In the evening they moved him from a holding cell in the precinct house to the county jail on the upper floors of the courthouse.  Now, in the night, alone, he wondered where everyone was.  He had lawyers.  Then he remembered that they had quit, the last of them, in exasperation at his endless criticism.  But surely someone should have come.
    Of course, most of them were gone now.  Marcus and Stratton and Landau and Hess and Gherum were gone.  Zoline and Jess Smith and President Harding.  Fowler the valet.  All gone.  But Conners was not gone.  Babe was not gone.  At least he didn't think so.
    He remembered Babe driving him him into the park and that when he'd looked around, later, the car was gone.  Babe must have got scared and ran.  Well, good for him.  Remus hoped Babe was out there in the world, running still.
    He had a cell to himself, a wooden bench, a single blanket, wool but thin. No pillow.  No mattress or sheets upon the hard bench.  The brick walls glowed cold.  His shoulder, especially, ached.  Sitting up took some pressure off it.  He wedged himself into a corner and dozed and woke back into damp darkness, shivering harder and aching more deeply as the night wore on.
    At one of her magnificent parties, the bright lighting made his eyes water.  He looked at all the fine people in their fine clothing.  He stood at the head of a table as long as a tennis court and held up a glass.  The guests grew silent.  He offered them well-chosen words of hope and good cheer.  They smiled and offered their glasses to him.
    The staff brought the food then, course after course of finely wrought delicacies in the form of wide flat bowls of a swirled orange and yellow soup, twisted knuckles of warm breads, selections of delicate and exotic appetizers.  He could name none of them, though she had told him half a dozen times the names of each.  It mattered to her to name what they had constructed, to name each particular element of it, as if by so doing, by cataloging and ordering, it could somehow be preserved.  Escargot, he remembered, then.  Chewy grubs marinated in hot garliced butter and threaded back into perfect shells.  He had laughed at this indulgence, the stuffing of dead mollusks into new shells, so that one could simply have the pleasure of taking the tiny fork in hand and pulling them out again, of feeling the slight suck of the vacuum they had formed.
    God, he was cold.  He'd always lived for the cold, for the waters or the black nights.  But this creeping insidious jailhouse chill was not that.  You needed to move.  If you could move, you could let it pull you in and just go where it took you, and come out better for it at the end.
   Once it had been the pier by the old world's fairgrounds in South Chicago.  As he shed the heavy woolen trousers and jacket his mother still dressed him in (though he was nearly fourteen), he gazed out across the unbounded expanse of it.  The flat gray swells rose and fell as if the whole thing were some breathing many-lunged creature, each lung expanding and contracting separately but in complex synchronicity. He'd never tried it this early. Small floes of ice still dotted the surface.
    As he walked from the pier toward the stone break wall to the north, his feet left scalloped depressions in the dirty sand.  In the summer, he could swim for two hours, but now it would be enough just to make it from the break wall to the pier.  A quarter of a mile.  Nothing, really, except in this cold.
    The lake slapped at the end of the wall.  The perpetual wind, frigid, heavy with moisture, whipped about him.  He shivered, breathing, looking.  Nothing.  Nothing.  His mind blank, in the way he could make it.  He dove.
    Oh, the ice of it, the blinding numbing frigidity.  The gray water hugged him to its bosom, sucked him down and squeezed him as his mother did sometimes, so tightly he couldn't breathe.  His mind dimmed; he saw sparkles, then darkness, until the ice shot through clear to his spine, to his heart and brain and the core of his gut, and burned, and he came back.
    He broke through a swell into the gray light, into the air.  The swells lifted him.  The great gray city, his city, Chicago, lay before him.  A rail ran along the shoreline, the steam from a locomotive coming toward him.  Farther up haze rolled from the mouth of the river, from the factories and foundries and refineries that lined it.  Beyond that he could not see, but knew what was there -- the green money haze of Lincoln Park, the part of the city that did not belong to him.  Not yet.
   He broke toward the pier, arms cutting, legs grinding, face turning between the lighter gray of the air and the darker gray of the water.  He swam to stay alive.  But halfway across he knew he wasn't going to make it.  He felt his muscles locking up, and he suddenly couldn't breathe.  He stopped and trod, gasping, looking up at the dimming sky.  He had never been so frightened.  He imagined his body, gray now as the water, slowly sinking, spinning, to the eternal warmth at the bottom.  That vision made him move against the pain.  Then he forgot where he was, forgot how to breathe, and inhaled the fishy greasy water, and choked.
   Then he was crawling onto the pier's rough planking.  The water he vomitted steamed on the wood.  He felt hands rubbing him, a coat thrown over him
   "Crazy damn kid."  A man walking in the fairgrounds had seen him go in.  The man rubbed until George began to feel his arms again, until he could walk back to the bench and get dressed.
     He looked back out over the gray water.
     "You try that again," the man said, "they'll be tossing the hooks for you."
     He knew he'd had no business going in.  He loved to swim, but that hadn't been why.  It was something else, a thing he needed to understand.  To try.  To know he could do.  He was alive.  He hid a smile.  His arms and his legs burned as the blood and the feeling returned.

Excerpt from The Jazz Bird, by Craig Holden, Copyright © 2002