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.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Can’t you stop the hiccups?”
“I might, but we haven’t the time. I recommend that you move Perkus directly to an emergency room. St. Ignatius Rockefeller, on Ninth Avenue at Thirty-sixth would be best.”
Richard saw an opening. “His aura came up black and you couldn’t handle it, huh?”
Strabo turned and spoke to me, with calm purpose. “I believe our friend may have hemorrhaged internally, Chase.”
“Christ,” said Richard, looking at me, too-I was the one to be looked at.
“Forever hailing taxicabs,” murmured Perkus, with amusement, after we’d hustled him downstairs and into another backseat, not saying to him what Strabo Blandiana had said, not bothering with any niceties that might slow us. Richard’s attitude toward this wayward visit to Blandiana now struck the defining note, as if I was hardly any more competent than Perkus, though Richard would have had no idea Perkus was in any crisis at all if I hadn’t called him. Perkus was completely acquiescent in our care, cast adrift, seeming afraid to wander into the snowstorm, the shifting shroud of which blurred his frail form into a kind of wraith even right beside us. Still, he eked out an assessment. “That’s the trouble with you, Chase, you think you can be insulated from the pedestrian view, a wholly stage-managed approach to existence. But the stage gets smaller and smaller, soon you’re living in a snow globe!” The daylit sky had darkened to a cave of orange at four o’clock, blotted by flakes which had now found their proper size and viscosity, ash from a cold volcano. Manhattan, schooled in the ceaseless winter, had begun folding its tent under the assault, cars vacating the avenues, shops rattling down gates, surrendering the evening. “That’swhy everyone loves you, Chase. You’re the perfect avatar of the city’s unreality. Like Manhattan, you’re a sentimental monument, stopped in time. I wonder what would happen if we asked this cab to take the Lincoln Tunnel? What sort of world is left out there?”
“There never was much of one,” said Richard.
“Probably we wouldn’t be allowed to try,” said Perkus. Now he censored himself, as though he’d already displeased the imaginary authorities he’d conjured, the Manhattan Border Patrol, and concentrated on managing the paroxysms rippling through him. I considered whether I might be the trapped-in-amber curiosity Perkus made me for. Whatever he said, I felt adaptable enough-I’d put myself into Perkus’s crosshairs, for one thing. That might only make me a masochistic Gnuppet. By now I could script Perkus’s abuse of me without his help.
Richard and I subsisted in the embattled, fearful silence that fell on us through the agony of the cab’s crawl up Tenth, then conducted Perkus past St. Ignatius’s emergency-intake doors, tracking snow prints along the tile, in through the low-ceilinged, uninspiring waiting room, presided over by a high-mounted television tuned to some disconcertingly jaunty cable-news broadcast. The waiting-room seats were nearly everywhere filled, a gauntlet of gazes we wouldn’t want to meet all at once, or, really, at all. Luckily, that feeling was mutual. Illness shies, especially the self-poisoning kind that appeared to dominate the room. Or was I just defensive about how Perkus had come to resemble an old drunkard or junkie? He had company in that here. It was the comparison that risked dragging him down-I wanted him seen as one of us, not one of them. I wanted Richard’s coat and shoes to count for a tremendous amount now-God bless the Hawkman. I knew how this place worked, or thought I knew: we had to distinguish him in their jaded attentions. We had a head start, finding no parents with children. And nobody bleeding, not on the outside, anyway. Best, there was no one between us and the triage nurse, a stolid black woman who might be thirty, or fifty. She worked behind sliding Plexiglas, like Chinese food in Brooklyn. A door to the right led to her small examining room, but she didn’t invite us through.
“This man needs a doctor,” I said. Perkus swayed between us, mumbling, making a good case he needed something, I thought. Richard plucked the smashed ocelot from Perkus’s head and stuck it in his hands instead, like a purse. The improvement was modest.
“You talk to me,” came a voice of impermeable thickness, resistant to its root, accent shading to some island. “Then I talk to the doctor.”
“He’s got hiccups,” I said. “And maybe internal bleeding.”
“Hiccups?”
“Chronic esophageal spasms,” specified Richard. “Which is a recognized medical condition, and has been known to cause injury and even death, so summon a fucking doctor.”
“Chronic hiccups,” repeated the nurse, writing it down.
“They’re sympathetic hiccups,” I said. “Sympathetic with an animal.”
At this the nurse only stared. She appeared to be examining Perkus for firsthand evidence, but his present hiccologue, though practically subvocal, was incessant enough that the spasms came only as lulls in his whispering-he hadn’t let out a solid gasping Hark! or Hurryup! since we’d passed through the hospital doors. In terms of symptoms, Perkus fired blanks.
“Write suspicion of internal hemorrhage,” said Richard.
She ignored him. “Has he been to see a doctor?”
“That’s why we’re here, to see a doctor!”
“Chronic refers to a diagnosis that shouldn’t come to the emergency room,” she said blandly. “Some people live with hiccups five or ten years.” Working in the emergency room, the triage nurse, I began to understand, was an enemy of the notion of emergency. I recalled an acting teacher who’d sworn to do his best to discourage every student who came his way-those that remained were, possibly, actors.
“He did see a doctor, who told us to come to your emergency room,” I said, speaking each word carefully. “He felt it was an emergency and that there might be… internal… bleeding.” I hadn’t wanted to use the term in front of Perkus, but he didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He’d assumed the role of patient, if anything, too quickly, seeming now to have held this bent and subdued posture for years. Hard to believe that as recently as the night before he’d lectured me on the causes of death in detectives. I should have left him the way I’d found him, still full of brash authority, a captain going down with the ship. Now all his words were for himself, at least in this place. He showed no evidence of bleeding, but all else was internal. Even his uncanny eye seemed to search inward.