move even closer to him, touching his toes. A blast of breath in his nostrils again.
—You hear me, Young?
—Sir.
—You married, Young?
—Sir.
—But instead of a picture of your wife you want to have a picture of a white woman so you can think of her when you jerk off at night.
—She is my wife.
He said it as soft as possible, hoping to strip the statement of offence, but the weight of the fact gave it the defiance of contempt.
—She is my wife, sir.
—She is my wife, sir.
—Take it down, Young.
—Sir.
—Now, Young.
Ryan stood where he was. To get to the locker Lester walked around him like a pillar, grasped his wife’s face by the ear, pulled the tape free of the gray metal until the image tore, becoming a paper bridge between his fingers and the locker. Then held it limply in his hand.
—Crumple it up . . . Now throw it in the bin.
—Yes, sir.
Instead of the adrenaline surge of power he normally experienced when humiliating recruits Ryan felt the opposite: that he had humiliated himself in front of the whole company. Young’s face had been so empty of self-respect and pride, devoid of anything except hurt, that Ryan suddenly wondered if even the abject obedience of slaves was a form of protest, of defiance. He felt ugly and for that reason he hated Young more than ever. He felt something similar with women: when they began to cry, that was when the urge to hit was strongest. Earlier, humiliating Young would have satisfied him – now he wanted to destroy him. He’d never encountered a man more lacking in strength, but he made the whole idea of strength and all the things associated with it seem 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
