Jazz as Therapy

Jazz draws in through the open window from a bar across the narrow street as the day’s light begins to disappear: it slices cleanly through the dense, fume-filled, end-of-summer atmosphere. The wooden partition beside the bed muffles the sound of retching from the next room, and a tired quietness settles in the air. The weak, hopeless flush of a toilet follows, and the halting, sporadic trickle of a slowly filling cistern. Somewhere in the building a man shouts, and a girl, maybe a child, starts to sob. On the ceiling, far above the bed, an old, ineffective fan clicks and whirrs, and in that squalid little room the mysteries of suffering and madness begin to mix and curdle one more time in the stagnant Athens twilight.

For almost a month Fiacre has been lying in the rented room, held tight in the noise and grime of the city. He arrived in a bad way from Corinth on a military bus, all guns and elbows as he remembers it. It was in the early hours of an October morning, 1977. He sat shivering and cold on a concrete slab near the parliament until things began to bustle up a bit. It was way too early to look for a room at that time of the morning and the bus had been a bad idea. He should have stayed on in Manolo’s flat in Corinth, and he might have done just that if the idea to leave hadn’t come to him in the middle of a fever when he wasn’t thinking straight. And he’d had a row with Manolo.

On the way to Athens the only way Fiacre had of keeping from passing out was to fix his gaze on the vague shapes that floated by at odd angles in the dark, and on the flames that shot into the night from distant oil refineries; as he stared and stared someone up near the front of the bus put their head out of the window and vomited, and it splattered over the window Fiacre was sitting beside. He sat and thought about this for a while, concentrating his gaze now on the menacing death-mouth of the gun the soldier on his other side was holding loosely across his knees. The gun was pointing straight at him and the soldier’s head was thrown back, asleep, his mouth hanging open just like his gun. The sleeping warrior keeled over as the bus swerved to miss something on the road and he slumped down on Fiacre’s shoulder. It gave him the only heat he had felt for a long while so he just let the soldier lie there.

In the midst of all the foul-smelling taste of mounting fever and disorientation Fiacre eventually gave in to delirium and came out of it sometime later with the vague impression of having been on a boat. By then he was so cold and the bus had stopped and was empty. Even the weight of the sleeping warrior was gone, but Fiacre was reluctant to move because he knew that moving was going to release the staleness that had gathered between his tongue and his palate and all around his teeth. Still the driver kept pulling at him and so he got up and got out, all cold and sick and feeling emptier than even the bus. That’s where he found the cold concrete slab, and Corinth and Athens and the bus all melted into one terrible nightmare with shivers.

By the end of the day Fiacre was in a room in a crazy sleeping-house called John’s Place near the main square. John, or whoever, fed him on Aspirin and coffee for a few days and then lost interest, so there’s no exact record of all that was going on around him or inside. No witnesses. But he still holds tight to impressions which might easily be memories, though on the other hand might just as easily not be. People put blankets over him when he shivered and took them off when he sweated. Water arrived, and pastries filled with spinach. The sheets on the bed were mysteriously dry and clean and fresh after each night of fever; two nurses – Canadian; rasps and snatches of Leonard Cohen from a room down the hall.

Now, in the chaos of tormented nights and vaguely remembered afternoons, a hand, cool like a touch from heaven, comes to him. Every night it lifts him just as he begins to re-enter the disturbance of dreams and temperatures following a reasonably calm and lucid afternoon. It is a sweetness, real and sublime, and it transports him far from illness and away from the brown of the walls and from the sickness into some other place where logic is warm and a different lucidity holds sway. It’s like floating, but not on clouds or water. Just floating. Every night as the fever begins to rise and Fiacre’s senses are sharpened to pain and he becomes newly aware of his troubled body and disabled mind, the time arrives when the pain is present but no longer hurts. That’s when Jazz from across the street begins its first trial runs, loose and trailing off and falling apart. Disconnected false starts. The first blind attempts to locate the seat of man’s pain, searching for nerve endings exposed by disappointment and betrayal, nerves lying ragged and bleeding at street corners.

The music begins to come together bit by bit. The instruments, the souls and the night corresponding ever more closely to each other in preparation for something that promises to be fine. Anticipation is kept alive but on a low heat till later when the master-musician arrives and adds a few practice blasts on the trumpet. He takes a while trying to get into the rhythm and the mood that the band has been laying down all evening in preparation, like sheets of rhythmic oxygen. Sometimes the master sits back a while and lets the band go on alone before stepping up again to declare himself to all creation in a blast that matches exactly the colour and pitch of the anxiety welling up from deep within Fiacre’s soul. In the tortured night the music wraps itself around Fiacre’s pain and draws out the poison and sick like a dentist draining an abscess from the base of a long-rotting tooth. Fiacre lies beside cool waters, plucked from the dark, menacing valley and carried up over hills, up and out of the sick of the city to where the air is clean and easy to breathe, then sleep.