The Sound You Get with a Jade Mouthpiece

by Fred Royall

He rose abruptly into consciousness and opened his eyes. He was facing the window and he looked through the blinds at the world outside. It was a tan and gray blur without his contacts. What time was it? He turned his head and looked at the clock. He squinted. It was just after nine. He wasn't late for work. It was Sunday. He took an inventory of himself. He had drunk a bottle of wine with dinner, he recalled, and then one more, plus a couple of stray beers. He'd been watching the war on TV and had passed out on the couch. Then somehow he had gotten up to piss in the middle of the night and ended up in bed. Now his consciousness was pulled very taut inside his skull. He felt as though his head was surrounded with a very tight rubber membrane. This made him feel silly and he laughed and groaned. He was surprised that he didn't feel tired. He wasn't fatigued. He was definitely awake, even painfully so, as though someone held a knife in the small of his back and demanded in his ear that he be alert. It was imperative that he get up and get on with the day.

He swung his legs out from under the loose covers and looked at his pale, thin shins. The bag of bones, that same old bag of bones, morning after morning. He had no particular affection for himself. Nor did he despise himself. He figured he didn't have much choice in the matter so he just carried on. "I'm old," he thought, and then he laughed and groaned. He walked to the bathroom and sat down on the bowl. It was unlikely that he could move anything just after waking but he sat down anyway. He had once fainted dead away while straining to piss standing in front of the bowl in the middle of the night. He had fallen like a dead weight and had trapped his balls between the rim of the bowl and his upper body. The surge of pain had jolted him back into consciousness suddenly and he had pitched back, slamming his head against the wall. He had lain on the floor for fifteen minutes waiting for the throbbing pain to die down. Ever since then he had sat down on the bowl. No sense in risking it.

As he pissed a flash of memory told him that he had sat down on the floor in the kitchen during the night. Sometimes he did odd things that didn't seem to have much point. He had once woken on the floor of the living room to find paper towels stuffed down into his pants. Another time he found a bucket on the floor of the closet under his suits and the bucket had been full of urine. He wasn't sure why, but at some point he had walked to the middle of the kitchen floor and plopped abruptly down on his bottom. Then he had gotten up and gone back to bed. He finished pissing and he got up and turned the hot water on. It always took a few minutes to heat up. Was he nauseated? He tried to gauge. He wasn't hungry but he didn't feel like he could throw up. It was Sunday and the spring was here, so he had a nice long day to recover. He walked to the kitchen and found the refrigerator magnets on the floor. He recalled reaching for them as he had sat down. They had come off in his hands and hit the floor. He reached down and grabbed all of them. He put them back up.

He ran the cold kitchen tap and opened the refrigerator. His mind was straining tighter and tighter. He wished he could just go back to bed and sleep it off but he was emphatically awake. He got out the coffee and fixed the pot. He put it on the stove and turned on the flame. He set the timer for twenty minutes. A morning ritual, always without fail. He went back to the bathroom and splashed his face. He soaked his hair down then brushed it out. He'd taken Thursday and Friday off, telling himself that he needed a break. He'd done nothing but drink the whole fucking time. He hated when he did this. He could blow a little jazz on the clarinet, and days off were supposed to be spent luxuriously playing tunes, but he hadn't taken the instrument out of its case. He drank beer and wine and he watched the war on TV. He hadn't showered and he wasn't going to shower this morning either. He didn't have the gumption to put his contacts in so he put his glasses on instead. He didn't have a strong odor but there was a concentrated funk in his underpants that he could smell.

On any day off he relished the chance to sit in a restaurant and have a leisurely meal but the hangover had queered that. What could he do with himself? He opened a window in the front room and found the air to be surprisingly warm. Chicago generally didn't have much of a springtime but this seemed like a pretty good approximation. The TV was on and the volume was low. It had been playing all night. The war was covered on several networks for twenty-four hours a day. He flicked it off. He wondered if he was the only one in the neighborhood with any interest in the war. Years earlier he'd been a graduate student in international relations with a concentration in China. As part of his education, and because the rents were cheap, he had taken an apartment in Chinatown. After he'd dropped out of his doctoral program he had thought of moving but inertia kept him there. Sure, he was friendless, and his Chinese had really gotten no better because no one would ever speak it with him. There was a lot of Cantonese among the shopkeepers and he couldn't understand them. But he enjoyed his anonymity here. It was a funny place for an amateur jazz player to live. It made him special. He stood out. It was the romance of urban life, playing strains of Cole Porter that unfurled like black ribbons out the window of his apartment and mixed into the exotic conversations of old Chinamen. That was his idea of Chicago.

He put the clarinet together and felt simultaneously engaged and nauseated. He blew a few arpeggios and his head throbbed. Saran wrap pulled to the breaking point encased his skull. He played I'm Confessin' (that I Love You). Its gentle caresses were particularly well-suited to the clarinet. A saxophone would overwhelm the melody. He played Up a Lazy River and his head swam with the carefree, bluesy swagger. He played Stompin' at the Savoy and he made all the notes work but then he grew suddenly tired. He laid the instrument down on the desk and then he went to the couch. In the kitchen the alarm sounded and he got up to turn the coffee off. He took an ice cube out of the freezer and clunked it into his coffee cup. Then he took the filter out of the pot and put it dripping into the sink. He poured steaming coffee over the ice cube. The cube split and shattered. He brought the coffee to his lips and took a sip. His mind strained and his temples were sensitive to the touch. What had happened in the war?

He walked to the front room and sat on the couch. He rummaged for the remote then flicked the set on. A news reader sounded blandly from the screen. He read the crawls at the bottom. There were no major developments. He was hoping they would have killed the tyrant and that the mass of enemy troops would have surrendered but it appeared as though the campaign lumbered on. Teenagers in full gear, following orders, laying on the floor of the desert and firing their rifles. He popped off the set and looked at his feet. What could he do today? He was in the middle of a Flannery O'Connor collection and he thought that maybe he could read so he reached for the book and fell back on the couch. The taut pull of his mind was eager for the words. He read the story with relish. The characters sickened him, as her characters often did. There was a gullible older man, his worthless son, and a trouble-making delinquent. The cops showed up periodically and there was lots of deception. The ending was tragic, with the son hanging by his neck in the attic. The story took forty-five minutes to read.

He drank down the rest of his coffee and decided he should walk. He put on jeans and a shirt then his tennis shoes. He grabbed a jacket and went out. The sun was bright but it exaggerated the straining sense behind his eyes. He would go to the bookstore. He decided this abruptly. He liked to walk the streets of Chinatown especially on Sunday. He was among the heathens and Sunday was no special day. There were no church bells ringing, no Sunday finest. Everything was open, just like on Saturday. He crossed the street and arrived at the bookstore. He stepped inside and walked up to the first display. He looked at each title and each cover. He was vulnerable to a sense of fascination. It was part of the hangover. He was set to be fascinated by details. The variety of subject matter covered by the books left him speechless. How was it possible that so many people could write so much about so many things? Who bought these books? Could he tour all the private libraries of Chinatown? He walked to the next display and performed the same scrutiny. He brought a hand to his face. He was four days unshaven. He rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. A woman bumped him from behind and then excused herself. He walked around to the back of the display and the same woman bumped him again. He felt a flash of ugly temper and it ruined the fascination. He left the bookstore.

Outside on the sidewalk he turned left, then he stopped and turned right. He stopped again. He didn't know what to do with himself. It was going to be a long day. Didn't everyone around him have some purpose? How could he be such a shell of a human being, with no obligations to anyone any where? Was he remarkable? Was he in some kind of danger? He walked to a bench and sat down. People passed in front of him and he marveled at them just as he had done at the books. He noticed across the street a coffee house called the Kai Kai. "Kai" was the verb to enter, he recalled, and "kai kai" was a set expression meaning "please come in." He thought this seemed appropriate so he got up and crossed the street. He pulled open a screen door and stepped into the cafe. It was rather large and very open. There was a counter and small tables. Old men sat at the tables talking quietly. It was dingy and poorly lit. It didn't smell particularly of food. He didn't see much on the tables other than cups. There were no table cloths. He walked to the counter and sat down. A girl came up to him and asked him something in Cantonese. He replied, "Coffee," and she walked off. She grabbed a cup and poured coffee from a pitcher then she asked him something else in Cantonese and he shrugged. She put the cup beneath a spout and then pressed a button several times quickly. A little trickle of cream dribbled into the coffee. She set it before him. He drank it. It had a peculiar but not unappealing taste. He didn't know how to characterize it. The flavor wasn't even very similar to coffee but it was not like anything else he'd ever drunk either.

He looked in front of him. He listened to the sounds of the room around him. There was no music. The conversations were quiet and foreign. How many hours every day were passed in this place in just this way? Was there some kind of wisdom in this? Were these people Daoists? Did they enjoy great longevity? They were all thin. Were they aware of the war? What was their opinion of it? He thought that these old men had come directly from China to Chinatown where they had lived and worked only among Chinese all their lives and were now retired and sitting every day with their fellow Chinese speaking Chinese to one another. He wondered why on earth they had come to the United States in the first place. Why not just stay in China? Their lives here were exactly the same as their lives had been there. Perhaps they had left rural poverty. Weren't there countless millions of Chinese subsisting in rural poverty? The girl walked over to him and he raised a finger. She took his cup and refilled it. She asked him the question again and again he shrugged. She pressed the button several times and cream trickled into the cup. She set it before him. He spied stacks of almond cookies in wax paper at the end of the counter. He pointed to them and she brought him one. He opened it and ate one of the sweet cookies. All at once he was very hungry and the cookies were a great pleasure. His unusual state of mind gave itself over ravenously to the pleasure of eating. There were crumbs everywhere on the counter. He swept them into his hand and dumped them into his mouth.

"What does she think of me?" he wondered about the counter girl. "Does she feel some kind of animosity toward me? Does she think I'm rich because I'm white? Does she find me strangely ugly? By contrast would she agree to a date with me? Can she speak English? How can a girl her age have just come over from China? Is she from communist China or from Taiwan? Is she maybe speaking Fukienese and not Cantonese? Is she smart? Are her talents going unrealized? Will she work here serving coffee for decades? Does she enjoy jazz? Could I bring my instrument in here and play for them? That would make a good story," he thought, "me playing Cole Porter for the old China folk. That's like a humanist story that people would find pleasant. An American short story." He would never write it. None of the old men seemed to order anything further. It was as though they ordered one cup and then sat there for hours. The girl always seemed busy behind the counter but he didn't see that she was really accomplishing anything.

International relations. What a laugh. He was a drunk and an amateur reed player. He'd squandered four days off on a bender and tomorrow was Monday and it was back to the grind. He ordered more coffee and drank it down. The soldiers crawled on their bellies and defended his way of life. The enemy raised a white flag but then fired anyway. The enemy were bastards. What were the old men talking about? What if they were all stupid? What if they were all boring? If he could actually understand them wasn't it likely that he would be disappointed with them? He wanted his check but he didn't know how to ask for it. He stood up and the girl came over. She figured out loud and then wrote on a piece of paper. It was a couple of dollars. He gave her three and nodded then he walked out. Were they talking about him now behind his back? He thought not. He was a cipher. They hadn't even noticed him. Outside the traffic proceeded slowly down 35th Street. He saw the welcoming gate in the distance, tall and red and gilded. He turned and walked back to his apartment. In the kitchen he re-heated the coffee and poured himself a mug. He came into the front room and clicked on the set. He read the crawls at the bottom of the screen. They weren't sure about the tyrant. They hadn't found his body yet. He picked the clarinet off the desk and he tried playing the introductory gliss from Rhapsody in Blue. He could never get it just right. He tried it and missed it. Then he tried it again. What was it about those flatted sevenths? They told the truth. All at once he considered his sanity.

Copyright © Fred Royall 2004