Aug 182011
 

I tripped over the candlesticks. The apartment was in splendid disarray. Piles of papers, sketches, perfect color prints, scraps of lugubrious and obscene cartoons spilling everywhere in wheaty sheaves. Several pyramids of ashes dotted the corners of the dusty windows and the disheveled bed. And there, in the bed, just discernable under a wadded swaddling of cheap muslin, a chunky lump moaned indecipherable phrases.

“Horrible… void… cessation… punchline….”

A bloody puddle bloomed in the center of the soiled whites. After getting up from my logjam of candlesticks, I made my way toward the puddle, calling M. Baudelaire’s name carefully, and finally turned down the bedsheets to reveal the suffering man.

His form seemed minimalized and dead pale, an albino capuchin monkey. Barefooted in his sweat-through night shirt, he shivered pitifully, as if in the final clasp of influenza. His forehead, normally so large and open, was sunken, clotted with a body’s self-concern for survival–no matter what the mind within wanted. Dead pale, blanched, and wrinkled. It was as if his entire mentality had been momentarily erased and only a knot of hurting muscle remained where exalted thoughts had once unfolded their whitest wings….

He had stabbed his heart!

My breath caught in my throat, which was bone dry. Mercifully, the knife had been removed, sparing me that cadaverous task. (I later found the blade, a pewter letter-opener, stuck point-first in the floor behind the headboard.) I grabbed a small pillow–a sampler of his mother’s with some bible verse embroidered in rainbow tones–and pushed it against the weeping leak in his chest.

“Hold this tight, just here,” I instructed him. “I go to fetch the surgeon.”

“They will curse your name for saving me,” M. Baudelaire prophesied as I placed his hand firmly on his mother’s pillow.

But he nodded his head weakly, a balloon tugged by its invisible string. This thin assurance would have to do; the situation, as they say, was dire. I took his doubtful accession to my command and hoped–if not for the best exactly, then at least for endurance enough for both of us to survive the present circumstances.

Later, after I had pointed the surgeon to his rooms, and informed one of M. Baudelaire’s unsavory associates (whom I met along the way) of his predicament, I thought I’d stop in at Mme. Zazzy’s gin shop, just off the side street that zips back to Ancelle’s office. I needed a drink!

Maybe I’ll try that new, blue vodka, clear and caustic as my Marie’s eyes….

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