Then it was over.
He was exhausted, but his knowledge glowed in him like fire. “So that’s it” was all he could say. “So that’s it. So that’s it.”
Bertie saw that he was no longer in the theater. The Chinaman was gone and Bertie was back in the Premingers’ living room. He struggled for control of himself. He knew it was urgent that he tell someone what had happened to him. Desperately he pulled open his trumpet case. Inside he had pasted sheets with the names, addresses and phone numbers of all his friends.
“Damn Klaff,” he said angrily. “Damn Second-Story Klaff in his lousy jail.”
He spotted Gimpel’s name and the phone number of his boarding house in Cincinnati. Tearing the sheet from where it was pasted inside the lid, he rushed to the phone and placed the call. “Life and death,” he screamed at Gimpel’s bewildered landlady. “Life and death.”
When Gimpel came to the phone Bertie began to tell him, coherently, but with obvious excitement, all that had happened. Gimpel was as excited as himself.
“Then the Chinaman opened his mouth and this tongue with writing on it came out.”
“Yeah?” Gimpel said. “Yeah? Yeah?”
“Only it was in Chinese,” Bertie shouted.
“Chinese,” Gimpel said.
“But I could read it, Gimpel! I could read it!”
“I didn’t know you could read Chinese,” Gimpel said.
“It was the meaning of life.”
“Yeah?” Gimpel said. “Yeah? What’d it say? What’d it say?”
“What?” Bertie said.
“What’d it say? What’d the Chink’s tongue say was the meaning of life?”
“I forget,” Bertie said and hung up.
He slept until two the next afternoon, and when he awoke he felt as if he had been beaten up. His tongue was something that did not quite fit in his mouth, and throughout his body he experienced a looseness of the bones, as though his skeleton were a mobile put together by an amateur. He groaned dispiritedly, his eyes still closed. He knew he had to get up out of the bed and take a shower and shave and dress, that only by making extravagant demands on it would his body give him any service at all. “You will make the Death March,” he warned it ruthlessly.
He opened his eyes and what he saw disgusted him and turned his stomach. His eye patch had come off during the night and now there were two of everything. He saw one eye patch on one pillow and another eye patch on another pillow. Hastily he grabbed for it, but he had chosen the wrong pillow. He reached for the other eye patch and the other pillow, but somehow he had put out one of his illusory hands. It did not occur to him to shut one eye. At last, by covering all visible space, real or illusory, with all visible fingers, real or illusory — like one dragging a river — he recovered the patch and pulled it quickly over one of his heads.
He stood stunned in his hot shower, and then shaved, cutting his neck badly. He dressed.
“Whan ’e iz through his toilette, Monsieur will see how much better ’e feel,” his valet said. He doubted it and didn’t answer.
In the dining room he tried not to look at Norma’s paintings, but could not help noticing that overnight many of her sunny side streets had become partial snow scenes. He had done that, he remembered, though he could not now recall exactly why. It seemed to have something to do with a great anthropological discovery he had made the night before. He finished the last of the pizza, gagging on it briefly.
Considering the anguish of his body, it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was hooked. Momentarily this appealed to his sense of the dramatic, but then he realized that it would be a terrible thing to have happen to him. He could not afford to be hooked, for he knew with a sense of calm sadness that his character could no more sustain the responsibility of a steady drug habit than it could sustain the responsibility of any other kind of pattern.
“Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” Bertie said.
In near-panic he considered leaving the Premingers’ apartment immediately, but he knew that he was in no condition to travel. “You wouldn’t make it to the corner,” he said.
He felt massively sorry for himself. The more he considered it the more certain it appeared that he was hooked. It was terrible. Where would he get the money to buy the drugs? What would they do to his already depleted physical resources? “Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” he said again.
To steady himself he took a bottle of Scotch from the shelf in the pantry. Bertie did not like hard liquor. Though he drank a lot, it was beer he drank, or, when he could get them, the sweeter cordials. Scotch and bourbon had always seemed vaguely square to him. But he had already finished the few liqueurs that Preminger had, and now nothing was left but Scotch. He poured himself an enormous drink.
Sipping it calmed him — though his body still ached — and he considered what to do. If he was hooked, the first thing was to tell his friends. Telling his friends his latest failure was something Bertie regarded as a sort of responsibility. Thus his rare letters to them usually brought Bertie’s intimates — he laughed at the word — nothing but bad news. He would write that a mistress had given him up, and, with his talent for mimicry, would set down her last long disappointed speech to him, in which she exposed in angry, honest language the hollowness of his character, his infinite weakness as a man, his vileness. When briefly he had turned to homosexuality to provide himself with funds, the first thing he did was write his friends about it. Or he wrote of being fired from bands when it was discovered how bad a trumpeter he really was. He spared neither himself nor his friends in his passionate self-denunciations.
Almost automatically, then, he went into Preminger’s study and began to write all the people he could think of. As he wrote he pulled heavily at the whiskey remaining in the bottle. At first the letters were long, detailed accounts of symptoms and failures and dashed hopes, but as evening came on and he grew inarticulate he realized that it was more important — and, indeed, added to the pathos of his situation — for him just to get the facts to them.
“Dear Klaff,” he wrote at last, “I am hooked. I am at the bottom, Klaff. I don’t know what to do.” Or “Dear Randle, I’m hooked. Tell your wife. I honestly don’t know where to turn.” And “Dear Myers, how are your wife and kids? Poor Bertie is hooked. He is thinking of suicide.”
He had known for a long time that one day he would have to kill himself. It would happen, and even in the way he had imagined. One day he would simply drink the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. But previously he had been in no hurry. Now it seemed like something he might have to do before he had meant to, and what he resented most was the idea of having to change his plans.
He imagined what people would say.
“I let him down, Klaff,” Randle said.
“Everybody let him down,” Klaff said.
“Everybody let him down,” Bertie said. “Everybody let him down.”
Weeping, he took a last drink from Preminger’s bottle, stumbled into the living room and passed out on the couch.
That night Bertie was awakened by a flashlight shining in his eyes. He threw one arm across his face defensively and struggled to sit up. So clumsy were his efforts that whoever was holding the flashlight started to laugh.