It was now about five, rush hour, and the recurrent nightmare of a packed subway seemed unbearable. I took a cab to the Sloane House; my bruised body begged for that one indulgence. But the cabby knew only two speeds: accelerate like a rocket and stop on a dime. After all the potholes, I felt like a golf ball after a tournament. Abandoning the cab on Thirty-fourth and Eighth, I breached through the repeated breakers of retreating commuters heading toward Penn Station and aimed my cane toward a cheap deli with blinking Christmas lights circling a big poster in the window written in day-glow pink, “Cold cut sandwiches, only $1!” I went in and asked for a dozen sandwiches.
“What kind?” a drab Arab asked.
“Bologna, liverwurst, salami, and ham—all on rye with mustard.” All the processed meats looked alike, but didn’t look like anything resembling meat. For dessert, I got two boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and a big bag of Wise potato chips. It was enough to convert someone to anorexia. They shoved the shit in a white plastic bag and it came to eighteen bucks. I walked over to the Sloane House. The front desk was thronged with a group of foreign students passing through New York for a couple days or so. I stayed closely behind them. Then came my turn, “Where are you from?”
“Here.”
“I’m sorry but the Sloane House is only for people from out of town.” I quickly took out the bogus wallet. Sven had a New Jersey drivers license. “I’m sorry I thought you said where was I presently. I’m from”—I checked the address—“Fort Lee.”
“Why don’t you go home?”
“I want to visit for a while.”
“May I see your ID?” I showed her Sven’s drivers license.
“You don’t look anywhere near thirty-six.”
“Thank you. The living’s been easy,” I said, hunching over my cane. She let me sign; she then told me more rules and details and said I could either pay up front or pay on a day-to-day basis. I paid for four days in advance, which left me with about ten bucks to rebuild my life after I had recovered.
“Don’t you have any luggage?” the desk clerk asked. I held up my white bag of groceries and explained that I travelled lightly. She made me sign a small white piece of paper and gave me a room on the eleventh floor. I waited for the elevator, which took forever, and soon found my tiny room and locked the door behind me. The narrow view of a courtyard emptying into a parking lot could make a Salvation Army Band suicidal. Tying a knot around my food bag, I let it dangle out the window in order to keep it preserved during the length of my convalescence.
A towel was provided by the hotel, so I stripped down to my bruises and bandages for a shower. With my right hand gripping the towel and the cane in my left, I limped out through the hall to the communal bathroom. Passing the stalls and sinks I moved toward the rear, approaching a racket of babbling voices, but I couldn’t make out a single word. The shower room was tiled water-tight with a single large drain in the center of the floor. Everything tilted toward the center. Grouped around the drain was a crew of Indian-looking sailors who were squatting naked scrubbing their salty uniforms against the rough floor just as their fathers probably had. Under the spout furthest away from them, I carefully washed away all the caked pus and dried blood. As the water jetted against my skin, I felt increasingly more sensitive. I figured that pain killers had to be among the dose of pills I was given at the hospital that morning. When their effects began to taper, agony slowly replaced it. As I stuck my face under the stream of water, the dull pain reminded me that my nose was broken. The pain started getting worse and aside from feeling faint I realized that the hot water was making the bruises swell and the unhealed scabs were reopening. Nodding farewell to the crew, I returned to the front part of the bathroom.
Gingerly I dried off and found dabs of blood on the towel. Relying increasingly on the cane, I slowly made it back to my room and locked the door. It was dark out and I didn’t turn on the lights. Slowly, carefully, I balanced myself on the hard bed. It reminded me of Helmsley’s hard couch and that reminded me of Helmsley. As I got tangled in the skein of memories I slipped toward sleep. Still in that intermediary state, I suddenly saw all those boots raining down on me and bolted up painfully into a seated position, wide awake. Slowly I angled up and with the cane moved over to the window. Only the city lights were visible, and over low roof tops, and through that empty lot in the distance, I could see tiny cars flowing down some avenue. A black sky of night crushed the scene. I hated long views of life when the infinite overwhelms the finite subjects. Not even forever lasts forever, and again I thought no matter what I do, someday I’d be nothing.
Aside from all the bad luck, I was a shamelessly ordinary guy, wholly dispensable. Counterparts of me must have inhabited all times and places. Packs of me must have malingered through the Mayan, the Minoan and Babylonian civilizations—societies that flourished and spanned centuries with vast cities, expansive domains, and great armies—now even those great cultures were barely known. Once again, I felt entirely severed from old mankind and needed some kind of distraction. I thought of all the little comforting thoughts that Helmsley had passed along to me, with the help of Plato and the greats: “Beauty is truth” and crap like that.
But Helmsley had committed suicide, so he must’ve been wrong somewhere in the addition. For tentative peace and sedation, I ended up abusing the sacred memories of a young, leggy girl that 1 had known years ago back home. Then I took another stab at sleep and, after bolting up once more with the boots dream, I finally punctured through into hard sleep.
A tearing pain awoke me almost twenty-four hours later when I tried turning my head. A steady ooze of blood and other humors that had loosened during the shower had solidified and fused my head with the pillow. My sinuses felt sealed as if by cement. I felt like I had just awakened from a coma. Other pains, new and great, trumpeted as I tried to move.
The regress report: My back was a shattered windshield with nerves, the stitches in my thigh were cold and sticky. The right side of my rib cage, which looked as if it had boot-shaped tattoos, was not the same shape it was when I went to sleep, the loose bones had shifted. All the medication was gone from my system and now the vultures were descending. Still lying supine, I slowly worked the pillow out from the pillow case and wrapped it around my head like a turban. I limped naked through the hall, clinging to my cane, and passed a group of fascinated Europeans en route to the bathroom. Under a warm shower I slowly peeled the pillow case off my face and head. I could hear the Europeans in the adjacent toilets; wonderful people—free of hangups, like shitting together.
I limped back, dripping through the hall, too much in pain to mind the cold. Back in my room I locked the door and dried off. I ate one of the ledge sandwiches, lay down, and went back to sleep without a pillow.
For the next three days or so, I slept without a pillow and awoke to increasing pain. The ledge sandwiches, which slowly filtered the New York air, tasted more and more like car fumes. The slow persistent pain made sleep increasingly shallow, until it dwindled into just a constant dazed state of repose. On the morning of the fourth day I awoke exhausted to a knock at the door.
“Sven Cohen,” asked a voice behind the door.