American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [5]
Next he was heading past the park entirely, up a hill where the apartment houses gave way to brownstones lining the streets like gentle dogs sitting side by side and beside him in the passenger seat a woman, evidently his wife, was singing softly but he couldn’t hear the song. He was making some kind of progress toward a destination, but in this unfamiliar memory everything seemed slowed down, moving through water. It was as though the woman next to him singing, the warm wind, the profile in the rearview mirror, the houses rolling by, the wide sky turning gently silver-gray, it was as though it was all happening in real life while he himself sitting in this hospital room was only a dream, imagined by a man driving a car through Harlem on a September afternoon.
He stared out the window and it was not September. It was some other month, some other world. The room was dark now, and the lights were turning on in the hallways and soon he would not be able to see anything but his reflection. He did not look forward to that. His face was a mess. His face was a reminder. Not of ships docking or of dancing at the Savoy but of dust and sun and fire. There were no fires left in him, he thought, only the memory of fire. This was his life now: cold and unlit and lived in a small room. All that remained after the fire had burned out was this ineffective body, this savaged face. But then he remembered the stories she stirred up in him and for a moment he sensed a living heat like an ember in his chest.
He wheeled away from the window. He could not get into his bed without assistance so he sat there looking at it. It had been his bed for a while now and he had developed a fierce attachment to it that he recognized was both understandable and absurd. He had slept in many beds over the years but this was the only one for which he had ever felt an affection. It was not a nice bed. The white sheets smelled sour from detergent and the thin pillow looked up at him forlornly but he took comfort in its simplicity. He needed it. He had no stillness inside.
For example he could feel a kind of music playing quietly, endlessly, inside of him. It was the shimmering sound of cymbals. He could barely hear it but whenever he strained to listen it would fade away almost completely and only return when he wasn’t paying attention. He tried to ignore it, to trick it into turning up the volume. He used to play music in his room so loud, he remembered, stupid teenage radio music that seemed idiotic and very beautiful to him now, so loud that the windows shook.
Eventually a nurse came in and helped him into bed. He heard the distant reverberation of cymbals. He saw his bedroom from childhood, the window which looked out at the tree, his shelf of trophies with their figures suspended in action, his clothes pooled on the floor. The cymbals continued, glistening beneath his thoughts. Then he saw what he had seen just this morning with her, the wide thoroughfare, the patterned scarf, a ship. He closed his eyes and remembered what had come to him like a memory but which was not his and yet by now had truly become a part of him. He was stunned by the vividness of the sensation of driving a car and feeling the wind. He knew what it was like to lose sensation and so he appreciated and savored these feelings. That this sensitivity was all in his mind was something for which he felt deeply grateful, an astonishing accomplishment of the human brain, and for a moment it seemed as if it was all that really mattered. But then he thought about his legs and he decided that real life actually mattered very much. He remembered this and the pain in his mind was as piercing and as deep as always.
1936
They drove farther uptown. They drove through Harlem, where Vivian pointed out some of the places she knew, then up to Inwood and into the Bronx. In University