Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“This man needs a doctor,” I said. Perkus swayed between us, mumbling, making a good case he needed something , I thought. Richard plucked the smashed ocelot from Perkus’s head and stuck it in his hands instead, like a purse. The improvement was modest.

“You talk to me,” came a voice of impermeable thickness, resistant to its root, accent shading to some island. “Then I talk to the doctor.”

“He’s got hiccups,” I said. “And maybe internal bleeding.”

“Hiccups?”

“Chronic esophageal spasms,” specified Richard. “Which is a recognized medical condition, and has been known to cause injury and even death, so summon a fucking doctor.”

“Chronic hiccups,” repeated the nurse, writing it down.

“They’re sympathetic hiccups,” I said. “Sympathetic with an animal.”

At this the nurse only stared. She appeared to be examining Perkus for firsthand evidence, but his present hiccologue, though practically subvocal, was incessant enough that the spasms came only as lulls in his whispering-he hadn’t let out a solid gasping Hark! or Hurryup! since we’d passed through the hospital doors. In terms of symptoms, Perkus fired blanks.

“Write suspicion of internal hemorrhage,” said Richard.

She ignored him. “Has he been to see a doctor?”

“That’s why we’re here, to see a doctor!”

“Chronic refers to a diagnosis that shouldn’t come to the emergency room,” she said blandly. “Some people live with hiccups five or ten years.” Working in the emergency room, the triage nurse, I began to understand, was an enemy of the notion of emergency . I recalled an acting teacher who’d sworn to do his best to discourage every student who came his way-those that remained were, possibly, actors.

“He did see a doctor, who told us to come to your emergency room,” I said, speaking each word carefully. “He felt it was an emergency and that there might be… internal… bleeding.” I hadn’t wanted to use the term in front of Perkus, but he didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He’d assumed the role of patient, if anything, too quickly, seeming now to have held this bent and subdued posture for years. Hard to believe that as recently as the night before he’d lectured me on the causes of death in detectives. I should have left him the way I’d found him, still full of brash authority, a captain going down with the ship. Now all his words were for himself, at least in this place. He showed no evidence of bleeding, but all else was internal. Even his uncanny eye seemed to search inward.

“A doctor with this hospital?” asked the triage nurse. I’d interested her, slightly, for the first time.

“No.”

“With which hospital, then?”

“Not with a hospital, a Chinese doctor, I mean, he isn’t Chinese, but he practices acupuncture.”

In her eyes I had now flown to the moon with my flapping arms, which appeared to be a kind of thing she saw too often and didn’t care to see again.

“The kind of doctor who sticks you with needles!” yelled Richard.

“Was someone attacked?” she asked.

“Eh?”

“Are you describing a crime and should I notify the police?”

“No,” said Richard with maximum irritation, yet seeming to recognize an official jargon that required some minimum of respectful reply. “No, there’s been no crime.”

“Then keep your voice down, this is a place for sick people,” she said, adding ominously, “ some of them.” Then she resumed her inspection of Perkus. I tried to be persuaded something medical was going in her look. “Can he sign his name?”

“Of course,” said Richard.

“One of you can come in and help him fill out a form. The other has to wait.” She directed this at me. Richard had made a distinct unfriend: in the triage nurse’s index the moon flappers were preferable to the shouters.

After the nurse took Perkus’s blood pressure and shone a quick light in his pupils (she frowned at the disobedient one), I jotted my way through the intake form. This meant conducting an interview, one Perkus only partly attended from where he sat across from me, burping, blinking, and murmuring: date of birth, medical history (negligible, he’d not been in a hospital since having his appendix out as a teenager), insurance (none), living relatives (a sister-who knew?), responsible parties should the patient be incapable of making care decisions (he hesitated over this until I thought he’d forgotten the question, then startled me by blurting, “You, Chase, you”).

Then it was back out into the purgatorial waiting area, where Richard had negotiated or bullied for three seats together in a row. We took our seats like latecomers in some impoverished theater, Perkus with his grotty ocelot loaf in his lap like something he’d killed with his bare hands. The television, I now saw, was tuned not to a news show but to an endless infomercial, the “anchor” at his desk merely a shill offering leading questions to a grinning middle-aged couple hawking DVDs containing secrets to real-estate wealth. Other guests sat on the seats to their right, nodding and grinning as they awaited their chance to chime in and report what millions the couple’s system had netted them. “Shift into High-per-Hour!” they kept incanting. “Not High-Power, but High-per-Hour!” In our dim company the television’s presentation was weirdly irresistible, and we all sat drinking it in. I couldn’t help wondering how the staff had tuned to this channel, out of so many. The degree of indifference seemed willful, an expression of the low odds you’d ever feel in the care of a thinking mind in this place. Yet just as one’s willingness to board a plane depends on believing a plane’s cockpit impervious to the condition of chaos that rules an airport, I’d let myself go on thinking Perkus was destined to meet some upstanding captain of medicine just outside this arena of human vacuity and dismay.

Perkus had just now surrendered some layer of will needed to manage his noise, and gave all the proof he hadn’t while under inspection of the triage nurse: “ Hawk! How work! Ha wreck! Shirk! Chute!” Though proof of hiccups wasn’t likely to move him to the front of the line. What was the sound of internal bleeding? A less koan-like question: What did these other denizens suffer, to rate being triaged ahead of us? I forced myself to take a closer look. Two different Hispanic husbands cradled rounded wives, and I guessed there might be endangered pregnancies in play. Hard to be sure under the coats and blankets. Otherwise, male or female, our rivals seemed mostly derelicts who’d come in out of the cold. They might as well have been dressed in brown paper sacks.

“Imagine a transcript of this thing,” said Perkus suddenly. It took me a moment to realize he meant the infomercial. “Just word for word, every gesture mapped and reproduced. You could stage it off Broadway, it would be like Beckett, Chase, the most astounding avant-garde spectacle, it’d run forever! Then in a few centuries it might be the only evidence of our species locked in some galactic museum not the original, but a grainy rehearsal tape of the show which in reality would likely have closed during previews, but anyway the universe could know we lived under this regime”-Perkus gestured at the screen overhead-“and yet were able here and there to laugh, however bitterly.”

Perkus recovered some wellspring of associations, riffing with new vigor, though the gaps kept on growing, like a digital brain on shuffle, and breaking down. He was oblivious to the glares of his unfortunate audience, those who bothered to glare-many seemed to take his sprung presence as a typical cost of entry to this pallid dungeon. Richard hunkered down, glaring back, bristling that anyone might object to us. Me, I listened. What were we going to do-ask Perkus to wind down again? These were signs of life. “Richard, here’s what I want you to understand, and never mind what Chase tells you, just so long as you don’t go blabbing it all to The New Yorker , hee hee-” He regaled Richard with his succinctest description yet of his simulacra theory of Manhattan, including leading roles for the three of us, and possibly Georgina Hawkmanaji (but not Oona), we who were several of the only real souls still inhabiting the island. He was pretty certain the gray fog, the subway-boring mechanical tiger, the chaldron sickness that had come over us, and the “Brando’s dead” rumor were each typical of the slippage at the edges of our reality by its handlers, who were for all their contrivances and capital unequal to the task they’d set themselves. If Richard could cause himself to look squarely at one portion of his investment in these fictions, he’d dissolve all the others. Perkus had been a fool, attempting to persuade Chase Insteadman, cracked actor-it was Richard who was positioned to understand, with one foot in both camps by his nature. Only then Perkus reversed again: Why bother? The world cannot be disenchanted, this was his new motto. Reside in whatever small cave of the real you can gather around yourself and a few friends. Walk the dog religiously, the dog has things to impart. Only watch the weather-when it stopped snowing, disbelieve his theories. Richard’s severity gave way to bleak playfulness: he’d believe anything if it didn’t require admitting Brando lived. I saw his bantering as a bid to keep Perkus at the level of the propositional, as though not to strand him too deep in any single foray. I was cheered; this was what I’d forgotten to do. I’d taken him too seriously.