Authors: Arthur Phillips
John stared at Fmre's slow-breathing belly on the convex mattress under the blinking screens and tangled lubes. He looked briefly at the twisted lips and newly dimpled cheeks, and then away again in haste.
He looked at his own hands and recalled a made-for-TV movie he'd once seen where the loving family of a comatose old woman had spoken to her unresponsive ears, determined in their fierce love that somehow "she can hear us, darn it. I know she can, and I' 11 do anything, do you hear me? Anything for her. I won't give up on her, so don't you dare give up on her . . ." And so. not wishing to be heard by whomever lay beyond the curtain, John shifted his chair toward the head of the bed, rested his elbows on his knees, and began to speak haltingly to his friend's boss's chest.
"Well, I certainly hope you get better, Imrc. You're very impressive when you're not, you know, like this. 1 don't like to think about what happened. It seems wrong that this can, and that's it for somebody who has done and seen everything you've done and, and seen . .. That whole thing about your life as a work of art. 1 wonder, was it worth it? I wonder that often about you. Was it worth it? Fighting tyrants? Everything you gave up to be on the right side when it seemed like the losing side? I sometimes imagine making an incredible sacrifice for someone or something: Oh, I lose a limb or I'm paraly/ed or I even lose my mind under some extreme duress . . . and then if somebody asks me—and I'm limbless or paralyzed or only semi-lucid—they ask me if it was worth it. And 1 always wonder what I would say. I would so want to know that I would say, 'Oh yes. It was worth it. Of course it was worth it.' even as I'm sitting there with some horrible mutilation. I think about you often, actually. It occurs to me that you know something very, ah. very ... It would be a shame, obviously, if, you know, I would feel very bad ... I actually, ah. feel very bad. huh, about the whole—"
John was ashamed to feel his throat tighten. He rubbed his eyes until the tickling sensation passed. His absurdity seemed to have no limits anymore, and so he thought immediately of that kitschy television show when Krisztina Toldy
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319
tapped him firmly on the shoulder. She scoldingly smoothed Imre's blankets and pillowcase, though John had touched nothing.
"Oh hello." he said.
"Yes."
Time circulated strangely in the hospital. In the hallway, it sloshed into standing pools, still and stagnant, so that the clock could barely muster the energy to register a change commensurate with the discomfort John felt in the hard little chair outside Imre's forbidden room as he sat and waited, perhaps forever, for the daily arrival of Charles or the specialist. Then, in a rush, the calendar would drop dates like a palm tree in season, and John would realize with amazement it had been a week, ten days, two weeks, nearly three weeks already since the stroke, and still Imre did not move, did not acknowledge, and still Charles paid John to sit guard for him while managing the press's affairs kept the junior partner "just incredibly busy."
Two days later, some excitement: One of the patient's eyes opened when blown on as the specialist had blown on it every day for three weeks. It shut again, and brain readings showed little difference.
The next day, Charles and Krisztina arranged to have Imre moved to a private clinic in Buda run by Swiss doctors. "For all I know the Hungarian doctors are great geniuses." Charles admitted, "but we have to do all we can for him. you know? It sure seems like this is a better place." John sat now on an ergonomic steel chair molded with a little ridge so that his buttocks were separately cupped. He leaned against the robin's egg-blue corridor wall while, hourly, at five after the hour, doctors nodded at him and entered the shiny chrome-and-marble room, then emerged to make a note or two on the translucent robin's egg-blue clipboard nestled in a translucent Plexiglas rack mounted on the sighing hydraulic door, which bore a brass doorplate engraved and screwed in the very day of the patient's registration, as if he were a new executive: /IMMFR 4—HERR i\iRF, HORVATH. Softly down the carpeted hall, from a doctor's receding back, floated the whistled melody of John's song.
"I can't put it off any longer, is the thing. I know this isn't the most tender thing I can say at the moment." Charles said two days later as Neville spoke in hushed and halting German to one of the consulting physicians, "but he's not exactly leaping out of bed to run his company, and this is not the optimal time for that kind of laziness."
"Sheer sloth." John agreed.
320 1 ARTHUR PHILLIPS
"I'm all for catching up on sleep, but something rather significant that's been simmering for a while is now positively boiling over, and so you can do me a great favor. I've got a group that you in fact helped put together, and I need a warm body in a dinner chair next Monday, and frankly, Imre ain't it. Can you manage not to have a stroke between now and Monday?"
Neville shook the Swiss doctor's hand and rejoined the two Americans. "Under the circumstances," he said in his professional BBC voice, "the incapacity determination's a relatively simple matter. I've arranged for the doc."
That night, the lines to get into A Hazam offended the old hands. Velvet ropes unironically held potential guests at bay. Inside the front door, press and guidebook mentions of the club were framed and mounted under the Hungarian words for As Seen In. An artfully shabby poster prophesied the arrival of A Hazam 2 and A Hazam 3, to appear in other districts of Budapest, and Prahazam, expected to sprout in Prague even sooner. This imminent pollination (the clubs would all sport the same autographed dictators' photos, the same hooded spotlights, the same random furniture) was the flagship Hungarian investment of Charles's old firm. Forever barring the club from their agenda, John and Charles instead sampled the pleasures of the Baal Room, recently opened by three young Irish entrepreneurs and decorated in an infernal theme. At the long bar shaped like a craggy shelf of molten rock, John and Gabor sat on red velvet stools while horned shirtless barmen in red tights brought them Unicum in fake human skulls and, new to the job, seemed nervously aware of the threat to bottles posed by their pointed. coilcd-Styrofoam tails. Cages suspended from the cavernous ceiling housed men and women in carefully torn leather bikinis, dancing/writhing over plastic cauldrons containing red flickering spotlights, while massive bouncers with stylized pitchforks and primitively painted faces roamed the floor looking for trouble. On a large stage, under swiveling and flashing strobes, people danced to British pop music mixed with a looped recording of human screaming.
Emboldened by a few sloshing skulls, John executed the opening maneuvers of the mistaken-movie-girl technique on the woman to his left, when, from the bar stool to his right, Charles spoke in confessional tones: "It was good to talk with you al the hospital that morning. It helped. Really. You know?" Oddly, he felt Charles meant it, but couldn't think what talk he was referring to. A good talk in the hospital one morning?
"Hey, whatever. No problem."
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.S/l
He turned back to his left, but the targeted mistaken movie star had disappeared. He had to admit it was not a heart-wrenching loss.
The high-tempo music ended and was replaced by the long, car-piercing shriek of a man in excruciating torment. Demonic laughter followed as the man sobbed chokingly. Then came the soft, romantic drums and opening synthesizer chords of John's favorite song; it had taken the DJ nearly an hour to get to his request.
"THE
THING
IS,
KAROLY,
YOU'RE
SITTING
ON
TOP
OF
THE
WORLD
AND
YOU
don't—"
"Charles."
"—even seem to know what to do about it. What?"
"Charles."
"Oh. Right. .."
Monday night, the promised South Sea islanders were late, and so from a vast distance, from faraway across the little round table set for five, from over the top of his own trembling black disc of Unicum. John watched Charles and Harvey massage their cocktails and converse past each other. He noticed this slight evidence of Charles's nervousness: Charles's smooth, interlocking surfaces were buckling and his distaste for Harvey emerged from under its protective cover (though Harvey, insulated in his own nervousness, did not notice). "They'll be here. They'll be here," Harvey assured them, unprompted, and sought to bring dead air to life with electrical wit: "So, honestly now, tell me straight—you think he's banging that Toldy woman?"
"Well aren't you a naughty sly boots." Charles looked at his watch and snapped two cuffs back over its face. "If he was, he's in no condition to do it now."
"Oh you never know, Karoly—"
"Charles. Charles. It's English. It's your native tongue."
"Yeah, but she keeps a pretty close watch over him in a private room, you were saying, yeah? It might have been one of those strokes that stirs the blood, if you know what I mean. Heard of things like that."
"Charles, can't you shut this moron up?" Harvey and Charles looked up in surprise, and John realised with a flush of embarrassment that he hadn't just
thought it. The tone of Charles's laughter, however, was expertly pitched; Harvey recognized at once John's good joke, not to be taken seriously.
The private dining room's thick maroon curtains, .surrounding the table on three sides, parted silently and a tuxcdoed waiter held the dark velvet at bay for two South Sea islanders. The winter-pale man in front was the younger, only a few years older than Charles hut prematurely gray in every way in his faux-antique accountant's spectacles. Plastically handsome and weekly coiffed, he stepped aside, weakly coughed, and allowed his boss to enter the cramped luxury enclave first. Here was John's promised surprise and a momentary bubble of stopped time in which to examine if: a three-dimensional simulation of a famous TV and newspaper face, a Down tinder accent familiar from talk shows and news programs, the stern or slightly smug expression (two options only) that decorated a dozen business maga/ine covers each year. Harvey welcomed and introduced him with heavy respect. Before sitting or acknowledging the introductions, however, the vision turned to the waiter and ordered an obscurantist, antipodal cocktail as if he were the real man—the televised man—and so John could not really feel any credible doubt. The trademark cowboy hat, the clay of the prominent mole-island off the southeast coast of the nose, the eyebrows like primeval forests that TV makeup ladies must have had to toil long hours to glue into the semblance of smooth human features: The props were all familiar. Stranger, though, were the discrepancies: Just inside the curtained enclosure, the Australian had twiLchy bad habits evidently suppressiblc only for the length of a news profile and no longer. Where the television face always locked onto its off-camera interviewers with executive intensity, 3-D Melchior never made direct eye contact, and so again John could almost convince himself that an impostor had joined them at this private table at the King of the Huns. Under the dim light, under the one solid wall's ornately framed reproduction engravings of royal hunting parties, John felt a strange but physically perceptible relief to find here another larger-than-life man who wasn't much, actually much less than the world had been led to believe.
Hubert Melchior did not own the largest media empire in the world. There was a man in Atlanta and another Australian, and there were, presumably, powers in Hollywood and Frankfurt and the glassed-in aeries of Manhattan, whose names had not bubbled to the surface of world consciousness, all of whom had longer tentacles, more influence, more televisions and books and newspapers expressing their branded opinions. But with enough to go around.
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Hubert Melchior's was one of those names that—even if one never followed business and finance—always seemed familiar. ("Ts he the one who did that stunt, the thing with the flaming kangaroos?")
"These are the blokes scared you so bad, Kyle?" Melchior muttered as he sat down with a little grunt. His gray assistant laughed slightly and nodded on cue. The jibe was delivered in a weirdly humorless monotone, almost a mumble, not the boisterous corporate faux-cheer John expected. Melchior didn't look at his assistant, had hardly looked enough at John or Charles to determine whether they were, in fact, sufficiently intimidating or not to have scared Kyle so bad. He watched instead his own hands, which, palms down, glided over the wooden table in random, slow-moving patterns.