‘Martina… How are you this year? How did you know I was in town?’
‘My husband told me.’
‘Oh really,’ I said sadly.
‘He’s in London. He just called this minute. So. Why are you here?’
‘Oh I get over pretty often these days. I’m getting a film off the ground at last.’
‘Yes, Ossie told me. I’m having some people over for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?’
‘Oh yeah? Who’ll be there?’
‘Mostly writers, I’m afraid.’
‘Writers?’ I said. A writer lives round my way in London. He looks at me oddly in the street. He gives me the fucking creeps.
‘That’s right. Writers. There’s a lady reviewer from the Tribeca Times. There’s a Nigerian novelist called Fenton Akimbo. And Stanwyck Mills, the critic.’
‘Tonight I can’t do,’ I said. ‘I have to go to this dumb party—with uh, with Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis.’
She sounded impressed, or at least her silence did. ‘Well I thought you’d probably be busy.’
‘Wait a minute. How about breakfast? Things are tight but breakfast I think I can manage.’
We arranged to meet the following morning in the Bartleby on Central Park West. Nine o’clock. At once I grimly instigated my miracle flu cure. You go to bed, wrap up warm, and drink a bottle of scotch. Technically it’s meant to be half a bottle, but I wanted to make absolutely sure. I cancelled all calls, put the Don’t-Disturb docket on the latch — and I was sleeping like a baby well before ten.
My travelling-clock told me eight-fifteen. I leapt out of bed feeling full of fight, really tiptop, apart from the sweats, the jerks, the shivers, a pronounced dizziness — and a sensation, hard to describe and harder to bear, that I had missed my stop on the shuttle and was somehow due yesterday at the next planet but one. Through the back window I warily inspected the span of the morning pale … My coffee arrived as I lay smoking in the tub, one leg atremble on the cold white shelf. I slashed myself shaving, then had a big rumble with my rug. I like to recede right out in the open but the slate-grey hanks kept doing bashful curtseys over the scooped zigzag of my brow. So I soaked the brush and plastered it all back. Next door I drank coffee in thick panting gulps. Eight-forty. Best outfit: long flared jacket, sharply tapered strides, chunky black brothel-creepers. I didn’t take a drink but as I locked my door I rehearsed the way in which I would say hi to Martina and laughingly call for champagne.
I headed east, then north. Whew, the day certainly had a funny colour to it — a harp light, but livid, bilious, as if some knot of eco-scuzz still lingered in its lungs. Go on, cough it out. And the shops were still sleeping … Where was the noise, where were the noisemakers? Only thin traffic with thin gimlet eyes. Suddenly feeling much stranger I stopped an old hardhat in his rompers of municipal blue.
‘What’s up, pal?’ I said rockily, and I think I even grasped his arm. ‘Where is everybody? Is this a bank holiday? Jesus, it’s so dark! Is there some kind of eclipse deal or something?’
‘What time you got? It’s nine o’clock.’
‘That’s what I got too.’
‘Nine p.m., sonny. It always gets dark here around now. People all gone home.’
I couldn’t take this, I don’t know why. So I started crying, not easily either but very tight and needing lots of work from the pumps of the chest. With extraordinary forbearance the old man stood his ground, his hands on my shoulders, saying, ‘Hang on to it, kid. You’re all right, I reckon. Yeah, you’ll do. You ain’t got a problem here. Listen — there’ll be another day.’
——————
And the man was right. On the third morning I woke to find the sheets were dry. Cautiously I opened my eyes and sat up straight. Yes, it had transferred, it had passed over, it had moved on to another place and was now busy somewhere else. And I thought: home, go home.
I slid out of the bag and rang room service. For over a minute I jogged on the spot. Now this is what waking up is supposed to be like. Was it my fancy, or had I lost a little bit of weight? I shampooed my rug. I found a bottle of disinfectant and took a swig of it. I did a press-up. I called the airline.