Parlow took him to Yuniko’s flat. He came morning and evening, with the doctor, and sometimes stopped by in the afternoon, to sit and smoke a cigarette.
The doctor injected the paraldehyde. After a week, the delirium tremens had passed, but the injections continued. Mike supposed that they were opiates. In any case, they made him drowsy, and he reflected that longing to die gave one a magnificent freedom to not give a shit about any other thing.
There was an old Japanese man in a cardigan. He must have been nearby, for any unusual noise or movement on Mike’s part brought him into the room.
In the beginning he administered the alcohol, one ounce, every two hours, day and night. He always found Mike awake, and waiting.
The man brought thin soup and hardtack twice a day. Most of the food was taken away uneaten, and Mike’s body began to stink of the excreted alcohol, the paraldehyde, and of the famine devouring it.
He had obtained some solace from the revelation that his mind, equally, was rotten, but that soon passed, and he was left with the fact.
He remembered a poem, a long-ago, schooldays poem.
“If it chance your eye offend you, pluck it out, lad, and be whole . . . But play the man, stand up and end you, when the sickness is your soul.”
He found comfort in thinking the poet, as he had when he was young, a fraud and a fool. For who could advise the tortured who was not tortured himself; and, if so tortured, why had the adviser not taken his own advice?
He could not understand how the girl could have died, and recurred to a problem which, to him, seemed the easier: who had committed the murder, and in retribution or warning for what offenses of Mike’s commission?
But, in truth, the two questions were not connected.
Mike realized he had devolved to the second, as it was, at least potentially, capable of solution. But he could reason his way to no solution, given all the time in the world, which his incarceration seemed to him, each moment not being longer than the previous, but quite long enough to last forever.
“An understanding of the process,” Parlow had said, “does not exempt one from the process.”
“What could exempt one from the process?” Mike had asked. He remembered they had been speaking of lust, or love, but he could not remember which.
He spent the day sleeping when he could. Often, in half sleep, he would hear the doctor speaking low, to Parlow. He remembered a voice which must have been that of his caretaker, speaking in Japanese, and, perhaps, being answered by a woman. But he never saw the woman. He assumed that she must have been Yuniko, Parlow’s mistress, and smiled remembering the cub reporter’s lesson “Never assume.”
Mike relished any train of thought which he might follow, for whatever time, to turn himself from his obsession with suicide.
“Pat and Mike were found dead on the living room floor. The only clues were a pool of water around them, and a cat in the corner. Figure it out.” Every cub reporter heard it in his first week, at the bar, from an old souse.
“Never assume.”
“Pat and Mike were goldfish,” Mike said aloud. He smiled.
And then the story that he told himself was done, and his thoughts were not his own. He alternated between outright delirium and obsession. He subdued himself, occasionally, with the making of lists.
His lists were his bequests. He had few possessions, but it occupied him to plan their distribution. Each would be accompanied by a note which would, as if that were required, further establish his thoughtfulness, and, thus, the loss, to the world, of his presence.
He would assign the speech “We never knew how much he suffered” now to this recipient, now to that one, then smile, to himself, at his fatuousness. But he did not stop making lists.
There was a girl he’d wronged, so many years ago.
He’d told the story to Peekaboo, at the end of one drunken night.
One of the girls was cooking breakfast. Breakfast was a skillet-fry of the night’s unsold meals. There were always potatoes and eggs, and meat or fish, and it was highly spiced and peppered. “They, one time,” Peekaboo had said, “the Nawlins girls, called it pottifer—I know that’s pot-au-feu—but no one else, I ever knew, just called it anything. One thing I do know: to make it, you have to be a whore.”
The girl at the stove and Marcus nodded. “Or have been a whore,” Peekaboo said, “or you can’t make it.”
The girl ladled out two large helpings into bowls, and set the bowls before Peekaboo and Mike.
“Thank you, honey,” Peekaboo said.
“Y’ever heard of puttanesca?” Mike said.
“No, I have not,” Peekaboo said.
“In Italy, they make it with macaroni.”
“Uh-huh,” Peekaboo said.
“Puttanesca means ‘whorehouse style.’”
“No, you don’t tell me,” Peekaboo said.
“That’s right,” Mike said.
“How about that,” Peekaboo said. “What’s in it?”
“Macaroni,” Mike said, “eggs, bacon, ham, chicken, whatever they have at the end of the day.” Everyone in the kitchen nodded their appreciation of the human variations on a theme.
“’N’ the main thing,” Peekaboo said, “is, spiced, I mean spiced; and beer or gin, you have to, burn the damn thing out.”
The damned thing, Mike had understood, was the night. And its exertions and trauma.
Mike had confessed his desertion of what, for the purpose of the story, he had remembered as his first young love. “Honey,” Peekaboo said, “that girl? Forgot you long ago. One: that’s the way of the world.” She gestured, indicating her entire establishment. “You see what men are. You think you immune? Being so nice and all, to your self-consideration? Human as you are? She din’t get fucked over by you? Wait ten minutes, the next man comes along. She forgot you long ago.
“She could go out, a virgin again, marry the bank clerk; you, on the other hand, got to carry it around, all this time, around your neck, like some locket. ‘How good I must be, ’cause watch how bad I feel.’ That’s bullshit of a high degree. Now you can throw that magic charm away. It makes you feel too good.”
In the Japanese girl’s room he toyed with adding his youthful betrayal to what he thought of as his murder of Annie Walsh. He was diverted to find that it neither increased nor lessened his anguish, which was, he knew, neither grief nor remorse, but madness; differing from them in that it could be neither studied nor manipulated.
A month passed. Parlow and the doctor came.
Mike asked for more substantial food. It was brought to him, and the liquor was discontinued. When six hours had passed without the ration of alcohol, Mike rummaged the apartment. He found twenty-two dollars in a ceramic jar on a kitchen shelf. He took it and left.