Chronic City

“You’re not listening to me,” said Stern. His voice rumbled, deep Bronx, a film noir bookie. “You should appreciate the phenomenon of your friend walking in today in the first place. He’d ruptured his internal organry in ten places, was dead days ago in certain regions of himself, how he’d been ambulating in that state I can’t imagine. The layman’s term for what we found is a slurry. You don’t want to go in there and see, you’d rather remember your friend the way he was, trust me.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Richard hoarsely. “A hundred times Perkus told me he was the target of a plot-one day he had to be right. I didn’t fucking believe him but now I don’t believe you. He’s alive and you’re keeping him. Let go.”

I’d joined them now, reaching my hands out to where Richard wrestled and lunged between the cops, those weary young sentinels of the permissible, who sighed and rolled their eyes between various bland utterances in the vein of Get hold of yourself, sir and Don’t force us to put you in cuffs. I wasn’t sure who I was reaching to assist, or assist in what, I wanted simultaneously to second each of Richard’s demands and accusations and to save him from having made them-it seemed to me in my confusion that his outburst, a grotesque error, had been punished by Dr. Stern’s pronouncements, not the other way around-but I was embroiled only momentarily, when a sweeping foot dropped me onto my ass on tile made slick with the cops’ shoe-meltage. My pratfall drew Richard’s attention, and the overconfident policemen freed him from their clinch. I suppose they rated his odds as a real fighter according to his wardrobe, so imagined they’d tasted his best.

Richard left this mistake unpunished at first. He reached to pull me to my feet, not so much a kindness, I felt, as that he was embarrassed by me, or wanted me on my feet to at least represent the possibility of backup to his next raid on the doctor and doors. He lifted me by my collar, as I gripped his wrists. “They say they killed him, but it’s shit, Chase, they’re lying.” No matter how Richard raised his voice nothing stirred the other zomboid figures populating the room, they only puddled deeper in despond.

“We wouldn’t and didn’t say anybody killed anybody,” said Stern. “People don’t come here to be killed, but sometimes, unfortunately, to die.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You were going to give him some… stimulants… to stop his hiccups.”

Stern shook his head almost sorrowfully. “They’d needed to be stopped a week earlier, at least. From appearances this patient had been living in a state of reckless negligence for some time, a background condition to the spasms.”

“Reckless… negligence…” I found myself parroting. “That isn’t what the other doctor told us.” Reeling, I tried to call to mind Perkus’s last words, his final hiccologue. Who’d known he was conducting a self-séance before our eyes? I wanted to reassemble the fragments, gather them in memory like the scissored syllables that might now still be traceable on the floor, if we hadn’t brushed them all off in the taxicab. I envisioned his splayed carcass, too, his formerly vital organs, as spilling forth with a riot of clipped lines and syllables. The doctors wouldn’t know what to do with those, we ought to retrieve them, at least, reason enough to work with Richard to get through those doors. I wept.

“Where’s Dr. Silly?” said Richard wildly, spittle flying. “Send out Dr. Silly, he isn’t part of your game. I want a second opinion!”

“A second opinion isn’t called for in death,” said Stern.

“Les Non-Dupes refusé!” bellowed Richard in his poor French accent as he punched a cop. When fist found nose at close range, Richard and his chosen target howled almost in harmony.

CHAPTER

Twenty-four

It might have been three or four AM before I thought to ask Richard to explain the sense of the French slogan he’d hurled at his moment of fleeting pugilistic triumph and then cried two or three more times until the enraged policemen muffled him with their own shouts and grunts and pi

Richard and I had pleaded to be placed together and been refused, had instead been housed in proximate cells, each designed for one man but holding two-a short bench for the one, the filthy floor for the other-with others who’d been plucked off the snowstormy streets under suspicion of possession of something or another and gathered in our own van full of fresh arrestees before we’d been unloaded here. Neither venue, bench or floor, invited sleep, but in Richard’s cell and in my own our cell mates seized the bench and curled into an angry self-cuddle. My cell mate, Darnell, had already played a variety of roles in our confused epic: in the van, where we’d all been uncuffed, then threaded together into a daisy chain, he’d whisperingly badgered and threatened me until I accepted a fingerprint-filthy baggie of some loose leaves (presumably pot, though compared to Watt’s steroidal buds this resembled lawn clippings) in order to shift it from the elastic at the back of his underwear where he’d had it hidden, to pass down the line for some unclear purpose. I’d finally taken the contraband behind my back, fumbling it from his fingertips to mine, only to have it refused by the next in line. After some squabbling between Darnell and this uncooperator, and a little more failed negotiation between Darnell and myself (Richard turned his head, disgusted at what I’d gotten myself into), the baggie fell to the floor of the van between us, to be discovered there by one of the officers.

Darnell’s next hijink occurred after processing while we waited for removal to the basement cells, in the care of the senior detectives. Here, lined up at a wall facing the second-story window, we prisoners contemplated in silence the snow falling to earth with punishing steadiness. We couldn’t, however, see over the high window sill to chart its accumulation, which we judged instead by the inches piling improbably atop a streetlight at eye level. Making conversation to no one in particular, Darnell declared that he sold stock by telephone. “No shit?” said one of the detectives. When Darnell lavished a series of investing tips on the earnestly listening cops, he persuaded them. A few even took notes. When he promised he’d make the detectives wealthy if they called their brokers in the morning, one deadpa