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.