Will Call

by Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The rule at Kessler's Pharmacy was fourteen days. A prescription that was filled and bagged and stapled and set in the will-call bin behind the counter, and not collected in fourteen days, went back to stock. The label was peeled off and torn in half. The tablets went back into the big brown bottle they had been counted out of, and the charge came off the book. Ruth Kessler did the returns herself on the last Saturday of the month, standing at the bin with a pencil behind her ear, and she had done them that way since 1951.

On the last Friday of February 1983, at ten minutes to eight, Neil Szabo stood at the bin with the overhead lights already off in the front of the store and counted the bags.

There were nineteen. Sixteen were ordinary: a Mrs. Albright's thyroid, two penicillins for children with ear infections whose mothers would come in on Monday swearing they had picked them up, somebody's Valium. Three were not ordinary. He had put them at the back of the bin, behind the D's, where the eye did not go.

FERRARO, D. — Bactrim DS #40. Dr. Lerner. Twenty-three days.

KOVAC, A. — Nystatin oral susp. 100,000 u/ml, 480 ml. Dr. Lerner. Nineteen days.

WEEMS, R. L. — Zovirax oint. 5% 15 g. Dr. Hoyt. Seventeen days.

He knew the faces that belonged to the names. That was the job, or half of it. Danny Ferraro was thirty-one, a waiter at a place on Bank Street, who used to come in on Sunday mornings for aspirin and the Times and stand at the magazine rack reading the arts section without buying it. Andy Kovac had a dog, a grey whippet with a red collar, that he tied to the hydrant outside and that cried the whole time he was in the store. Ray Weems, Neil had seen only twice. He was from somewhere in the South and called Neil sir, which nobody in the West Village had done in twenty years.

He knew where Andy Kovac was, because the whippet was now being walked twice a day past the window by a woman from Andy's building. He did not know where the other two were. He had an idea.

He took the stenographer's pad out from under the cash register, where it lay on the shelf with the rubber bands and the roll of spare tape, and opened it to the page he had been on, and under the heading he had written that afternoon, Delivers, he wrote nothing. Then he put the pad in the inside pocket of his overcoat, which was where it went every night. It did not stay in the store overnight. That was one of his two rules about the pad. The other was that there were no customers in it.

There were seven pages. The handwriting got smaller as it went on. Doctors who don't lecture: Lerner on West 12th, Hoyt, a woman at the Ninth Street clinic whose name he had spelled two ways and then crossed out both. Dentist: one, on Bank Street, last appointment of the day, gloves, two pairs; he would not say so on the telephone, you had to go in and ask for the five-thirty. Lawyer — wills, where the friend inherits: one, on Christopher Street, upstairs over a shoe repair shop, forty dollars. Funeral: here there had been three names, and two were crossed out, and the third was in Brooklyn, a man named Ruiz in Sunset Park who would come to the hospital for the body when the parlours on Bleecker Street would not. Hospital — lets the friend stay: St. Vincent's, some floors, some nights; a question mark.

He had not meant to keep a list. It had begun the previous summer, at the slow hour after lunch, when men came to the counter with a prescription, and paid, and then did not leave, and stood there turning the white bag in their hands, and finally asked him something that had nothing to do with the prescription. Do you know a dentist who'll—. Is there anybody who'll do a will that—. They asked the pharmacist because the pharmacist was the only person in the medical world who would talk to you across a counter without an appointment, in your street clothes, for nothing. He had begun by remembering the answers. By November he had stopped trusting himself to remember them.

He locked the narcotics cabinet and checked it, and turned the sign, and let himself out the side door onto Hudson Street. It was raw and wet and smelled of the river. He walked home.

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Hal was in the kitchen with his feet in the plastic basin and the Post open on the table, not reading it. He had tuned five pianos that day, two of them on the Upper West Side in walk-ups, and his knees had views about it. He was fifty-three. He had been tuning pianos in Manhattan since 1956 and he had come up from Chattanooga with the tuning lever in a cardboard box, and he still said ma'am to old ladies, the way Ray Weems said sir.

"There's soup," Hal said. "It's the lentil. I did something to it."

"What did you do to it?"

"I don't know yet. Something with a lemon."

Neil took off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door, and Hal watched him take the pad out of the inside pocket and put it on top of the refrigerator, where it went every night, beside the jar of rubber bands and the flashlight. Hal watched this every night. Most nights he did not say anything.

"How many in the bin," Hal said.

"Nineteen."

"How many."

"Three."

Hal took his feet out of the basin and dried them, one and then the other, on the dish towel, which Neil had asked him a thousand times not to do. Neil ate the soup. It was better than the lentil usually was. He said so.

"It's the lemon," Hal said. Then: "Ruth does the returns tomorrow."

"I know when Ruth does the returns."

"What are you going to tell her?"

"I'm going to tell her they didn't forget."

Hal got up and went to the refrigerator and took the pad down from the top of it, and Neil put his spoon down. Hal did not open it. He held it in both hands, the way he held the felt mutes for a piano, by the edges.

"Third Avenue," Hal said. "Nineteen fifty-nine."

"I know."

"They had us all up against the bar. They went through every wallet. The sergeant had a notebook just like this one, the spiral at the top, and he wrote down every name and every address and every place of work. Place of work. I had nine clients on East End Avenue. By Christmas I had two." He put the pad back on top of the refrigerator, squared it to the edge. "You told me there's no customers in it."

"There aren't."

"There's doctors in it. There's a lawyer. There's a dentist who wears two pairs of gloves and doesn't want anybody to know it." Hal sat down and looked at the basin of grey water. "A list is a list, Neil. Anybody can pick it up and read it the other way."

Neil did not have an answer to that, because it was true. He washed the bowl and the pot, and Hal emptied the basin into the sink after him, which was the wrong order, and they went to bed. In the dark Hal put his hand flat in the middle of Neil's back, between the shoulder blades, which was where it had gone every night for nineteen years, and after a while Neil heard his breathing change. Neil did not sleep for some time. He lay and listened to the radiator knock.

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Ruth Kessler was seventy-three and four foot eleven, and she wore a grey cardigan with the pockets stretched out of shape by everything she kept in them: the pencil, the reading glasses, a pack of Sen-Sen, the key to the safe. She came from Berlin. She had come in 1938 with her husband, who had been a pharmacist in Charlottenburg and was a pharmacist again on Hudson Street by 1941, after taking the New York examinations at the age of forty-four in a language he had learned from the radio. He died in 1950. She had run the store since. She was not a pharmacist. She was the owner, and she hired pharmacists, and she had hired Neil in 1968 after asking him three questions, the last of which was whether he could be on time.

At ten past ten on Saturday, she called him into the back.

The three bags were on the desk in the back room, beside the adding machine, in a row. She had not peeled the labels. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, which was how she sat when she was waiting for a supplier to explain an invoice.

"Twenty-three days," she said. "Nineteen. Seventeen."

"Yes."

"You know the rule."

"Yes."

"Then tell me." She did not say explain. She said tell me, and waited.

So he told her. Not all of it. He told her that Danny Ferraro had not been in since the end of January, and that Andy Kovac's dog was being walked by a neighbour, and that he had heard at the counter on Thursday from a man buying cough drops that Ray Weems was on the seventh floor at St. Vincent's. He told her that Dr. Lerner wrote more prescriptions for Bactrim now in a week than he used to write in a year. He told her that in the last three months he had seen eleven bags go back to stock with the same three or four doctors' names on them, and that he had torn the labels in half himself. He told her that nobody who left a bag in the bin for twenty-three days had forgotten it.

She listened with her hands in her lap. When he was finished she unfolded her hands and picked up the Bactrim bag and looked at the label, FERRARO, D., a long time, longer than it took to read it.

"My brother Kurt," she said, "went once to a lecture in Berlin, in the Tiergarten. In twenty-eight, twenty-nine. A doctor there who gave lectures to anyone who came. Kurt came home and danced me round the kitchen. He was not a dancer. He trod on my feet the whole way round." She put the bag down. "In thirty-three I was on the Opernplatz. Not for the burning. I was walking home and you could not get through, there were forty thousand people. The students came in with torches. And they had on a pole the head of that doctor. A head, a bust, from his house. Up on a pole, like a — " She lifted one hand, flat, to show the height. "And they threw it on the fire with the books." She put her hand back in her lap. "I don't know why I tell you this. It has nothing to do with Bactrim."

Neil did not say anything. After a while she said, "Kurt was in Shanghai after. He wrote until forty-one."

Then she took her glasses off, and folded them, and put them in the cardigan pocket, and said, "So. What do you need."

He had not expected the question. He had expected to be told to peel the labels. He found that he had an answer ready, which meant he had been thinking it for some time without knowing.

"Ernesto," he said. "Saturdays. And the money for the three bags. And a line in the book that says we deliver."

Ernesto was the boy with the bicycle who took the old ladies their prescriptions on Saturdays and was paid a dollar a run and his tips.

"Ernesto, yes. The money, yes." She took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote something on the back of an invoice: three figures, a sum. "The line in the book, you write it. It is your book." Then she looked at him, over the top of where her glasses had been. "Where is it, the book?"

"In my coat."

"Not under the register."

"Not overnight."

"Not under the register at all," she said. "The register is the first thing anybody opens." She stood up. She came up only a little past his shoulder. "And Neil. When you write it, you write it like this: the name of the street. Not the name of the man. Bank Street, the five-thirty. Anybody who needs to know who is on Bank Street at five-thirty can go and find out. Anybody else, it is a street." She went to the door and stopped. "My husband kept a book like that in thirty-six. Who would sign a paper. Who had a cousin in Rotterdam. He kept it in his head after the first time they searched the shop. He said his head was bad paper but nobody could open it in the street."

She went out to the front. He heard her say good morning to Mrs. Albright, who had come for her thyroid.

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Ernesto took Andy Kovac's nystatin to the building on Jane Street where the woman with the whippet lived, and Ray Weems's ointment to the front desk at St. Vincent's, in a fresh bag with Seventh floor written on it in Ruth's hand. Neil took the Bactrim himself, at one o'clock, when Leon came in to cover the counter.

Danny Ferraro lived on Perry Street, on the fourth floor of a walk-up with a broken buzzer and the street door propped open with a folded Village Voice. Neil climbed with the bag in his coat pocket. On the third landing someone was frying onions and someone else was playing a Linda Ronstadt record and stopping it and playing the same song over. On the fourth landing there were two doors, and one of them had a brass knocker in the shape of a hand holding a ball, and that was the one.

A man opened it whom Neil did not know: forty, heavy-shouldered, in a flannel shirt with paint on the cuffs, with reading glasses pushed up into his hair.

"I'm from Kessler's," Neil said. "On Hudson. I have Danny's prescription."

The man looked at him and then at the bag, and something in his face came loose and was put back.

"Gil," the man said, and stood aside. "Gil Nunes. Come in. Don't mind the — come in."

The apartment was one long room with the kitchen at one end and the windows at the other, and the windows were full of plants, a great many, on shelves Gil had evidently built himself because they were not quite level. There was a sofa under the windows, and on the sofa, under an afghan in orange and brown squares, was Danny Ferraro. Neil had last seen him in December at the magazine rack. He knew him; that is to say, he knew the shape of the head and the way the hair grew, and the rest he had to take on trust.

"It's the pharmacist," Danny said. His voice was all right. It was the same voice. "Look at that. House calls."

"Not house calls," Neil said. "Deliveries. It's new." He took the bag out and gave it to Gil, not to Danny, because Gil was standing and Danny was not, and then he thought he had done that wrong and did not know how to undo it. "There's no charge. Mrs. Kessler says."

"We were going to come," Gil said. "I kept meaning to come down. I'd get as far as the corner." He held the bag in both hands. "It's been, the last few weeks — "

"I know," Neil said.

He told them about the tablets: twice a day, with a full glass of water, more water than you think, and the rash to look out for, and what to do if it came. He said it the way he said it across the counter, the words in the order they always went in. Gil took his glasses down out of his hair and read the label while Neil talked, following along.

"Will it work?" Danny said from the sofa.

Neil thought about Dr. Lerner's prescriptions, and the eleven bags, and the torn labels. He thought about saying yes, and about saying we'll see, which was what doctors said.

"It works on what it works on," he said. "For the pneumonia, it works. It's a good drug. It's not a drug for the other thing. There isn't one."

Danny looked at him for a while, and then nodded, as if Neil had passed something.

"OK," Danny said. "Thank you. Nobody says it like that."

There was a cat on the windowsill, among the plants, a ginger cat, and it got down and came along the back of the sofa and settled against Danny's neck, and Danny put his hand up into its fur without looking.

"Is there anything else," Neil said. "That you need."

Gil and Danny looked at each other. It was a quick look, a look that went across the room and back, and Neil had seen it at the counter a hundred times, two men deciding which one of them was going to ask.

"His teeth," Gil said. "There's a tooth. It's been three weeks. We called two places and the second one asked was he a homosexual, on the telephone, before they'd give us a time."

Neil put his hand to the inside pocket of his coat where the pad was. Then he took his hand away.

"Bank Street," he said. "The green door, by the laundromat. Ground floor. Go in, don't call. Ask for the five-thirty."

"The green door on Bank," Gil said. "The five-thirty." He looked round the kitchen for a pencil.

"Don't write it down," Neil said. "Please."

Gil stopped looking for the pencil. He looked at Neil. Then he nodded, the same nod Danny had given, and said it again, slowly, "Bank Street, the green door by the laundromat, ground floor, go in, don't call, the five-thirty."

"That's it."

Danny had his eyes closed and the cat against his neck. "Green door," he said. "Bank."

Neil let himself out. Gil came to the door with him and shook his hand, and held on to it a moment longer than a handshake, and let it go.

On the third landing the Linda Ronstadt record had stopped, and the onions were done, and the stairwell was quiet. Neil stood a moment with his hand on the newel post. From above him, through the door with the brass hand on it, he could hear Gil's voice, not loud, the way a man says a telephone number to himself between the phone book and the phone: Green door. Bank Street. The five-thirty. And then, lower, from further inside the room, the other voice saying it after him.

He went down the rest of the stairs and out into Perry Street, where the wet had gone off and the light was coming in low from the river, and he turned toward Hudson and walked back to the store with his hands in his coat pockets.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Harrīcō Beniāmīn per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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