The Prisoner of Vandam Street (3 page)

I
n life, I’ve always thought, it’s a good thing to practice waking up in hell because then, when the real thing comes, you’ll be ready for it. While it was true that Mick Brennan’s Irish-cockney style and rather blunt interpersonal techniques were cloying and somewhat tedious, they were far less maddening than McGovern’s pecking you to death with “Say again?”

Moving from McGovern to Brennan, I felt, was like traveling up to a higher circle of hell. The next auditory sensation I experienced, however, convinced me beyond any doubt that I had plunged to new depths and was currently residing inside the very bowels of that fiery and terrible place.

“Kinkstah!!” shouted the familiar rodentlike voice, far too loud and ebullient for the way my mind and body were feeling. “Kinkstah! I’m here, baby! Your favorite Doctor! Doctor Watson, of course!”

“Ratso,” I said weakly. “Could you turn down your vocal mike?”

“Sure, Kinkstah! Anything, Kinkstah! I came as soon as Brennan called me. He was in some pub run by a friend of his who kept it open all night because Mick was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Said something was seriously wrong with you resulting from complications brought about by McGovern slipping you a mickey at the Corner Bistro. I knew that couldn’t be it, Kinkstah. What’s really wrong with you, Kinkstah?”

“Munchausen by proxy. I want to kill all of the Village Irregulars.”

“That’s technically not the correct definition of munchausen by proxy, Sherlock. In munchausen by proxy, the primary care-giver—I’m your primary care-giver, by the way—”

“That’s comforting.”

“—could be a mother, a nurse, a nanny, someone like that. Anyway, the primary care-giver seeks to make the child sick or appear to be sick either physically or emotionally so that the care-giver gets attention or sympathy by extension—”

“Ah, you’re so insightful, Watson! Only a keen, observant mind like yours would have the insight to realize my malady for what it is—a cry for help. That’s all it is. An attention-getting device. The fact that my temperature’s a hundred and six and that I’m alternately freezing to death or burning alive, and that I’m shitting and pissing and puking and delirious and hallucinating—”

“Get a grip on yourself, Sherlock. No one’s saying you’re not sick. We all realize you’re sick—”

“And I realize that you’re sick—”

“And you’re the one shivering in a hospital bed with a face that looks like a death mask. But don’t worry, Sherlock. We’ll find out what’s wrong with you and have you back on your feet in no time! I just saw the doctor down the hall. He’s coming in to check on you soon.”

“What does he look like?”

“A waiter at the Bengali Palace.”

“Why does every guy from India always come to New York and wind up being a doctor?”

“Because they couldn’t figure out how to drive a taxi?”

There were times when a little light banter with Ratso might have amused me, but this was not one of them. Here he was laughing and yapping away, and every time I closed my eyes I saw a pale horse. Or a coffee-colored river. There may have been times in my life when my grasp on mortality was more tenuous, but I couldn’t remember when. This could really be it, I reflected darkly. This was the way the world ends, not with a bang but with Ratso nattering away about the precise definition of munchausen by proxy, or Brennan calling the nurse an ol’ boiler or McGovern a wanker. Where was McGovern, by the way? A little strange, wasn’t it? I no longer believed he’d slipped me a mickey, but I figured he’d at least pop in to see what condition my condition was in. Maybe I was imagining things, but I was beginning to see a troubled, sadly vexed visage lurking just beneath the bright countenance of Ratso’s face. This troubled me too and vexed me not a little. If Ratso was worried, it was no doubt about a quarter past the time for me to be worried because, after all, I was the one who was hanging by spit directly above the trapdoor. One of the most depressing things about being in a horsepital terribly afflicted with a very serious, very mysterious ailment, is watching people pretend that it’s nothing serious. There is a gravestone I once saw in the bone orchard called Shalom Memorial Park just outside of Chicago where my mother and father are buried. The gravestone has the man’s name and dates of birth and death, and underneath those particulars it simply reads: “Nothing serious.” There’s another gravestone there that is inscribed with something in Yiddish, underneath which the translation is thoughtfully included: “The Cubs stink.”

I seemed to be enjoying a brief respite from the fever and the shaking chills, but there was to be no respite, apparently, from Ratso. He was wandering back and forth, constantly moving from the room to the hallway, waiting for the doctor, all the while eating the breakfast that I couldn’t eat and yammering away about this and that. The current subject of his yapping, as near as I could tell, appeared to be the physical attributes of a young woman he’d met at the nurse’s station.

“Jesus,” he shouted. “You should’ve seen the rack on that broad! She was kind of hysterical though. Her mother’s very sick, I think.”

“Everybody here is very sick, Ratso. That’s why we call it a hospital.”

“Anyway, I didn’t get her phone number.”

“That’s a shame.”

The conversation was sapping what little energy I had. Not only that, but the nausea now was coming in waves that also appeared to blur my vision and my thought processes as well. My auditory senses seemed to be fine, but it was not a pleasant prospect that Ratso might have to become not only my eyes but also my voice to the rational world, if indeed, such a place existed. At least Ratso was loyal, I thought. He positively luxuriated in playing Dr. Watson to my Sherlock. If at times he could be a pluperfect asshole, at least he was a fixed pluperfect asshole in a changing age. Now if he only was possessed with Watson’s medical abilities.

“Watson,” I said, half-deliriously.

“Yes, Sherlock,” said Ratso with genuine concern. “What is it?”

“Watson,” I said. “What if I’m dying?”

“You can’t die, Sherlock,” he said. “You’re only on chapter four.”

“Ah, Watson! How practical of you to make that observation.”

“And I’d like to make another observation,” Ratso sang out cheerfully. “Here comes the doctor now!”

I looked up and saw a small man as thin and dark as a pencil standing before me and wavering like a mirage on a summer highway. Once my eyes focused a bit I realized that he did look a great deal like a waiter at the Bengali Palace. I found this oddly comforting. The doctor studied my chart assiduously for about six hours, stared at me balefully for about a fortnight, then, as I began sinking into a state of torporous confusion again, he spoke at last.

“ ’Ello, my name is Dr. Q. Tip Skinnipipi,” he said, in an accent thicker than mulligatawny soup. “What you have, my dear fellow, is malaria.”

“Malaria!” shrieked Ratso, in a voice that might not have wakened the dead, but certainly would have irritated them. “Where in the hell did he get malaria?”

I followed the conversation but I did not seem able to form words or even wish to participate. Had I been able to speak, however, I probably would’ve asked the same question Ratso had.

“Malaria is quite rare in America these days,” said Skinnipipi. “Quite rare, indeed. Has the patient come into contact recently with any migrant workers’ camps?”

“The patient,” said Ratso, “has never worked a day in his life.”

“I see,” said Skinnipipi gravely. I was glad that somebody could see. The doctor’s face was now resembling an old rugged cross between Gunga Din and a child’s Halloween mask as glimpsed through a rearview carnival mirror on a 1944 Jesus H. Christler as it sailed over some crazy cliff into Armadillo Canyon. Even I, as the patient, could sort of half-tell that I was delirious at the moment. In an offbeat way it was kind of fun listening to the adults discuss my condition in serious grown-up tones, as if I were a child who wasn’t there. I liked the way Dr. Skinnipipi rolled the “r” in the word “malaria.” I was hoping he would do it again. As it happened, I didn’t have long to wait.

“There are four different strains of human malarrria, you see,” said Dr. Skinnipipi instructionally to Ratso. “They are caused by four different species of the Plasmodium parasite.”

“Got it,” said Ratso, as he took copious notes in a little notepad. In my experience, I’ve never really trusted people who said “Got it.” It usually means they don’t get it.

“The patient may have contracted malarrrrrrria many years ago,” Skinnipipi droned on. “It may have persisted in the liver and recurred. We do not know, you see. Even if the patient may know the answer, we cannot expect a coherent response for forty-eight hours, when the fever breaks.”

“MamaMAmamamama!” I said.

“Got it,” said Ratso. “By the way, doctor, what are the four strains of malaria?”

“They are
Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, Plasmodium fuckmedeadmate,
and the last, and only truly deadly strain,
Plasmodium falciparum.
”

“Got it,” said Ratso, scribbling furiously. “Which strain does the patient have?”

“
Plasmodium falciparum,
” said Skinnipipi.

“Beedledeedee!” I said.

“And that would be—” said Ratso, looking over his notes.

“—the only truly deadly strain,” finished the doctor smoothly.

Ratso, for once, was silent. The patient, as near as I could tell, was silent. Indeed, for that moment in time, all the sirens and subways and cell phones and dogs and babies and junkies in New York seemed suddenly muted by a cosmic finger. And, even in my state of fevered delirium, I suspected I knew which finger it was.

At last, the doctor spoke again. This time he spoke directly to Ratso. He spoke in a soft, hushed tone, almost as if I was not lying there in a hospital bed but had already begun my journey, winding my way to heaven, or hell, or very possibly, to nowhere at all.

“As you would say,” said Dr. Skinnipipi rather officiously, “he has ‘got it.’ ”

M
cGovern surfaced about the time my fever broke. I was not pleased to discover that I was still in the same dreary hospital room, but I figured it was preferable to being on a cloud somewhere playing a fucking harp. I’d missed McGovern, actually, and the truth was he represented a very comforting force as he sat in a large comfortable chair by my bed, reading a newspaper and reminding me by his very presence that I was still alive.

“Hell of a hangover,” he said, laughing loudly at his own little joke. The sound of that Irish laughter, I must report, while not quite music to my ear, was not at all unpleasant.

“We’ll beat this thing, Kink,” he said with unbridled gentile optimism. “Ratso apprised me of the full situation.”

“Where is Ratso?” I said.

“He left a few hours ago. Said he had to take a powder.”

“With Ratso that could mean any number of things,” I muttered.

“What about ‘wings’?” asked McGovern. “Say again?”

“I said, ‘Ratso doesn’t pull any strings.’ ”

“None of us do, Kinkster. We’re all on your side and we’re all going to do everything we can to get you better.”

“Then it’s just possible that I’m really fucked,” I observed bleakly.

“What? You think the hospital really sucks? I wouldn’t say that, Kink. Of course, they did throw Brennan out of here last night, but the shape he was in he probably would’ve gotten 86’ed at the Monkey’s Paw. I think this hospital’s really been good to you, Kink.”

“So has baseball.”

“Say again? What about baseball?”

“Nothing.”

“No, you can
tell
me. I can
hear
you. Just stop mumbling and
say
it.”

“I said, ‘I’d like to throw a baseball at your scrotum!’ ”

“Modem?” said McGovern brightly. “You’re getting a new modem?”

And so the conversation went. Like millions of other conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and whores, hunters and hunted, full of all the words Andy Gibb ever had, full of horseshit and wild honey, full of sound and fury, signifying only the meaninglessness of life. Yet even without the words and the music, life did occasionally convey a flying scrap of reckless wonder from the kind heart of a large Irishman to the tattered soul of a fevered Jew. There are people, I thought, not for the first time, there are people. And the beauty of it was you never knew who they would be. Old friends, perfect strangers, even pluperfect assholes, all might catch you in the wink of an eye, call your name like a train whistle in the night, guide you like an angel on your shoulder. There were people, I thought. And one of them was sitting in a chair in a hospital room reading a newspaper.

“Ratso’s worried,” said McGovern, looking up from the paper, “but I’m not. You’re tough, Kink. Or you wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

“I guess I have done pretty well for myself,” I said, glancing around the depressing little room. “I’ve got a sink and a urinal. What more could I ask for?”

“I don’t even know why you need both,” said McGovern.

“You might be right.”

“What? Need more light?” McGovern got up and turned the room lighting on to high interrogation. It flooded the room with fluorescent light and blinded me.

“You sure you want more light?” asked McGovern solicitously.

“I’m not sure of anything,” I said.

Time drifted by as it tends to do in horsepitals, airports, whore-houses, train stations, slaughter yards; it drifted by like a hobo in the night, so slowly, so swiftly, so silently that you almost forgot it was there. Little minutes, little moments, little pieces of our lives that no one’s ever sure quite what to do with. The present blends with the past and the faraway becomes suddenly very close to the heart and the lost and distant are suddenly near and dear and the pearly shells on the childhood beach are the bright, dead leaves in the old man’s yard. When I came to again I wasn’t certain if moments had passed or years, but there was a large, Jewish buttocks obscuring my line of vision and, from previous sightings, I took it to be Ratso’s. He, apparently, was engaged in a serious discussion with McGovern, who, I assumed, was standing on the other side of the buttocks.

“So tell me more about this Dr. Pickaninny,” McGovern was saying.

“It’s Dr. Skinnipipi,” Ratso corrected, “and he says there’s good news and bad news.”

“That’s what they all say,” I said.

Ratso and McGovern looked over at me, as if I’d just risen from the dead. A nurse was checking an IV line that was dripping into my arm. For the first time in what seemed like ages, my mind felt clear and lucid. I knew who I was and where I was and then it became confused with the recent blurry past and I lost the moment of precious clarity and watched it disappear like a lover on a train. Now the place was filled with the dim forms of people and animals I had loved and known in my life, some of them I knew to be still alive, some I knew to have long ago and quite recently departed this busy station of mortal sadness.

“What are all these people doing in my room?” I said.

Ratso and McGovern exchanged worried glances. They came closer to my bed. Ratso spoke softly, an event that occurred only on very rare occasions. I knew I was in trouble.

“They’re here because they love you,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. And I closed my eyes.

This is when I learned the great secret of life and death: When you close your eyes, the living disappear, but the dead keep on living. So I traded one Ratso and one McGovern for everyone else I’d ever loved and lost. It was a good trade, actually, but it wasn’t quite enough to win the pennant.