The Throat (88 page)

"If you
really want to give it to me," I said.

"It's yours.
I'll take care of the paperwork and have some good art handlers pack it
up and ship it to you. Thanks." He fidgeted for a while, having run out
of things to say, and then he was gone.

Four hours
before my flight was scheduled to take off, John called to say that he
was in a meeting with his lawyers and couldn't get out. Would I mind
letting myself in with the extra key and then pushing it through the
mail slot after I locked up again? He'd get the painting off to me as
soon as he had the time and be in touch soon to let me know how his
plans were developing. "And good luck with the book," he said. "I know
how important it is to you."

Five minutes
later, Tom Pasmore called. "I tried to wangle a ride out to the airport
with you, but Hogan turned me down. I'll call you in a day or two to
see how you're doing."

"Tom," I
said, suddenly filled with an idea, "why don't you move to New York?
You'd love it, you'd make hundreds of interesting friends, and there'd
never be any shortage of problems to work on."

"What?" he
said in a voice filled with mock outrage. "And abandon my roots?"

Officer
Mangelotti stood beside me like a guard dog as I signed myself out of
the hospital, drove me to Ely Place, and trudged around the house while
I struggled with the problem of one-armed packing. The curved blue
splint covering my right arm from fingers to shoulder made it
impossible for me to carry downstairs both the hanging bag and the
carryon, and Mangelotti stood glumly in the living room and watched me
go back up and down the stairs. When I came down the second time, he
said, "These are real paintings, like oil paintings, right?"

"Right," I
said.

"I wouldn't
put this crap in a doghouse." He watched me pick up both bags with my
left hand and then followed me out through the door, waited while I
locked up, and let me put the bags in the trunk by myself. "You don't
move too fast," he said.

I looked at
my watch as he turned onto Berlin Avenue—it was still an hour and a
half before my flight. "I want to make a stop before we get to the
airport," I said. "It won't take long."

"The sergeant
didn't say anything about a stop."

"You don't
have to tell him about it."

"You sure get
royal treatment," he said. "Where's this stop you want me to make?"

"County
Hospital."

"At least
it's on the way to the lousy airport," Mangelotti said.

A nurse in a
permanent state of rage took me at quick-march tempo down a corridor
lined with ancient men and women in wheelchairs. Some of them were
mumbling to themselves and plucking at their thin cotton robes. They
were the lively ones. The air smelled of urine and disinfectant, and a
gleaming skin of water had seeped halfway out into the corridor,
occasionally swelling into puddles that reached the opposite wall. The
nurse flew over the puddles without explaining, apologizing, or looking
down. They had been there a long time.

Unasked,
Mangelotti had refused to leave the car and told me that I had fifteen
minutes, tops. It had taken about seven minutes to get someone to tell
me where Alan was being kept and another five of jogging along behind
the nurse through miles of corridors to get this far. She rounded
another corner, squeezed past a gurney on which an unconscious old
woman lay covered to the neck by a stained white sheet, and came to a
halt by the entrance to a dim open ward that looked like a homeless
shelter for the aged. Rows of beds no more than three feet apart stood
in ranks along each wall. Dirty windows at the far end admitted a tired
substance more like fog than light.

In a robot
voice, the nurse said, "Bed twenty-three." She dismissed me with her
eyes and about-faced to disappear back around the corner.

The old men
in the beds were as identical as clones, so institutionalized as to be
without any individuality—white hair on white pillows, wrinkled,
sagging faces, dull eyes and open mouths. Then the details of an
arched, beaky nose, a crusty bald head, a protruding tongue, began to
emerge. The mumbles of the few old men not asleep or permanently
stupefied sounded like mistakes. I saw the numeral 16 on the bed in
front of me and moved down the row to 23.

Flyaway white
hair surrounded a shrunken face and a working mouth. I would have
walked right past him if I hadn't looked first at the number. Alan's
thrusting eyebrows had flourished at the expense of the rest of his
body. I supposed he had always possessed those branchy, tangled
eyebrows, but everything else about him had kept me from noticing them.
Even his extraordinary voice had shrunk, and whatever he was saying
vanished into a barely audible whisper. "Alan," I said, "this is Tim.
Can you hear me?"

His mouth
went slack, and for a second I saw something like awareness in his
eyes. Then his lips began moving again. I bent down to hear what he was
saying.

"… standing
on the corner and my brother had a toothpick in his mouth because he
thought it made him look tough. All it did was make him look like a
fool, and I told him so. I said, you know why those fools hang around
in front of Armistead's with toothpicks in their mouths? So people will
think they just ate a big dinner there. I guess everybody can recognize
a fool except one of its own kind. And my aunt came out and said,
You're making your brother cry, when are you ever going to learn to
control that mouth of yours?"

I
straightened up and rested my left hand on his shoulder. "Alan, talk to
me. It's Tim Underhill. I want to say good-bye to you."

He turned his
head very slightly in my direction. "Do you remember me?" I asked.

Recognition
flared in his eyes. "You old son of a gun. Aren't you dead? I shot the
hell out of you."

I knelt
beside him, the sheer weight of my relief pushing me close to tears.
"Alan, you only hit me in the shoulder."

"
He's
dead."
Alan's voice recovered a tiny portion of its original strength.
Absolute triumph widened his eyes. "I
got
him."

"You can't
stay in this dump," I said. "We have to get you out of here."

"Listen,
kiddo." A smile stretched the loose mouth, and the shrunken face and
enormous eyebrows summoned me nearer. "All I have to do is get out of
this bed. There's a place I once showed my brother, over by the river.
If I can watch my big motormouth, uh…" He blinked. Fluid wobbled in the
red wells of his eyelids. "Curse of my life. Talk first, think later."
Alan closed his eyes and sank into the pillow.

I said,
"Alan?" Tears leaked from his closed eyelids and slipped into the gauze
of his whiskers. After a second, I realized that he had fallen asleep.

When I let
myself back into the car, Mangelotti glowered at me. "I guess you don't
have a watch."

I said, "If
you bitch one more time, I'll ram your teeth down your throat with this
cast."

When I got
back to New York, I did my best to settle back into my abnormal normal
life, but settling was exactly what I couldn't do. Everything had been
taken away while I was gone and replaced with other objects that only
appeared to resemble them—the chairs and couches, my bed and writing
table, even the rugs and bookshelves, were half an inch narrower or
shorter, the wrong width or height, and subtly shifted in a way that
turned my loft into a jigsaw puzzle solved by forcing pieces into
places where other pieces belonged. Part of this sense of dislocation
was the result of having to type with only the index finger of my left
hand, which refused to work in the old way without the assistance of
its partner, but all the rest of it, most of it, was simply me. I had
returned from Millhaven so disarranged that I no longer fit my
accustomed place in the puzzle.

Wonderfully,
my friends distracted me from this sense of disarrangement by fussing
over my injury and demanding to hear the story of how I had managed to
get myself shot in the shoulder by a distinguished professor of
religion. The story was a long story, and it took a long time to tell.
They wouldn't settle for summations, they wanted details and vivid
recreation. Maggie Lah was particularly interested in what had happened
on the morning I got lost in the fog and told me that it was simple,
really. "You walked into your book. You saw your character, and he was
yourself. That's why you told the man in the ambulance that your name
was Fee Bandolier. Because what else is the point of this book you're
writing?"

"You're too
smart," I said, flinching a little at her perception.

"You better
write this book, get it out of your system," she answered, and that was
perceptive, too.

When Vinh
brought plates of delicious Vietnamese food up from Saigon's kitchen—an
internal takeout—Maggie insisted that he go back downstairs for soup.
"This is a person who requires a great deal of soup," she said, and
Vinh must have agreed, because he went right back down and came back
with enough soup to feed us all for a week, most of it parceled out
into containers that he put into my refrigerator.

Michael Poole
wanted to know about the Franklin Bachelor period of Fee Bandolier's
life and if I thought I understood what had happened when John Ransom
reached Bachelor's encampment. "Didn't he say that he got there two
days before the other man? What did he do there, for two whole days?"

"Eat soup,"
Maggie said.

These friends
clustered around me like a family, which is what they are, at various
times and for various periods, separately and together, for two or
three days, and then, because they knew I needed it, began giving me
more time by myself.

Using one
finger, turned at an unfamiliar angle to the keyboard, I started typing
what I had written in John's house into the computer. What would
normally have taken me about a week dragged out to two weeks. The hooks
and ratchets in my back heated up and rolled over, and every half hour
or so I had to stand up and back into the wall to press them back into
place. My doctor gave me a lot of pills that contained some codeine,
but after I discovered that the codeine slowed me down even further and
gave me a headache, I stopped using them. I typed on for another couple
of days, trying to ignore both the pain in my back and the sensation of
a larger disorder.

Byron
Dorian's painting arrived via UPS, and five days later April's Vuillard
turned up, wrapped in foot-thick bubble wrap within a wooden case. The
men who delivered it even hung it for me—all part of the service. I put
the paintings on the long blank wall that faced my desk, so that I
could look up and see them while I worked.

Tom Pasmore
called, saying that he was still "fooling around," whatever that meant.
John Ransom called with the news that he had found a place for Alan in
Golden Manor, a nursing home with lake views from most of the rooms.
"The place looks like a luxury hotel and costs a fortune, but Alan can
certainly afford it," John said. "I hope I can afford it, or something
like it, when I'm his age."

"How is he
doing?" I asked.

"Oh,
physically, he's improved a lot. He's up and around, he doesn't look so
small
anymore, and he's eating
well. I meant that in both senses. The
food at the place is better than it is in most restaurants around here."

"And
mentally?"

"Mentally, he
goes in and out. Sometimes, it's like talking to the old Alan, and
other times, he just disconnects and talks to himself. To tell you the
truth, though, I think that's happening less and less." Without
transition, he asked if I had received the painting. I said I had and
thanked him for it.

"You know it
cost about a thousand bucks to get it packed and shipped by those guys?"

Around eight
o'clock one night, three in the morning for him, Glenroy Breakstone
called me from France and announced that he wanted to talk about Ike
Quebec. He talked about Ike Quebec for forty minutes. Whatever Glenroy
was using these days, they had a lot of it in France. When he had
finished, he said, "You're on my list now, Tim. You'll be hearing from
me."

"I hope I
will," I said, telling him nothing but the truth.

The next
morning, I finished typing out everything I had written in Millhaven.
To celebrate, I went straight to bed and slept for an hour—I'd hardly
been able to sleep at night ever since I'd returned. I went downstairs
and ate lunch at Saigon. After I got back up to my loft, I started
writing new scenes, new dialogue again. And that's when my troubles
really began.

Sleeplessness
must have been part of the trouble. In the same way that the fingers of
my left hand had mysteriously lost the ability to type, my body had
lost its capacity to sleep. During my first nights back in New York, I
came awake about four in the morning and spent the rest of the night
lying in bed with my eyes closed, waiting until long past dawn for the
gradual mental slippage, the loosening of rationality, which signals
the beginning of unconsciousness. To make up for the lost sleep, I took
hour-long naps after lunch. Then I began waking at three in the
morning, with the same results. I tried reading and wound up reading
until morning. By the end of the first week, I was going to bed at
eleven and waking up at two in the morning. After another four or five
nights, I never went to sleep at all. I took off my clothes and brushed
my teeth, got into bed, and instantly felt as though I'd just gulped
down a double espresso.

I couldn't
blame the cast or the pains in my back and shoulder. These were
uncomfortable, awkward, and irritating, but they were not the problem.
My body had forgotten how to sleep at night. I went back to my doctor,
who gave me sleeping pills. For two nights, I took the pills before
going to bed, with the alarming result that I'd come out of a lengthy
daze at six in the morning, standing by the window or sitting on the
couch, with no memory of what had happened since I had stretched out on
my bed. Instead of sleep, I'd had amnesia. I threw the pills away, took
two-hour naps in the middle of the day, and waited it out. By the time
I began writing fresh material, I had stopped going to bed—I took a
shower around midnight, changed clothes, and alternately worked, read,
and walked around my loft. Sometimes I turned off the lights and wrote
in the dark. I took a lot of aspirin and vitamin C. Sometimes I
wandered into the kitchen and gazed at the surreal buildings that Tom's
computer had invented. Then I went back to my desk and lost myself in
my made-up world.