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Brandy’s puts out their garbage.”
    “Where does he live?”
    Perkus shrugged. “I don’t know that he particularly lives anywhere , Chase. He sometimes sleeps under a pool on Orchard Street, he says it’s a block run by Mafia, so no one would ever suspect orbother him. I believe he often simply sleeps on the subway trains when he goes down there.”
    “But why… does he go … down there? Or come … up here?”
    “I never asked.” Perkus poured two cups of coffee. He rolled another joint out of the loose dope scattered on the linoleum, to replace what he’d added to Biller’s care package. The brand was Silver Haze. Sharing it with Biller seemed at once a kind of communion, lowered from above to those supplicant hands, and a gesture of egalitarian comradeship: I self-medicate, why shouldn’t you? And the Chandler novel with the vintage cover art—did Perkus have two copies of that, or was he gradually feeding his precious collection out onto the street to Biller? For Perkus, books were sandwiches, apparently, to be devoured.
    Perkus was alert to my fascination. “I’ll introduce you,” he said. “He’s just shy at first.”
    Marijuana might have been a constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java heisted. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: “Oh caffeine!/you contemporary fiend screen/into your face I’ve seen/into my face/through my face—” And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.
    I pictured the fugue that resulted in this writing being interrupted by a seizure of migraine, the pen dropping from Perkus’s hand as he succumbed to one of his cluster headaches. It was impossible not to picture it this way because of the day I walked in on himin the grip of a fresh one. He’d called to invite my dropping by, then fell victim. The door was unlocked and he beckoned me inside from where he lay on his couch, in his suit pants and a yellowed T-shirt, with a cool cloth draped over his eyes. He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he’d so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache.
    “It’s a bad one,” he said. “The first day is always the worst. I can’t look at the light.”
    “You never know when it’s coming?”
    “There’s a kind of warning aura an hour or two before,” he croaked out. “The world begins shrinking…”
    I moved for his bathroom, and he said, “Don’t go in there. I puked.”
    What I did I will admit is unlike me: I went in and cleaned up Perkus’s vomit. Further, seeking out a sponge in his kitchen sink I ran into a mess there, a cereal bowl half filled with floating Cheerios, cups with coffee evaporating to filmy stain rings. While Perkus lay on the couch breathing heavily through a washcloth, I quietly tinkered at his kitchen, putting things in a decent order, not wanting him to slip into derangement and unhealth on what it had suddenly occurred to me was my watch —he appeared so disabled I could imagine him not budging from that couch for days. Not counting Biller, who’d stayed outside the window, I’d never seen another soul in Perkus’s apartment except for his pot dealer. The dinette table was scattered with marijuana, half of it pushed through a metal strainer, the rest still bunchy with seeds. I swept it all back into a plastic box labeled FUNKY MONKEY and scooped the joints Perkus had completed into the Altoids tin he kept for that purpose. Then,