“Anything you’d like—anything. Only name it, and I will see that you get it within the hour,” said Warthrop.
Chanler was trembling. Fluid dripped from the corners of his eyes. The doctor reached down to wipe away the tear, and his friend jerked violently beneath the covers. “Don’t! . . . touch me . . . Pellinore.”
“Name it, John,” the doctor insisted.
Chanler’s head rocked from side to side. His eyes continued to leak tears; the pillowcase was stained with them. “I can’t.”
The monstrumologist and von Helrung withdrew to the fireplace to confer out of earshot.
“This is unconscionable,” Warthrop told von Helrung. “The man needs a doctor. The only question is, shall you summon one, or shall I?”
“I heard that!” Chanler called.
“His condition is beyond the scope of—,” began von Helrung, but his former pupil would have none of it.
“He should be in Bellevue right now, not wasting away here with this baboon in a peacoat!”
“Shit!”
The two men started at the expletive.
“Worse than the hunger, Pellinore!” John Chanler called. “The shit! Every hour on the hour, buckets and buckets of shit!”
Warthrop glanced at von Helrung.
“He has been incontinent,” explained the Austrian apologetically.
“So dysentery, too—and you still don’t think he needs a doctor? It will kill him in a week.”
“Do you know what that’s like, Pellinore?” shouted Chanler. “To lie wallowing in your own shit?”
“We change the sheets immediately,” protested von Helrung. “And you could use the pan, John. It’s right there beside you.” He turned to Warthrop and said beseechingly, “I try to make him as comfortable as possible. Understand, mein Freund, there are things that—”
The doctor brushed him aside and returned to the bed.
“The wrong metaphor,” gasped Chanler. “The wrong hell. Not Sisyphus. Not Greek. Christian. Dante’s rivers of shit. That’s what it is.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital, John,” Warthrop told him.
“If you try, I’ll shit on you.”
“No doubt you will, but I’m taking you anyway.”
“That’s all is it—it is—Pell, but we forget.”
“I don’t understand, John. What do we forget?”
Chanler lowered his voice, pronouncing the word with great solemnity, as if he were sharing a profound truth: “Shit.” He giggled. “It’s all shit. I am shit. You are shit.” His eye fell upon the simian features of Augustin Skala. “He is definitely shit. . . . Life is shit. Love . . . love is shit.”
Warthrop started to speak, and von Helrung cut him off.
“Don’t, Pellinore. It is not John who speaks now. It is the beast.”
“You don’t believe me,” said Chanler. “You haven’t bathed in it yet, that’s all. The minute it sullies your unadulterated ass, you jump into a river, don’t you?”
He coughed, and thick green bile broiled in his mouth and bubbled over his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed it back down.
“You disgust me,” Chanler said. “Everything about you is repulsive—nauseating—you sickening mealy-mouthed piece of snot.”
The doctor said nothing. If he remembered that he himself had spoken these words before, he did not show it. But I remembered.
“Pellinore, Pellinore, being perfect is such a chore! Do you remember that one?” Chanler asked.
“Yes,” answered the doctor. “One of the kinder ones, as I recall.”
“I should have let you drown.”
Warthrop smiled. “Why didn’t you?”
“Who would I have played my jokes on, then? It was all for show anyway. You didn’t really mean to drown yourself.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was with you, you stupid bugger. If you’d really meant it, you would have waited till you were alone.”
“An error owing to inexperience.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Pell. You’ll get there. One of these days . . . all of us . . . suffocating in shit . . .”
His eyes rolled toward the ceiling. The lids fluttered. The doctor looked at me and nodded. He’d heard enough. He pointed toward the door. We’ d crossed halfway to the exit when Chanler called out in a loud voice, “It won’t do any good, Pellinore! He’ll finish me before the ambulance leaves the gates!”
The doctor turned. He looked at von Helrung, and then swung his eyes in Skala’s direction.
“What do you think he’s got in his pocket, hmm?” Chanler said. “He’ll have it in my heart the minute you close that door. He pulls it out when nobody’s around and cleans his nails with it—picks his teeth—scrapes the crud off his crusty bunghole.” Chanler was grinning ghoulishly. “Amateur!” he sneered at the stoic Bohemian. “Don’t you know anything? That’s a job for the ogimaa. Are you ogimaa, you stinking immigrant monkey?”
At the use of the Iyiniwok word, Warthrop stiffened. “How do you know that word, John?”
Chanler’s head lolled upon the pillow. The eyes rolled back in their sockets. “Heard it from the man old, the old man in the woods.”
“Jack Fiddler?” asked the doctor.
“Old Jack Fiddler pulled on his pipe, stuck it up his arse, and gave it a light!”
“Pellinore.” Von Helrung touched the doctor’s arm and whispered urgently, “No more. Call the ambulance if you like, but do not push—”
Warthrop shrugged off the hand and strode back to John Chanler’s side.
“You remember Fiddler,” he said to him.
Grinning, Chanler answered, “His eyes see very far—much farther than yours.”
“And Larose? Do you remember Pierre Larose?”
I heard a snatch of the same nonsense he’d spouted in the wilderness, “Gudsnuth nesht! Gebgung grojpech chrishunct.” In a loud voice Warthrop repeated the question, adding, “John, what happened to Pierre Larose?”
Chanler’s demeanor abruptly changed. A look of profound dismay—eyes welling with tears, the fat lower lip quivering like a child’s when confronted by inexpressible loss—transformed his vaguely bestial appearance into one of heart-wrenching pathos.