‘They were built for smaller people!’ Sherman crowed. ‘And now these fatties cram themselves in it’s definitely a smaller world.’
The day after that it was the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City and Sherman and I were riveted for hours by Hagop Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs poised in the eye of a needle.
The Armenian had been an extremely calm man, and there was the assumption that acts of such controlled creation necessarily implied taboos on acts of procreation.
We were staying at the Culver City Hotel and I couldn’t get Sherman on the house phone, so I took the stairs up to his floor. When I knocked on the door it swung open and there he was, naked, sprawled across the high four-poster bed. It would’ve been a cliché to describe him as ‘lost’ in the billowing breasts of the brunette who was sharing the bed with him. A cliché — and straightforwardly wrong, because in the split-second before he bawled at me to ‘Fuck right off!’ I saw that Sherman was quite at home.
5.125
Burke Shops at Wal-Mart
Standing in the Chevalier Woods, my boots buried in damp leaf mould, I stared into the white face of a deer. Overhead a jet’s headlights carved a tunnel out of the autumn dusk. There had been no way of walking out of the O’Hare terminal, which was surrounded by runways, so I took the subway to Rosemont, then picked my way between office blocks to the banks of a cold and polluted river.
The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor — I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements — massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.
The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across one doorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.
That sophism was taken for fate in disguise… I didn’t like her tone, although I knew it was nothing personal. Anyway, my tics had returned and what time I could grapple from the repetitive operations messing up my head was assigned to the flesh-coloured foam rubber between the brace and her bent wrist. Fantastic materials, glass terrycloth, plastic…
Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning: ‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem that cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop window read ‘N — Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were taquerías, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.
My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone — stylized as a minuet — and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.
‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.
‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.
‘Deep-vein thrombosis — they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’
‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’
‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’
5.0625
Rat Poison
Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading The Tatler.
‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And he’ — a significant lash of a drip — ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you…’
He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her gallery and she said she’d tell the family. It was drizzling and I was grateful for the Barbour.
‘Did you speak to Herve?’ Sherman quacked as soon as I returned.
‘We-ell, I think it was him — my French is, um, rather inadequate. But Sherm, don’t you think you should try to rest?’
‘No, no, I don’t — I’m fucking flat out here as it is.’
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘They say hooray, we’re coining it, then they send in a nurse with another bag of rat poison.’
‘Is that what that stuff is?’
‘Yes, yes, nothing quite like it for thinning the blood.’
Baltie had been sent out to buy petits fours, which was what Sherman most wanted besides his phone back. I sat on the bed — there was plenty of room. My friend’s head moulded the pillows, and for the first time I wondered about the process involved in casting his body forms. I reached out to take his hand but he jerked it away:
‘What the fuck’re you crying for?’ he said.
5.03125
Light Aircraft
It was the smallest check-in desk either of us had ever seen — more like a lectern, with the Loganair logo plastered across the front. ‘Loganair!’ Sherman guffawed. ‘Should be loganberry.’ He stumped over to a drinks dispenser and began punching buttons distractedly. I wondered if he was already withdrawing from his phone habit.
Sherman’s doctor had said ambulation was the key to long-term recovery from DVT. ‘He means walking,’ the artist explained to me, ‘so if you’re still game for this northern jaunt let’s go.’
It had been a grim winter in London — I scratched my wrists so much one of them went septic. It was all right now, though, and as the twin-engined plane motored towards the thousand-foot sea cliffs of Foula I felt the unfamiliar turbulence of optimism. Sherman was in the co-pilot’s seat telling the pilot what to do.
5.015625
Paying Guests
An off-white cloud hung above the hills behind Mrs Field’s bungalow; tractor tyres weighted down the roof. She didn’t seem that pleased to see me again — although Sherman soon charmed her.