“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.