Meanwhile he was getting worse. Thursday morning he slipped another cog. It came, he hoped, from working a double shift and not eating. The day man, a fellow named Perlmutter who had a sick wife, did not show. Like an idiot, he offered to stay on, figuring, what with his new plans and his expenses at Brooks Brothers, that he needed the money.
After sixteen hours underground he came staggering out into the gorge air of Seventh Avenue. For some ten minutes he stood, finger to nose, in the thunderous blue shadow of Pennsylvania Station. A bar turned in his head. Now let me see, said he, and taking out Living from his pocket, read a few maxims. Hmm. The thing to do is make a list.
Somewhere in the smoky vastness of the station lanced through with late slanting cathedral beams of sunlight — late or early? was it evening or morning — and haunted by old déjà vus of Here-I-am-up-from-Charlotte-or-Chattanooga-or-Tuscaloosa-and-where-do-I-go-from-here, he got turned around good and proper and came down on the wrong platform, headed in the wrong direction, and took the wrong train. He must have dozed off, for when he woke up he was in New Lots Avenue, or perhaps it was Far Rockaway.
What woke him? Something. His heart was thumping, making a regular commotion. Now he knew! A pair of eyes had been looking at him, gazing into his even as he slept with eyes open. Who? Rita. Or did he dream it? The train had stopped. He looked around but there was no one. Yet somebody was following him. He knew that. Goofy as he was, his radar still swung free and there was a prickling between his shoulder blades. Somewhere in Brooklyn he changed to an old local with straw seats and came out at a seaside station.
It was dark. He found himself in a long street which was nearly black between the yellow street lights at the corners. The sea was somehow close. There was a hint of an uproar abroad in the night, a teeming in the air and the sense of coming closer with each step to a primal openness. He walked six blocks in the empty street and there it was. But it was nothing like Wrightsville or Myrtle Beach or Nag’s Head, lonesome and wide and knelling. It was domesticated. There were notion shops right up to the sand and the surf was poky, came snuffling in like lake water and collapsed plaush on a steep little old brown beach.
He looked behind him. No one followed him in the street. The drowsiness came again. He had to sleep then and there. He lay down in the warm black sand of a vacant lot and slept two hours without moving a muscle. He woke in his right mind and went back to the Y.
Jogging home from the reservoir the next morning, he spotted Rita two hundred yards away, sitting on a bench next to the milk-fund booth, the toilet-shaped telescope case under her hand. All at once he knew everything: she had come to get rid of him. She hoped he would take his telescope and go away.
But she was, for the first time, as pleasant as could be and patted the bench next to her. And when he sat down, she came sliding smack up against him, a bit too close for comfort. He humped himself over in his sweat suit and tried to smell as good as he could.
Her fist came softly down on his knee; she looked him in the eye and spoke not eight inches away. He couldn’t hear for listening.
“But you and I know better,” she was saying. “He’s got no business going home.”
“Jamie?”
Looking into her eyes was something of a shock. Every line of her face was known to him. Yet now, with her eyes opening into his, she became someone else. It was like watching a picture toy turned one degree: the black lines come and the picture changes. Where before her face was dark and shut off as a gypsy, now her eyes opened into a girlishness.
“Bill—”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Oh come on. Rita.”
“O.K., Rita.”
Again the fist came down softly on his knee.
“I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“The Vaughts are very fond of you.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“The extraordinary part of it is that though you are a new friend — perhaps because you are a new friend — you have more influence with them than anyone else.”
“I doubt it. I haven’t heard from them in several days.”
“Oh, they carry on about you something awful. They plan to take you home with them, don’t they?”
“When did you hear that?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did Mr. Vaught tell you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“But never mind about Poppy. Right now it’s Jamie who needs us.” As gravely as she spoke, he noticed that she cast her eyes about, making routine surveys of Eighth Avenue. There was about her the air of a woman who keeps busy in a world of men. Her busyness gave her leave to be absent-minded. She was tired, but she knew how to use her tiredness.
“Why?”
“Jamie can’t go home, Bill.”
“Why not?”
“Let me tell you something.”
“All right.”
“First — how much do you care for Jamie?”
“Care for him?”
“Would you do something for him?”
“Yes.”
“Would you do anything for him?”
“What do you mean?”
“If he were in serious trouble, would you help him?”
“Of course.”
“I knew you would.”
“What is it?” he asked after a moment.
Rita was smoothing out her skirt until it made a perfect membrane across her thighs. “Our Jamie is not going to make it, Bill,” she said in a low thrilling voice and with a sweetness that struck a pang to the marrow.
There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?
“So it’s not such a big thing,” she said softly. “One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off.”
“How’s that?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear.
“At Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“I don’t, ah—”
“But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill.”
Oh, and I’m sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I’m not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.
“You don’t seem surprised,” said Rita after a moment.
“I knew he was sick,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.
“Why shouldn’t he go home?” he asked, straightening up.
“Why shouldn’t he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood’s as normal as yours or mine. He’s out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So. He’ll be dead in four months.”
“Then I don’t see why he shouldn’t go home or anywhere else.”
“There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He’s got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras.”
To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie’s illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn’t have to listen.
“—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: ‘I think we’re in trouble. Take a look.’ I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged — they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—”