You are welcome in this place, Alex says. Everyone who is not small-minded and conventional is welcome here. But this is not your world. It never can be. Likewise, your world is not mine. You are called a juvenile delinquent. It’s a stupid label, it insults and inters a treasure-house of undocumented human experience, and it cannot easily be put aside. I don’t offer you my understanding. I know you don’t want it. But I do offer you my respect. We can help each other. Of that I am certain.
Alex’s words are all but drowned out by a short fanfare from the two horns; he claps a heavy hand on Stanley’s back, tips the brim of an invisible cap, and slouches off toward the music. The drummer scrapes a lurching stutter from his kit, and Stuart—his eyes still closed, his notebook sweeping the air before him—begins to shout across the room. Silver! he says. Darkness! Echo! Ocean! Gather up the things that are yours, O Lady! I offer my voice for the gathering. The room seems to contract, the air to grow more dense, and the shaved hairs on the back of Stanley’s neck rise up like ghosts.
Stuart’s language is plain, almost conversational, but his voice is melodic, incantatory, completely transformed, and Stanley catches almost nothing of what he says. His rhythms sometimes follow the drums, sometimes strain against them. The horn players are off-balance, at a loss, bleating awkward figures between his pauses for breath. A passing phrase snags Stanley’s attention—I reach for the hot coal, and suck my burned fingers—and dredges up the memory of a story his grandfather often told about the young Moses in Egypt. Stanley imagines Stuart bathed in light, hauling stone tablets down from a sacred mountain, and he smirks at the thought.
The smoke chafes Stanley’s throat, making him lightheaded. His damaged leg is unsteady, trembling, and he steps back to lean against the wall by the café’s entrance. Another man—potbellied, ginger-bearded, middle-aged, wearing black-framed spectacles and a tweed driver’s cap—is standing on the doorway’s opposite side. The two eye each other for a moment. Then they turn and stare across the room again, motionless as telamons, the bass drum pulsing lightly on their guts and faces.
Last night on Abbot Kinney Boulevard I met the archangel Sariel, Stuart is saying. Dead-ringer for Robert Ryan. Worn-out, in need of a shave. Up front, Lipton nods along to the music, punches his fist into the flesh of his palm. Alex has found Lyn along the left wall; his body eclipses her from view. Just ahead, Claudio sprawls between two hipster girls; he turns to give Stanley an easy grin. The kid has no recollection at all of why they came here tonight, Stanley realizes. Maybe he never really understood.
The blond girl is moving across the room now, headed Stanley’s way, drifting between the tables like a paper cup down a rocky brook. She keeps her flat stare trained on him till she’s within a few feet. Then she veers to take the arm of the ginger-bearded man. She leans in as Stanley watches, resting a hand on his stomach, standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Her posture—waist bent, black-sheathed knees locked, ass angled out—reminds him of a cheesecake pinup, and he wonders if the performance is meant for him. Aside from a few rapid blinks, the bearded man’s face remains static, vacant.
When she’s done speaking she gives the man a peck on his ruddy cheek and returns to her spot at the far end of the crowded room. It takes her a while to get there. She doesn’t look back, at Stanley or at the bearded man. When she comes to a stop the man tips himself forward, turns, pulls open the café door.
Stanley watches him between the backward letters painted on the glass. The man stands at the curb, filling and lighting a pipe. Then he crosses the street. On the opposite side a small bowlegged dog is tied by its leash to an ashcan; the bearded man unhitches it, and they walk toward the beach. Wispy tendrils of fog reach in from the ocean, and the man and his dog vanish before they reach the boardwalk.
Inside the café the Negro trumpeter has stopped seeking openings between Stuart’s lines; he now plays an eerie looping riff under the poet’s chants, and the altoist follows suit with a moaning ostinato of his own. The bass drum hits grow more frequent and forceful until they merge into a great subterranean tremor, and now Stuart seems not to be speaking words at all, just a torrent of gibberish that sounds as if it should make sense but resolutely does not. Stanley’s eyes sweep the crowd—John standing on his chair, Alex sliding a hand under Lyn’s skirt, the blond girl sinking down the wall and disappearing—then close their lids. The music that comes across the room seems to pin him to the brick. He can no longer distinguish the sax from the trumpet, the trumpet from the drums, the drums from Stuart’s voice. And now all the sounds are gone, vanished into themselves, into a sheet of uniform noise that encompasses everything.