“Occasionally. It isn’t a problem.”
“Maybe the doctor sees it as more of a problem than you do. Particularly when he has a patient who falls down in the street and gets himself a concussion.”
“It really does say alcoholism?”
“I told you. Want to see it?”
“But it doesn’t say anything about a sex change?” That had been a lingering fear.
The nurse chuckled. “Somebody told you that. That’s what we call alcoholism sometimes. It cuts down on the testosterone in men. Your beard stops growing, and you hardly ever get bald.”
When she had gone, he reached for the telephone, but his hand was shaking so badly he drew it back. There was no mirror in the room. He got up anyway, feeling vaguely that there had to be one somewhere, and was startled to see his own drawn face reflected in the dark window glass.
The short winter day had ended. Outside, cars as high and awkward as Jeeps crawled along the street with blazing lights. Pedestrians were individually invisible; but it seemed to him that some black fluid, as thick and slow as heavy oil, flowed and swirled at the edges of the traffic.
And it came to him that this viscous ichor was perhaps the reality, that the faces and figures to which he was accustomed might be as false in essence as the photomicrographs printed in the newspapers on slow news days, pictures that showed human skin as a rocky desert, an ant or a fly as a bewhiskered monster. This was how God saw men and women; who could blame him then, if he damned them all or forgot them all?
“I know what ya thinking.”
He turned quickly, more than half embarrassed, at the sound of the voice. An extremely erect little man with a head like a polished ivory ball was looking through the doorway. He noticed with some relief that the little man wore hospital pajamas like his own.
“I was thinking about mail,” he lied. “Today somebody gave me a charm that’s supposed to bring you mail, and it seems to me that maybe I’ve been getting it.”
The little man stepped inside. “Let’s see it.”
“I meant these roses. And something I just saw on TV, but I can’t show you that.”
“Ya charm. Let’s see it.”
He shrugged. “I can’t show you that either. It’s in this locker, I suppose.”
“If Joe was ‘ere, ’e’d bust open this tin box for ya like dynamite.” The little man rattled the door.
“Is Joe the attendant?”
The little man grinned and shook his shiny head. “Joe’s my fighter. I’m a fight manager. Joe, he’s strong as a couple of bulls. ‘E’d tear this tin box apart for ya if I told ’im ta.”
“I doubt if the hospital would like that. Anyway, that’s where I think my charm is. I don’t really know; they’ve never given me an inventory or anything.”
“Joe’s ‘eavyweight champeen of the world. I used ta ’ave a couple other fighters, Mel and Larry. Only when Joe won us the champeenship, I dropped ’em. I made sure another manager took ’em on, a good manager. They understand. They know I’ll give ’em a break whenever I can. ’Ere’s my card.” The little man’s hand went toward the place where the breast pocket of his suit coat would have been, had he been wearing a suit instead of his hospital pajamas, and came away empty. The little man grinned again, this time sheepishly.
He sat on the bed and waved toward the chair. “Why don’t you sit down? I had an accident, and I guess I’m still a bit shaky; besides, we might as well sit if we’re going to talk.”
“Thanks,” the little man said. “I like ta sit around and gab—makes me feel like I’m about ta cut a deal for Joe, ya know what I mean? So listen up! We gotta have a ’undred thousand up front, or we don’t play.”
He said, “You’ll get it, don’t worry.”
The little man nodded. “That’s the way, pal. ’Ey, I got ya name from the chart on ya bed. I’m Eddie Walsh, President, Walsh Promotions.” Walsh’s hand was small, cool, and hard.
“Pleased to meet you. Where are we anyway, Eddie? What is this place?”
“United,” Walsh told him. “I thought ya was thinking of getting out.” Then, seeing his look of incomprehension, Walsh added, “The United General Psychiatric Hospital, they call it. This ’ere’s the good wing.”
North
He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head once again; this time he was trying to sleep. The ward, or wing, or whatever the hell it was, slept already. Occasionally he heard the soft footsteps of the rubber- shod nurses; even more rarely, the shuffle of a patient’s thin slippers. He was thinking about the world.
Not the world in which he now found himself, but the real world, the normal world.
There, Chinese-Americans spoke ordinary English and became nuclear physicists; the girls on floats did not invite men into their floats. In the real world, he thought, alcoholics did not get private rooms. Probably.
Most significant of all, in the real world streetcars had been done away with long, long ago, their very tracks entombed in layer upon layer of asphalt. True, it hadn’t made sense to do away with them. They had been cheap, energy efficient, and nonpolluting. Yet they had been done away with, and a hundred harmful gadgets had been allowed to stay—that was the way you knew it was the normal world.
A trolley car was going past the hospital now. He heard the faint clang of its bell, and he knew that should he go to the window he would see its single headlight, shining golden through the falling snow.
