Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Chase,” Perkus whispered after an interval.

“Yes?”

He peered at Richard to be certain his words to me were going ignored. Richard obliged this need. He’d begun tapping angrily at his cell phone, texting something, working the buttons like a teenager attempting to swindle a vending machine.

“There’s one more thing,” said Perkus. “You won’t understand now but later it’s about you know who.”

“Oona?”

“Shhhhhhhh.” In some way Perkus wished to resume our secret conversation, but only in fragments, or code, increasingly his two specialties.

“Okay,” I said.

“It’s a joke. Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”

Could the answer be guns don’t kill detectives, love does? I waited expectantly.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Make her give you the answer.” He pushed this out with difficulty and satisfaction, like a tennis player grunting a difficult shot into an unreturnable position. The game, surely, was between Perkus and Oona. I was the net.

“Mr. Pincus Truth,” called an orderly from the Staff Only doors where he stood, reading from a clipboard. For the seeming eternity we’d waited, we’d nonetheless bypassed some of the brown-paper sackers, still slumped where they’d been when we entered-I guess hiccups with a side order of hemorrhage wasn’t the lowest rung on the triage ladder after all. Perkus stood, forgetting the ocelot hat, which tumbled to the filthy linoleum, finding its right place, it seemed to me. We stood with him, Richard shoving his cell into a coat pocket. The orderly held the door and we came to him together, Perkus morally supported by us on either side, though he moved under his own power, kept his own balance. He seemed dutifully passive, a model patient trudging into the inevitable unquestioned. I yearned to see a show of scorn for Western medicine, a proscenium for Gnuppetry if ever there was one. Yet he only appeared to want to go through those doors. The waiting and the fluorescent light had humbled and sold him, aroused his anonymous gratitude to have his name called, in any garbled form-Strabo Blandiana could learn a thing or two about breaking down a skeptic. “Can you walk?” the orderly asked.

“Y- es.”

“Are these your family members?”

“We’re friends,” said Richard.

“Then you’ll need to wait out here,” said the orderly.

“How will we know whether he’s being admitted or released?” asked Richard.

“Someone will speak with you, if you’ll take a seat.”

The infomercial had looped for the third time before I understood this wasn’t a case of poor channel selection but of synergy. The hospital must have franchised its waiting-room broadcast, these shadows of avarice destined to flicker over the faces of despondency until the end of time, the two having as obtuse a relation as those birds and that tower. Now that we’d returned to our seats without Perkus I considered that others in our company, bad as they looked, might not be here on their own accounts, but be waiting for news of someone worse off, a friend they’d dragged in as we’d dragged Perkus.

“How’s Georgina?” I asked Richard, acting as if this were some cocktail party and we, old friends, had at last been left together to catch up.

“Georgina’s nipples are the size and color of those baby Italian eggplants,” he said. He seemed to be making a dispassionate report, with no desire to shock. “There’s a dark brown line running up from her pussy hairs to her navel, which by the way is distended now like a little thumb.”

“I wasn’t asking for a nude sketch, but thanks. How are her spirits?”

He ignored me. “Do you know what the brown line and the purple nipples are for, Chase? I never knew this. Too bad Perkus isn’t here, he’d find this fascinating. If the mother is somehow unconscious and there’s no one else to help the newborn baby find her tits in order to get milk, the baby can follow the line and see the nipples and go get itself a drink. Isn’t that freaky?”

“I guess.” Perhaps the hospital had put him into a medical frame of mind.

“Georgina’s body is literally being transformed into a milk map . Just to give you a sense of, you know, the kind of world I’m living in at the moment.”

“Are you pissed at me about something?”

“Let’s not make this about us, okay? Let’s just sit here and wait to find out about Perkus.”

“Sure.”

“You should have called me sooner.”

“Thanks, I’m feeling guilty enough as it is.”

Richard began checking e-mails or texts on his phone again. I settled in to once more consider the infomercial-I’d been urged by the broadcast to take my wage and imagine two or three zeros behind it. I wondered what my wage was. My account, residuals seeping in, never emptied, that was all I knew. My fortunes depended on something not unlike this broadcast-somewhere sometime always, on the WB11 or its local equivalent, Martyr & Pesty ran, filling the hours on some screen, my childhood japery larded with canned laughter, in an infinite loop, perhaps even in a waiting room, to grate on the nerves of the sick and dying.

A young, bespectacled doctor appeared and beckoned to me and Richard. We hurried to him, our frenetic worry the outstanding flavor in this flavorless zone, though no one bothered to be interested. Perkus’s muddy ocelot lay on the floor to mark our seats. “You’re Mr. Truth’s friends?”

“Yes.”

“You had some question?”

“Just what’s going to happen,” I said, as though speaking to a soothsayer who might offer any number of revelations, Mr. Truth himself.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry. Hiccups can be treated by a great variety of agents. Intravenous chlorpromazine is the current consensus. To circumvent hypotension you’d preload the patient with five hundred to a thousand milliliters of saline”-he recited from mental pages-“or you could try haloperidol, or metoclopramide, ten milligrams every eight hours, I think.” Here was the next card turned in Hippocratic three-card monte: first the demoralizing ambiance, then the bland inexplicable jargon. The doctor looked ever younger as he scratched a finger nervously around the perimeter of his glasses-perhaps he’d borrowed them just before coming through the doors, in order to better impress us. “What’s fascinating is you can come at chronic hiccups from so many angles; anticonvulsants, analgesics, an anesthetic, like ketamine, even a muscle relaxant!” Our medical prodigy grinned like he’d passed an oral exam.

“Right, so how will you treat them?” said Richard.

He shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

“Have you examined him?”

“How could I, when they sent me to talk to you? Besides, you wouldn’t want me, I’m a new resident. Dr. Stern will see your friend. He’s the attending.”

“Who are you-Dr. Silly?”

“That’s unnecessary, sir.”

“Let us see him.”

“Who, Stern?”

“Perkus, Stern, either of them.”

“I can’t.”

The resident ducked out before Richard could sling another insult. I returned to our seats, but Richard began an angry leonine pacing at the doors through which Perkus had vanished. The waiting room took on a swirling time-lost quality, a pocket in the storm that was possibly also a floe stranded from the mainland of ice. The triage nurse was in hard-bargain negotiation with a newcomer, a gray-coated man in galoshes who clutched his stomach, moaning faintly, as snow dripped from hat and shoulders. As Perkus had more or less commanded, my thoughts radiated outward from this room to migrate across the bridges and tunnels of Manhattan. I thought of Oona but also of outer space and other places I’d rather be. In the Stonehenge restroom you know one thing-you’ve seen Stonehenge. Here you knew less each minute. I remembered Indiana. Every once in a great while I did. I began dreaming of a Polish starlet. I fell asleep, under a blanket of guilt.