Chronic City (10 page)

Mstislav, the most dedicated gardener among us now that Sledge rarely emerges from the Attic, has been tinkering with the carbondioxide balance, a dangerous but crucial sport. At six or seven hundred parts per million, the air in here is dreadful but sustains life. Regular jiggering of organic functions are needed to keep the ratio from ballooning to something deadly. To make a long story short, after an alarmingly high reading, Mstislav discovered a mound of rotting mangrove fronds under a seemingly healthy hillock of wheatgrass—a
camouflaged nightmare of poison-leaching compost. Endgame for us here could be that simple, that foolish. Everyone, even the Captain and Sledge, was required to take up pitchforks in an emergency campaign to clear the fermenting stew into garbage stockings, which then had to be banished from our air space, pronto. Now, for months Keldysh has been stuffing waste into one of the emergency modules, a reasonably nifty solution, with the notion that we’d eventually test our ability to launch the module and dump its contents at the edge of the Chinese scatter field. Perhaps our garbage, drifting slowly into Earth’s gravity, could even take out some of the Chinese mines that keep us trapped here. A fantasy, perhaps. We’d have to eliminate hundreds for Mission Control even to begin to discuss reaching us with a shuttle. But we dream, why not? If Keldysh’s scheme fell short, the worst would be to see a garbage-stuffed module destroyed on passage through the scatter field. We’ve got two other modules.

Well, this surplus of mulch-bulging stockings forced our hand, before Keldysh had any chance to chart a launch plan. Zamyatin was enraged at Keldysh for attempting the early launch, but we’d all encouraged him, Zamyatin included. And in truth, we were all exhausted from twelve hours of what Mstislav laughingly called “serf toil,” one of the rare jokes among the Russians that even Sledge and I could get. Also the last laugh we’d have for a while. Keldysh crashed the module. It rebounded off solar panel V, snapped off an antenna, and then clanged disastrously against the Den’s exterior tile. Glued to the video feed like teenagers watching a horror film, we saw the module tumble unbraked through, yes, the Chinese mines. Then flare and vanish. (Honestly, I do think by then Keldysh had his head in his hands, and could have reversed course if he hadn’t been so despondent at the earlier impacts. Mission Control will delete this parenthetical before releasing this letter. Howdy again, fellas.) Farewell to excess compost, to unrecyclable plastic
waste, to irredeemably shameful diapers, and to the module itself. The flume of mute fire another warning, if we needed it, to recalibrate orbital decay daily. Like flossing. (I joke to keep your attention during the dry technical passages, my darling distractible Chase.) I don’t think anyone thought to inspect the Den’s interior for damage until we smelled the antifreeze, a skunk’s reek speeding through
Northern Lights’
tiny atmosphere.

It was Mstislav who had the foresight to remotely seal the Den, then insist we don oxygen masks and investigate. Forget for now any damage to the interior—we were predisposed to concern ourselves with the rocket ship’s hull, every spaceman’s concern! By the time we reached the Den we’d lost Sledge somewhere, but the remaining five of us went in wearing masks and discovered the wrecked antifreeze line spewing turquoise blobs, which floated and shattered to paint every surface of the Den’s interior. Mstislav and Zamyatin clamped the line. Then, fresh off our serf toil in the Greenhouse, we space janitors now set to scrubbing and sponging and wringing the blue goo into containers, a task much like the pursuit of Dr. Seuss’s Oobleck. (I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At the finish our uniforms were coated. Mstislav, champion of this episode, reasonably pointed out that any droplet of the pollutant we exported from the Den was destined for circulation and, ultimately, our mucous membranes. Our bloodstreams. So we stripped and trashed the clothes. Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of shock, squeezing last beads of antifreeze from our hair. (Don’t be jealous. They’ve seen me naked before. Anyway, on our present diet I’m shrunken to a ten-year-old’s gaunt outlines, not exactly turning heads. My periods have stopped, too. And yes, again, I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At last, and ignoring various bruises and scrapes that first-aid protocols would have had us tend immediately, we all slunk away to our various
hidey-holes, each to strap ourselves to a wall for some desperately needed sleep. Starved as we were, I don’t think anyone emerged for ten hours or more.

I won’t tell you what Sledge was up to in the interval while we scrubbed the Den. I’m too tired.

Even omitting that, I can’t imagine, having written it out now, that Mission Control will release too much of this report. Still, when our media-digest packet turns up (there’s always so much demand for our scrawny bandwidth, so many technical transmissions in line ahead of anything personal, that the packet is usually delayed a week or two), I’m startled at how many columns they devote to us. How fascinating can we really be? They’ll forget us soon. We’ve practically forgotten ourselves. That’s why I rely on you, Chase, to believe in me. As I drift, you anchor me in reality. On Earth. In Manhattan, where you sit reading this, perhaps in that fake-French coffee shop (is it really called
Savoir Faire?)
with the amazing almond croissants you pretend to allow yourself only once or twice a month but in truth devour at least twice a week. That’s where I picture you, Chase. With powdered sugar on your fingers as you open Mission Control’s overnight envelope. The sugar on your lips and fingers and possibly on your nose, too—that sweet dust is me, your astronaut, your lostronaut, your Janice.

CHAPTER
Five

Perkus Tooth
read
The New York Times
as he rode the F train downtown. He’d lifted the copy from a neighbor’s doorstep—up at this ungodly hour, he felt entitled to it. He hadn’t purchased a copy since the day Richard Abneg had called to insist he read about the eagles, and before that, not for many months. Perkus refused to pay for the
Times
, wasn’t interested in giving subsidy to hegemony. The paper was nearly useless to him anymore. He used to light on items that spoke to him, elements in the larger puzzle. These he’d clip and try to shift out of context, pinning them above his kitchen table, onto the layered backdrop of his own broadsides, to see what age would do to their meaning as they yellowed, as they marinated in pot fumes. Lately this never happened. The front page seemed recursive, every story about either a species of animal collapsing into extinction or the dispersal of the Matisse collection of some socialite who’d died intestate. Yesterday a minke whale, its motives perhaps deranged by ocean fungus, had wandered up the East River nearly to Hell Gate:
FROLICKING VISITOR DELIGHTS HEARTS, AND THEN DIES
. Another animal story that had made the front page concerned the latest
depredations of the escaped tiger, who’d razed a twenty-four-hour Korean market on 103rd Street.

Then there was the requisite update from space, another installment in the travails of Janice Trumbull and her Russian cohort, the crew doomed to orbit. The piece on the space station took up a third of the front page, and where it continued on the interior the
Times
had run substantial excerpts of Janice Trumbull’s latest letter to Chase Insteadman. A soap opera. Perkus’s attitude toward his new friend Chase’s situation was an area of suspended judgment, only flooded with Perkus’s usual conspiratorial searchlights. That the situation reeked of fakery was only natural—what wasn’t? Oona Laszlo, too, had dropped a few hints, though she often teased Perkus’s grave suspicions, and was at bottom untrustworthy. In making Chase’s acquaintance, Perkus had alluded heavily that he not only knew but understood and forgave—for who hasn’t found themselves enlisted in this city’s reigning fictions from time to time? Yet Chase seemed entirely sincere and heartbroken, as much hanging on the updates from space as any other punter. Perkus felt sorry for him. But then the whole
New York Times
seemed phony to Perkus, even or perhaps especially when it featured his friends. He checked the Metro section, but there was no update on Abneg’s eagles. The Arts section was of course useless. Perkus recognized none of the names. It struck him as largely consisting of rewritten press releases. Yet this paper as a whole felt more insubstantial even than usual—where were all those pieces nobody ever read, but everybody relied upon to be there? He glanced at the front, the top-right corner: WAR FREE EDITION. Ah yes, he’d heard about this. You could opt out now. He left the paper on his seat when he exited the train at Twenty-third Street.

Aboveground, he walked north on Sixth. This was the farthest afield Perkus had traveled in many months, perhaps in over a year.
However absurd, he couldn’t recall the time previous, or what exactly last had drawn him out of the bounds of what had become his quarantine: east of Lexington, north of Grand Central Station. Even midtown east, where he’d occasionally drop into the
Rolling Stone
or Criterion offices, was disorienting to Perkus; the part of Manhattan he encountered here, with its lingering echoes of an older, ethnic-mercantile realm, and the proprietary and jocular gay enclave that overlaid those garment-district ghosts, the complacently muscular pairs holding hands as they strolled—all this was like another city to him. Perkus joked uneasily to himself that he ought to have a guidebook, he felt so foreign here.

A pair of Chinese-dissident protesters occupied a part of the sidewalk on Sixth; they squatted in cages and wore T-shirts decorated with fake blood, commemorating some crackdown against their politicized variety of meditation or worship. One of these caged persons met Perkus’s eye before he could avoid it, and pointed, first at herself, then at him, seeming to say,
You and Me Are the Same
. Another of their group stood beside the cages, urging pamphlets on passersby, all of whom veered expertly aside, alert within their cocoon of earbuds or cell conversation, raising preemptive hands like Indians in a Western. All except Perkus: he ended up clutching a scuffed and incoherent pamphlet. Glancing at it, he saw a primitive drawing, repeating the image of the sidewalk tableau, a figure in a cage barely big enough for a dog. He crumpled the pamphlet into a trash can and tried to walk as steadily as the human stream of which he was part.

In truth, Perkus felt ill. That was the reason for the jaunt and why he was so vulnerable to dislocation, yet it made him wish to reverse course before he’d taken some irrevocable step. He’d shaved and showered, for the first time in many days, understanding it was likely someone would be examining his undressed body. Then, defensively
prideful, he’d donned his best suit, a deep-maroon pinstripe three-piece that would have risked seeming clownish had the vents and pockets not been so impeccably detailed, the fit to his wiry body so trim and modish. The suit wasn’t tailored for Perkus. He’d gotten lucky, found it at the Housing Works Thrift Shop on Seventy-seventh. He made a daylight dandy in the maroon suit, and now, like a lush who’d woken drunk, weaved slightly on the pavement, he couldn’t help it. The sun was bright and the day was bitterly cold. Better to get indoors and face whatever it was he’d gotten himself into. He found the building on Twenty-fifth Street and pushed a button at the intercom, gave his name, was buzzed into the lobby. These were the offices of Strabo Blandiana, the celebrated master of Eastern medicine, who catered almost exclusively to stars—Chase Insteadman had been in his care since that time, ten years past, when he’d qualified as something of a star himself. Chase had induced Strabo to make an exception to his long waiting list for Perkus, then pleaded with Perkus to keep the appointment. Incredibly, Perkus had agreed. Now, at the threshold, he fought every impulse to flee.

Neither Strabo’s candle-scenty reception area nor the gentle, fair-haired, dippily smiling young man who welcomed Perkus to a seat there inspired any hope that Perkus’s prejudices against Eastern medicine might be disappointed. But the vibe, so to speak, was mellow, palliative in itself, and Perkus really didn’t want to be out on the street again too soon. Couldn’t hurt to fill out the clipboard’s two pages of questions on health history and “Present Areas of Complaint”—Perkus laughed to himself that he had plenty of those. He specified “cluster headache, a subvariant of migraine,” not wanting to be mistaken for having fantasized his symptom, and preemptively disdaining any curative gesture that veered too much into fantasy itself. Then defiantly listed caffeine and THC under “Medicines.” Perkus had brewed himself a pot of coffee (Peet’s Colombian roast)
and smoked a joint (Watt’s Ice) this morning before walking to the subway, and could feel both medicines still buzzing pleasantly in his bloodstream. He sat alone in the waiting room, apart from the blond kid, who each time Perkus looked up from the clipboard grinned welcome as if for the first time. No sign of other patients, no clue to what was expected of Perkus or what he should expect. Perkus reminded himself he wasn’t into astrological symbols or archetypes of any kind. He had a fucking headache. Actually, it was gone, though this had been one of the cruelest, lasting a week and a half, with barely any oases of relief. In its wake he was enfeebled, that was all, and needed an infusion or two of what he liked to call, only half jokingly, “replacement lipids”—a Jackson Hole vanilla malted and an extra slice of Swiss on his burger deluxe.

When Strabo opened a door Perkus was disarmed utterly. The Romanian was so much younger than Perkus had imagined, and devastating in his calm. Strabo’s personal style was minimalist, hair cropped in a close Caesar, the sleeves of his black turtleneck, some superfine knit, pushed to mid-forearm, revealing on his left a tremendous gold Rolex. No ascetic renunciation of worldly treasure here. Strabo’s gaze penetrated quickly, satisfied itself, and moved on, declining to make a show of hypnotic spookiness. Despite himself, Perkus felt disappointed. Did he rate just a glance? Strabo hadn’t even hesitated over Perkus’s morbid eye.