Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Thanks.”

“No offense, Chase, but it’s like trying to describe Gnuppets to a Gnuppet.” Perkus’s glee in this superb comparison was tempered by the ferocity of the seizure that marked it, an emphysematous gasp for breath adequate to complete the phrase.

“We’ll talk after you’ve seen the doctor.” Richard’s unrestrained sarcastic inflection of this last word served not only to reinforce what a poor selection he thought I’d made in Strabo Blandiana but to assuage Perkus that the two of them still spoke above my head, and so his promise of future listening was sincere. Perkus, no matter his state, caught this implication and was reassured. His response was to defend Strabo, halfway.

“Blandiana’s an interesting character, Richard. Did you know that before we met he actually troubled to read quite a bit of my work?”

“Really.” Richard kept it neutral.

“Strabo’s a kind of catalyst person, I think. His offices might function as a message center or way station for higher intelligences…” From his vague tone I couldn’t tell whether Perkus meant the offices had already been used that way or only had that potential. I wasn’t sure he knew. (Perhaps it was an allusion to the framed chaldron poster. Or to the chance of Fran Lebowitz running into Frank Langella in the waiting room.) It was maddening that I even wanted to follow his drift into chaotic abstractions. My friend Perkus Tooth had collapsed, then accepted my help. That truth ought reasonably to end my attempt to collate and refold his many crumpled maps of the universe. Yet he was never so very far from where I’d first met him, a door into my life in the city as I knew it now. And I loved him-if that made me his unteachable Gnuppet, so be it.

“Hark! ” said Perkus. When he spoke the hiccups emerged as silences, but when he was silent they took the form of these Shakespearean exhortations.

Arrived in Chelsea, we got him out of the cab, through the darkening street, under a snow-choked sky, and up to Strabo Blandiana’s rooms. In arranging this appointment Strabo and I had spoken on the phone once the afternoon before, once this morning. Strabo had made any number of confidence-inspiring remarks about chronic hiccups, which I needed him to do, for hiccups, I kept telling myself, were the problem here. The healer spoke of my wisdom in coming to him first, explaining that too many of those enduring chronic hiccups found their way to acupuncture only as a last resort. He’d place needles at E-37, E-1, and E-33, and then we’d be able to consider how Perkus had got to this point, characteristically implying he’d make symptoms disappear in order to proceed to deeper matters, the world sickness that by its nature infected every soul. I did my best to preview Perkus’s low state, the tatterdemalion soon to appear in his suite. Strabo assured me he’d have any other clients tucked away in their own rooms when we came through-any idea that he’d be affronted himself was beneath mention. Strabo’s commitment, once he’d taken a client, was absolute. He had no idea how Perkus regarded him. It wasn’t clear to me, actually. Perkus might have absorbed more sincere value from his first visit than he’d ever admit.

Strabo even seemed capable of soothing Richard Abneg’s suspicions as he eased Perkus off behind a closed door, leaving us to face that dippy receptionist in a waiting room that had been otherwise cleared as promised. Richard and I didn’t make any small talk, too conscious of that possible listener, but I believe I wasn’t wrong to sense relief in him. I’d produced a kind of obsequious triumph, having moved the hot potato of Perkus from one bracket of authority to another, leaping the gulf of distrust between the two-the best a Gnuppet might hope to do. I don’t know how long I was allowed to reside in that bubble of false satisfaction before Strabo reappeared, minus Perkus.

“Will you…?” Strabo gestured us into another room, and closed the door.

Now, as though he’d been holding it at bay earlier, I felt Richard’s gaze working over Blandiana’s neat crew sweater and huge gold watch, his etched sideburns, the flawless shaving in the dimple of his chin, his poreless nose. I could feel Richard thinking I may wear the beard, but I know which of us is the faking fakir here . Strabo didn’t blink, but seemed to grant a tiny interval for Richard’s contempt to be withered in an atmosphere of total acceptance. Then he spoke. “As you know, I’m in no way hostile to Western treatment. In the case of certain purely medical emergencies I recommend swift intervention of modern techniques, and this is one of those times.” Strabo betrayed no panic, though he inspired plenty in me.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Can’t you stop the hiccups?”

“I might, but we haven’t the time. I recommend that you move Perkus directly to an emergency room. St. Ignatius Rockefeller, on Ninth Avenue at Thirty-sixth would be best.”

Richard saw an opening. “His aura came up black and you couldn’t handle it, huh?”

Strabo turned and spoke to me, with calm purpose. “I believe our friend may have hemorrhaged internally, Chase.”

“Christ,” said Richard, looking at me, too-I was the one to be looked at.

“Forever hailing taxicabs,” murmured Perkus, with amusement, after we’d hustled him downstairs and into another backseat, not saying to him what Strabo Blandiana had said, not bothering with any niceties that might slow us. Richard’s attitude toward this wayward visit to Blandiana now struck the defining note, as if I was hardly any more competent than Perkus, though Richard would have had no idea Perkus was in any crisis at all if I hadn’t called him. Perkus was completely acquiescent in our care, cast adrift, seeming afraid to wander into the snowstorm, the shifting shroud of which blurred his frail form into a kind of wraith even right beside us. Still, he eked out an assessment. “That’s the trouble with you, Chase, you think you can be insulated from the pedestrian view, a wholly stage-managed approach to existence. But the stage gets smaller and smaller, soon you’re living in a snow globe!” The daylit sky had darkened to a cave of orange at four o’clock, blotted by flakes which had now found their proper size and viscosity, ash from a cold volcano. Manhattan, schooled in the ceaseless winter, had begun folding its tent under the assault, cars vacating the avenues, shops rattling down gates, surrendering the evening. “That’swhy everyone loves you, Chase. You’re the perfect avatar of the city’s unreality. Like Manhattan, you’re a sentimental monument, stopped in time. I wonder what would happen if we asked this cab to take the Lincoln Tunnel? What sort of world is left out there?”

“There never was much of one,” said Richard.

“Probably we wouldn’t be allowed to try,” said Perkus. Now he censored himself, as though he’d already displeased the imaginary authorities he’d conjured, the Manhattan Border Patrol, and concentrated on managing the paroxysms rippling through him. I considered whether I might be the trapped-in-amber curiosity Perkus made me for. Whatever he said, I felt adaptable enough-I’d put myself into Perkus’s crosshairs, for one thing. That might only make me a masochistic Gnuppet. By now I could script Perkus’s abuse of me without his help.

Richard and I subsisted in the embattled, fearful silence that fell on us through the agony of the cab’s crawl up Tenth, then conducted Perkus past St. Ignatius’s emergency-intake doors, tracking snow prints along the tile, in through the low-ceilinged, uninspiring waiting room, presided over by a high-mounted television tuned to some disconcertingly jaunty cable-news broadcast. The waiting-room seats were nearly everywhere filled, a gauntlet of gazes we wouldn’t want to meet all at once, or, really, at all. Luckily, that feeling was mutual. Illness shies, especially the self-poisoning kind that appeared to dominate the room. Or was I just defensive about how Perkus had come to resemble an old drunkard or junkie? He had company in that here. It was the comparison that risked dragging him down-I wanted him seen as one of us, not one of them. I wanted Richard’s coat and shoes to count for a tremendous amount now-God bless the Hawkman. I knew how this place worked, or thought I knew: we had to distinguish him in their jaded attentions. We had a head start, finding no parents with children. And nobody bleeding, not on the outside, anyway. Best, there was no one between us and the triage nurse, a stolid black woman who might be thirty, or fifty. She worked behind sliding Plexiglas, like Chinese food in Brooklyn. A door to the right led to her small examining room, but she didn’t invite us through.