Chronic City (55 page)

“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.

CHAPTER
Twenty-four

It might have been
three or four AM before I thought to ask Richard to explain the sense of the French slogan he’d hurled at his moment of fleeting pugilistic triumph and then cried two or three more times until the enraged policemen muffled him with their own shouts and grunts and pinned us both to the floor of the St. Ignatius Rockefeller ER, to bind our wrists and also bind us together with a double butterfly of plastic cuffs, much like the twist ties uselessly enclosed with certain varieties of garbage bags. By this time we’d accepted the fact that we weren’t going to be released despite the ritual palliative lies
(“Don’t worry, you’ll be out in four hours”)
that greeted each of our serial attempts to conduct a serious and reasoning conversation (our attempts, that is, to give them adequate chance to note our distinguishing difference from their milieu, and of the comic in-appropriateness of our circumstantial passage through it, therefore to send us forth into the night with hearty apologies and no further ado, etc.) with one or another of our captors and handlers. These included, first, the young and bruised arresting policemen, who could be excused any grudge against us but actually seemed to revert to
generic and jovial carelessness in our regard once we’d been added to the van full of other arrestees; next the detectives, milling in the station as we were initially processed, our wallets and wristwatches vouchered, our shoelaces also confiscated, those detectives who appeared so worldly and approachable in their plain clothes and worn faces (yet these were duplicate souls to the younger policemen, only graduated to a more or less adult mien); and last, the weary and marginally humane janitorial types presiding over the actual cells in that station-house basement, who after several rounds of complaining stuck their own quarters in the vending machines to provide us with the cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers that became our only nourishment through our whole ordeal, out of some apparent base sense of human dignity or justice—yet perhaps also with the dull yet inexhaustible curiosity of those pushing snacks through the monkey-cage bars at the zoo. Check it out, the white guys in fancy coats, they eat! Having had no dinner or even snack through our afternoon and evening hours in the hospital, we ate unashamedly, licking our fingertips for the monosodium glutamate crumbs.

Richard and I had pleaded to be placed together and been refused, had instead been housed in proximate cells, each designed for one man but holding two—a short bench for the one, the filthy floor for the other—with others who’d been plucked off the snowstormy streets under suspicion of possession of something or another and gathered in our own van full of fresh arrestees before we’d been unloaded here. Neither venue, bench or floor, invited sleep, but in Richard’s cell and in my own our cell mates seized the bench and curled into an angry self-cuddle. My cell mate, Darnell, had already played a variety of roles in our confused epic: in the van, where we’d all been uncuffed, then threaded together into a daisy chain, he’d whisperingly badgered and threatened me until I accepted a fingerprint-filthy baggie of some loose leaves (presumably pot,
though compared to Watt’s steroidal buds this resembled lawn clippings) in order to shift it from the elastic at the back of his underwear where he’d had it hidden, to pass down the line for some unclear purpose. I’d finally taken the contraband behind my back, fumbling it from his fingertips to mine, only to have it refused by the next in line. After some squabbling between Darnell and this uncooperator, and a little more failed negotiation between Darnell and myself (Richard turned his head, disgusted at what I’d gotten myself into), the baggie fell to the floor of the van between us, to be discovered there by one of the officers.

Darnell’s next hijink occurred after processing while we waited for removal to the basement cells, in the care of the senior detectives. Here, lined up at a wall facing the second-story window, we prisoners contemplated in silence the snow falling to earth with punishing steadiness. We couldn’t, however, see over the high window sill to chart its accumulation, which we judged instead by the inches piling improbably atop a streetlight at eye level. Making conversation to no one in particular, Darnell declared that he sold stock by telephone. “No shit?” said one of the detectives. When Darnell lavished a series of investing tips on the earnestly listening cops, he persuaded them. A few even took notes. When he promised he’d make the detectives wealthy if they called their brokers in the morning, one deadpanned, “Fuck that, in the morning I’m firing him, and
you
got the job,” and we all laughed, Darnell too. Yet he seemed to feel he’d earned no special treatment from the police. The credit Darnell had earned was with us, his natural peers, for having been entertaining.

He entertained us, too, during the interminable wait for fingerprinting in the windowless basement, before we’d even seen our cells, let alone been disbursed to them. He narrated what he’d been doing when arrested, cut loose due to his “call center” having closed early for the storm, he’d been going from one nightspot to another in
the snow, trying to get laid
—looking for some strange
, was how he put it. Then he reassured us, mentioning the worse scrapes he’d been in in his days, the actual prison time he’d shrugged off. We should be happy to know we were in for nothing so bad tonight, we were so obviously just a load of fools harmless to one another and to society. We’d only been arrested to make numbers, to keep the mayor’s lifestyle imperatives satisfied. But we weren’t going home, we should be certain of that, too. No matter what they told us we’d still be here in the morning, and lucky to be seen by a judge before tomorrow afternoon. Like Darnell’s stock tips, this was, alas, persuasive.

Darnell’s final guise was as an angry sleep-talker, from his huddle on that bench. When Richard and I found we could sit together at the shared bars of our two cages, our backs to the wall, to talk, we did so, despite the crud on the floor and the disgruntled chorus coming from those on benches or with their heads propped in their hands, those wishing to soak quietly in their defeat. As my conversation with Richard became the only sound and our keepers even damped the lights, as if guiding a planeload of Atlantic crossers into one of those false, foreshortened overnights to London or Paris, Darnell began adding a keening commentary, his limbs twitching with each exclamation. These nightmare fragments seem to issue from his prisoner’s id.
“Clock start the minute you walk in the place,”
he warned. Then, “Boy don’t need a life preserver, boy need an
ass
preserver.” Once, he screamed,
“Attica! Attica!”

Richard and I spoke of Perkus Tooth without mentioning his name. Richard’s rage was gone, worn or arrested out of him. He told me a few things I’d been unable to imagine, about Perkus in high school and the single year of NYU he’d managed, and about the birth of Perkus the broadsider, the invisible overnight fame he’d created for himself when the city had still been open to Beat or punk self-invention, that city Perkus had always chided me for failing to
know: Frank O’Hara and Joe Brainard, Mailer and Broyard and Krim, Jane Jacobs, Lenny Bruce, Warhol and Lou Reed, all of it, including Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Jim Carroll, poets declaring themselves rock stars before they even had songs, Jean-Michel Basquiat writing SAMO, Philippe Petit crossing that impossible distance of sky between the towers, now unseen for so many months behind the gray fog. Richard left Perkus’s name unspoken but he named a lot of others, threw in a few of his own heroes, too, and if he didn’t mention Perkus’s the reason might be that it would have seemed too complete a processional, the sound of a door being quietly but firmly shut forever.