Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

He had to wait five weeks, and each night the chief came to his camp at the edge of the jungle to say good-by. Perlmutter was embarrassed one evening when the chief gave him the necklace he had seen him working on. Perlmutter gave the chief a reprint, but saw that the shy man was disappointed.

“Read it after I’m gone and make three wishes,” he told the chief.

On the afternoon the boat came Morty hailed it from the shore. “Take me to where I get the mule,” he shouted.

He wasted another day while the doctors immunized the natives.

As they were pulling away he heard a chorus of strange sighs from the direction of the clearing. Morty had never heard anything like it before.

“First of Lorp, must be,” the captain said to the doctor.

It took three weeks to get to where the mule was and two after that before the sandy beginnings of the highway. It was another six days from there in the jeep to the port. In ten days there was a boat that could take him to a place where the cook thought there might be a ship for Vancouver, British Columbia.

Morty worked on his book along the way. It was, he felt, his best effort in his lifelong struggle to synthesize the universe. Still, something was missing.

In the evenings he listened to the songs of the sailors. He took them down and translated them into English, but there was nothing new to be gleaned from them.

From Vancouver he made his way across Canada and entered the United States at International Falls, Minnesota. It was fitting, he thought, that he should approach New York from the West. He was, after all, a Westerner. New York he had saved for last. It was no use fooling himself. It would be last. He had a million diseases; a polyglot death worked in him — there’s your synthesis, he thought sadly — and as he made his way toward the East Pole he was troubled by his timing. He would be there in the final margins of his health and mind and resources, but it couldn’t be helped. He had come as one only could come: prepared, knowing a trillion things, having seen everything else. As though New York were the land and everything else the sea — so great was his hope — and he were some sea changeling swimming from western depths, out of all the old places, toward a drier fate. He did not know what to expect, but it would be tremendous.

“No standing,” the driver said.

“I have to see this.”

“No standing till the bus stops.”

Morty sat down in the front seat, over the wheel, and leaned far forward. He stared past the green-tinted glass, looking for light. Through the open window he heard the subaqueous roar. Under the water the bus hissed through the tiled tunnel. And then light . And then ramps. They spiraled toward a passageway. The bus went up and through and stopped.

“What is this place?” Morty asked.

“It’s the Port of New York Authority,” the driver said.

“Ah,” Morty said, “ authority .”

In a phone booth, with a tool he took from his knapsack, he severed the chain that held the Yellow Pages to the narrow shelf. He buried the thick book in the depths of the knapsack.

He was exhausted from his journey.

“Where are rooms?” he asked the woman in the Travelers’ Aid booth. “I require a bed, a chair, a desk and light-housekeeping privileges. I can pay one hundred dollars a month for a good central location.”

“This isn’t that kind of agency,” the woman said.

“But you know a good deal about this city?”

“Yes,” the woman said, “we have to.”

Morty reached inside his shirt and slyly palmed the Haitian Sleep Stone he wore on a chain around his neck. He brought it out and hypnotized the woman. She said she’d call a friend who had a place on West 70th Street.

“I’m done with all that,” Morty said. “ East 70th Street.”

“Not…for…a…hundred doll…ars,” the woman spoke soddenly from her trance.

Morty sat propped up in bed. Behind his head was the bulging knapsack he used for a pillow. He read the Yellow Pages until two in the morning and had just finished TAXIS when he had the inspiration. He went to Eighth Avenue and 164th Street, to the Manhattan garage of the largest cab company in the city. He chose one ramp and followed it down until he came to an enormous room where there were more cabs than he had ever seen. I could have used one of these in the jungle, he thought absently.

Despite the vastness of the room and the dim light, the yellow machinery lent a kind of brightness to the place. Everywhere there were drivers, alone or in groups, writing up log sheets or talking together. Men stood in line in front of the coffee machines along the wall. Inside some of the cabs, the doors open wide on their hinges, Morty could see drivers reading newspapers. He heard the steadily registering bells on the gas pumps. It was three-thirty in the morning.

Morty walked toward the center of the cavernous room and climbed up on top of a cab.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you? Get down from there,” a man yelled.

“New York cab drivers are world famous,” Morty shouted from the roof of the cab, “for their compassion and their oracular wisdom. I am Morty Perlmutter, fifty-seven years old, fifty-seven-time loser of the Nobel Prize for Everything, and I’m here to find out what you know.” They stared up at him, astonished. “I got the idea from the Yellow Pages,” he added sweetly.

“That’s my cab that nut is up on,” a driver said. “Come on, nut, off and out.”

“I challenge you to a debate, sir,” Morty shouted. “I challenge all of you to a debate. Let’s go, every man on his taxicab.” He watched them carefully. Someone moved forward threateningly but stopped, still several feet away from the taxi on which Morty stood. It was the Perlmutter Dipsy Doodle, the dependable mock madness, one of his most useful techniques. He told them that frankly. He told them to their faces. He didn’t hold back a thing.

“It’s a known fact,” he said. “People have a lot of respect for insanity. Madmen are among the least persecuted members of any society. It’s because they’re not a part of society. They’re strangers . The Greco-Persian ethic of hospitality lies behind that. Listen, I didn’t read Hamlet until I was forty-two years old, but I learned the lesson. When does Hamlet die? During the single moment in the play he’s completely sane , that’s when! Figure it out.” He folded his arms and hugged himself and did a little dance on the roof. He was completely safe. “Come on, up on your cabs. Everybody.”

A man laughed and put a knee on his fender. “What the hell,” he said, “I’m a sport. A sport’s a sport.” He scrambled onto the hood and made his way over the windshield to the roof of the cab and stood up uncertainly. “Hey,” he said, “you guys look goofy down there.”

Morty applauded, and below him the drivers were grinning and pointing up at the two of them. Soon others were climbing over their cabs, and in a few minutes only the man whose roof Morty had taken was without a cab to stand on. He seemed disappointed. Morty shrugged.

Perlmutter waited until the others stopped giggling and became accustomed to their strange positions. “All right,” he said. “You men have lived in this city all your lives, most of you. What do you know? Tell me.” He pointed to a fat driver on a taxicab across from him, but the man looked back blankly and smiled helplessly. Morty waited for one of the others to speak. At last a tall driver in a green cap started to say something.

“Louder, sir,” Morty shouted. “It’s hard to hear pronouncements in this cave.”

“I was just saying that if you want I could talk about what’s wrong with the traffic in this town.”