“You sound better,” she said uncomfortably.

“I’m horrible,” I said.

“Look, Chase, sick isn’t my thing. You should call your friends.”

On that chilly note we ended the call. I’d have liked to think she meant we were something more than friends, though nothing in her tone had encouraged me to think she meant anything but less. Perhaps she’d only visited the first time to be sure I wasn’t malingering. I’d never even been inside Oona’s apartment and now I wondered whether she’d be inside mine again. All I had to show for my illicit love was wrinkled magazines, and the copy of People had turned out to be a poison pill, containing a one-page piece on Janice’s diagnosis called “Adversity in the Sky.” I left it untouched on my couch. Oona must have spotted the item herself, and what she meant by bringing it into my apartment I couldn’t guess.

Perkus didn’t find me, but Susan Eldred did. The occasion was the arrival in her office of the first finished DVD copies of The City Is a Maze. When Susan learned I was sick she used her lunch hour to visit, showing no fear of taking away my infection, bearing in roast lentil soup and a jar of a remedy she swore by, a mossy-smelling horse tablet called Wellness Formula. (These reminded me exactly of what Strabo Blandiana might prescribe; in the next days I’d choke down as many of the pills as I could stand.) Along with the early copy of Von Tropen Zollner’s film, Susan also brought a cache of Criterion booty, the cheeriest items, she claimed, on their list: William Powell and Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, a British romance called I Know Where I’m Going!, and what Susan advertised as “Godard’s only musical,” A Woman Is a Woman. This was the fifth or sixth day of my quarantine, my strength returning, and Susan struck me as a vision of what a sane, female version of Perkus Tooth might resemble: you didn’t have to be mad to care for mad stuff. Maybe Susan would stay and ladle me soup and educate me on the outer reaches of the Criterion list, and I could forget Perkus and Oona both. My self-pity was opening to a more acquisitive phase (sometimes, reinstated in my body by illness, in the grip of weakening fevers I woke to paradoxically vital erections), but Susan Eldred had a fiancé, as did Janice Trumbull, a fact everyone knew. So I let her get away unmolested.

I watched the effervescent My Man Godfrey first, then I tried I Know Where I’m Going! But I started the second feature at the wrong hour, my fever tending to peak toward midnight, and the movie, which seemed to concern a woman who was trying to leave one island and go to another, and a man who was afraid to enter, even in daylight, an ancient stone tower, struck me as dreamlike and terrifying, not a romance at all. At the climax, if I wasn’t actually dreaming, a man frantically rowed a minuscule boat at the edge of a whirlpool, thanks a lot, Susan. All the film lacked was a bear on a floe. The next morning I ejected the disk and put it with the others in a drawer (I was relieved to have skirted the Godard musical). I only paused to glance at Perkus’s liner notes for The City Is a Maze, which began: As Leonard Cohen tells us, “there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.” Equally, according to Iris Murdoch, “the bereaved have no language for speaking to the unbereaved.” For denizens of the country of Noir, such protests delineate the incommensurable rift or gulf between those doomed to patrol the night country and those moored in daylight, a coexistence of realms, one laid upon the other as veneer. This irreconcilable doubleness may be credited to dictates of the Production Code, but is also grounded in the fecund versatility of the studio system, where crew, actors, and even sets were employed in hasty alternation to the task of depicting the fates of both doomed and undoomed, bereaved and unbereaved. Many of the studio pros helping realize Zollner’s exemplary nightmare had been, weeks before, shooting a romantic comedy on the same row of facsimile New York brownstones as The City Is a Maze, one featuring the same lead players, among whom Edmond O’Brien, for one, gives no evidence of having read to the end of the script to see his character’s fate…

Oh, I missed him, and his ridiculous language. I wanted to hear Perkus speak it again, everything revealing its opposite, everything incommensurate and irreconcilable and unbereaved. In the same spirit, we’d been too briefly chaldroned, and now were unchaldroned. Was it better to have loved chaldrons and lost, or never to have loved them at all? And what came after?

In this interval I barely saw a newspaper, but I gathered that the chocolate smell cleared up without explanation. Also I heard that the cold front wouldn’t budge, the slate skies winter-locked, and that the tiger wrecked a York Avenue temple gymnasium where aging Jewish men played pickup ball every Monday and Wednesday in a game that had been regular for thirty years. The following day the mayor’s office unveiled a Web site for tracking the tiger’s movements, and recommended it to those seeking forewarning of traffic tie-ups and subway cancellations. All this came to me while flipping channels, and when I passed over a news station I never lingered. I avoided news and newspapers because I feared getting word of Janice’s heroic self-biopsy, and what it would reveal. I learned anyway, from breaking-news crawls at the bottom of my screen, that she had a malignant cancer in her foot, and spreading to other regions. That plans were under way for a course of improvised chemotherapy, using what they had on hand in Northern Lights’ medical supplies. Possibly an attempt would be made to launch a small rocket filled with better meds past the Chinese mines, into orbit, where the Russians could grapple it into the space station. Failing chemical intervention, there was talk of the possibility of a desperate surgery, even amputation.

In my head I composed tormented letters, but I’d been warned that Mission Control would refuse their delivery, so I never put a word on paper. I screened my calls. The only news I wanted, finally, was outside my window: that the birds still attacked their routes around the spire, those pathways to nowhere that seemed to articulate my own invisible urgencies. The birds couldn’t interpret the stone, but by their proximity they could seem to define it, adore it, abide with it. That was as near to a sense of valuable work in the world as I could imagine myself having. Only I would need, when I was well again, to make sure of what my own church spire should be. I knew the plan for Chase Insteadman was that I should wait for Janice. Yet something nearer at hand, some person or artifact, some situation or scene, was calling. I didn’t know whether I was bereaved or unbereaved, but I wasn’t bereaved the way I felt I ought to be.

Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji came on Thursday. I was almost well. They learned not from Perkus (who might be oblivious, so far as I knew) but from Maud Woodrow, whom I’d telephoned just hoping for some breath of gossip in my loneliness, not because I hoped she’d visit or even be particularly sympathetic. When I’d then been contacted by Richard I explained I was really fine, but he said Georgina insisted they look in. The two of them arrived just before noon with a caterer’s roasted turkey and some sides, shocking me. Richard seemed to think it was incredibly funny, and maybe it was. He wore an expensive Burberry coat, unmistakably new, and after he helped Georgina out of her own he went into my wardrobe and found wooden hangers for them both. The Hawkman helped me set a small table, scooping sweet-potato mash and creamed spinach from plastic quarts into rarely used serving bowls, gravy poured into a coffee mug, and dusting off a batch of cloth napkins I’d forgotten I owned. We even switched on the television to catch the end of the Macy’s parade, the kooky giant balloons, supermen and Gnuppets and unrecognizable new personae bobbing through the sleety canyons, the kids toughing it out in the cold.