Chronic City (54 page)

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?”