25

BECAUSE NOW GREGOR REALLY IS STONE BROKE. Although the management of the St. Regis is willing to overlook his unpaid bills because he has moved to a single cramped room, he can no longer frequent the hotel restaurant. He can no longer maintain a laboratory or local office anymore, either. And since Gregor still tries to keep busy, even if it’s only for appearances, he has had to exchange his bookkeeper for the hired hands at an accounting service and his secretaries for the young, pigeon-fancying Western Union messenger, who isn’t too greedy for tips and works as his part-time errand boy.

The Axelrods having set him up in an office in a tiny little room in the Blackstone Hotel, there Gregor will try to sell a few projects for new machines by mail order, but these inventions seem increasingly conceived just for something to do, less from conviction than through the sheer automatic habit of inventing. An elastic-fluid turbine. An improved lightning rod. A locomotive headlight. A hydraulic turbo-alternator. All advertised, in Gregor’s characteristically humble style, as innovative if not revolutionary, easy to operate, highperforming, and—simply put—of overwhelmingly superior quality.

Well, these ventures, like so many others, will never come to anything. And not only because of the indifference of his contemporaries, as Gregor mournfully maintains. Because in a man’s life, it sometimes happens as well that nothing works anymore, that the inventory of fixtures falls into disrepair. Here and there, bit by little bit, one sees how the mind deteriorates: just like matter does. It happens via addition and subtraction: sly elements join in—dirt, dust, mold—while precious ones degenerate through wear, fatigue, erosion. And then there’s the corrosion that attacks, chews up, and devours nerve cells the way it does atoms, producing all sorts of slowdowns, cracking joints, aches, negligence, and hit-and-miss messiness. It’s a long, tortuous process, imperceptible at first, but which can sometimes, abruptly, become as plain as day.

As when Gregor has an idea that no one, as far as he knows, has ever had before. It’s a bold process, the degasification of copper, thanks to which the metal, now free of gas bubbles, will be denser and therefore much improved. Gregor finally manages to pitch this intrepid conception to a metallurgical research facility. Impressed by his reputation, the engineers consider his proposal but quickly figure out that champion electrician though he may be, Gregor knows little about the science of metals. Having given him an appointment and knowing him to be touchy, they treat him with careful consideration, using the softest of kid gloves to explain that his audacious system—although most interesting—cannot possibly succeed: it is all the more difficult to extract gas bubbles from copper because copper, you see, has no gas bubbles to extract. So it really isn’t strange, they tell him gently, that no one ever thought of his system until now. Gregor silently gathers up his papers and withdraws, smoothing his mustache.

It also happens that he files a series of patent applications he hasn’t even properly thought out yet, for some hasty work on fluid mechanics; the patents are recorded not without indulgence, and even a touch of pity. It happens more and more that when Gregor offers his services as a consultant to all and sundry, the projects, evaluations, reports, and prospectuses he has drawn up are systematically turned down, and the few companies he stubbornly sets up quickly prove to be duds. All this, on average, produces nothing but crumbs, simply serving to repay a few outstanding debts and provide the errand boy’s salary about half the time. Well, even though the young man doesn’t ask for much, there’s a limit, and Gregor’s errand boy begins combing the want ads.

If Gregor begins to withdraw even further from society, it’s not just that he can’t afford to go out, because now even his desire to see people is fading. He’s never been much of a drinker, but ever since the beginning of Prohibition, he has disliked its consequences: the atmosphere has changed, and he finds what will be called the Roaring Twenties—wood alcohol in speakeasies, flappers, the Charleston, Al Capone, Al Jolson, gilded youth, and market crashes—somewhat shocking. As the company of men, not to mention that of women, begins to grate on him, all he basically has left are the pigeons.

And there Gregor moves up a notch, exchanging his role as their nanny for that of their nurse: now he won’t simply feed them, he’ll take care of them. Having boned up on pigeons and doves, he soon prides himself on his expertise regarding their habits and customs and above all, their anatomical pathology. Equipped with a first-aid kit, he tirelessly roams the streets, docks, parks, studying these birds and spotting alarming signs in their behavior—depression, weight loss, a wheezing cough, any limping or arthritis, diarrhea, torticollis—so that he can attend to them immediately. Plaster casts, injections, disinfection, massage: he applies the therapeutic remedy appropriate to each case, although he will not intervene when the symptoms are too serious, when a pigeon begins to walk backwards, for example, or can’t see well enough to peck up grain. Gregor knows that such behavior is due not to the proverbial foolishness of the species, which he denies outright, but to the paramyxovirus, which is always fatal and resolved only by euthanasia, which Gregor refuses to perform.

The thought naturally occurs to Gregor, while he’s at it, to move from outpatient treatment to institutional care by setting up a pigeon clinic. Which raises the question of premises. Since the management of the St. Regis would be most reluctant to house this endeavor, Gregor knows he cannot shelter too many long-term patients in his room. He therefore decides to take in only one at a time, on a case-by-case basis, for short-term or emergency care. To this end, he rents a large aviary from a fowler near the hotel for use as a waiting room, where he can keep his patients before their consultation. Meanwhile, he pursues his theoretical and practical studies—perfecting his skills in the care of crumpled wings, broken legs, gangrene and alopecias, quick to diagnose fowlpox at a glance, identify gout, detect nematodes, distinguish emphysema from aerophagia—and consults a veterinarian only about the rarest disorders.

His passion does not stop there: increasingly unwilling to be separated from his patients, Gregor resolves to flout the hotel rules by keeping a small group in his room, which he readies beforehand with homemade nests of wire, string, and cotton. Then late one night, after distracting the attention of the night concierge through some subterfuge, he smuggles a large covered crate containing six ailing birds up to his room on the fourteenth floor.

At first he limits the patients to a small rotating group, no more than half a dozen. Since he must sometimes be away tending to what’s left of his affairs at his Blackstone office, Gregor entrusts his charges to a chambermaid, who for a small sum will keep his secret and follow strict instructions regarding the birds. Soon Gregor will expand his operation, however, and the nests will multiply, for there is no lack of invalids: fifteen wounded pigeons will be in residence, then twenty, thirty, and the chambermaid will not be able to handle them all, so Gregor will have to hire two other hotel maids to take turns sitting at their bedsides. The patients will start cooing fortissimo, the fourteenth floor will begin to smell funny, other guests then lodge complaints—and the management of the St. Regis will summon Gregor to demand that he shut down his avian clinic.

This done and the premises disinfected, Gregor must first resign himself to his solitude, limiting his caretaking to daily visits to the aviary, now a dispensary where he regularly brings new patients and works toward their recovery. But things aren’t the same anymore; he always leaves there feeling a bit sad and sometimes, to avoid returning to his empty hotel room, he tries to lift his mood with another walk around Grand Central Station, or else—this afternoon, for example—he goes to get a haircut.