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growing compulsive (I do keep my own apartment neat, though I’d neverbefore felt any anxiety at Perkus’s chaos), I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. It was certainly the case that blundering in on Perkus’s headache had made me self-conscious and pensive, but I felt I couldn’t go. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and Perkus offered no comment, apart from the slightest moan. But after I’d been clattering at his compact discs for a while he said, “Find Sandy Bull.”
    “What?”
    “Sandy Bull… he’s a guitarist … the songs are very long… I can tolerate them in this state … it gives me something to listen to besides this throbbing…”
    I found the disk and put it in his player. The music seemed to me insufferably droning, psychedelic in a minor key, suitable more for a harem than a sickroom. But then I really know nothing about music or headaches.
    “You can go …” said Perkus. “I’ll be fine …”
    “Do you need food?”
    “No… when it’s like this I can’t eat …”
    Well, Perkus couldn’t eat one of Jackson Hole’s fist-size burgers, I’d grant that. I wondered if a plate of some vegetable or a bowl of soup might be called for, but I wasn’t going to mother him. So I did go, first lowering the lights, but leaving the creepy music loud, as Perkus wished. I found myself strangely bereft, discharged into the vacant hours. I’d come to rely on my Perkus afternoons, and how they turned into evenings. The light outside was all wrong. I realized I couldn’t recall a time I’d not come back through his lobby, brain pleasantly hazy, into a throng of Brandy’s Piano Bar patrons ignoring the sign and smoking and babbling outside on the pavement, while piano tinkling and erratic choruses of sing-along drifted from withinthe bar to the street. Now all was quiet, the stools upturned on Brandy’s tables. And all I could think of was Perkus, stilled on the couch, his lids swollen beneath the washcloth.
    The next time I saw Perkus I made the mistake of asking if his tendency to veer into ellipsis was in any way connected to the cluster migraines. He’d been bragging the week before about his capacity for shifting into that satori-like state; how, when he ventured there, he glimpsed bonus dimensions, worlds inside the world. Most of his proudest writing, he’d explained, was born of some glimpse of ellipsistic knowledge .
    “There’s no connection,” he said now, where we sat in our Jackson Hole booth, his distaff eye bulging. “Cluster’s a death state, where all possibilities shut down… I’m not myself there… I’m not anyone. Ellipsis is mine , Chase.”
    “I only wondered if they might somehow be two sides of the same coin…” Or two ways of peering out of the same skull, I thought but didn’t say.
    “I can’t even begin to explain. It’s totally different.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said spontaneously, wanting to calm him.
    “Sorry for what?” He’d spat out a gobbet of burger in his fury at refuting me.
    “I didn’t mean anything.”
    “Ellipsis is like a window opening, Chase. Or like—art. It stops time.”
    “Yes, you’ve said.” The clot of chewed beef sat beside his napkin, unnoticed except by me.
    “Cluster, on the other hand—they’re enemies.”
    “Yes.” He’d persuaded me. It hadn’t taken much. I wanted to persuade him , now, to see an Eastern healer I knew, a master of Chinese medicine who, operating out of offices in Chelsea, and with a waiting list of six months or more, ministered to Manhattan’swealthy and famous, charming and acupuncturing away their ornate stresses and decadent ills. I promised myself I’d try, later, when Perkus’s anger cooled. I wanted so badly for him to have his ellipsis, have it wholly and unreservedly, wanted him to have it without cluster—however terribly