But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer

before the board.

      —Well, I’m pretty sure they did, sir, because before I went to join the army I had to take a spinal and I didn’t want to take it. When I went down I was very high and they put me in jail and I was so high they took the whiskey away from me and put me in a padded cell, and they searched my clothes while I was in the cell.

      The pauses between phrases, the connections not quite there, the voice always just behind the sense of what he was saying. Pain and sweet bewilderment in every word. No matter what he said, just the sound, the way the words shaped themselves around each other, made each member of the court feel as though he were being spoken to privately.

      —When you say you were pretty high, what do you mean by that? Do you mean the whiskey?

      —The whiskey and the marijuana and the barbiturates, yes, sir.

      —When you refer to being high, could you explain that?

      —Well, that’s the only way I know to explain myself.

      —When you are not high, does it affect you physically?

      —Oh yes, sir. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t care to blow my horn and I don’t care to be around anybody . . .

      —It affects you badly?

      —Just nervous.

      His voice like a breeze looking for the wind.

      Seduced by the voice and then hating themselves for succumbing to it, they sentenced him to a year in the stockade at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Worse than the army even. When you were in the army being free meant getting out of the army; here freedom meant being back in the army. Concrete floor, iron door, metal bunk beds suspended from the wall by thick chains. Even the blankets – coarse, gray – felt like they had been woven from iron filings swept off the floor of the stockade workshop. Everything about the place seemed designed to remind you of how easy it would be to dash your brains out. The human skull felt delicate as tissue in comparison.

      Slamming doors, clanging voices. The only way he could stop himself from screaming was to cry and to stop himself from crying he had to scream. Everything you did made things worse. He couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t bear it – but there was nothing to do but bear it. He couldn’t bear it – but even saying that was a way of bearing it. He became quieter, looked no one in the eyes, tried to find places to hide but there was nowhere, so he took to trying to stay inside of himself, eyes peeping out of his face like an old man’s face through the gap between curtains.

      At night he lay on his bunk and looked at the fragment of night sky that angled through the tiny prison window. He heard the guy in the next bunk turn toward him, his face flaring yellow in the light of a match.

      —Young? . . . Young?

      —Yeah . . .

      —You looking at them stars?

      —Yeah.

      —They ain’t there.

      He said nothing.

      —You hear what I’m saying? They ain’t there.

      He reached across for the proffered cigarette, pulled deeply on it.

      —They’re all dead. Takes so long for the light to get from there to here by the time it does they’re finished. Burnt out. You’re looking at somethin that ain’t there, Lester. The ones that are there, you can’t see ’em yet.

      He blew smoke toward the window. The dead stars hazed for a second and then brightened again.

      He stacked records on the turntable and walked to the window, watching the low moon slip behind an abandoned building. The interior walls had been knocked down and within a few minutes he could see the moon clear through the broken windows at the front of the building. It was framed so perfectly by the window that it seemed as if the moon was actually in the building: a mottled silver planet trapped in a brick universe. As he continued watching it moved from the window as slowly as a fish – only to reappear again in another window a few minutes later, roaming slowly around the empty house, gazing out of each window as it went.

      A gust of wind hunted around the room for him, the curtains pointing in his direction. He walked across the creaking floor and emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass. He lay on the bed again, gazing at the cloud-coloured ceiling.

      He waited for the phone to ring, expecting to hear someone break the news to him that he had died in his sleep. He woke with a jolt and snatched up the silent phone. The receiver swallowed his words in two gulps like a snake. The sheets were wet as seaweed, the room full of the ocean mist of green neon.

      Daylight and then night again, each day a season. Had he gone to Paris yet or was that just his plan? Either it was next month or he’d already been there and come back. He thought back to a time in Paris, years ago, when he’d seen the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, the inscription 1914–18 – how sad it still made him feel, the thought of someone dying as young as that.

      Death wasn’t even a frontier anymore, just something he drifted across in the course of walking from his bed to the window, something he did so often he didn’t know which side of it he was on. Sometimes, like someone who pinches himself to see if he is dreaming, he felt his own pulse to see if he was still alive. Usually he couldn’t find any pulse at all, not in his wrist, chest, or neck; if he listened hard he thought he could hear a dull slow beat, like a muffled drum at a funeral in the distance or like someone buried underground, thumping the damp earth.

      The colours were slipping from things, even the sign outside was a pale residue of green. Everything was turning white. Then he realized: it was snow, falling to the sidewalk in huge flakes, hugging the branches of trees, laying a white blanket over parked cars. There was no traffic, no one out walking, no noise at all. Every city has silences like this, intervals of repose when – if only for one moment in a century – no one is speaking, no telephones are ringing, when no TVs are on and no cars are moving.

      As the hum of traffic resumed he played the same stack of records and returned to the window. Sinatra and Lady Day: his life was a song coming to an end. He pressed his face against the cold of the windowpane and shut his eyes. When he opened them again the street was a dark river, its banks lined with snow.

       Duke woke as they crossed the state line. He blinked, ran his hand through his hair, and looked out at the unchanged darkness of the landscape. The remains of a dream were melting in his head, filling him with a vague sadness. He eased himself in his seat, groaning at the slight ache in his back.

      —Lights, he said, groping in his back pocket for something to write on. Harry reached forward and clicked on the interior light, filling the car with a pale glow that made the night and road seem even darker than before. Duke hunted along the dashboard for a pen and jotted a few things in the borders of a curling menu. He had written more hours of music than any other American and most of it began like this, scrawled on anything that came to hand: serviettes, envelopes, postcards, cardboard ripped from cereal packets. His sheet music started out like that and that was also how it ended up: original scores wound up in the bin as mayo-and-tomato-smeared sandwich wrappers after a couple of rehearsals, the essentials of the music handed over to the safekeeping of the band’s collective memory.

      As his pen hovered over the menu his concentration intensified as if he was remembering something from the dream and was trying to focus the memory a little clearer. He’d been dreaming of Pres, his last years, when he was staying in the Alvin, no longer interested in remaining alive. Instead of Broadway the hotel in the dream was surrounded by a winter countryside, snow. He noted down what he could remember of the dream, nursing a semi-hunch that there was something in it he could use in a piece he’d been thinking about recently, a suite covering the history of the music. He’d done something like it before – Black, Brown and Beige – but this was going to be something specifically about jazz. Not a chronicle and not even history really, something else. He worked from small pieces, things that came to him quickly. His big works were patchworks of smaller ones and what he had in mind now was a series of portraits,