A doctor took pictures of my lungs. They were full of snow flurries.
When I walked out the office all the people in the waiting room looked grateful they weren't me. Certain things you can see in a person's face.
I'd felt something was wrong because days before I had chased a guy up two flights of stairs and I'd had trouble breathing, like there was a barbell on my chest. I'd been drinking pretty hard for a couple weeks, but I knew it was more than that. I'd gotten so angry about the sudden pain that I broke the man's hand. He spat teeth and complained to Stan that he thought it was excessive.
But that's why they've always given me work. Because I'm excessive.
I told Stan about the chest pains and he sent me to a doctor who was into him for forty large.
Outside the doctor’s office now I took the cigarettes from my jacket and started to crush the pack in my hands, but I decided this was no time to quit. I lit one up there on the sidewalk but it didn’t taste good and the smoke made me think of cotton fibers weaving through my chest. Buses and cars cruised slow and daylight flashed off their glass and chrome. Behind my sunglasses it was kind of like I was at the bottom of the sea and the vehicles were fish. I imagined a much darker, cooler place, and the fish became shadows.
A horn jolted me awake. I’d started to step off the curb. I flagged down a taxi.
I was thinking about Loraine, a girl I’d once dated, and how one night I’d stayed up talking with her till dawn on a beach in Galveston, from a spot where we could watch the plump white exhaust from oil refineries unroll in the distance like a road into the sun. That would have been ten, eleven years ago. She was always too young for me, I guess.
Even before the X-rays I was already foul with anger because the woman I had thought of as my girlfriend, Carmen, had started sleeping with my boss, Stan Ptitko. I was on my way to meet him at his bar. Not much point today. But you don’t stop being who you are just because there’s a blizzard of soap chips in your chest.
There’s no getting out alive, but you hope to avoid a deadline.
I wasn’t going to tell Stan or Angelo or Lou about my lungs. I didn’t want them hanging out at the bar, talking about me when I wasn’t there. Laughing.
Fingerprints smudged the cab’s window, and uptown approached outside of it. Some places open themselves for you, but there was nothing gatelike about New Orleans. The city was a sunken anvil that sustained its own atmosphere. The sun flared between buildings and oak trees and I felt the light on my face and then the shade, like a strobe. I thought about Carmen’s ass, and the way she smiled at me over her shoulder. I still thought about Carmen, and it didn’t make sense because I knew she was a whore and totally heartless. She’d been with Angelo Medeiras when we started up. I guess I took her from him, more or less. Now she was with Stan. Angelo worked for him, too. It cooled my sense of insult to assume she was balling a few guys behind Stan’s back.
I was trying to think of who I could tell about my lungs, because I wanted to tell someone. You have to admit that’s a bullshit piece of news to get when you’ve got business to attend.
The bar was called Stan’s Place, brick and tin-roofed, with barred windows and a dented metal door.
Lou Theriot, Jay Meires, and a couple people I didn’t know sat inside, old guys. The bartender’s name was George. His left ear was packed with white gauze. I asked him where Stan was and he nodded toward a set of stairs running up the wall to the office. The door was closed, so I sat on a stool and ordered a beer. Then I remembered that I was dying and changed the order to a Johnnie Walker Blue. Lou and Jay were talking about a problem with one of the bookmaking franchises. I could tell because I’d run book for a few years in my early twenties and knew the language. They stopped talking and looked up at me because I was listening. I didn’t smile or anything and they went back to talking, but much softer now, with their heads turned down so I couldn’t hear. They never cared much for me. They knew Carmen as a waitress here, before she hooked up with Stan, and I think they had some ill will toward me on her behalf.