Chronic City (15 page)

“Where you from?”

It seemed odd to say Upper East Side. For one thing, his part of things was so much farther
upper
. “Downtown,”

I told him.

“You and her married?”

“No.”

“You Zoom, right?”

“Sorry?”

“From that show,
Mister Pesty.”

There may be no way to say this sensitively: from my vantage, I’ve come to believe black people watch a lot of reruns. Or at least they tend to know me for my first fame, rather than my second, that social half-life at Janice Trumbull’s side or in cocktail photographs in
New York
magazine.

“That’s me.”

“You look old.”

“I am old. That was a long time ago.” It occurred to me that he was probably near the age I was when cast for
Martyr & Pesty’s
first season.

“Why you never punch that dude in the face?”

“It’s not me, it’s a character. If it were me I would have punched him.”

“Naaah.” My interlocutor seemed to think I lied.

“Well, Zoom needed to keep his job, you know.”

This answer satisfied him better, and he fell silent behind me for the time being. Oona was quiet, too, behind our leader, and we made a kind of reverent company as we picked our way up and down the scrubby rises led by these sprites, these ushers, who’d emerged from the wasteland. The ball field was in view for a moment, then it wasn’t. Puffy Coat halted at a section of the cyclone fence where it was split and curled away from the ground as if by a raiding animal. He set his stick on the ground, then gripped the fence and widened the breach, nodding to indicate that we should duck through, his breath frosting in the air before him.

“This can’t be what Noteless had in mind as an approach to his great work,” I said.

Oona had wriggled past the barrier, and now beckoned me to follow. “I don’t think he necessarily intends to make it easy to see. I’ve heard some people rent helicopters and fly over.”

“What if we just took his word for it?”

A dust-trampled path led downhill from the damaged fence, into deeper brush. Bladder swelling, hands chapping in cold, I was just ready to despair totally when Noteless’s
Fjord
erupted into view at our feet. The chasm seemed to have been hewn out of the earth by unnatural force, the ground’s lip curling suddenly downward, bringing
with it shrubs and small trees now turned horizontal to sprout from the
Fjord
’s walls. The artificial crevasse yawned at least fifty yards across, perhaps a hundred. On the vertiginous cliffs dangled dozens of pairs of sneakers tied together at the laces, lodged on all sides in the branches and scrub. Then I made out other stuff, on the ridge at our feet, junk which unlike the sneakers had perhaps been intended to finish a journey into the earth’s craw but had fallen short: children’s toys, kitchenware, electronics, knotted plastic bags of unspecified treasure. I made out a tricycle and a large nude doll, a smashed stereo turntable, a power drill. I wondered whether the refuse was Noteless’s flourish, or the local community’s spontaneous outpouring. In any event, the cascade of garbage was the only thing “urban” about his
Fjord
, since the city was entirely out of view. We could have been a hundred miles into forest, for all the skyline of treetops informed us. I wondered, too, whether I knew exactly what a fjord was, after all. Or maybe it was Noteless who didn’t know what a fjord was. Shouldn’t it be full of water? Perhaps it was, at the bottom.

We stepped nearer, the four of us. Beneath the lip of trees and grass and the crap that had lodged there, the earth gave way to an underbelly of roots and stones, and below that, darker stuff, veins of sunless soil, and shadow tapering to total blackness. It was as though a titanic ax had descended from heaven to sink its blade in the parklands, then be lifted away. Oona and I stepped as though hypnotized nearer to the lip—there was no definite limit to approach, only whichever foothold on that curled ridge of landscape you’d last judge safe to take. Trampled grass showed others were braver than ourselves. The boys hung back. Having marshaled us here, they seemed to want to let us steep in the site’s insane grandeur undisturbed a while. The wind had died entirely by now, and the long tilt of clouds overhead seemed ready to close over us like the lid of a box. I took an involuntary step backward, and heard something glassy crackle underfoot.
But I didn’t take my eyes off the dark center before me. The longer I stared into the
Fjord
, the more likely it seemed that I’d pitch headfirst into that light-destroying well, so the sky could slam shut and entomb my tiny form inside.

“Okay, it’s kind of incredible. Let’s go home now.”

“Wait, I want to take it in,” Oona said. “It’s a total vision of death.”

“One hundred percent agreed. I’m cold and I have to pee.”

“So go pee.”

I stepped backward again, unwilling to trust the
Fjord
at my back. Again I felt a gritty crackling under my shoes. I turned one heel up, as if to check for dog shit, and found dusty shards of thin glass embedded in my sole’s leather. Crack vials. That detail, I figured, was beyond even Noteless’s vision. He’d had collaborators at this site.

“Can you believe they’d put the man who built this in charge of the
Memorial to Daylight?”
said Oona. “I wonder if those people have ever even
seen
this thing.”

“Well, he’ll obviously have to … compromise … on the memorial…” I’d found a discarded Starbucks cup and was using it to scour the glass from my shoe.

“Did you know he originally proposed
Urban Fjord
for Columbus Circle? Needless to say, they refused him.”

“Pretty petulant of him to have put it here instead.”

“You’re projecting, Chase. Whatever you think of Noteless, there isn’t a less petulant man alive.”

“I’ve never heard you speak so reverently about one of your assignments. You’re trying to make me jealous.”

The boys stepped up beside us—like museum guards, it occurred to me now.

“What you gonna give?” asked Puffy Coat. Leaning on his
broomstick crook, framed in wilderness, he could have made some mock Pre-Raphaelite tableau. But I needed to get a grip on myself. Not everything was in quote marks, or wearing some mystical halo of interpretation. I suffered Perkus’s disease by proxy. I should focus on the real. Two badly parented boys had led us to see the freakish hole in the ground on this chilly bluff at the edge of their ghetto. They were playing hooky. Their older brothers would have mugged us.

“What do you mean?” said Oona.

“Everybody put in something,” said Puffy Coat. “What you got?”

“An offering, you mean.”

Puffy Coat only shrugged. That word was near enough to what he had in mind.

Oona looked at me, and pointed at the coat pocket where
Obstinate Dust
bulged. “He brought something,” she told the boys.

“I want to return this to Perkus,” I protested.

“Perkus gave the book away, Chase,” said Oona. “Besides, what else have we got? I’m not tossing in my Treo.”

“Do it, Cheese,” said New York Jets.

I had to tell myself it wasn’t Perkus Tooth I’d be symbolically interring in that pit, but Ralph Warden Meeker. From the sample I’d taken on the 1 train, he and Noteless deserved each other.
Obstinate Dust
, meet Obstinate Hole. Anyway, it would be a relief to walk the return path without the asymmetrical sink-weight in my pocket. I gave the book a spirited heave, wrenching my shoulder in the process. The tubby paperback fluttered softly as it dwindled to a birdlike speck, proving the real breadth of Noteless’s monstrosity. Then it was gone.

“Ow.” I cradled my shoulder, amazed at what a single effort could inflict. I hadn’t been to the gym in months. At least I’d gotten the book past the crud-strewn whale’s lip, into depths where its impact returned no sound.

The ceremony freed us from the
Fjord
’s spell. The boys turned and piloted us back through the tear in the fence, and up the last rise, until Fort George Avenue was evident ahead of us, and beyond it, hints of the wider city, even the reassuring far-off Chrysler and Empire spire-tops. There our guides soberly shook each of our hands, and turned back. Their graceful final silence would forever enshrine them for me as mythological chaperones. I peed behind a tree, then Oona and I found our way back into the streets. Oona was on the silent side herself.

Something was wrong at the 191st Street station. Reflective tape barricaded one stairwell entrance, and an orange-vested MTA worker, wearing a black woolen hat with earlaps and puffing out great gusts of breath steam, stood at the center of a teeming mob of disappointed passengers. Pushing into this congregation of the confused, we made our way near enough to overhear the worker, who in the most blasé tone possible announced that the subway was out of commission going downtown, and directed us to a nearby bus stop for a shuttle to 125th Street, where we could reboard the train. He parried all questions with a shrug, and rewound his spiel for the next party.

A bit stunned, Oona and I trudged with the others in the direction of the bus stop, two blocks down Nagle Avenue, on Broadway. The chaos there was more appalling than at the stairwell. One shuttle bus was loaded and just embarking, full with seated and standing passengers to such a point that I could hear its carriage sigh unhappily, promising breakdown in a mile or so. Another hundred passengers waited, in a streaming, hive-like circulation around a pole on which was taped a hasty, Magic Markered sign promising shuttle service at fifteen-minute intervals. A scene to crush your heart.

“What happened?” Oona addressed this as a kind of local petition to the five or six aggrieved passengers milling nearest. As in a street incident involving wreckage or fire trucks a volunteer explainer emerged, a middle-aged Hasid with curved shoulders draped in a long, soiled scarf, and bearing twin shopping bags like a milkmaid’s yoke. He seemed drawn to Oona as another dressed in black.

“Somebody said the tiger again,” he told her.

“They still haven’t caught it?”

He made a sour face under his beard, as though tasting the civic ineptitude. “If it stays so far uptown, what do they care? Five, six times I’ve been forced to get off and switch to the bus.”

“Really?”

He nodded, widening his eyes: really. “They claim it’s tearing up the track. But then an hour later the train goes right through. A convenient excuse, that’s all. So let it devour a small-businessman’s livelihood now and again. People like distraction. They live on it, gobble it up.”

I had to interrupt. “You’re saying they… encourage the tiger?”

He shrugged. “Tolerate maybe. Encourage maybe. It’s not mine to say. What they don’t do is
catch.”

“Thank you,” said Oona. She nudged us away before I could ask more.

“I don’t completely get that man’s theory,” I said. “If there’s really a tiger, then why would he call it an excuse?”

“Well, the MTA could be opportunistically lying about the tiger’s whereabouts, I think that was what he meant.”

“Where do you suppose he’s getting his information?”

“Same as me, Chase. He’s just repeating what he’s heard.”

“Please don’t be so short with me. I think I dislocated my shoulder.”

“Don’t whine.”

“Now I’m completely sure you brought me out today as some kind of esoteric punishment,” I said. “I only don’t understand what I did wrong.”

Oona gave me a knifelike look. “You’re a little confused, Chase. I brought you with me for protection. I was scared to come up here alone.”

How quickly we’d become invisible to each other. I saw Oona Laszlo now, as if in a visionary flash, almost as if she were a blazing chaldron set before me. Pale, not so much dressed in black as feathered in it like a wounded bird, tinier in the white canvas tennis shoes she’d selected for the hike to Noteless’s
Fjord
than I’d ever seen her before, blinking her mascaraed eyes at me with a self-loathing which, if I let myself truly take notice, never subsided. A sort of elegant fragment or postulate of a person, but not whole, not entirely viable, certainly not credible waiting to board a shuttle among all these stolid brown-faced citizens whose depressive rage hovered smoggily overhead, a communal rain cloud formed of a loathing so much readier, so much less curdled in irony. Of course Oona again made me think of Perkus, and of course again I wouldn’t say so. I roused then what was best in me, what made me worthy of her or Perkus or anyone else who’d ever called to me for protection, and stuck out my expert arm and hailed an empty taxicab pointed downtown. It was hardly a miracle—this was Broadway, after all, never mind the high triple digits—but it felt like a miracle, one I’d summoned personally, in the manner of a quarterback’s Hail Mary pass.

We plopped exhausted and relieved into the cab’s backseat. The heater got my nose running and I snuffled happily. Even before Oona gave the driver her address we sped off, putting the grotesque scene of the bus stop behind us. We wouldn’t be missed—more shamblers redirected from the subway were arriving there, in waves.