Mallomars and Lipton Tea

In this newsletter: Healthcare news, the prophecies of Seymour Katz, and some words of advice.

Part I: Some Healthcare News

In Barron’s this week, I wrote about CVS Health’s deal to buy a growing primary care chain, and why there are still big questions about the company’s strategy.

Last week, I wrote about how Hologic’s big plan to turn its Covid-era boom into long-term growth seems to be working out. I also talked to Pfizer’s top executives about why they expect Covid-19 cases to rise in the coming years, explained the unusual price of the first Humira biosimilar to launch in the U.S., and wrote about a federal judge rejecting Johnson & Johnson’s attempt to move litigation over its talc products into bankruptcy court.

I discussed a number of these stories on a Barron’s podcast a week ago Thursday; you can listen here.

Part II: The Prophecies of Seymour Katz

We might be at the point where, if you’re still reading this, you don’t need to be reminded of the series of letters that a mysterious correspondent named P.D. Rapaport has been sending me about ghosts and gambling and a missing barber named Baum. (Links to all of the letters are here.)

This correspondence has shoved aside my other interests, as readers of “The Black Umbrella” likely have noticed. Where once I tossed off nostalgic fripperies on closed Upper West Side dining establishments, now I struggle through these hallucinatory accounts of violent excursions and inexplicable encounters. P.D. Rapaport has drafted me as his amanuensis; the letters arrive as fragments, and I spend long hours manipulating them into coherence, animated only by the fading hope that he is no humbug, and that his discoveries may mark a path through the mysteries that trouble us before sleep. 

I suppose I could stop; just throw out his next letter and go back to sending you “lists about things,” or whatever. Not this week. What follows is the last of three letters I received on the same day earlier this winter, all postmarked from Massapequa, New York. This letter picks up at 2 a.m. on the Columbia University campus, where P.D. Rapaport had finally found Seymour Katz, the purported oracle-ghost who Rapaport believes can help him locate Baum.

(Of course, as always, I must remind you that there is no letter and there is no Rapaport.)

Dear Mr. Nathan-Kazis,

The ghost of Seymour Katz was slender and sharp-nosed; the face of a duke, the tweeds of a don. His white hair seemed to have secured a special exception to Newton’s first law, and it churned in space above his head. He stood halfway up the Low Library steps grinning at me, as though I was making a little joke, just between us.

“You found me,” he said.

“How did you know I was looking?” I asked.

The ghost laughed. “I suppose I should tell you how I died.” He paced down the steps and then up, doing circuits around the moonlit Alma Mater bronze. I followed, trying to match his long strides.

“It’s that old familiar story,” he said. His voice suggested a childhood at a Brooklyn high school named for a president, and then long years in New Haven. “A man, a woman. A husband. A knife. She was a waitress at the luncheonette on Broadway. Heavy mugs, burnt coffee. Old bears in red lipstick behind the counter. A cigarette between the lips, a spare behind each ear. Barking like cabbies at the cooks; the cooks barking back. Ten minutes in there was like hooking yourself into a ten-thousand volt A/C circuit. A useful preparatory to facing the undergraduates.”

A shadow covered the moon, and for a moment I lost sight of Seymour Katz as he disappeared around the corner of the statue. I hurried to catch up. He moved fast on the way up the stairs, skipping a stride with each step, but took more care on the way down, as though he feared falling.

“She turned up there one spring, a fawn among grizzlies,” he continued. “She was no match for the place, but she did her best. Slapped on the red lipstick, the blue eye shadow. Shouted more like a librarian than a cabbie, which annoyed the cooks, and they shouted at her to shout louder. She would hide a book under the counter, though how she could read through all the cigarette and bacon smoke I cannot say. She knew certain of my essays, of course, and she always tried to be the one to bring me my coffee. Eventually I asked her to dinner at L’Etoile. A ridiculous place, off the lobby at the Sherry-Netherland. They served a decent paillard of veal, however, and it was outside of the neighborhood, which was the point. A man died at the next table while we were ordering; his heart gave out halfway through his lobster tart. They covered him with a tablecloth and left him there, and they brought us a plate of moules marinières on the house. The ambulance didn’t arrive until dessert. Two slices of chocolate torte. The young woman appreciated my charms, and after that it was all very lurid. It ended with her husband barging into my office one morning and cutting open my throat with a straight razor. Right there.” He nodded up at one of the university buildings looming up over us. “He was an engineering student. Or perhaps biology, I don’t recall. A different university. I never was much good with my fists. In the Army they put me behind a desk with a pile of foreign newspapers. Anyhow, the husband got the electric chair.”

We were at the top of the steps now, between two granite columns, the campus spread before us like a dining room table after the guests have gone, the lights shut off, the dishes left for the morning. Seymour Katz’s floating hair swayed to unheard rhythms. “I suppose you want to hear about what it was like after that young man killed me,” he said. I nodded. “I won’t tell you. Death is very boring. Or maybe it isn’t. You wouldn’t like to hear about it, I don’t think. You’ll see for yourself, soon enough.” He paused and looked at me. I averted my eyes. “Now, the future. The future is not boring,” he said, spreading his arms out wide, gesturing broadly at all the onrushing infinities. “The future is something we can discuss. I have a young friend who likes to talk about the races. I suppose you’d like to hear about the sixth at Aqueduct this Sunday? An eight horse field. You can look up the names in the racing form. Baghdad Blade. Banshee. Bleeding Childers. Five Tango Charlie. Mungo. Apothecary. Elegant Doomer. Big Joe Silver. I know which one will win. Shall I tell?”

I shook my head no.

“Ah, an intellectual! Good. No parlor tricks, no side show prognostications. For you, only the weightiest truths; the lifting of the heaviest shrouds.” The ghost smiled, insinuating once again the presence of some joke between us I still could not discern. I wanted to hush him, to end his lecture, to make him tell me what he had done with Baum. But I stayed quiet, and he went on. “The future comes marching two-by-two,” he said. “This fall, the little hurricane passes over the city. Next fall comes the great hurricane; it throws sea foam nine stories up the sides of the Coney Island towers. Great events reverberate; they cast echoes forwards in time. The world to come is built of matched pairs.”

He stopped and tried to push down his hair, as if trying to get it to abide, for the moment, to the universe’s fundamental principles. It floated up again as soon as he removed his hands. It was 3 a.m. now, and police sirens were whizzing up Broadway. The noise seemed to startle the ghost, and he began to rattle through a catalogue of prophesies. “The lesser pandemic. The sugar maple blight. The birth of the first sentient machine. The collapse of the Oroville Dam. The dispersion of the of Hyalomma ticks, who bring a hemorrhagic fever all across the northern hemisphere. The consumption of the last giant squid by the last sperm whale. The Cascadia earthquake. The final monarch butterfly migration. The greater pandemic. The failure of the last honeybee colony. The failure of the first Martian colony. The failure of the last grape crop. The first nuclear exchange. The eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera. The long winter. The birth of the last human child. The death of the last human child. The final collision of the Earth into the black dwarf Sun.”

I sat down on the top step and put my head into my hands.

“No? Those truths are too weighty, perhaps?” the ghost said. “What, then, did you want to discuss? All infinity lies before you, Mr. Rapaport, waiting to be revealed. What can I elucidate? Not politics, I hope?”

“I’m looking for your friend,” I blurted. “The barber. Baum.”

“Baum,” he laughed, surprised, and there was something carnivorous in the sound he made. “How disappointing. Baum’s future is not so bright. Not bright at all. Keep your distance from Baum, is my advice to you.” He grinned wide at me, showing his teeth. “I must go! Come see me again, Mr. Rapaport. It’s a pleasure to speak with you, very truly it has been. Come and visit me any time!”

The ghost of Seymour Katz turned to walk off down the steps, and as the distortions between us flickered and swayed, he seemed not to fade away, but to transform, and for an instant I saw in his place the shape of a small dog, or perhaps a fox, and the sight filled me with such terror that I thought I might vomit. I shut my eyes.

I didn’t quite lose consciousness, I don’t think. I remember the granite was cold and hard against my back, and then two small hands were shaking me, and a voice ordering me to stand up. A small, gray-haired woman was squatting next to me. She had the cold, sharp eyes of a kestrel. “You have seen Seymour Katz?” she demanded. Her accent was vaguely Polish, her voice accustomed to command. “You fool. Come with me.”

The apartment of Dr. Evgenia Sarkovich was small and smelled of books. Not the happy smell of glue along a fresh binding, but the heavy smell of too many volumes in too tight a space; of a used bookstore with an undisciplined proprietor, a leaky roof, and a significant mouse problem.

We arrived at the apartment after a brief, silent walk off the Columbia campus and then south and towards the river, into that precinct west of Broadway settled by academics and journalists and those who pretend to enjoy their company. She lived in a prewar building along Riverside Drive, guarded by a sleepy, uniformed doorman who seemed unsurprised to see Dr. Sarkovich bringing in a befuddled-looking man after 3 a.m. Perhaps all intellectuals kept such hours; perhaps 3 a.m. was an unexceptional time to receive visitors in the sitting rooms of Morningside Heights.

Dr. Sarkovich’s apartment was not messy, just crowded. It was as though the entire contents of some ancestral Warsaw mansion had been shoved into this uptown one-bedroom. There were three overstuffed chairs and a couch, plus fine wooden side tables, lamps with tasseled shades and, looming in one corner, a pewter samovar with all the bulk of an air conditioner. The carpet was thick and Persian, the coffee table marble-topped.

Virtually every inch of wall space was given over to book storage. Dr. Sarkovich’s collection had clearly long ago overwhelmed whatever elegant bookcase had come with the rest of the furniture set; maybe it was still in there somewhere, buried under books, but she had supplemented it with makeshift jobs of planks and milk crates, with shelves the telltale industrial white of Ikea plywood, and with some tall stacks that may or may not have been supported by shelving at all.

“Tea,” Dr. Sarkovich said, and it was an assertion more than an offer. She walked not to the samovar, which must have been for show, but into a small kitchen, and I heard the sounds of an electric kettle, a refrigerator door, a hunt for sugar cubes. I waited. The only art on the wall, just next to the kitchen, was a kitschy print of Hasidic men in Tevye caps and peyes dancing in a goat field under a starry sky.

Dr. Sarkovich returned with two teacups on a silver tray and a plate of Mallomars, which were just out of season. She took two and gestured for me to help myself.

“You have been very stupid,” she said, biting into the puffy chocolate cookie. She cocked her head and glared at me. She did not blink. “You and your colleague, you endanger my research. What were you thinking?”

I stared back at her. My exhaustion had manifested in a surging headache and a thirst that the tea could not quench, and I couldn’t summon the words to begin to clarify what seemed to be some species of misunderstanding.

“What made you summon Seymour Katz?” Dr. Sarkovich demanded.

“Seymour Katz’s ghost,” I said, correcting her.

“Ghost?” she snapped. “What do you mean, ghost?”

I was silent for a moment, confused. “The ghost on the steps,” I said. “Seymour Katz.”

Dr. Sarkovich shook her head. “This is not correct,” she said. “There is no ghost. Ghosts are for television, for Halloween; ghosts are decorations on suburban lawns. What are you talking about, ghosts?”

It had not occurred to me that Dr. Sarkovich had not known that Seymour Katz was a ghost. I had assumed, I think, that she was an initiate; a priest in the cult of the ghosts, come to chastise me for some breach in protocol. I wondered if I had badly misunderstood. Then she went on.

“Ghosts are not real,” she said. “Seymour Katz is a material phenomenon. Maybe he told you he was a ghost. If so, it was a trick, perhaps a trap. That is what Seymour Katz does. Seymour Katz is not a ghost, he is a god.”

I suppose, in the course of my normal life, if an older woman brought me to her mouse-infested apartment to tell me over Mallomars and Lipton black tea that a god named Seymour Katz appeared some nights on the steps of Low Library, I would have not have believed her. I was, however, no longer following the course of my normal life; I had spent the day talking to ghosts. And even if Dr. Evgenia Sarkovich was wrong about ghosts in general, perhaps she was right about Seymour Katz in particular: I realized, with surprise, that I could still remembered the story Seymour Katz had told me about getting his throat cut with a straight razor. I had forgotten the other ghost’s death stories the instant they related them, as if by magic.

I didn’t know what to say to Dr. Sarkovich, so I sat and sipped my tea and looked at the bookshelves. There was a birding guide, a Hungarian phrasebook, Gershom Scholem’s book on Shabbetai Tzvi, a history of iron ore mining, a 1953 Barnard College yearbook, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and a shelf full of Freud in German.

“I am a researcher at the Institute,” Dr. Sarkovich said, finishing another Mallomar. “Seymour Katz is my particular area of study. I have developed theories, as you can see.” She gestured to a stack of papers six inches high on the marble coffee table. They were handwritten in what might have been Polish, or perhaps a personal cipher, on unlined pages; the edges curled with age. “My book,” she said. “My great work. I hope to complete it this year, perhaps next. I must insist, absolutely insist, that you not interfere. I don’t know who you are. I suspect you have been sent from the other Institute, have you not? A young scholar, seeking your own research subject? You only pretend not to know what Seymour Katz is. Let us come clean with each other. I can help you, of course. You need only ask. I could be a mentor to you. I know of other gods, many others. Wild gods; gods who manifest with animal heads and human limbs. New arrivals in New York City. Such rich subjects for serious study. And I have friends! Friends at many of the learned societies, who can be useful in your work. But I must insist, absolutely insist, that you stay away from Seymour Katz.”

She stood up and walked into the kitchen, and I heard more rustling and the snap of a can opening. She came back with a Diet Coke, which she drained quickly as she settled back into her seat. “I cannot have other researchers interfering at this stage of my work,” she said. “You must stay away. What if you chase him off? It could be disastrous, absolutely disastrous.”

“I promise you, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I began.

“You lie!” she shouted, leaping from her seat and shaking a narrow finger at me. “Someone must have sent you here. Someone must have tutored you. The other Institute. One of the learned societies. Or someone else? Some secret order? Some esoteric cult?”

“Baum’s notebook,” I said. “He disappeared. I followed instructions.”

“Baum?” she said. “The other young man. Yes, I watched him, too.”

“You know where he is?”

“Of course not,” she scoffed. “He never saw me. He came every week to summon Seymour Katz, and I watched them from behind the column. I know he came from your Institute, as well. He must have. Another young scholar. Your collaborator, your colleague. I did not disrupt his encounters with Seymour Katz. I do not like to be discourteous. But when they sent you, as well, that exhausted my patience. Everyone knows that Seymour Katz is mine! How many papers have I given about him, at how many conferences, how many symposia, over how many years? I know our institutions have our differences, young man. But do scholars owe nothing to each other?”

I was confused and impatient, my headache growing worse. “I don’t know anything about any institute,” I said. “Baum is a barber. He’s missing. I need Seymour Katz to tell me where he is.”

She let out a short, ironic, laugh. “Seymour Katz is a trickster,” she said. “He won’t help you. He spreads confusion, he does not ease it.”

“But what do you mean, he’s a god?” I said, finally returning to the point. “I’m telling you, I need to find Baum. They gave me until Friday afternoon.”

“A god is a god,” she said. “This city is full of gods. People come here from all over, and so do gods. Maybe a god had worshippers somewhere else, and the worshippers came here, so the god did, too. Or maybe their worshippers all died, or converted, or forgot about them, and so the god came on their own. The streets are paved with gold, aren’t they? Prayers, offerings, sacrifices, attention. Who can tell what they want. Seymour Katz is a god, just like the rest of them. I won’t say any more. You can read my book once it’s published.”

“But is what he says true? His prophesies? Can he see the future?”

“He made prophesies?” Now she was attentive. She took up a pen and pulled what seemed to be a random book from the shelf, and prepared to take notes on the inside cover.

“Nothing good,” I said. “Hurricanes, earthquakes, pandemics.”

“Be more specific!”

“Something about echoes. A dam collapse. Ticks. The death of the last sperm whale. I don’t know.”

She sighed, annoyed. “Perhaps you’re not a scholar” she said, closing the book. “He can see the future, yes. But he lies about what he sees, when it suits his tricks.” She stood up and took my teacup. It seemed a signal to leave.

“Stay away from Seymour Katz,” Dr. Sarkovich said, as she closed the door. “The city is full of gods. Find your own.”

It was nearly 5 a.m. I rode down to 14th Street on the 1 train, fast asleep, then sleepwalked through the transfer to the F, and slept again all the way to Brooklyn. I woke as the subway surfaced after Court Street, and I realized I had forgotten the Shallots Profaned somewhere way uptown. It was lost now, swallowed by the city.

I got back to my building just as the neighborhood was waking up. The landlady and her dog were asleep; the lights out in the windows of their downstairs apartment. I walked up the stairs and through my unlocked door. Snoring on the couch was Baum, the missing barber.

The letter ended there. I await further correspondence from Mr. Rapaport.

Part III: Words of Advice

• This is a fascinating thing: A review by a retired CIA spy hunter of a book that accuses him of being a spy. (He did not like the book.)

• Here’s the A.I. program Midjourney’s illustration of Seymour Katz.

• The Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert, always good for bird photos, has been providing indispensable coverage of Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle-Owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo who has been evading capture this week. Zoo folks don’t seem to appreciate Manhattan Bird Alert’s reporting, per this tweet from a senior zoo executive.

• Flaco’s now-empty cage at the Central Park Zoo is just outside of the penguin exhibit. It’s niche maybe three feet deep, six feet wide, and fifteen feet tall, with some branches inside. We went to see Flaco on Saturday, and after that we went to the zoo, and it was rather jarring to look through the binoculars at that enormous owl thirty feet up a pine tree, and then to visit the tiny little corner where they used to keep him. Anyway, Flaco vomited out a rat’s skull today, which suggests that he’s doing alright out there. Fly high, Flaco.

• The photo at the top of this section depicts snow removal during the Great Blizzard of 1899. More images showing the full process are here.

That’s all I’ve got.