The Fugitivities, стр. 19

Riocabo’s editor gestured toward the scintillating skyline and aspirated violently on his smoke as Jonah pondered the view.

“Right, got to be off, then. Thanks for the light, yeah?”

Jonah watched him flick the butt in a high arc toward the street, and then the editor slicked his fingers through his hair as he marched resolutely back to the stairwell and down to the business below.

When he got back to the party, Octavio and Sasha were nowhere to be found. He made himself another drink, downed it, and drank another. People were staring; he didn’t give a damn. He was going to get faded, and this shit was free. The luminaries of the literary world and their sour complexions felt as alien and irrelevant as the savage customs of some obscure tribe whose way of life only really tells you how you read your own, how you think, and what you care about—or what you don’t care about. An ethnography of rarefied social gatherings in New York City could make an interesting volume someday. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

He stumbled out into the night. Traffic honking, hipsters yelling on Bedford Avenue coming at him, nice white couple out on the town. Racist bastards. He hailed a cab and hoisted himself inside. Too hot. The West African up front asked too many questions. “Ay, yo, open the window! Turn the radio up, man! I said turn that shit up!” Hot 97, Funk Flex playing throwbacks. RIP J Dilla tributes still pouring in. Dilla dead at thirty-two. All that Motor City soul leaking out, all that warm fuzz on the tracks he blessed…so many things lost and found in hours of head-snapping beats, all those years knocking Tribe, Illmatic, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Uptown Saturday Night, scattered mixes taped off the radio, the nineties boom bap, with its Christmas chimes, clunky rhymes, and fat piano licks, blowing smoke over the yellow Discman with the skip protection, practicing gangster gestures with the earphones in…Can it be that it was all so simple then?…Mecca to Medina. Harlem to Brooklyn. Queensbridge. Exodus of the Afrocentric Asian. The Sunz of Man. Trife Life. Wu-Tang. The Chef. Shine like marble. Rhyme remarkable. Time is running out…Ay, man, I said turn that shit up! Rush of lights and blasted air like a wind tunnel…we moving. Through the night. Like Gladys. Singing “The Way We Were.” Can it be that it was all so simple then?…What happened? What happened to all that was and all that was supposed to be? All that beauty. What did it all mean? And how would it ever all get remembered? My Nigga! My Nigga! Time is running out…

The cab hit the bridge, and the clunk knocked him back like a slug to the chest. He drank in the sheet of lights slashing from all sides now, the effect nightmarish, like the strobe of a muted television in another room. A swelling breathless rage seemed on the verge of splitting him apart. Then they were in city traffic again, lurching ahead violently in breakneck spurts. At a slow corner, he had the car pull over, ready to be sick. The cabbie demanded money. Give him the money. Blood-thirsty vampires. Just needed another drink anyway, whatever was left. Whatever. So many things incoherent. Like this other man sleeping behind the fucking Citibank planter. He entered another bar. Pricey, glossy sign, beefy arms. A Gorgon manned the cobra-headed taps. Music crashed overhead. Television aspirants, underage girls on safari, squealing, blurting obscenities, ordering Jell-O shots that cost twice what the Mexican barback would make in an hour washing their vomit off the floor later as they passed out in private cars on their way back to the upper echelons that flank Central Park. And then this moronic automaton shoving him out, ready to swing. Outside again, colder than before. Everyone in the street a sad clown. Everything ugly. Shrieking homeless man. Poor bastard shoving his raggedy-ass Rocinante under the aquiline noses of the Abercrombie & Fitch flagship. Pale mannequins floating in the twinkling windows. Unbothered as this wretched man, reeking of filth, howls and pounds his fists against the glass.

He was leaning heavily against a wall, breathing hard. Screaming into his cell phone. But there was no call in progress. Who was he dialing? Did he get her digits at the party? Sasha? He sat down in a damp cool place. Next thing it was like his head was leaking. Slush. Toppled, flattened out. The blur was general for some time, he had no idea how long.

A man appeared towering over him. For a moment he was sure it was Uncle Vern, but that couldn’t be. Was it his father? No, it was Phineas! It was the jazz pianist! The genius of Phineas watching over, up above his head, playing sweet music in the air. And it was all rhythm. Rhythm! Flowing in time like a river. Like the whole frame, conceived in motion. America, a mighty river rhythm. World moving, pulling everything into its fated direction, debris digested, every broken limb jigged up, dead matter as welcome as the live, as likely to proliferate unspeakable wastelands of ruin as to float the delirious chandelier of a paddleboat. A river rhythm swallowing belly-up even its sucking countercurrents, its bubbling froth nurturing settlements of moss, loosely girdled banks soused in green shades, the long-bearded current animating the living underbelly right down to the bottom. Nothing on solid ground. Everyone floundering, everyone grasping like looters for whatever might be at hand. Not only the poorest but even the richest families in the land busy making a raft for themselves, doing their best to paddle along, facing the wilderness, knowing nothing of where they are, knowing nothing of the way back. Only the slaves holding a tattered map to join the sundered worlds—their vision grown deep. And here was one. Could it be? Yes, Phineas standing overhead, astonishingly tall, like some warrior god of Meroë