“Fuck it, I’m finding a doctor,” said Richard. He stood and hammered his fist on the Plexiglas-the nurse was out of view. I saw two policemen step up then, from the corridor to the left, behind doors forbiddingly labeled, leading to the ambulance-entry ramp. The cops had been on the ramp smoking cigarettes and grumbling into their stupid radios, complaining of the cold to lucky buddies back in the station house, I suppose. Now Richard gave them a good excuse to get out of the cold. I saw him lean expertly into their company, talking under his breath. I cheered simply for him to stir up some reaction here in this lifeless zone-Perkus’s hiccologues were keeping the whole place going, those and the real-estate infomercial. Richard could play some mayor’s trump card and get Perkus seen.
“Chase…” Perkus was uninterested in Richard and the police, except as an opportunity to have me alone. However much he disdained my grasp of his revelations, apparently he had some use for my confidential ear. His tone turned from declamatory to intimate. “So, I’m in bad faith with you over a couple of things. Do you remember what I said about rock critics, Chase?”
“Oh, sure.” Why should I ever be amazed at his swerves? But I wasn’t sure I wanted him to switch into confessional mode, as if he thought he was running low on chances. As much as I wanted him to be well, I didn’t want him to know he was sick.
“I’m one of them, Chase.”
“One of what?”
“A rock critic I mean. I knew every one of those poor bastards at some point Shaw Nelson Williams We broke bread, Chase. They taught me what I know, how to think I don’t know why I ever denied it.” He rushed these last words into one breath between the herky-jerks. I wanted to tell him to ease himself, not try to talk, but that would be as if to tell him to fold the only tent he’d ever set up on the windswept desert of existence.
“Each an explorer of new worlds a Columbus or Magellan. They were my brothers.”
“Well…” I found myself wanting to give him some absolution. “They probably knew how you really felt.”
“Listen forget them I need to tell you something important about me and you can’t ever tell Richard. Or Oona.”
Richard, in the corner with the cops, had his back to us, gesticulating, looking less persuasive than I’d hoped. Perkus still had his opening with me.
“I’m not like you, Chase. I’ve never had a girlfriend.”
“Some men like to keep free and easy. Monogamy’s not the only game in town,” I added joshingly. “Looking at my own poor outcomes, some might say you’ve done the more honorable thing.”
“I mean none at all.”
He groaned it like a frog. Thank God for the inane barking of the infomercial. If only it could have kept me from hearing, too. I didn’t need to ask any clarifying question to know how absolutely Perkus meant me to take his words. I suppose I should have known it from his rage of confusion at my attempt to set him up with the Jackson Hole waitress, poor doomed Lindsay. I thought crazily how the tiger might be Perkus’s poltergeist, destroying only what he found himself unable to live with: his kingdom of broadsides, the prospect of a lover, the city itself. I wondered if Oona was safe. Now, as though reading my thoughts, he mentioned her.
“Oona was the one. I should have told you.”
I sat staring at the infomercial, unwilling or unable to face him. “So you had one girlfriend, actually.”
“No, I once tried and was rebuffed.”
The word bore all the weird delicacy of his innocence. After so long, the size of his loneliness was hard to contemplate. I suppose his kind of radical openness required barricades in some areas-he couldn’t have let women pass easily through him and still make room for all those arcane references, all those wild conjectures, all those drugs, all that cosmic radiation flooding his brain. He’d shut the door to sex and in came chaldrons and Ava and hiccups instead. Well, I couldn’t argue with the life-architecture of the most remarkable person I knew, only quibble around the edges like an interior decorator, offering wallpaper for his dungeon. “We’ll have to do something to get you up and running, then, when we’re past this… present… episode.” I worked to keep a gulp or click or sob from my own voice. My words were addressed to a dissolving person-shaped pile of hiccups, not a ready candidate for Upper East Side pickup scene.
Richard plopped into his seat with a tight sigh. At least confessions were done for now-I’d taken my limit. “What did you learn?” I asked him.
“What did I learn? I learned that they have some squeaky-tight protocols around here and I could be arrested if I pushed through the Staff Only doors as I kept swearing I’d do, that’s what I fucking learned.”
“Did you tell them who you are?”
“Who I am?” Richard chuckled. “My impression is that if you’re a cop working below 125th Street these days pretty much anyone you ever lay hands on or even give the hairy eyeball says Do you know who I am or You know I could have your badge in a heartbeat or I’ve got full diplomatic immunity to be carrying this suitcase full of cocaine-dusted Benjamins, hence they all find such gambits pretty much outright hilarious.” Richard seemed energized in the defeat, his typical response. Perhaps he felt confirmed in the deep truth of his rascal identity-he didn’t want to be who his credentials said he was. The eternal police-mind, which saw everyone as a lawbreaker, had seen him true. But Perkus was stimulated, too, and raised his pitch again. He was stimulated by one implication in particular.
“Cops live in New Jersey, don’t they, Richard?”
“Jersey, sure, or Staten Island or Hicksville or White Plains, whatever.”
“They laugh because they know.”
“Know what?” said Richard warily, sensing the trap.
“What’s outside the limit, maybe fallout-strewn wasteland or Chinese slave dictatorship, people in cages too small for dogs.”
“In that case wouldn’t it be more sensible to use robot policemen?” said Richard. The couple overhead were explaining how many people misunderstood the foreclosure process, the fact that so many homeowners were simply looking for a partnership plan like the one they offered, to ease them free of their mortgages.
“Sor--ry?” croaked Perkus.
“Robot policemen wouldn’t track so much fallout back and forth from Staten Island, don’t you think? And they wouldn’t require so many bribes, or toroid pastries.”
“-ut-”
“What I mean to say is no more fucking plots now, Perkus, I mean it.”
Perkus grimaced and wrapped himself again deep inside his hiccups, but he couldn’t out-glower Richard, not in his present state. I was afraid to negotiate between them, so we slid back into the lull that ruled this human backwater. The policemen had returned to their chilly ambulance ramp, where they stood shaded from snowfall, yet stamping their cloddish shoes, in light dimming blue to purple, another day defeated.
“Chase,” Perkus whispered after an interval.
“Yes?”
He peered at Richard to be certain his words to me were going ignored. Richard obliged this need. He’d begun tapping angrily at his cell phone, texting something, working the buttons like a teenager attempting to swindle a vending machine.
“There’s one more thing,” said Perkus. “You won’t understand now but later it’s about you know who.”
“Oona?”
“Shhhhhhhh.” In some way Perkus wished to resume our secret conversation, but only in fragments, or code, increasingly his two specialties.
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s a joke. Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”
Could the answer be guns don’t kill detectives, love does? I waited expectantly.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Make her give you the answer.” He pushed this out with difficulty and satisfaction, like a tennis player grunting a difficult shot into an unreturnable position. The game, surely, was between Perkus and Oona. I was the net.