Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-three

Anne Sprillthmar, a brilliant young South African magazine writer, had been posted in London before being plucked away and hired by Tina Brown during her brief sensational tenure as editor of The New Yorker. When Brown had just as quickly moved on, Anne Sprillthmar stuck, endeared herself to the new regime at the famous weekly, and thrived, in her way a perfect Manhattanite, typical of the international elite who lately seemed more the island’s right inheritors than its ostensible natives. Sprillthmar was as tall as me and nicely immodest of that fact, standing up without concaving to shelter her breasts as too many tall women do. Bare of a hat, her long copperish hair carried a frosting of snow when she first appeared to shake my hand and say her name, in that faintly exotic, even scandalous accent-bearing its notes of historical shame but presented unshamefully-and when she came near enough I could spot pinpoint snowflakes perching on the tips of her peach-colored lashes. She was even nice-smelling. When we met she’d been shadowing Richard Abneg through his daily paces for four days, fly on the wall as he transacted his duties, the vital errands of the Arnheim administration, and I doubt I’d ever been sorrier to learn that a beautiful and intriguing woman would be difficult to shake from my immediate company. In fact, it wasn’t exactly the first time Anne Sprillthmar and I had met. I hadn’t recognized her without her tall, long-snouted dog. My elevator girl.

Our recently long-lost friend Richard had found himself cast as bureaucratic firewall between city hall and the spiraling fiasco of the giant escaped tiger’s non-capture-of the mayor’s failure even to explain the circumstances and origins of the creature’s loosing upon Manhattan. So Richard had been shoved to the forefront, to dissemble and deflect in Arnheim’s place. This public scapegoat’s role had in turn aroused curiosity about the old semi-reconstructed squatters’ advocate, and the saga of his long rightward drift into legitimate power. Abneg as sweaty and pragmatic everyman in extremis had immediately struck Anne Sprillthmar as a type worth working up for a profile, in lieu of the access the mysterious mayor would never have granted. When Sprillthmar pitched him to her editors she’d been happily green-lit.

This explained why Richard Abneg wasn’t alone when he arrived at the curb of the Friendreth Canine Apartments that next day, in answer to my pleading call. He’d made a commitment to give the journalist access to one of his typical weeks on the go, and grudgingly quit making distinctions between personal and public destinations after she’d insisted she wanted to portray him “in the round.” Richard bolted from the taxicab, punching black shoe prints in the dusty covering that had begun to whirl from the sky, leaving the apparently unflappable journalist to pay their fare, and didn’t apologize or introduce her when she caught up to him under the Friendreth’s portico where I waited. Richard wore the splendid new coat Georgina had purchased for him, and his shoes were fine now, too-he’d always signified his distance from formality by the rattiness of his footwear, but the Hawkman had lately banished all his favorites.

“This had better be good.”

I wasn’t sure whether I should be furious at Richard for his abdication of Toothland, only that he was so patently aggrieved at my summoning him here that I couldn’t bother trying to reverse the charges. Let Richard be the furious one, whether it was to cover feelings of guilt or not. I needed him today.

“We’re taking Perkus in for a checkup, only he doesn’t know it,” I said.

“Your timing is bad,” Richard muttered. I didn’t know whether he meant the snowstorm, the particular curses of his agenda, the hovering presence of his profiler, or something else, more basic to my being. I didn’t doubt he was right in any case. Anne Sprillthmar introduced herself more fully (my name seeming to mean nothing particular to her, a relief), then fell in with us on our way upstairs. Her presence was unassuming, despite her glamour-I figured it was part of her journalist’s talents for putting people at ease when they shouldn’t be. It wasn’t as though she were recording us with anything more than her warmly puzzled, unjudgmental eyes. At Perkus’s door I tried to warn them both, incompetently, mentioning squalor, disjunction, hiccups, a well-intentioned but boundless three-legged dog. Richard pushed past me in annoyance. I held the door for Anne Sprillthmar. By the time I followed her inside the journalist was squatting on the kitchen’s filthy tile, restraining Ava from tunneling too far down her throat with those patented fang-bared tongue-kisses. “Sweet baby, sweet baby, doesn’t anybody ever give you love, you poor thing?” The accent made Anne Sprillthmar’s endearments super-lascivious. “Oh, yes, you’re a big baby, aren’t you, darling?” It was on seeing that Anne Sprillthmar was a “dog person” that I recovered an image of her, riding Oona Laszlo’s elevator at my side.

Further inside, the encounter I’d willed was taking place, Perkus startled into semi-accountability as only Richard Abneg’s implicit reproach could startle him. He’d been huddled on the couch, with Sterling Wilson Hobo’s Immaculate Rust in scissored remnants all around him, shattered like everything else that met Perkus’s interested eye, digested in his own personal mashup. At first I thought to protest-hadn’t Perkus said Hobo wasn’t his sort of poet? — and then I saw the pages and verses had been reduced past even Hobo’s minimalist intentions, the words and even letters dismembered from one another. Perkus had the single syllable fal stuck to his cheek. Here was the final destination of all of Perkus’s languages: the ransom note. Perkus, kidnapped by his own theories, had then suffered Stockholm syndrome, in which one preferred a jailer to oneself.

Or maybe I was unfair. Maybe hiccups wrecked him. Anyhow, he’d wrecked, chin shadow become an unkempt whitish beard, scruff become inane wisps spilling over his ear tops, disarray become dereliction. Perkus wasn’t the only startled person on the scene. Richard Abneg was silenced, too. I saw Perkus through his eyes, miles deep in self-dungeoning since their farewell on Eighty-fourth Street. I recalled they’d been boys together, that unimaginable land of brilliant New York childhood I’d been made to feel ashamed I lacked. I’d given Richard no chance even to understand what the Friendreth Apartments were about-he probably credited the malodorous decor entirely to Perkus. Close enough. Everything stood for itself. Perkus hiccuped violently to rupture the silence and an exclamation mark of drool decorated his chin.

Richard didn’t speak to him at first, but turned back to me, the rage and hurry leached from his voice. “You have a doctor waiting?” he asked. I nodded, and he said, “Take Anne back into the kitchen.” Anne Sprillthmar, with Ava nuzzling up into her kneading hand, had come in behind me, and now stood shocked. Perkus gawked back at her. “I’ll talk to him for a minute,” said Richard, as if neither Perkus nor the journalist could hear him. “We should have kept a cab waiting. There won’t be many in this goddamn cul-de-sac.”

“We’ll go downstairs and find a cab and be waiting for you.” I was grateful for Richard’s command, eager to expand on my usefulness in return for his taking responsibility for what happened next, perhaps even what had happened to begin with.

“Get two and send her back to the Condé Nast building.”

The snows were wilder than even ten minutes earlier, though these were still the sort of brittle pinprick flakes I had trouble imagining accumulating much, not because they’d melt-it was too cold for that-but because they’d whirl and drift and be whisked into piles, never adhering to anything, not even one another. If cab-hailing could be called street smarts, Richard’s were unerring: Anne Sprillthmar and I had to walk to the corner of First for a taxi. We rode it back while I explained to her that Richard wanted her gone.

“What is that place?”

“Only dogs are supposed to live there. If you Google under Friendreth you’ll find out all about it.”

“I’m guessing this has nothing to do with the tiger.”

“No, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Nothing to do with Richard’s official responsibilities.”

“Who is that dismal person?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Would I know the name?”

“I doubt it.” I could excuse dismal, which was easily justified. Yet I felt an obligation to be as flinty as Richard, on his and Perkus’s behalves, rather than to act as sentimentally undone as I felt, under the twin sway of the disastrous watershed occasion-I was as amazed at myself for waiting so long to put Perkus Tooth into a framework of emergency as I was that I had finally done so, and that it had, seemingly, worked-and my irrelevant and inappropriate responsiveness to Anne Sprillthmar’s voice, height, and scent.

She made one last bid for conversation. “Amazing about this weather, don’t you think?”

“I guess-yes.” I didn’t want to think about the snow, though in our cab we were surrounded at all sides by a theater of white chaos. The snow seemed to be thinking about us. That would do for now. Anne Sprillthmar got out and found herself another cab, smiling placidly through a wiped porthole in my window to let me know I’d done no damage to her undamageable serene curiosity about me and other things.

Richard Abneg stuffed Perkus into the cab just a moment later. He’d got him into several layers of charity sports-gear junk to insulate his skeleton from the cold, and a fleabag hat I thought I’d never seen, until I recognized it as the fur tower Biller had once sported, now crushed and matted, as if Ava had been regularly humping it. Ocelot, I remembered. Perkus seemed to be waking from a spell, slowly. “Who was that woman, Chase?”

“You better ask Richard.”

Richard pushed in at Perkus’s door, securing Perkus on the hump seat, hands cradling his knobby corduroy knees. A few bits of language, words and letters jaggedly snipped from their contexts, still clung to his pants amid the melting snowflakes. The cabby’s lush incense didn’t blot a certain doggy, pukey, unshowered smell. I told him where to take us.

“Is that your new girlfriend, Richard? What happened to the Hawkman?”

Richard might have known better than to try to wait him out.

“You make a beautiful pair. Beautiful coats.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a journalist doing a profile.” Before Perkus could pry it from him, Richard added, “For The New Yorker.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Is Avedon going to take your picture?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Perkus was disturbingly gleeful through his debris and hiccups. His eyes were thrilled, one with Richard, the other with the surrounding scene. “So you’ve done it, Abneg! How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“How does it feel to finally ride the hegemonic bulldozer?”

Richard let this line die in silence. Our cab got lucky shooting downtown, then made slow sticky progress crossing west on Thirty-fourth Street. Perkus, unanswered, ground into his silent management of the jarring hiccups, sometimes seeming to murmur between them to himself, not daring to speak. “I need to walk Ava,” he said suddenly.

“Chase will go back and walk Ava,” said Richard, smoothly delegating.

“Maybe you should call Sadie Zapping,” Perkus mused. He spoke as if conjuring a figure in mist, some fallen Valkyrie or minor archangel.

“I’ll do that,” I said. I had no idea if this was possible, but I’d be willing to try. I didn’t plan on abandoning Perkus anytime too soon. The Friendreth’s volunteers, Sadie or another, would certainly look in on the dog before long.

“Perkus is probably wondering what kind of doctor he’ll be seeing,” said Richard, his voice weary, as he craned his head at the snow-clotted traffic. He’d fallen into a queer oblique habit of addressing us each through the other, perhaps a measure of how badly he’d been rattled by Anne Sprillthmar’s questions.

“Strabo Blandiana,” I said. “They’ve met before. He’ll be familiar with Perkus’s history.”

“The Romanian quack,” said Richard darkly. “I know who he is.”

“He’s a Chinese practitioner,” I said.

“Chase must think I’m out of balance,” said Perkus humorously.

“Ironic,” said Richard.

“No, it is ironic,” said Perkus, his voice an ember reigniting in a damp bonfire, cheek muscle frogging beneath his Unabomber beard. “Given all that’s off balance around here!” He was revving up another of his hiccologues. “Seriously, I’ve got to talk with you, Richard. A lot of this, uh, stuff I’ve been working on is completely lost on Chase.”

“Thanks.”

“No offense, Chase, but it’s like trying to describe Gnuppets to a Gnuppet.” Perkus’s glee in this superb comparison was tempered by the ferocity of the seizure that marked it, an emphysematous gasp for breath adequate to complete the phrase.

“We’ll talk after you’ve seen the doctor.” Richard’s unrestrained sarcastic inflection of this last word served not only to reinforce what a poor selection he thought I’d made in Strabo Blandiana but to assuage Perkus that the two of them still spoke above my head, and so his promise of future listening was sincere. Perkus, no matter his state, caught this implication and was reassured. His response was to defend Strabo, halfway.

“Blandiana’s an interesting character, Richard. Did you know that before we met he actually troubled to read quite a bit of my work?”

“Really.” Richard kept it neutral.

“Strabo’s a kind of catalyst person, I think. His offices might function as a message center or way station for higher intelligences…” From his vague tone I couldn’t tell whether Perkus meant the offices had already been used that way or only had that potential. I wasn’t sure he knew. (Perhaps it was an allusion to the framed chaldron poster. Or to the chance of Fran Lebowitz running into Frank Langella in the waiting room.) It was maddening that I even wanted to follow his drift into chaotic abstractions. My friend Perkus Tooth had collapsed, then accepted my help. That truth ought reasonably to end my attempt to collate and refold his many crumpled maps of the universe. Yet he was never so very far from where I’d first met him, a door into my life in the city as I knew it now. And I loved him-if that made me his unteachable Gnuppet, so be it.

“Hark!” said Perkus. When he spoke the hiccups emerged as silences, but when he was silent they took the form of these Shakespearean exhortations.

Arrived in Chelsea, we got him out of the cab, through the darkening street, under a snow-choked sky, and up to Strabo Blandiana’s rooms. In arranging this appointment Strabo and I had spoken on the phone once the afternoon before, once this morning. Strabo had made any number of confidence-inspiring remarks about chronic hiccups, which I needed him to do, for hiccups, I kept telling myself, were the problem here. The healer spoke of my wisdom in coming to him first, explaining that too many of those enduring chronic hiccups found their way to acupuncture only as a last resort. He’d place needles at E-37, E-1, and E-33, and then we’d be able to consider how Perkus had got to this point, characteristically implying he’d make symptoms disappear in order to proceed to deeper matters, the world sickness that by its nature infected every soul. I did my best to preview Perkus’s low state, the tatterdemalion soon to appear in his suite. Strabo assured me he’d have any other clients tucked away in their own rooms when we came through-any idea that he’d be affronted himself was beneath mention. Strabo’s commitment, once he’d taken a client, was absolute. He had no idea how Perkus regarded him. It wasn’t clear to me, actually. Perkus might have absorbed more sincere value from his first visit than he’d ever admit.

Strabo even seemed capable of soothing Richard Abneg’s suspicions as he eased Perkus off behind a closed door, leaving us to face that dippy receptionist in a waiting room that had been otherwise cleared as promised. Richard and I didn’t make any small talk, too conscious of that possible listener, but I believe I wasn’t wrong to sense relief in him. I’d produced a kind of obsequious triumph, having moved the hot potato of Perkus from one bracket of authority to another, leaping the gulf of distrust between the two-the best a Gnuppet might hope to do. I don’t know how long I was allowed to reside in that bubble of false satisfaction before Strabo reappeared, minus Perkus.

“Will you…?” Strabo gestured us into another room, and closed the door.

Now, as though he’d been holding it at bay earlier, I felt Richard’s gaze working over Blandiana’s neat crew sweater and huge gold watch, his etched sideburns, the flawless shaving in the dimple of his chin, his poreless nose. I could feel Richard thinking I may wear the beard, but I know which of us is the faking fakir here. Strabo didn’t blink, but seemed to grant a tiny interval for Richard’s contempt to be withered in an atmosphere of total acceptance. Then he spoke. “As you know, I’m in no way hostile to Western treatment. In the case of certain purely medical emergencies I recommend swift intervention of modern techniques, and this is one of those times.” Strabo betrayed no panic, though he inspired plenty in me.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Can’t you stop the hiccups?”

“I might, but we haven’t the time. I recommend that you move Perkus directly to an emergency room. St. Ignatius Rockefeller, on Ninth Avenue at Thirty-sixth would be best.”

Richard saw an opening. “His aura came up black and you couldn’t handle it, huh?”

Strabo turned and spoke to me, with calm purpose. “I believe our friend may have hemorrhaged internally, Chase.”

“Christ,” said Richard, looking at me, too-I was the one to be looked at.

“Forever hailing taxicabs,” murmured Perkus, with amusement, after we’d hustled him downstairs and into another backseat, not saying to him what Strabo Blandiana had said, not bothering with any niceties that might slow us. Richard’s attitude toward this wayward visit to Blandiana now struck the defining note, as if I was hardly any more competent than Perkus, though Richard would have had no idea Perkus was in any crisis at all if I hadn’t called him. Perkus was completely acquiescent in our care, cast adrift, seeming afraid to wander into the snowstorm, the shifting shroud of which blurred his frail form into a kind of wraith even right beside us. Still, he eked out an assessment. “That’s the trouble with you, Chase, you think you can be insulated from the pedestrian view, a wholly stage-managed approach to existence. But the stage gets smaller and smaller, soon you’re living in a snow globe!” The daylit sky had darkened to a cave of orange at four o’clock, blotted by flakes which had now found their proper size and viscosity, ash from a cold volcano. Manhattan, schooled in the ceaseless winter, had begun folding its tent under the assault, cars vacating the avenues, shops rattling down gates, surrendering the evening. “That’swhy everyone loves you, Chase. You’re the perfect avatar of the city’s unreality. Like Manhattan, you’re a sentimental monument, stopped in time. I wonder what would happen if we asked this cab to take the Lincoln Tunnel? What sort of world is left out there?”

“There never was much of one,” said Richard.

“Probably we wouldn’t be allowed to try,” said Perkus. Now he censored himself, as though he’d already displeased the imaginary authorities he’d conjured, the Manhattan Border Patrol, and concentrated on managing the paroxysms rippling through him. I considered whether I might be the trapped-in-amber curiosity Perkus made me for. Whatever he said, I felt adaptable enough-I’d put myself into Perkus’s crosshairs, for one thing. That might only make me a masochistic Gnuppet. By now I could script Perkus’s abuse of me without his help.

Richard and I subsisted in the embattled, fearful silence that fell on us through the agony of the cab’s crawl up Tenth, then conducted Perkus past St. Ignatius’s emergency-intake doors, tracking snow prints along the tile, in through the low-ceilinged, uninspiring waiting room, presided over by a high-mounted television tuned to some disconcertingly jaunty cable-news broadcast. The waiting-room seats were nearly everywhere filled, a gauntlet of gazes we wouldn’t want to meet all at once, or, really, at all. Luckily, that feeling was mutual. Illness shies, especially the self-poisoning kind that appeared to dominate the room. Or was I just defensive about how Perkus had come to resemble an old drunkard or junkie? He had company in that here. It was the comparison that risked dragging him down-I wanted him seen as one of us, not one of them. I wanted Richard’s coat and shoes to count for a tremendous amount now-God bless the Hawkman. I knew how this place worked, or thought I knew: we had to distinguish him in their jaded attentions. We had a head start, finding no parents with children. And nobody bleeding, not on the outside, anyway. Best, there was no one between us and the triage nurse, a stolid black woman who might be thirty, or fifty. She worked behind sliding Plexiglas, like Chinese food in Brooklyn. A door to the right led to her small examining room, but she didn’t invite us through.

“This man needs a doctor,” I said. Perkus swayed between us, mumbling, making a good case he needed something, I thought. Richard plucked the smashed ocelot from Perkus’s head and stuck it in his hands instead, like a purse. The improvement was modest.

“You talk to me,” came a voice of impermeable thickness, resistant to its root, accent shading to some island. “Then I talk to the doctor.”

“He’s got hiccups,” I said. “And maybe internal bleeding.”

“Hiccups?”

“Chronic esophageal spasms,” specified Richard. “Which is a recognized medical condition, and has been known to cause injury and even death, so summon a fucking doctor.”

“Chronic hiccups,” repeated the nurse, writing it down.

“They’re sympathetic hiccups,” I said. “Sympathetic with an animal.”

At this the nurse only stared. She appeared to be examining Perkus for firsthand evidence, but his present hiccologue, though practically subvocal, was incessant enough that the spasms came only as lulls in his whispering-he hadn’t let out a solid gasping Hark! or Hurryup! since we’d passed through the hospital doors. In terms of symptoms, Perkus fired blanks.

“Write suspicion of internal hemorrhage,” said Richard.

She ignored him. “Has he been to see a doctor?”

“That’s why we’re here, to see a doctor!”

“Chronic refers to a diagnosis that shouldn’t come to the emergency room,” she said blandly. “Some people live with hiccups five or ten years.” Working in the emergency room, the triage nurse, I began to understand, was an enemy of the notion of emergency. I recalled an acting teacher who’d sworn to do his best to discourage every student who came his way-those that remained were, possibly, actors.

“He did see a doctor, who told us to come to your emergency room,” I said, speaking each word carefully. “He felt it was an emergency and that there might be… internal… bleeding.” I hadn’t wanted to use the term in front of Perkus, but he didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He’d assumed the role of patient, if anything, too quickly, seeming now to have held this bent and subdued posture for years. Hard to believe that as recently as the night before he’d lectured me on the causes of death in detectives. I should have left him the way I’d found him, still full of brash authority, a captain going down with the ship. Now all his words were for himself, at least in this place. He showed no evidence of bleeding, but all else was internal. Even his uncanny eye seemed to search inward.

“A doctor with this hospital?” asked the triage nurse. I’d interested her, slightly, for the first time.

“No.”

“With which hospital, then?”

“Not with a hospital, a Chinese doctor, I mean, he isn’t Chinese, but he practices acupuncture.”

In her eyes I had now flown to the moon with my flapping arms, which appeared to be a kind of thing she saw too often and didn’t care to see again.

“The kind of doctor who sticks you with needles!” yelled Richard.

“Was someone attacked?” she asked.

“Eh?”

“Are you describing a crime and should I notify the police?”

“No,” said Richard with maximum irritation, yet seeming to recognize an official jargon that required some minimum of respectful reply. “No, there’s been no crime.”

“Then keep your voice down, this is a place for sick people,” she said, adding ominously, “some of them.” Then she resumed her inspection of Perkus. I tried to be persuaded something medical was going in her look. “Can he sign his name?”

“Of course,” said Richard.

“One of you can come in and help him fill out a form. The other has to wait.” She directed this at me. Richard had made a distinct unfriend: in the triage nurse’s index the moon flappers were preferable to the shouters.

After the nurse took Perkus’s blood pressure and shone a quick light in his pupils (she frowned at the disobedient one), I jotted my way through the intake form. This meant conducting an interview, one Perkus only partly attended from where he sat across from me, burping, blinking, and murmuring: date of birth, medical history (negligible, he’d not been in a hospital since having his appendix out as a teenager), insurance (none), living relatives (a sister-who knew?), responsible parties should the patient be incapable of making care decisions (he hesitated over this until I thought he’d forgotten the question, then startled me by blurting, “You, Chase, you”).

Then it was back out into the purgatorial waiting area, where Richard had negotiated or bullied for three seats together in a row. We took our seats like latecomers in some impoverished theater, Perkus with his grotty ocelot loaf in his lap like something he’d killed with his bare hands. The television, I now saw, was tuned not to a news show but to an endless infomercial, the “anchor” at his desk merely a shill offering leading questions to a grinning middle-aged couple hawking DVDs containing secrets to real-estate wealth. Other guests sat on the seats to their right, nodding and grinning as they awaited their chance to chime in and report what millions the couple’s system had netted them. “Shift into High-per-Hour!” they kept incanting. “Not High-Power, but High-per-Hour!” In our dim company the television’s presentation was weirdly irresistible, and we all sat drinking it in. I couldn’t help wondering how the staff had tuned to this channel, out of so many. The degree of indifference seemed willful, an expression of the low odds you’d ever feel in the care of a thinking mind in this place. Yet just as one’s willingness to board a plane depends on believing a plane’s cockpit impervious to the condition of chaos that rules an airport, I’d let myself go on thinking Perkus was destined to meet some upstanding captain of medicine just outside this arena of human vacuity and dismay.

Perkus had just now surrendered some layer of will needed to manage his noise, and gave all the proof he hadn’t while under inspection of the triage nurse: “Hawk! How work! Ha wreck! Shirk! Chute!” Though proof of hiccups wasn’t likely to move him to the front of the line. What was the sound of internal bleeding? A less koan-like question: What did these other denizens suffer, to rate being triaged ahead of us? I forced myself to take a closer look. Two different Hispanic husbands cradled rounded wives, and I guessed there might be endangered pregnancies in play. Hard to be sure under the coats and blankets. Otherwise, male or female, our rivals seemed mostly derelicts who’d come in out of the cold. They might as well have been dressed in brown paper sacks.

“Imagine a transcript of this thing,” said Perkus suddenly. It took me a moment to realize he meant the infomercial. “Just word for word, every gesture mapped and reproduced. You could stage it off Broadway, it would be like Beckett, Chase, the most astounding avant-garde spectacle, it’d run forever! Then in a few centuries it might be the only evidence of our species locked in some galactic museum not the original, but a grainy rehearsal tape of the show which in reality would likely have closed during previews, but anyway the universe could know we lived under this regime”-Perkus gestured at the screen overhead-“and yet were able here and there to laugh, however bitterly.”

Perkus recovered some wellspring of associations, riffing with new vigor, though the gaps kept on growing, like a digital brain on shuffle, and breaking down. He was oblivious to the glares of his unfortunate audience, those who bothered to glare-many seemed to take his sprung presence as a typical cost of entry to this pallid dungeon. Richard hunkered down, glaring back, bristling that anyone might object to us. Me, I listened. What were we going to do-ask Perkus to wind down again? These were signs of life. “Richard, here’s what I want you to understand, and never mind what Chase tells you, just so long as you don’t go blabbing it all to The New Yorker, hee hee-” He regaled Richard with his succinctest description yet of his simulacra theory of Manhattan, including leading roles for the three of us, and possibly Georgina Hawkmanaji (but not Oona), we who were several of the only real souls still inhabiting the island. He was pretty certain the gray fog, the subway-boring mechanical tiger, the chaldron sickness that had come over us, and the “Brando’s dead” rumor were each typical of the slippage at the edges of our reality by its handlers, who were for all their contrivances and capital unequal to the task they’d set themselves. If Richard could cause himself to look squarely at one portion of his investment in these fictions, he’d dissolve all the others. Perkus had been a fool, attempting to persuade Chase Insteadman, cracked actor-it was Richard who was positioned to understand, with one foot in both camps by his nature. Only then Perkus reversed again: Why bother? The world cannot be disenchanted, this was his new motto. Reside in whatever small cave of the real you can gather around yourself and a few friends. Walk the dog religiously, the dog has things to impart. Only watch the weather-when it stopped snowing, disbelieve his theories. Richard’s severity gave way to bleak playfulness: he’d believe anything if it didn’t require admitting Brando lived. I saw his bantering as a bid to keep Perkus at the level of the propositional, as though not to strand him too deep in any single foray. I was cheered; this was what I’d forgotten to do. I’d taken him too seriously.

Perkus wound down again. He offered a round of disconnected phrases, attempts at deadpan, though they came out forlorn. “So I don’t have a headache anyway!” I smiled to show him I appreciated the irony. Then, “We should have brought something to read.” He asked if I’d called Sadie Zapping about Ava-I said yes, lying. Perkus appeared satisfied, though we’d never been apart long enough for me to make a call, and his hiccups turned to a spell of spasmodic yawning, as though his quaking body wished to shutter itself for a nap. His breath was rank. Richard, like me, had an eye on the clock. Almost an hour had gone by. Nobody had been called from the room except one of the Hispanic couples. A few more gray and weather-smitten forms had trudged inside, accompanied by blasts of snowy air.

“Fuck it, I’m finding a doctor,” said Richard. He stood and hammered his fist on the Plexiglas-the nurse was out of view. I saw two policemen step up then, from the corridor to the left, behind doors forbiddingly labeled, leading to the ambulance-entry ramp. The cops had been on the ramp smoking cigarettes and grumbling into their stupid radios, complaining of the cold to lucky buddies back in the station house, I suppose. Now Richard gave them a good excuse to get out of the cold. I saw him lean expertly into their company, talking under his breath. I cheered simply for him to stir up some reaction here in this lifeless zone-Perkus’s hiccologues were keeping the whole place going, those and the real-estate infomercial. Richard could play some mayor’s trump card and get Perkus seen.

“Chase…” Perkus was uninterested in Richard and the police, except as an opportunity to have me alone. However much he disdained my grasp of his revelations, apparently he had some use for my confidential ear. His tone turned from declamatory to intimate. “So, I’m in bad faith with you over a couple of things. Do you remember what I said about rock critics, Chase?”

“Oh, sure.” Why should I ever be amazed at his swerves? But I wasn’t sure I wanted him to switch into confessional mode, as if he thought he was running low on chances. As much as I wanted him to be well, I didn’t want him to know he was sick.

“I’m one of them, Chase.”

“One of what?”

“A rock critic I mean. I knew every one of those poor bastards at some point Shaw Nelson Williams We broke bread, Chase. They taught me what I know, how to think I don’t know why I ever denied it.” He rushed these last words into one breath between the herky-jerks. I wanted to tell him to ease himself, not try to talk, but that would be as if to tell him to fold the only tent he’d ever set up on the windswept desert of existence.

“Each an explorer of new worlds a Columbus or Magellan. They were my brothers.”

“Well…” I found myself wanting to give him some absolution. “They probably knew how you really felt.”

“Listen forget them I need to tell you something important about me and you can’t ever tell Richard. Or Oona.”

Richard, in the corner with the cops, had his back to us, gesticulating, looking less persuasive than I’d hoped. Perkus still had his opening with me.

“I’m not like you, Chase. I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

“Some men like to keep free and easy. Monogamy’s not the only game in town,” I added joshingly. “Looking at my own poor outcomes, some might say you’ve done the more honorable thing.”

“I mean none at all.”

He groaned it like a frog. Thank God for the inane barking of the infomercial. If only it could have kept me from hearing, too. I didn’t need to ask any clarifying question to know how absolutely Perkus meant me to take his words. I suppose I should have known it from his rage of confusion at my attempt to set him up with the Jackson Hole waitress, poor doomed Lindsay. I thought crazily how the tiger might be Perkus’s poltergeist, destroying only what he found himself unable to live with: his kingdom of broadsides, the prospect of a lover, the city itself. I wondered if Oona was safe. Now, as though reading my thoughts, he mentioned her.

“Oona was the one. I should have told you.”

I sat staring at the infomercial, unwilling or unable to face him. “So you had one girlfriend, actually.”

“No, I once tried and was rebuffed.”

The word bore all the weird delicacy of his innocence. After so long, the size of his loneliness was hard to contemplate. I suppose his kind of radical openness required barricades in some areas-he couldn’t have let women pass easily through him and still make room for all those arcane references, all those wild conjectures, all those drugs, all that cosmic radiation flooding his brain. He’d shut the door to sex and in came chaldrons and Ava and hiccups instead. Well, I couldn’t argue with the life-architecture of the most remarkable person I knew, only quibble around the edges like an interior decorator, offering wallpaper for his dungeon. “We’ll have to do something to get you up and running, then, when we’re past this… present… episode.” I worked to keep a gulp or click or sob from my own voice. My words were addressed to a dissolving person-shaped pile of hiccups, not a ready candidate for Upper East Side pickup scene.

Richard plopped into his seat with a tight sigh. At least confessions were done for now-I’d taken my limit. “What did you learn?” I asked him.

“What did I learn? I learned that they have some squeaky-tight protocols around here and I could be arrested if I pushed through the Staff Only doors as I kept swearing I’d do, that’s what I fucking learned.”

“Did you tell them who you are?”

“Who I am?” Richard chuckled. “My impression is that if you’re a cop working below 125th Street these days pretty much anyone you ever lay hands on or even give the hairy eyeball says Do you know who I am or You know I could have your badge in a heartbeat or I’ve got full diplomatic immunity to be carrying this suitcase full of cocaine-dusted Benjamins, hence they all find such gambits pretty much outright hilarious.” Richard seemed energized in the defeat, his typical response. Perhaps he felt confirmed in the deep truth of his rascal identity-he didn’t want to be who his credentials said he was. The eternal police-mind, which saw everyone as a lawbreaker, had seen him true. But Perkus was stimulated, too, and raised his pitch again. He was stimulated by one implication in particular.

“Cops live in New Jersey, don’t they, Richard?”

“Jersey, sure, or Staten Island or Hicksville or White Plains, whatever.”

“They laugh because they know.”

“Know what?” said Richard warily, sensing the trap.

“What’s outside the limit, maybe fallout-strewn wasteland or Chinese slave dictatorship, people in cages too small for dogs.”

“In that case wouldn’t it be more sensible to use robot policemen?” said Richard. The couple overhead were explaining how many people misunderstood the foreclosure process, the fact that so many homeowners were simply looking for a partnership plan like the one they offered, to ease them free of their mortgages.

“Sor--ry?” croaked Perkus.

“Robot policemen wouldn’t track so much fallout back and forth from Staten Island, don’t you think? And they wouldn’t require so many bribes, or toroid pastries.”

“-ut-”

“What I mean to say is no more fucking plots now, Perkus, I mean it.”

Perkus grimaced and wrapped himself again deep inside his hiccups, but he couldn’t out-glower Richard, not in his present state. I was afraid to negotiate between them, so we slid back into the lull that ruled this human backwater. The policemen had returned to their chilly ambulance ramp, where they stood shaded from snowfall, yet stamping their cloddish shoes, in light dimming blue to purple, another day defeated.

“Chase,” Perkus whispered after an interval.

“Yes?”

He peered at Richard to be certain his words to me were going ignored. Richard obliged this need. He’d begun tapping angrily at his cell phone, texting something, working the buttons like a teenager attempting to swindle a vending machine.

“There’s one more thing,” said Perkus. “You won’t understand now but later it’s about you know who.”

“Oona?”

“Shhhhhhhh.” In some way Perkus wished to resume our secret conversation, but only in fragments, or code, increasingly his two specialties.

“Okay,” I said.

“It’s a joke. Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”

Could the answer be guns don’t kill detectives, love does? I waited expectantly.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Make her give you the answer.” He pushed this out with difficulty and satisfaction, like a tennis player grunting a difficult shot into an unreturnable position. The game, surely, was between Perkus and Oona. I was the net.

“Mr. Pincus Truth,” called an orderly from the Staff Only doors where he stood, reading from a clipboard. For the seeming eternity we’d waited, we’d nonetheless bypassed some of the brown-paper sackers, still slumped where they’d been when we entered-I guess hiccups with a side order of hemorrhage wasn’t the lowest rung on the triage ladder after all. Perkus stood, forgetting the ocelot hat, which tumbled to the filthy linoleum, finding its right place, it seemed to me. We stood with him, Richard shoving his cell into a coat pocket. The orderly held the door and we came to him together, Perkus morally supported by us on either side, though he moved under his own power, kept his own balance. He seemed dutifully passive, a model patient trudging into the inevitable unquestioned. I yearned to see a show of scorn for Western medicine, a proscenium for Gnuppetry if ever there was one. Yet he only appeared to want to go through those doors. The waiting and the fluorescent light had humbled and sold him, aroused his anonymous gratitude to have his name called, in any garbled form-Strabo Blandiana could learn a thing or two about breaking down a skeptic. “Can you walk?” the orderly asked.

“Y- es.”

“Are these your family members?”

“We’re friends,” said Richard.

“Then you’ll need to wait out here,” said the orderly.

“How will we know whether he’s being admitted or released?” asked Richard.

“Someone will speak with you, if you’ll take a seat.”

The infomercial had looped for the third time before I understood this wasn’t a case of poor channel selection but of synergy. The hospital must have franchised its waiting-room broadcast, these shadows of avarice destined to flicker over the faces of despondency until the end of time, the two having as obtuse a relation as those birds and that tower. Now that we’d returned to our seats without Perkus I considered that others in our company, bad as they looked, might not be here on their own accounts, but be waiting for news of someone worse off, a friend they’d dragged in as we’d dragged Perkus.

“How’s Georgina?” I asked Richard, acting as if this were some cocktail party and we, old friends, had at last been left together to catch up.

“Georgina’s nipples are the size and color of those baby Italian eggplants,” he said. He seemed to be making a dispassionate report, with no desire to shock. “There’s a dark brown line running up from her pussy hairs to her navel, which by the way is distended now like a little thumb.”

“I wasn’t asking for a nude sketch, but thanks. How are her spirits?”

He ignored me. “Do you know what the brown line and the purple nipples are for, Chase? I never knew this. Too bad Perkus isn’t here, he’d find this fascinating. If the mother is somehow unconscious and there’s no one else to help the newborn baby find her tits in order to get milk, the baby can follow the line and see the nipples and go get itself a drink. Isn’t that freaky?”

“I guess.” Perhaps the hospital had put him into a medical frame of mind.

“Georgina’s body is literally being transformed into a milk map. Just to give you a sense of, you know, the kind of world I’m living in at the moment.”

“Are you pissed at me about something?”

“Let’s not make this about us, okay? Let’s just sit here and wait to find out about Perkus.”

“Sure.”

“You should have called me sooner.”

“Thanks, I’m feeling guilty enough as it is.”

Richard began checking e-mails or texts on his phone again. I settled in to once more consider the infomercial-I’d been urged by the broadcast to take my wage and imagine two or three zeros behind it. I wondered what my wage was. My account, residuals seeping in, never emptied, that was all I knew. My fortunes depended on something not unlike this broadcast-somewhere sometime always, on the WB11 or its local equivalent, Martyr & Pesty ran, filling the hours on some screen, my childhood japery larded with canned laughter, in an infinite loop, perhaps even in a waiting room, to grate on the nerves of the sick and dying.

A young, bespectacled doctor appeared and beckoned to me and Richard. We hurried to him, our frenetic worry the outstanding flavor in this flavorless zone, though no one bothered to be interested. Perkus’s muddy ocelot lay on the floor to mark our seats. “You’re Mr. Truth’s friends?”

“Yes.”

“You had some question?”

“Just what’s going to happen,” I said, as though speaking to a soothsayer who might offer any number of revelations, Mr. Truth himself.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry. Hiccups can be treated by a great variety of agents. Intravenous chlorpromazine is the current consensus. To circumvent hypotension you’d preload the patient with five hundred to a thousand milliliters of saline”-he recited from mental pages-“or you could try haloperidol, or metoclopramide, ten milligrams every eight hours, I think.” Here was the next card turned in Hippocratic three-card monte: first the demoralizing ambiance, then the bland inexplicable jargon. The doctor looked ever younger as he scratched a finger nervously around the perimeter of his glasses-perhaps he’d borrowed them just before coming through the doors, in order to better impress us. “What’s fascinating is you can come at chronic hiccups from so many angles; anticonvulsants, analgesics, an anesthetic, like ketamine, even a muscle relaxant!” Our medical prodigy grinned like he’d passed an oral exam.

“Right, so how will you treat them?” said Richard.

He shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

“Have you examined him?”

“How could I, when they sent me to talk to you? Besides, you wouldn’t want me, I’m a new resident. Dr. Stern will see your friend. He’s the attending.”

“Who are you-Dr. Silly?”

“That’s unnecessary, sir.”

“Let us see him.”

“Who, Stern?”

“Perkus, Stern, either of them.”

“I can’t.”

The resident ducked out before Richard could sling another insult. I returned to our seats, but Richard began an angry leonine pacing at the doors through which Perkus had vanished. The waiting room took on a swirling time-lost quality, a pocket in the storm that was possibly also a floe stranded from the mainland of ice. The triage nurse was in hard-bargain negotiation with a newcomer, a gray-coated man in galoshes who clutched his stomach, moaning faintly, as snow dripped from hat and shoulders. As Perkus had more or less commanded, my thoughts radiated outward from this room to migrate across the bridges and tunnels of Manhattan. I thought of Oona but also of outer space and other places I’d rather be. In the Stonehenge restroom you know one thing-you’ve seen Stonehenge. Here you knew less each minute. I remembered Indiana. Every once in a great while I did. I began dreaming of a Polish starlet. I fell asleep, under a blanket of guilt.

I woke to Richard bellowing. “Show me, motherfucker!” He was in the clutch of his two cops, bellowing as near to the face of a tall, white-haired doctor as their sturdy blockade would allow. The doctor, who wore a bloodstained white smock (unconscious of the cliché any actor would refuse), held his hands open, an apparent plea for reason, though his long, deep-lined face, for all its expressive potential, revealed nothing particularly intimate, no fear of Richard, no pity, his eyes showing a gruesome veteran’s steel instead. The doctor appeared less Stern than shorn of human sympathies. It was Richard’s face that told too much, told me everything before I knew it. His beard seemed to be sticking straight out in fury, as though electrified, his mustache snot-glistening. “Where are you keeping him?” Richard seethed and snuffled. “Let me get him the fuck out of here, he was better off with the puncturist than you murderers.”

“You’re not listening to me,” said Stern. His voice rumbled, deep Bronx, a film noir bookie. “You should appreciate the phenomenon of your friend walking in today in the first place. He’d ruptured his internal organry in ten places, was dead days ago in certain regions of himself, how he’d been ambulating in that state I can’t imagine. The layman’s term for what we found is a slurry. You don’t want to go in there and see, you’d rather remember your friend the way he was, trust me.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Richard hoarsely. “A hundred times Perkus told me he was the target of a plot-one day he had to be right. I didn’t fucking believe him but now I don’t believe you. He’s alive and you’re keeping him. Let go.”

I’d joined them now, reaching my hands out to where Richard wrestled and lunged between the cops, those weary young sentinels of the permissible, who sighed and rolled their eyes between various bland utterances in the vein of Get hold of yourself, sir and Don’t force us to put you in cuffs. I wasn’t sure who I was reaching to assist, or assist in what, I wanted simultaneously to second each of Richard’s demands and accusations and to save him from having made them-it seemed to me in my confusion that his outburst, a grotesque error, had been punished by Dr. Stern’s pronouncements, not the other way around-but I was embroiled only momentarily, when a sweeping foot dropped me onto my ass on tile made slick with the cops’ shoe-meltage. My pratfall drew Richard’s attention, and the overconfident policemen freed him from their clinch. I suppose they rated his odds as a real fighter according to his wardrobe, so imagined they’d tasted his best.

Richard left this mistake unpunished at first. He reached to pull me to my feet, not so much a kindness, I felt, as that he was embarrassed by me, or wanted me on my feet to at least represent the possibility of backup to his next raid on the doctor and doors. He lifted me by my collar, as I gripped his wrists. “They say they killed him, but it’s shit, Chase, they’re lying.” No matter how Richard raised his voice nothing stirred the other zomboid figures populating the room, they only puddled deeper in despond.

“We wouldn’t and didn’t say anybody killed anybody,” said Stern. “People don’t come here to be killed, but sometimes, unfortunately, to die.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You were going to give him some… stimulants… to stop his hiccups.”

Stern shook his head almost sorrowfully. “They’d needed to be stopped a week earlier, at least. From appearances this patient had been living in a state of reckless negligence for some time, a background condition to the spasms.”

“Reckless… negligence…” I found myself parroting. “That isn’t what the other doctor told us.” Reeling, I tried to call to mind Perkus’s last words, his final hiccologue. Who’d known he was conducting a self-séance before our eyes? I wanted to reassemble the fragments, gather them in memory like the scissored syllables that might now still be traceable on the floor, if we hadn’t brushed them all off in the taxicab. I envisioned his splayed carcass, too, his formerly vital organs, as spilling forth with a riot of clipped lines and syllables. The doctors wouldn’t know what to do with those, we ought to retrieve them, at least, reason enough to work with Richard to get through those doors. I wept.

“Where’s Dr. Silly?” said Richard wildly, spittle flying. “Send out Dr. Silly, he isn’t part of your game. I want a second opinion!”

“A second opinion isn’t called for in death,” said Stern.

“Les Non-Dupes refusé!” bellowed Richard in his poor French accent as he punched a cop. When fist found nose at close range, Richard and his chosen target howled almost in harmony.