“Beat it, yuppie,” Basil said.
“Let’s get, Horatio.”
“Basil’s right, Super,” Avey said. “It’s probably not the best idea to go traipsing in there with a… with Dinky like he is.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Oh will you now.”
Avey locked eyes with Super. “This is no time for screwing around,” she said, somehow effectively. For once the old man was silent.
“Let’s just go in there and see what they want,” Basil said.
“They’ll call the cops on us, I bet,” I said, thinking as I did how much Basil hated humans in a uniform, but most especially cops.
“They’ll take one look at Dinky and know it was an accident.”
“It’s no use standing here guessing,” I said.
Basil raised an arm that I slid under, Avey did, too, and off we went.
The triage windows were jammed. Before one sat a father with his teenage son, his ankle in a cast of rags. Around the other, an entire family had clustered, all of them jabbering one atop the other in a blur of non-Mexican Spanish. The place stunk of armpits, blood, carpet cleaner, dust. Everywhere people were roiling in fits, and those who weren’t looked on the verge. When finally the kid with the ankle got up, I slid into the seat before some bleeding woman and told her it was life and death.
“But you can’t do that,” she said. She dropped her rotten tissue on the counter and tapped at the window to the nurse behind it. “Tell him he can’t do that,” she said.
“You can’t do that,” said the nurse. She was young and appallingly thin, with close-set eyes and enormous specs.
“I’m a hemophiliac,” said the woman. “You just can’t do that.”
I leaned into the speaker and told the nurse, “My friend is dead.”
“This is very important, miss,” the hemophiliac said. “Would you please tell him he just can’t do that?”
“Where is this friend?” said the nurse, whose name by her tag was “Wendy.”
“In the back of our truck.”
“And you’re sure he’s deceased.”
“Listen, miss,” Basil said, “no disrespect intended, but we’re in no mood for snazzy gags. You got a stretcher or something we can haul him in on?”
Wendy shot Basil a smile meant to wither.
“He’s got problems, too,” I said.
“What’s wrong with him.”
“His feet.” I pointed at Basil’s feet. “What’s your procedure for taking in, you know, for taking in corpses?”
Wendy saw that we weren’t joking. She slid her pen into the board with the sign-in list. The hemophiliac had started harping again, but Wendy stifled her with a hand. “We’ll have some nurses come out with a gurney,” she told me, her voice gone mellow. “They’ll have to admit the body through the ambulance bay.”
“Here’s my number,” I said, “and this is his license. How long you think they’ll be?”
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Rockets would sigh that night, high over this somber town. They’d explode in the clouds and mingle the rain of that outcry with the rain that had been and would be, and though that show might gesture toward elegance, even toward a grotesque munificence, it would never quite make the grade. How is it we think that to achieve ourselves we must stand on the backs of notions? Let’s bring the stars down to earth. Let’s cut down a tree to hang the stars on. Let’s maim our blunders with time, and with whispers and gifts and cheap perfume. In the crowd we’ll savor the taste of false vitality and pretend we’re not ourselves, not even people, but only an image of the sights around. Orgy of the whir, orgy of the hum, in these we’ll search for the things we’d been told we could hope to be. Behind the smile on that man, the gaze of that girl — there’s but an effigy, the shimmer of so many days pushed through — ching-a-ling-ching, rattle-bang-boom: shriek, laugh, cry, groan. There on the streets, in the swarming casinos, we’d watch the past slide off and wait for the bells to toll a new year. Who knows what it means to police their days? This night we’d need to shrink the field, lower the boom, raise high the lanterns, red and green and gold. And the meager light we’d thought we made for ourselves would be little more than the twilight we thought we knew. The rockets would care for the rest. They’d explode, and we would sigh, and the faces around us, whatever they might be, would give comfort, if only by their numbers. Because tomorrow would be new, a brand new month and year. Let the night take our money and our pain. Yes, and yes. Calendar on…
Later, smiling at Basil and Lucille as they danced among the crowds, the old man would say, “It’s survival of the slickest, boy, and that’s something even the blind can see.” And then he’d turn away, his face a puzzle, mumbling about maltworms and knaves, and vanish in the people, Fortinbras at his heel. I thought of Joubert’s notion of the nest in the mind of the bird. All over the world, this very moment even, creatures were busy building homes — nests and hives and caves and dens and tunnels and lairs and dams, and hobo jungles and tenement slums, and birdhouses, and dovecotes, and dumps — everywhere, everywhere, a place for each and all. That’s why we could play tonight, and that’s why we could pray tomorrow. You want your moments, you need a place to make them, the way you need that place to remember and regret. We’d need roofs over our heads when it was said and done, and pillows beneath them, else how could we trick ourselves for even a moment with the platitudes that help to make us real? I’m as good as gold, and you’re an angel in disguise, and the devil may care, though not, perhaps, until tomorrow, so hey, run with the money while you can, baby, run, you’re a nine days’ wonder… God is not just one. Our clichés tell us so every minute.
Wendy never returned. How could I hope to know what would be? I took Avey’s hand, and we turned to face the crowd. A series of watercolors lined the walls, made by kids. Most scenes were happy families, father on the left, the tallest, followed by mom and the children by height, with a dog at the end: Daddy, Mommy, Stephanie, Abbie, Socks. There was a drawing too of a gold-haired woman with a jagged smile and flat blue eyes. That was it — no father, no children, no dog. Beneath her, in lopsided scrawl, was the single word, MOM. And mom was crying, and her tears were blood. Barry Manilow muzak piped through the speakers, just below the general din, “Copacabana,” it seemed, though I didn’t know for sure. Next to a TV running a soap sat a hundred gallon aquarium, filled, like the room its people, with all manner of fish. I watched them bump through a maze of shipwrecks and logs, endlessly gaping, until an old coot hobbled by, stinking of baby food and bad cologne, and a little girl maybe four years old let out a howl only children can make, packed with the world’s own pain and sin. At that, her mother jerked her wrist and quick as light snatched the slipper from her foot and rapped the child’s head. And then a woman was at my ear, with braces on her teeth and Mary Hartman braids.
“He’s outside,” Avey told her.
“In the parking lot?” said the woman’s colleague. Stocky like a miner, she had a mullet with gelled spikes on top and a stringy mane down her back — the kind of do middle-aged lesbians have been rocking for a decade or so.
“In our truck,” said Basil. He’d limped over once he realized the women had come for us. “You guys’re going to take him?”
The stocky woman clasped her hands at her waist and wore a face reminiscent of certain preschool teachers, deceptively bemused, falsely sympathetic. “Do you know what happened?” she said.