—Yes, I had a wild party. Definitely one of the all-time great nights.
I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she meant that she’d held a party which had gone badly, or that she’d made the mess herself. There were mugs and glasses scattered along the windowsills. The gash in the brickwork looked like it had been done with a power tool, maybe an angle grinder.
Then we were sitting down opposite each other on two prototypes of a famous Danish chair, and the silence was building up, the pressure of my untold story climbing higher and higher. The only thing I could think of to say was how sorry I was. Again.
—Sure.
She followed my eyeline to the damaged wall.
—My neighbors really love me.
—What did you do?
—I don’t even know. I was upset.
—That sounds bad.
—Yeah?
—So you know Corny had me kicked out.
—I heard.
Her voice was flat. She didn’t say she was sorry or ask where I was staying. I asked how Carter was doing.
—The same. Exactly the same. They say we shouldn’t get our hopes up. It’s very unlikely anything will change now. Even if he wakes up…
She trailed off. I thought of Carter in a high room over the city, his consciousness scattered under the pressure of blood clots and lesions. I told her I would never be disloyal.
—You mean to my brother?
—And to you. I screwed up, I know it, but in revenge Cornelius has locked me out of the studio. I don’t care about the apartment. All our work is in the studio. Our files, all our equipment. I don’t have any other—we have clients, we’ve signed contracts. You understand, Leonie? My whole life is in that studio.
—Corny’s very angry. He called it a direct frontal attack on the family.
—I didn’t take any money, I swear. The guy called me and I picked up the phone. I just need. How can I put this. If he could let me have my property, that’s all I ask. My intellectual property.
—Maybe if you got a lawyer.
Her family had most of my possessions, all my equipment, my tools. I had a couple hundred dollars in a checking account. How could I afford a lawyer?
—What I’m saying, Seth, is that I really can’t get involved. I can’t get in between you and Corny.
I asked if I could use her bathroom. On the way there I peeped round the half-open door of her bedroom. The bed was a midden of clothes and shoes and other things—Q-tips, an open compact spilling powder. Bits of broken mirror littered the floor. It looked like Leonie was sleeping in the living area. Someone had thrown blankets and pillows onto a couch opposite a big pulldown screen, a little survival zone haloed in trash. I locked the bathroom door and sat on the toilet, wondering what to say when I came out. I examined her toothbrush, the flesh-toned silk robe hanging on a hook on the door. Inside her medicine cabinet were rows of bottles, containing vitamins and esoteric supplements. She had prescriptions from a homeopath, a Chinese herbalist. Capsules of freeze-dried thymus gland extract, “fortified with herb activators and naturopathically prepared nutrients for synergistic effect.” Something called turquoise aromatherapy color energy blend. A cabinet full of charms to ward off death. I tried to imagine how she must feel to herself as she stood naked in that marble-tiled bathroom, swallowing pills. Hearing death come creeping in, slinking round her ankles like a cat.
I took a couple of caps of something called Acetyl-L-Carnitine and scrutinized myself in the mirror. I barely recognized the haggard face I saw, its cheeks hollowed out by anxiety, by fear. I knew that if I didn’t go back out and tell Leonie what JumpJim had told me, then I would break apart, just vibrate until I shattered.
—I am afraid, I said. I am so afraid.
—What are you afraid of?
Of the sound underlying the other sounds, the suffering rising up all around me, the mare’s nest of cable I have to untangle if I am going to find the fault. Of the way the past has hold of Carter. Of my suspicion that it has a name and a face.
Help Carter, I sobbed. I meant help me.
Leonie help me. I am caught in a riptide. Help me, at least. Carter is already beyond our reach.
HOW LONG AGO? That doesn’t matter. Far back in time, drowned in the crackle and hiss. I was nineteen years old, living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village and working as a messenger at the New York Herald Tribune, running copy between reporters and editors in the newsroom of their building on 41st Street. Long gone, that newsroom, that paper.
I was a jazz fanatic, but I had no time for the modern stuff. No Miles or Coltrane for me, no bebop, which I called Chinese jazz, because it was all splintered and broken up. I was what they used to term a “hot collector,” obsessed with the music of the twenties. To me that was the real deal, the source and origin. Like every other dumb kid starting out down that particular road, my god was Bix Beiderbecke. I didn’t know a thing. On my lunch breaks I’d hang around at a store in midtown we all knew as Indian Joe’s, digging in the crates. I’d buy any old crap for eight bars of Bix.