As soon as he was standing, he wished he'd stayed on the nice horizontal sidewalk. His head was spinning dizzily and his mind was being sucked down into the whirlpool. He held on to the post grimly and tried to stay conscious.
A long time, possibly two or three seconds, passed. Malone hadn't moved at all when the two cops came along.
One of them was a big man with a brassy voice and a face that looked as if it had been overbaked in a waffle-iron. He came up behind
Malone and tapped him on the shoulder, but Malone barely felt the touch. Then the cop bellowed into Malone's ear.
"What's the matter, buddy?"
Malone appreciated the man's sympathy. It was good to know that you had friends. But he wished, remotely, that the cop and his friend, a shorter and thinner version of the beat patrolman, would go away and leave him in peace. Maybe he could lie down on the sidewalk again and get a couple of hundred years' rest.
Who could tell?
"Mallri," he said.
"You're all right?" the big cop said. "That's fine. That's great. So why don't you go home and sleep it off?"