He pulled himself up a swaying wall and tried to see. All that frantic bedlam before him seemed to have slowed and each whirling face swam off in perfect parallax like warriors and their mentors twinned, a roomful of hostile and manic Siamese. Ahhh, said Suttree. Making his way toward the door he realized with a faint surge of that fairyland feeling from childhood wonders that the face he passed wide eyed by the side of an upturned table was a dead man. Someone going with him saw him see. That’s fucking awful, he said. Suttree was bleeding from the ears and couldnt hear well but he thought so too. They stumbled on like the damned in off the plains of Gomorrah. Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle.
He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing. He tried to move but the jagged ends of bone in his chest were like scissors. His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. He raised his eyes and felt the dried blood crack across his forehead. Lights kept rising one by one and after a while he realized that they were bulbs in a corridor ceiling and that the periodic squeaking sound was a caster on the cart that was wheeling him. The emergency room was filled with people bleeding. Grumous battlers with misshapen heads. All watched over by hordes of police. They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.
Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who’d spoke of disorders of the soul and news of night. When you asked for the shop of the heart’s apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon’s keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb hobbled after.
The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a nightbeast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorous on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curbside cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.
Suttree heard people discussing his skull. Could he but see himself. His head half shaved and gray and numb with novocaine. An old doctor with a mosquitoclamp and a needle stitched his scalp. Suttree still in his street clothes, one sleeve cut away, stained and stinking with blood and beer and shit. A nurse sat with his elbow in her lap, picking out pieces of glass with a pair of forceps and placing them in a steel tray.
He woke in a small white room. Late evening. Bird shadows oblique upon the wall. He raised his head and looked about. Two pigeons on the windowsill ruffled their feathers. A westerly view, cold winter sunlight. Constant beyond the sounds of traffic in the streets there boomed a slow roll of surf. His head was swathed in bandages and his hand hurt. He held it up. One finger wrapped and resting in an aluminum holder. His hand separated into two hands side by side both injured. He blinked his eyes and they rejoined. Callahan, you bastard, he said. He lay back and slept.
When he woke again he saw that he was not in a room but in a ward. The screen had been pushed away from his bed and he could see down a long hall many men in beds like his. Night time, yellow bulbs burning in the ceiling. A nurse was going down the ward with a cart collecting the dinner trays. He had to keep blinking his eyes to keep things ordered and discrete. He seemed to be in an old folks’ home. Iron beds filled with gray octogenarians propped upright in nightshirts, humped and hawking and leering beadily at one another like paranoids.
Suttree tried to raise himself onto one elbow but his chest hurt. He was wrapped in tape to his armpits and he had an image of burial windings here in this room among the dying. He tried to focus his eyes. To see one person in the ward who looked as if he might have more than days to live. A cold sweat broke out upon him. He felt his head. Terminal brain damage under the towels? He tried to recite the multiplication tables and this filled him with sexual memories and caused him to lie back smiling. He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back.