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.