by Lisa Mason
“I do, but it will have to wait for another time.”
He climbs the stairs again and walks past billboards depicting palms, staring eyes, mystic triangles, astrological signs. Ah, this must be the hall of fortune-tellers. Then calligraphy on gilt and red signs, drawings depicting the weird little legs of the ginseng root. He glances in the door and spies a Chinese herbalist bending over huge straw baskets of roots and barks and sticks and God knows what. A wicker tray offers lizards, serpents, and other unidentifiable reptiles split open and dried like beef jerky. Down the hall, a billboard of a man’s body, his internal organs and nerves and blood vessels on display and lines and arrows drawn all over him purporting to show the currents of the body’s energy. Myriad needles are poised at certain junctures. Acupuncture. Daniel believes that’s what they call this strange science. Brr, needles. Not for him.
Then there are tailors with their bolts of cloth and dead-faced mannequins, and dealers in goods too old to be new and too new to be antiques. He finds another open door yielding to a spectacular room. The floor on the next story has been torn out so that the ceiling is a full two stories high—thirty or forty feet! A cast-iron staircase winds up to that ceiling, and the room is entirely lined, floor to ceiling, with books. Books, books, and more books—some crumbling and dirty-looking, quite a few more finely bound in leather with gold and silver leaf glinting on their spines. Daniel has never seen so many books.
“What is this place?” he whispers to a bespectacled clerk who passes by with an armful of books.
“Why, this is Mayor Sutro’s private library,” the clerk whispers back. “He’ll have a million books before long.” He shoos Daniel out and shuts the door.
Third floor, fourth floor. He huffs and puffs up the stairs. Zhu claims chain-smoking is what causes his shortness of breath. What nonsense. He taps out a ciggie, lights it. It’s this indolent life he’s led in San Francisco, lazier than his time in Paris. That’s what has stolen his breath. Dust has gathered along the baseboards of the fourth floor, and quite a few of the suites are vacant. Other gentlemen, apparently, are not so willing to hike up four flights of marble stairs, and the Monkey Block boasts no elevator like the skyscrapers on Market Street. Perhaps, when his business picks up, Daniel himself could establish an office here. There’s a happy thought—Daniel J. Watkins, Esquire, etched in gold letters on a glass door. But what is he? A real estate broker, a spinner of pictures, a dreamer, a drunk?
No! Not a drunk. Not anymore.
And there, at the end of the hall is the sign for Dr. Mortimer, Physician.
Daniel hesitates before knocking, suddenly unwilling to confess his distress to a total stranger. He could simply cut down. Skip the brandy for breakfast. Hell, do not breakfast with Jessie Malone at all. The Queen of the Underworld is a terrible influence. He ought to take coffee and toast and Mariah’s fresh-squeezed orange juice in his suite. And stay away from the Cocktail Route, lay off the Green Fairy, not to mention mescal and Pisco Punch. He ought to purchase a bicycle. Bicycle riding, that’s the ticket. Fabulous for the health, they say. Put him right in no time. A two-wheeler with one of those silver bells, a horn, and a silver flask. A flask, of course. He licks his lips. By God, he’s dry.
As though sensing his presence through the smoked glass, the physician bounds out into the hall. “Hello there, sir! Either you’re lost or you’ve come to see me, and both may amount to the same thing.” He makes a show of sniffing Daniel’s breath. “Ah, here to see me, then. Here for the cure. Of course, you are. Come in, come in!”
Daniel recoils. What unpardonable rudeness from a total stranger. From anyone else, that would warrant a good pop in the trap. But this is the good doctor with the cure.
Dr. Mortimer seizes him by the sleeve and practically flings him inside, shoving him down in a burgundy leather club chair. A full skeleton dangles from an iron rod in the corner. Hand-colored lithographs of bodily organs line the walls as Mortimer seats himself at a spartan walnut desk. Bile rises in Daniel’s throat. The opposite wall is even less comforting—stoppered jars contain decomposing organic matter moldering in formaldehyde. Daniel compares the preserved rot to the lithographs, identifying a brain, a kidney, a curled intestine. He cannot identify the rest. Does not want to try.
“Now then, young sir, let’s get down to business.” Mortimer is absolutely blazing with healthful energy. He’s in his early thirties, perhaps, with a receding hairline, a neat French mustache, and penetrating brown eyes sparkling with deep sympathy. Those eyes notice Daniel’s distress, and the physician leaps to his feet and fetches a cut-crystal glass of water. He’s got an excellent physique, Daniel notices, trim and wiry beneath his well-cut brown serge suit, his slim waist nicely cinched. He hands Daniel the glass and seats himself at the desk again, making a show of whipping out a clean new file and snapping it open to a questionnaire. He dips his pen in an inkwell, poised to write. Smiling, rosy-cheeked, and bright-eyed.
Daniel tips the glass to his lips. Water is the last thing in the world he wants. Poor old Tchaikovsky and his cholera. But he sips, encouraged by Mortimer’s energy and kindly purpose.
“I shall need to take your vital statistics,” Mortimer says and spits out questions. “Mhm, twenty-one years of age. Mhm, Saint Louis. Ah, real estate, you don’t say. Splendid.” His lively eyes flip up from the questionnaire and regard Daniel acutely. “Now then, young sir. Drinking every day, are you?”
“I fear so.”
“When do you start?”
“At breakfast, of course.’
“And continue till night?”
“Well into the night.” Daniel kneads his forehead. Mescal is leaving a nasty ache behind his eyes. He licks his lips. If only he had a shot, one little shot. Of something. Anything.
“Hung over now, are you?”
“What in bloody hell do you think?”
“Splendid. Got the shakes? Mhm.” Scratch, scratch of his pen. “Bowels loose? Nosebleeds? Dyspepsia? Aches and pains? Unpredictable moods? Melancholy? Seeing things?”
“Seeing what things?” Daniel snaps.
“Well, I don’t know. Things crawling just out of the sight of your eye. People out to persecute you.”
“No, nothing like that.” Were the roughnecks in the fishermen’s togs merely his imagination? No, Harvey’s thugs are hardly imaginary. The goose egg on his noggin is still tender.
“Splendid. Beat the wife?”
“Not married.”
“Beat the mistress?”
The mistress. Daniel is silent. His mistress says she’s from six hundred years in the future, and she sees things. She’s insane, quite insane, slipping her eyes to the side when she thinks he’s not watching, muttering to herself. Speaking in voices. He remembers the first time he heard one of her lunatic voices, which she managed to project with the facility of a professional ventriloquist. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. What does he see in her? She’s Jessie’s servant. A Chinese servant, one of the lower races and a woman, an inferior to him in every way he can fathom. Yet he’s seen her heal the crack in a man’s skull. Seen her fight off thugs with her bare hands. Seen her, for that matter, add and subtract columns of numbers that would make his head swim. The mere sight of her excites in him the snake of lust and, when he’s stinking, she robs him of his sense and good graces. With her gentle strength, she entreats him not to harm himself, while he harms her so much with his cold fury, his assaults on her womanhood. In so many ways, she’s better to him than his own—
Better than his own mother, is the thought he wants to finish. You see? he berates himself. He thinks too much when the drink is in him. Thinks and thinks till he’s half-mad.
“Can you help me, Dr. Mortimer?”
“Can I help you?” Mortimer flings his pen down, caps the inkwell. He leaps to his feet, sprints over to the chair, pulls up a stool, and straddles it. He leans intently into Daniel’s face. “Young sir, I am not a moralist. I am not a temperance worker. I a
m a physician, and I know very well how the cares of our modern life weigh heavily upon us all.” Mortimer sighs deeply. “Do you know how man used to live? Man did not live in these accursed cities, filled with bad air and noise and poxy women. Man did not live subjected to the factory boss or the financier. No, man lived in the country, in the field, in the forest. In the jungle! In paradise, young sir. Man was free. He worked as he pleased, took his ease when he wanted, ate healthfully and abundantly. And man in these blissful times had another healthful amusement besides the hunt, the games, the songs, the virgins.”
“What other amusement was that?”
Mortimer moves closer, and Daniel can smell lavender cologne over the athletic smell of his sweat. “In our very own New World, south of the border, is a marvelous plant known to the glorious gold-drenched civilization of the Incas. It is the sacred plant of their heathen goddess which they harvested readily from their jungle paradise and used extensively in arcane ancient rituals.”
Daniel gulps more water, still thirsting for a drink. Perhaps less so, now.
“Mere Indians were not the only ones to acquaint themselves with the divine plant,” Mortimer says. “It was the conquistadors, those stern men of swordsmanship and domination, who discovered the divine plant for the rest of the modern civilized world and laid it at our feet. For they knew it to be a healthful boon.”
“I never heard of such a thing,” Daniel says.
“Young sir, the divine plant has found its way into our American cities in manifold ways. The dockworkers of New Orleans were among the first to partake of it. An observer I know personally has witnessed the increased endurance, the remarkable persistence, the stamina, the building up of sheer strength, the suppression of appetite, not to mention the cheerful disposition—without drink, mind you—among those hardworking men.”
“Without drink?”
“Without drink, young sir, and laughing in the sun.” Mortimer leaps to his feet, sprints around behind his desk, and produces charts, diagrams, ink drawings, more lithographs. “The divine plant is a stimulant, understand that, and as a stimulant not only does it produce all the salubrious effects I’ve just mentioned, but works as a cure for anemia, bronchitis, debility, la grippe, sore throat, angina pectoris, and lung troubles. Gastric carcinoma, pneumonia, typhoid fever, all these ills have been cured. Not to mention shock and sexual exhaustion.” He leans over the desk, and directs his blazing brown eyes into Daniel’s dazed gaze. “Melancholia? Of course! Need I add the cure for dipsomania?”
“I must try it!” Daniel cries.
“The cure is guaranteed.” Mortimer sits and folds his hands. “But, of course, living life is up to you, young sir. Dipsomania of your sort is a powerful disease. If you feel compelled to return to the bottle after the divine plant of the goddess, there is not much more I can do for you.”
“I understand. Please! Let me try it.”
Mortimer leaps to his feet again and leads Daniel to a side table. A wide flat mirror is set into the sort of silver tray a woman might use to display her perfume bottles. Mortimer reaches into a drawer, takes out a vial of fine white powder and a straight-edge razor blade. He spills a little mound of powder onto the mirror and chops at it like a Chinese cook preparing vegetables. In this fashion, he rearranges the powder into long, fine lines. Now he takes out a straw made of silver with cunning little designs of snakes entwined around the shaft.
“You ingest the cure like this,” Mortimer says and, with a vigorous inhalation, promptly sniffs up two lines of the powder through the straw. “You try it now. Take one nostril, then the other,” he says, coaching.
Daniel does as he’s told. A short blast of pain assaults him and the new discomfort of the astringent powder flying up his nose. A bitter taste pools at the back of his throat.
Medicine. By God, why must medicine always taste so dreadful?
And then sheer energy careens into his brain, a short blinding moment, a vertigo. The whole world reels and spins. And then the moment of reeling blindness passes into a sheer wash of pleasure, of strength, of good health and stimulation. Bliss, vigor itself, this sacred gift from the heathen goddess!
“Dr. Mortimer, I am cured!”
“Well now, well now,” the physician murmurs, clearly pleased. “Would you like a prescription?”
“Of course! How much?”
“Five dollars, please.”
It only takes money, that’s what poor old Schultz said. Daniel counts out coins. The proceeds from the sale of the Western Addition lot are flying out of his boodle bag like pigeons startled from a roost. Well. He shall spend no more cash on the Cocktail Route. He is cured of that expensive hobby.
“What is this divine plant of the Incas, Dr. Mortimer?” Daniel asks as he hands over the money.
“Young sir, the heathens plucked leaves right off the miraculous tree and chewed them as a cow chews her cud.” Mortimer hands over a receipt, a tiny silver spoon, and three vials of the white powder. “As you can see, the sacrament comes in a refined form these days. We physicians call it by a scientific name.”
“What name is that?”
“We call it cocaine.”
*
Cured!
In the space of an hour, Daniel has reclaimed his soul, restored his health and his sanity. Miracle! Invincible, he feels positively invincible. This must be how a Titan feels, thundering across the primordial world, fearing no one, shrinking from nothing. His blood soars! The pathetic stupor of mescal for lunch and brandy for breakfast is long gone. A god of the ancients he is, his muscles mythological, his brain swooping like a hawk. His eyes take in the splendor and the squalor of Montgomery Street in one omniscient glance as he steps out onto the sidewalk.
And what a sight it is—the proper plain-faced ladies suffocating in their corsets, sweating in their heavy dark dresses. The painted chippies pathetic in their shame, but colorful and lively. The bloated men of all classes leering at the women, filled with their self-importance and stupidity. All of them drunk, of course, from fine gentleman to roustabout. And the celebrants of el Dia de los Muertos, lunatics cavorting in their death’s-head masks, making mockery of the grim ultimate solution to all man’s ill’s.
Not Daniel J. Watkins. He is restored from the Dead!
He stands at the corner of Columbus and Montgomery. The weird angle of the streets suddenly appears to him as a fork in the road designed by the Devil. He must choose his path. How he has longed to choose his path! And suddenly his path is clear. He will settle Father’s paltry real estate dealings. He will make the deadbeats pay or quit the premises, make them settle their accounts one way or another. As is only right and proper.
And then?
Then he is desperate to figure out how to make photographs project on a wall in a sequence so that the persistence of vision will make each image a whole, make images move and dance like life itself. Indeed, designs for such a gizmo dance through his newly stimulated mind. Flip the images like a deck of cards? Or wrap a roll of photographic paper on a spool and spin it? And if such a feat could be done? Why, the story of civilization could be told in pictures. The mighty empires of Europe and the East. America’s hardscrabble story, every sacrifice and adventure and great love. How many thrilling stories could be shown in pictures if only one could figure out how to make static images come alive.
Dr. Mortimer’s cure is a rousing success. Daniel can think more clearly than he has in days. In years! His heart throbs with a glowing pleasure, and thoughts of sin swell in his mind. A happy side effect, according to Dr. Mortimer, encouraged by healthful radiance. He could take care of his vile need at once, for a red light glows in a little window on the third story of a commercial building two doors down. But Daniel J. Watkins does not pay for it.
Where is his mistress? He must see her at once.
He dashes downtown to Sutter Street, barges into the Parisian Mansion. There he finds Zhu and Jessie Malone conferring in the parlor, Li’l Lucy weeping. Several o
ther sporting gals stand around with troubled faces. The ugly little Peruvian maid watches from the sidelines with a look of smug triumph.
“Please, Miss Malone,” Li’l Lucy cries. “Give me a chance. Just one more chance.”
“Your jig is up, Li’l Lucy,” Jessie says. “And don’t say I didn’t warn you, neither, because I did. I’ve warned you over and over till I’m blue in the face. I’ll not have a poxy girl at the Parisian Mansion. The biz is the biz.”
“We can try to treat her symptoms,” Zhu argues. “The disease goes into remission. It’s not her fault, Miss Malone.”
“And whose fault is it, then, may I ask?” Jessie snaps her fingers, and the Peruvian maid scurries over with a goblet of champagne.
“I was just saying today to a fine lady that you’re fair, Miss Malone. Don’t make me regret those words.”
“She knows she gotta douche, and she don’t do it. She ties one on and passes out.”
“Please, Miss Malone,” Li’l Lucy whimpers. “Please.”
“Have you heard about a method of protection called condoms?’ Zhu says. “The girls should use them. You could practically eliminate your problems with disease, not to mention pregnancy.”
“Missy, if this is one of your gadgets from six hundred years in the future, I am sure we cannot just go down to Kepler’s Sundries and pick up a few.”
“Actually, you can,” Zhu says. “I read an article in The Argonaut just yesterday. I know you loved newfangled things, Miss Malone, and this is the latest thing in the French brothels. Really, I don’t know why you don’t already use them as a regular practice in your business. My spirit Muse tells me that condoms have been around since the 1700s.”
“Sure and what is this thing, exactly, and what’s it made of?”
Daniel listens closely, his face heating up at his mistress’s frank talk.