Chronic City (30 page)

“I like to check before I go out.”

“That’s fine,” Perkus assured him.

“Do you want me to set up an alert on your desktop? It blinks if the code goes to Red.”

“That’s okay. I’m not online enough for it to matter.”

“Can you show us your… World?” said Oona.

“This computer’s too slow,” said Biller. He retopped his head with the ocelot, and was gone.

“I don’t want to worry anyone,” said Oona half an hour later, seemingly apropos of nothing, “but Biller’s little wonderland might eventually bring about the destruction of our universe.”

“Huh?” We’d been smoking marijuana, I’d been scheming on shifting Oona and myself out the door, shifting our evening to a more physical plane. Perkus had been auditioning CD tracks for us, airing rock groups he claimed as precursors to or missing links between other rock groups I’d never heard of. And I was confused before Oona had even spoken. When these evenings dragged into epics, I sometimes wished I could keep Perkus in better focus. Oona’s ferocities frequently nudged him to the margins here on his own main stage. But I had no option of asking her leave in order to be alone with Perkus, so I’d opt instead to remove her and myself. There were rewards.

“Have you heard of simulated worlds theory?” she asked both of us. “It’s something Emil Junrow was working on before he died, I actually wrote about it in
I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of it,” said Perkus, voice conveying a defensive uncertainty. “What’s that got to do with Biller?”

“If you understand it, you must realize that the likelihood is that we’ll be shut down once we develop our own virtual worlds,” she said, plainly mocking. By using the word
understand
she meant to say she knew that Perkus, and certainly myself, didn’t.

“Please explain,” I said.

“Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it’s possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings, something like Biller’s avatars, who sincerely believe they’re truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you’d never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it.”

“Sure,” said Perkus. “Everybody knows that.” He tried to dismiss or encompass Oona’s description before she could complete it. “It’s common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares. I think science established that
decades
ago, for crying out loud. Your Junrow was—huh!—behind the curve on that one.”

“Right, right,” said Oona slyly. “But here’s the point. If we agree that the odds are overwhelming that it’s already happened, then we’re just one of innumerable universes living in parallel, a series of experiments just to see how things will develop. You know, whether we’ll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever. There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once.”

“Why couldn’t we be the original?” I asked.

“We
could
be,” said Oona. “But the odds aren’t good. You wouldn’t want to bet on it.”

I didn’t protest to Oona that we
felt
like the original, to me. I knew she’d say that every fake universe would feel like the original, to its inhabitants. Yet everything around me, every tangy specific in the simulation in which I found myself embedded, militated against the suggestion that it was a simulation: the furls of stale smoke and gritty phosphenes drifting between my eyes and the kitchen’s overhead light, the involuntary memory-echo telling me one of the rock
bands Perkus had played was called Crispy Ambulance, a throbbing hangnail I’d misguidedly gnawed at and now worked to ignore, the secret parts of Oona Laszlo I’d uncover and touch and taste within the hour, if my guess was right.

“The problem,” she continued, “is that our own simulated reality might only be allowed to continue if it were either informative or entertaining enough to be worth the computing power. Or anyway, as long as we didn’t use too much, they might not unplug us. That’s assuming there remains some limit on that kind of resource, which all our physical laws suggest
would
be the case. So the moment we develop our own computers capable of spinning out their own virtual universes—like Yet Another World—we become a drastic drain on their computing power. It’s exponential, because now they have to generate all of our simulations, too. We wouldn’t be worth the trouble at that point, we’d have blown the budget allocated to our particular little simulation. They’d just pull our plug. I mean, they’d have millions of other realities running, they’d hardly miss one. But, you know, too bad for
us.”

“By ‘they’ you mean God, I guess.” I was surprised to hear myself use the word.

“Let’s agree to call them ‘our simulators.’”

Now Perkus looked truly terrified. His good eye withdrew, his kooky one reeled.
“What should we do?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we
can
do,” said Oona. “Except, if possible, keep our simulators really entertained.” With that she gave me a look. Lecture over. Something else to begin.

How did Perkus occupy himself, when Oona and I left him alone those December nights? Richard Abneg and I used to see him through to the dawn, until one or all of us were dozing in our chairs.
Oona and I, on the other hand, typically whipped Perkus and ourselves into a frenzy, then vamoosed. I felt an extra pang this night, discharging him into the wake of Oona’s provocations. Her merry nightmare of simulated worlds was too much the sort of thing Perkus would gnaw over.

Yet he never seemed to begrudge our going. I wondered if Perkus might be bidding on chaldrons all alone, in the dark, after hours. He still hoarded Ice, used other name brands for social smoking. I could so easily picture him, padding in his socks to the CD player to insert the Sandy Bull disk, then lowering the lights and leaning his head into the cowl of the screen’s glow, fingers puttering without angst or undue wishfulness, all possessive lusts dispelled in past attempts, only entering a perfunctory bid for what he no longer imagined he’d win, content to seek the remote embrace of that inexplicable ceramic other—the only variety of pair-bonding Perkus Tooth allowed himself, so far as I could tell. Was this picture real? Who knew? Chaldrons, like Lindsay the waitress and whether Marlon Brando was alive or dead, had joined the list of things we no longer mentioned. Our silence on those subjects was just part of the price we’d paid to enter this oasis, this false calm that had carried me, carried all of us, if I can be trusted to speak for the others, to nearly the end of the year, to the day in late December when things changed again, that irreversible day which began with the mayor’s invitation arriving in the mail.

CHAPTER
Fifteen

I culled it
from the mass of junk in my brass mailbox on my way out that morning. Who knew how long it had spent there—I checked that box once a week or so, and then just to bundle the pointless catalogues and credit-card offers into the building’s handy recycling bins. The creamy rectangular envelope, my name and address hand-calligraphied, HIS HONOR JULES ARNHEIM embossed in the upper corner, had some mass or density that tugged downward, and so slipped from the garbagy sheaf, and into my attention, almost as in a card trick. For all that it telegraphed importance, I tucked the envelope into my coat’s inner breast pocket to open in the taxicab, worrying I’d be late. Then I forgot it there for a little while, disconcerted by the early hour and already regretting my awkward mission.

The previous Wednesday I’d emerged from the shower to find Oona with her head cocked, punching impatiently through the messages piled on my answering machine, whose digital readout had been blinking Full for a few days already. She turned to offer a crookedly sweet smile, unashamed at her prying. I suppose I was
transparently hapless in this regard: Oona could feel confident she was my only secret, so what would she be prying after? She’d restored the volume so the messages were audible; the voice of my old publicist Foley leaked from the machine while Oona’s finger hovered over the Next button.

“You’ve got to do something about this,” said Oona, with an uncommon air of sympathy.

“About what?”

“You need to go out once in a while and represent,” she said gently. “It’s your only job.”

Oona tapped past the blipping first syllables of the last few unheard messages, the bulk of them Foley’s greeting, repeated in descending tones of resignation. I’d certainly known it was Foley’s calls I’d been ignoring, even after I lowered the machine’s volume. Janice’s diagnosis had brought a raft of media requests, mercifully channeled through my lecture agency. After so long having nothing for me, I suppose they might be a little frustrated I wasn’t pouncing on these fresh opportunities. What I couldn’t fathom was what Oona thought she was doing nudging my denial’s manhole cover and peeking underneath.

I toweled my hair, convenient cover. “I’m not an expert on decaying orbits or foot cancer, you know. They want me to wring my hands and talk about how much I love her.”

“Well, that’s easy then, since you do love her.”

I stared. I didn’t know why Oona insisted on it, but I was less sure of my love each time she did. Perhaps that was her reason.

“I’ll help you sort through these if you like.”

“I think if you hit Delete twice it erases them all.”

By the time I was dressed she’d cleared the machine, but had also written out, on a lined yellow pad she kept in her coat pocket, a list of the outlets requesting interviews, then begun crossing out the
majority of them. “Don’t bother with these … this you’ve already missed … look, Chase, you should at least do the
Brian Lehrer Show
. It isn’t sensational or hysterical, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The whole city tunes in to WNYC, you get a lot of bang for your buck.”

“What if I want… no bang?”

“We all have to do our part.” Oona’s encouragement was strangely tender, like a cornerman exhorting a jittery boxer back into the ring. I found myself not wanting to let her down. If it was for Oona, I could talk about Janice once or twice, exhibit my heartbreak and confusion. No one would ever known how little I remembered, and if I wanted details I only had to read the newspaper.

“Call your friend Foley,” said Oona, tearing off the top sheet, on which she’d heavily circled the radio invitation she favored. She left it beside my phone, then reloaded her pockets and tugged her skinny leather gloves over her knuckles. “Bye for now.”

“Foley’s not my friend,” I said. “She’s my publicist.”

“Okay, call your publicist.”

“You’re my friend.”

“I’m your whatever.”

It wasn’t the twenty-minute segment of airtime to which I’d consented that unnerved me now. I could call on old vocal prowess; for me, voice-over had been the least difficult task in performance, while embodiment was the more esoteric art, and I was rusty. A voice issuing in the void could claim anything and persuade easily enough. If Brian Lehrer or his staff meanwhile wished to see through me, let them feel welcome. I’m sure they’d had bigger fakes than me on the premises. But once I’d heard where WNYC was headquartered, in the Municipal Building on Centre Street at Chambers, at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized I hadn’t been so far downtown since the gray fog’s onset. I didn’t think of myself as afraid, nor a recluse like Perkus. I just figured I hadn’t happened to go. But this
morning I was afraid, perhaps an intimation of the evening to come. Foley had said she would meet me at WNYC’s offices and I was glad.

Wouldn’t you know it, giving flesh to my fear were distant sirens. You could hear these anywhere in the city, but they took on a different cast at the perimeter of that cloud bank that had settled on the island below Chambers. I glimpsed the fog’s rim in the crooked canyons from the windows of my cab. It swallowed daylight right up to the bridge’s on-ramp, hazy tendrils nestling into the greens around city hall. At that I recalled the envelope in my breast pocket, my fingers drifting in to confirm its presence, but too late, I’d arrived. I passed through the Municipal Building’s airport-style security, emptying pockets of change and keys for bored men in uniform, then rode the elevator twenty-five floors to meet my small public fate.

Foley found me at the station’s glass doors and ushered me in. The show was to consist of me and a female cancer doctor, an oncologist who’d been consulting with Mission Control on Janice’s case, and who greeted me a little coldly, I thought. We’d been seated at our microphones and prepped a little, supplied with drinking water and shown the Cough button, when Lehrer came in, trailing more of his staff, and Foley too, and made an apology: we weren’t going to go on the air after all, had been bumped. Those sirens weren’t irrelevant, something had happened, close by, and the station was shifting to live coverage, on the street. A man, one of the money people, instead of showing up at the offices of the brokerage house where he worked, had thrown himself and his briefcase into the giant excavation for Noteless’s memorial. It was all unfortunately too easy to do, creep close to that site, under cover of the gray fog. Lehrer explained all this in a wryly consoling voice I now realized I’d heard a hundred times before. “I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this as winter comes in,” he told us. “I think it’s that much harder to report for work down
under that cloud every day when it’s so cold.” The doctor and I stood, rendered dumb. Everything about this confused me, but I didn’t want to take up anyone’s time. I felt I should be the apologetic one, sorry for my own dispensability, as though I’d let down Lehrer and Foley, Oona too. Yet confirmed in my own suspicion that I was generally a filler item, useful only on slow news days.