Sonny arrived late that same evening.