malaise*lithium

They laid it down beside a thorny plant. They came for Jazz without subterfuge, knocked on its thick wooded door with bony knuckles, and when it came they took it away. Everyone watched from the street. It was a plain car, like a rental, and one of the men laid his hand on Jazz’s head when they put Jazz in the back of the car.
No one said a thing when they led Jazz down an ammonia-scented linoleum hallway and down six flights of stairs and down another hallway–a concrete one.
In the vacuum of Jazz’s absence was the screal of prematurely rusted feedback, banging, cajoling and gathering gladhandlers.

Someone came from the church and took the door off Jazz’s old home. They turned it into a halfway house for people who were on the inside but wanted to get out. Painters, some writers and musicians. On Monday evenings they gathered in the front yard, stood around in half-circles that faced the street and smoked cigarettes they shamelessly laced with hash. A neighborhood boy passed one night when it was maybe too late for boy his age to be out alone. They stopped him and said, “do you think your teacher is trustworthy?” (in a way that implied that the sentence was not capitalized). The boy said that in questioning authority the artists were questioning themselves, that it was id versus ego, couldn’t they see? and that his mother was calling him.

They came for Jazz on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year. They had not planned for that coincidence, but some said that they had. And they led Jazz down the linoleum hallway and echoed down a concrete hallway and they bound Jazz down on a wooden chair under one light bulb that swung.

Around the corner from where Jazz used to be, the Hatfords brewed their own and neighbors from both sides of the street could go there and get fucked up for free. They stayed up drinking. Made noise all night. They took Jazz on a Tuesday evening and on Wednesday the Hatfords switched from pilsner to corn liquor and people began to wake up in the street.

At the end of the concrete hallway, sober as galvanized tin, Jazz went down the way anyone would; with a squeak of surprise and confoundment and then a resignation to changelessness. Jazz, well, Jazz went down easy. One of the men crossed his legs and took off his gloves and laid them on his knee.

A feral cat stays in the thorn-rimmed divot beneath the blackberry bush. Its fur is matted. One ear is notched. It wears a cracked up leather collar with a tag that reads “Bixby.” “Bixby,” Jazz had said, “you know yourself,” but the cat couldn’t hear anything that was said inside the car.

There were two of them. They came for Jazz and took it back to where the others waited. They found Jazz where it had always been and took it where it never should have gone.

When the artists and musicians and writers left Jazz’s house, they left painterly things and musical things and scribblings. The house was then occupied in rapid succession by a family of badgers, a movie-filming crew, holders of various public offices, a school for pregnant girls, a fog of disbelief, a bevy of hallucinogen-quaffing mind-expanders who thought the place was like really outta sight, a bicycle repair shop and finally eight businessmen from out of town who shared the place to cut costs.

Jazz had not known any of this was going to happen, or if it had it had made no preparation or outward signal of the knowledge. They bound under one light bulb that swung and made Jazz divulge its secrets. Jazz had no resources. Jazz had no well of fortitude. Jazz, of course, preferred to improvise.

Jazz came up the hard way, riding under false floors in R.E.O. trucks, chalumping along in Venezuela, getting soaked in Ecuador, breaking down to little strings unrecognizable out of sequence, converting it into tangled ontologies and getting along by virtue of sheer opacity. Swimming through the catacombs. Jazz can hold its breath, but not its tongue. They broke Jazz easy.

On Thursday they talked about Jazz in the periodical sections. Back away from the magazines that really move. One held a copy of Syllogisms Quarterly in front of her face, said, “Did you hear the news? Jazz broke.”
“I found out this morning,” said another, hiding his face behind the July-August edition of Congressional Anecdotes, and both looked severe and gaunt. No subscription cards fell from the magazines because they don’t put such cards in those kinds of magazines, so there was nothing on the floor at their feet.
The next time anyone heard from Jazz it was on television Friday night. It was like Winston Smith. Jazz smiled in a way that said “I’m not Jazz anymore,” but it still looked like Jazz and sounded like Jazz, sometimes, for a moment, and most people thought it was Jazz, but now it played nice.
Jazz tried to go home, but the place was gone. Someone had pushed the house over and was building an indoor water slide in it’s place. Jazz’s mailbox was still there, but there wasn’t any mail. Nothing was like it used to be.

“Jazz,” someone said.
Jazz turned around.
“Oh, you looked like Jazz,” said a woman with a trombone case. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m Jazz,” Jazz said, but the woman didn’t seem to hear.
“I’m just so frazzled. I can’t keep my head together.”
Someone else said, “I know what you mean. I can’t get calm. I can’t focus. I guess I don’t feel safe enough with all this going on.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” said the woman with the trombone case. “I don’t feel safe.”
The other woman said “My kids. . .” but then Jazz was too far away to understand.

They set up a trap in the street for the thieves that night, but all they caught was the cat that lives under the bush at Jazz’s house. They lifted it out of the pit with an unstrung hammock and it lingered for the whole afternoon.
The next night they caught one of the businessmen who had lived in Jazz’s house. He had come from the Hatfords’ side of the street, his face was pink and his suit was silk and he was late for work on Monday.

Jazz was lying all about the place. In fragments in the produce bins, on top of newspaper dispensers –the grungy little boys that had turned into grungy little boxes. Jazz was all in ribbons. Jazz had come apart.

They laid it by a thorny plant. Some people said it was how they planned it, some thought it was proof of entropy but never said it. Jazz had come apart, they said, and had always been like it was on television, like Winston Smith in nineteen-eighty-five, but others said Jazz was only Jazz before there was television.
The people on the street weren’t a clique anymore. After Jazz came apart they came apart, too. They became all separated. They became people who were just living together. Seeing the same things every day. Reading the same newspapers, speaking the same language and thinking and the believing the same things. Speaking spontaneously, gasping in unison. All of them discrete as dominoes and contiguous as the drone of a streetsweeper.

There were no bars on the street where Jazz lived, and those pieces of Jazz couldn’t be found in bars or in the places that they counted. They found Jazz out like finding out a law of nature and then it was everywhere at once and devoid of magic.
They laid Jazz out next to a thorny plant, saying it had been a plain car, like a rental, and the cat with matted fur collapsed nearby. They laid Jazz out next to a thorny plant.