Just then, Spike appeared. He saw the girl lying in a heap and felt her pulse; it registered as only the faintest thread. He picked the girl up, set her on her feet, and ordered Yurik to walk her around the room. He himself ran out to score some cocaine to add to the other stuff he had on him.
Yurik tried to lead her around the room, but she could hardly walk. She dragged her scrawny legs across the dirty floor, like a limp rag doll in his grip. They walked, or shuffled, in this way for twenty minutes, and then for twenty more. Yurik forgot that Mickey was waiting for him. He was consumed by only one thought: was the girl still alive, or was he dragging around a barely living corpse?
Spike came back. Yurik thrust the girl at him, and grabbed the dose for Mickey, saying he couldn’t stay a minute longer—Mickey was waiting.
Yurik never learned whether Spike had been able to bring the girl around. When he got back to Chelsea, Mickey was sleeping peacefully. Yurik didn’t try to wake him. Mickey slept for another hour, then another. When Yurik touched him again, Mickey was not yet cold, but he was no longer alive. His face looked peaceful, his expression a bit mocking, and Yurik, after a moment of panic, felt a surge of calm acceptance, and relief. He grabbed his guitar and started playing, singing the words he still remembered from his youthful Beatlemania.
First he sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then “She’s Leaving Home.” Suddenly he remembered that he had sung these songs years ago, when his grandmother Amalia died and he was still a boy. How long ago it seemed! It was almost as though this had happened not to him but to someone else. And he felt a deep sense of loss, and mourning.
The entire New York music community came to say goodbye to Mickey. Everyone who was still alive, in any case. AIDS had reaped a rich harvest during those years, and drug addicts and gays were in the front ranks of its victims. Mickey’s mother and sisters came to see the departed—a poor Puerto Rican family that had turned its back on him thirty years before. They showed up hoping that they would inherit something, but there wasn’t anything to inherit. There was no money, and they didn’t know that the apartment belonged almost wholly to the bank. They thought Yurik was Mickey’s partner, but Yurik didn’t care. Even if it had been true, it wouldn’t have damaged his reputation in any way.
It so happened that Yurik got the most valuable inheritance of all from Mickey: his various friends. They were world-famous musicians, and street musicians, famous only on a single street corner or square in the Village, or at a particular subway station; they were DJs, producers, owners of recording studios, and the countless others who drive the wheels of the vast music industry. For the last year of his life, Mickey had seemed to want to vouchsafe all the people who visited him into Yurik’s keeping, and at the funeral, which many of them attended, they greeted him and offered their condolences.
After the funeral, they went to a private club in Chelsea, where they drank and jammed the night away together—greats and nobodies alike. The slightly acrimonious, sardonic Mickey, a fan of folk and world music, would have been pleased. His Puerto Rican kin beat out the backbone of the music with their ridged wooden güiro, an elderly Indian man produced cosmic twangs and trills on the sitar, and a swarthy hunchback, most likely an extraterrestrial, drew forth psychedelic sounds from a wind instrument that resembled a sheaf of pipes, both diminutive and large. Yurik played, too, his own composition, which he had been working on for the entire year. In memory of Mickey.
For it was Mickey, who had lived so easily, so lightly, and had died so painfully, who had instilled in Yurik the consciousness that, in the highest sense, music had no authorship. It was a gift, and an ability to read the divine book, to transpose a universal sound that needed no notation into the language of paltry musical instruments, invented for the convenience and purpose of transmitting supremely important messages—messages that could not be conveyed in any other way … And the best ears, the best hearts and souls of this spiritual dimension called music, listened to Yurik’s song that evening. And heard it.
That day marked another change of direction in Yurik’s life. He received several tempting offers, and chose the one most interesting to him, though least promising from a financial perspective—an almost unknown band that performed funk covers from the seventies.
They rehearsed on 125th Street, on the outskirts of what was then still the “ghetto”—where, at the subway exit, a stream of Columbia University students headed in one direction, and a stream of African Americans headed in the other. The demarcation line was both visible and palpable.
Yurik detested racism, and white racists, but he and another guitarist, a Japanese guy they called Suzuki, agreed to be met at the subway entrance by Abe Carter. In this neighborhood, racism demonstrated its lesser-known reverse side. Abe, their black bass player, was their protector and guide into the interior, a rough neighborhood where Chuche, their singer, and Pete, their drummer, were waiting for them in a dilapidated apartment with boarded-up windows. After the rehearsal, Abe accompanied them back to the subway; there was less chance of their being jumped if they were to cross paths with a local gang.
They rehearsed for three months, almost daily, and at the end of it achieved a truly smooth, tight repertoire, not just a collection of random numbers. Yurik was giddy with delight, and felt like an athlete before the deciding match.
On the evening before a gig that had already been announced, their singer was killed in a street brawl. It was like a plane crashing during takeoff. They spent a week in that wreck of an apartment, never leaving it, saying goodbye to Chuche: they drank, smoked, shot up, played … Yurik was badly shaken. First Mickey, and now Chuche … Death was hovering nearby, as though wanting to get to know him. The drugs these guys used were different, more potent and lethal. On the eighth day after the funeral, when days and nights in the decaying apartment had all blended into a single stream of swirling darkness and bright color, Yurik came to his senses and felt a rush of fear. He grabbed his guitar and went to Long Island—to save his own skin.
They didn’t expect him. Martha was almost reconciled to the fact that the boy had gotten out of hand; but, from an American perspective, he was already grown up. His arrival was inconvenient. Another guest was staying in Yurik’s room: Grisha, visiting from Israel. Yurik collapsed on the leather sofa in the living room, without even bothering to take a shower, and slept for nearly twenty-four hours. Before falling asleep, he managed to tell Martha that his friend had been killed.
“A trauma, yet another trauma,” Martha said to Vitya, reminding him of the previous tragedy of Mickey. Vitya agreed absentmindedly.
Grisha, who had previously been very stout, had slimmed down over the last ten years and recovered his youthful slenderness. He was the father of six children of various ages. “Trauma,” he said, “is an invention of that most unreliable of sciences—psychology. Everything is a matter of biochemistry and life experience.”
Though Martha had worked in administration at the university for many years, she had been trained as a psychologist, and was surprised: why unreliable?
By now, Grisha had the answers to every possible question. “Because it’s not even science! It’s a delusion. There are precise, stable phenomena or systems: biochemistry, which is obvious, and not yet thoroughly understood, and the programmed behavior that corresponds to it. What does trauma have to do with it?” He ended by saying peevishly, “Everyone went crazy over Freud. Some sort of global delusion. Mystification at its worst … The chemistry of life, that’s what it’s all about.”