But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer

irrelevant, silly. Rebels, ringleaders, and mutineers – they could all be countered: they met the army head-on, played by its rules. However strong you were the army could break you – but weakness, that was something the army was powerless to oppose because it did away with the whole idea of opposition on which force depends. All you could do with the weak was cause them pain – and Young was going to get plenty of that.

      He dreamed he was on a beach, a tide of booze advancing toward him, waves of clear alcohol breaking over him, sizzling into the sand.

      In the morning he looked out at a sky colourless as a window-pane. A bird fluttered by and he strained his eyes to keep track of its flight before it disappeared over adjacent roofs. He’d once found a bird on a windowsill, wounded in some way he couldn’t establish: something wrong with its wing. Cupping it in his hands, he’d felt the flutter-warmth of its heart and nursed it back to health, keeping it warm and feeding it grains of rice. When it showed no sign of getting its strength back he filled a saucer with bourbon and that must have done the trick – after dipping its beak in the saucer for a few days it flew away. Now whenever he saw a bird he always hoped it would be the one he had taken care of.

      How long ago was it that he’d found the bird? Two weeks? Two months? It seemed like he’d been here at the Alvin for ten years or more, ever since he got out of the stockade and out of the army. Everything had happened so gradually that it was difficult to establish the point at which this phase of his life had begun. He’d once said that there were three phases in his playing. First he’d concentrated on the upper range of the horn, what he called alto tenor. Then the middle range – tenor tenor – before moving down to baritone tenor. He remembered saying that but he couldn’t fix in his mind when the various phases had been because the periods of his life they coincided with were also a blur. The baritone phase coincided with his withdrawal from the world, but when had that begun? Gradually he’d stopped hanging out with the guys he played with, had taken to eating food in his room. Then he had stopped eating altogether, seeing practically no one and hardly leaving his room unless he had to. With every word addressed to him he shrank from the world a little further until the isolation went from being circumstantial to something he had internalized – but once that happened he realized it had always been there, the loneliness thing: in his playing it had always been there.

      Nineteen fifty-seven, that was when he’d gone to pieces completely and ended up in Kings County Hospital. After that he’d come here to the Alvin and abandoned interest in everything except gazing out of the window and thinking how the world was too dirty, hard, noisy, and harsh for him. And booze, booze at least made the world glisten at the edges a little. He’d been in Bellevue in ’55 for his drinking but he remembered little about either Bellevue or Kings apart from a vague feeling that hospitals were like the army except you didn’t have to do all the work. Even so there was something nice about lying around feeling weak and having no urge to get up. Oh yeah, and one other thing. It was in Kings that a young doctor from Oxford, England, had read him a poem, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, about some cats who roll up at this island and decide to stay there getting high and doing nothing. He’d dug its dreamy cadences, the slow and lazy feel it had, the river drifting like smoke. The guy who wrote it had the same sound that he had. He couldn’t remember his name but if anybody had ever wanted to record it, he’d have dug playing on it, playing solos between the verses. He thought of it a lot, that poem, but couldn’t remember the words, just the feel of it, like someone humming a song without really remembering how it went.

      That was in 1957. He remembered the date but that got him nowhere. The problem was remembering how long ago 1957 was. Anyway, it was all very simple really: there was life before the army, which was sweet, then there was the army, a nightmare from which he’d never woken up.

      Exercises in the daybreak cold, men shitting in front of each other, food that made his stomach heave before he even tasted it. Two guys fighting at the foot of his bed, one of them pounding the others’ head on the floor until blood spotted his sheets, the rest of the barracks going wild around them. Cleaning out the rust-coloured latrine, the smell of other men’s shit on his hands, retching into the bowl as he cleaned it.

      —It’s not clean, Young, lick it clean.

      —Yes, sir.

      At night he flopped into bed exhausted but unable to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, the aches in his body leaving splotches of purple and red in his eyes. When he slept he dreamed he was back on the parade ground, marching through what remained of the night until the clang of the noncom’s swagger stick against the foot of his bed split his sleep like an axe.

      He got loaded as often as he could: homemade alcohol, pills, grass, anything he could get his hands on. If he got high first thing in the morning the day slurred past like some whitewater dream that was over before he knew what had happened. Sometimes he almost wanted to laugh in spite of his fear: grown men acting out the fantasies of little boys, men who hated the fact the war was over and were determined to carry it on any way they could.

      —Young!

      —Yes, sir.

      —You ignorant nigger cocksucker bastard.

      —Yes, sir.

      Oh, it was so ridiculous. However hard he tried he couldn’t fathom what purpose it was meant to serve, this being shouted at continuously . . .

      —Is that a smile, Young?

      —No, sir.

      —Tell me something, Young. You a nigger or you just bruise easy?

      —Sir?

      Yelling, orders, commands, insults, and threats – delirium of open mouths and raised voices. Everywhere you looked there was a yelling mouth, a huge pink tongue flexing in it like a python, sparks of saliva flying everywhere. He liked long, tulip-stemmed phrases and in the army it was all short-back-and-sides shouts. Voices approached the condition of a baton rapped against metal. Words bunched themselves into fists, knuckle-vowels thudded into his ears: even speech was a form of bullying. When you were not marching there was the sound of others marching. At night his ears rang with the memory of slammed doors and stamping heels. Everything he heard was like a form of pain. The army was a denial of melody and he found himself thinking what a relief it would be to be deaf, to hear nothing, to be blind, numb. Senseless.

      Outside his unit’s quarters were tiny strips of garden where nothing grew. Everywhere was concrete except for these narrow strips of stony soil and they existed only to be kept absolutely free of any kind of plant life. To grow here a flower would have to be ugly and hard as old metal. He began to think of a weed as something beautiful as a sunflower.

      Tin skies, asbestos clouds. Birds avoided flying over the barracks. Once he saw a butterfly and wondered about it.

      He left the hotel and walked to a cinema where She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was playing. He had already seen it but that made no difference – he had probably seen every Western ever made. The afternoon was the worst part of the day and a movie swallowed up a good part of it in one gulp. At the same time he didn’t want to spend the afternoon in the dark watching movies set at night, gangster movies or horror films. In Westerns it was always afternoon, so he was able to avoid the afternoon and get a nice helping of it at the same time. He liked to get high and let the images float before his eyes like the nonsense they were. He’d sit with the old and the infirm, unsure of who were deputies and who were outlaws, indifferent to everything on the screen except for the bleached landscape and stagecoach clouds hauling their way across sand-blue skies. He couldn’t have made it through the day without Westerns but all the time he was watching them he was eager for them to end, impatient for the whole charade of settled scores to be over with so that he could emerge again into the fading daylight.

      It was raining when the film ended. As he walked slowly back to the Alvin, he saw a newspaper in the gutter, his picture on one of the pages. It soaked up rain like a sponge, the paper drifting apart from itself, his picture bloating with damp, words showing through his face until it turned to gray mush.

      In the hospital after injuring himself during training he was interviewed by the head of neuropsychology: a doctor but a soldier too, used to dealing