Chronic City (47 page)

This might be Perkus in a perfect nutshell, taking Kafka as a resource guide to pet ownership. “Does he say anything about how to cure her hiccups?” Ava’s hiccing seemed to be getting worse—or perhaps I should say more persistent, since it didn’t appear to bother the indomitable animal.

“She’s fine,” he said. “At night they go away so she can sleep. I hug her around the chest and sort of squeeze them away.”

“Is that prescribed in Kafka? Maybe we should take her to see Strabo Blandiana.” I teased, but again, it was Perkus I wanted to have Strabo take a stab at. Maybe the medicinalist knew the right points for a needle to enter the human body and trigger self-awareness, pride in one’s appearance, as well as species pride, the desire to rejoin the human race. Then I felt ashamed for preferring Perkus’s Beau Brummell phase to his present guise as a Staten Island garbageman—it wasn’t as if the first had been geared to impress others or me personally, or signaled any high regard for the opinions of the human race. What had drawn me to Perkus was his absence of
any calculation, except in figuring how to persuade me of his next urgent theory or ephemeral fact.

Still, I worried about his health. I’d already snuck aspirin and floss into his bathroom. He boasted he was cluster-free since the hallucinatory and epochal headache that, with tiger and blizzard, had ushered him to this new life. He didn’t smoke pot—it was now as if he’d never smoked pot. I didn’t ask if ellipsis had departed him, too. Who was I to judge that he looked hungry, hunted, harrowed? Maybe being out of his apartment had only revealed an underlying truth, and I, fatally callow, had romanticized his former appearance. One thing I was sure of, Perkus’s temples looked flattened, dented, without the disguise of floppy hair. Once he’d had only the wrecked and reckless eye. Now his whole cranium looked imbalanced to me, though possibly this was birth trauma, a forceps impression. Perkus
had
, after all, gotten from there to here like the rest of us. But where was he going?

It was after the next snowstorm that I uncovered the fact that Biller and I weren’t Perkus’s only lifeline at the Friendreth anymore. The temperature locked in again, the skies white so that we could feel it coming for a day or two. Korean markets and bodegas and building superintendents everywhere had given up trying to pry up the baked black crusts on either side of narrow-carved walkways, and now laid down a desultory path of salts hoping to preserve just that width they’d struggled for. Only a couple of inches fell overnight, nothing more. By morning it was done and in the bright daylight you might feel you’d been largely spared, after that warning sky. Except now it was March and you felt something was wrong, or anyway different. Winter had stayed. Everyone joked about the weather, and the joke they joked was “Everyone does something
about the weather, but nobody ever talks about it,” and it wasn’t funny.

The snowfall, though negligible, slowed the city into depression, a ceremonial plummet like a flag at half-mast. You could travel where you liked but people called in sick and battened themselves at home. I really only knew this by osmosis since the people I knew mostly had nowhere to go, by privilege or otherwise. But I ran into Susan Eldred, from Criterion’s noble offices, in her snow boots outside the Friendreth’s door, just leaving. I was arriving with East Side bagels, miraculously still a little hot in their paper sack. This was two in the afternoon—still, thanks not to Perkus but to Oona, my idea of first thing in the morning. (Perkus rose with Ava and the dawn for the first walk and first coffee of the day.) Susan and I looked at each other rather stupidly at first, as though we’d been caught and now had something to justify or confess.

“We must be calling on the same dog,” I joked, trying to dispel the air of needless guilt.

“Perkus has been bugging me to round up some stuff for him,” Susan explained, as if she had to. “Nobody’s going into the offices because of the snow, so I figured this would be a good day to drop by.”

“Bugging you how? Does he call?”

“He’s called a couple of times but honestly what lit a fire under me was when he showed up in the offices last week with Ava.”

“Well, I’m relieved he’s making the effort,” I admitted.

“I’d do anything for him, actually,” said Susan Eldred, with helpless sincerity. I filed it away as her promise if I needed it. It was too cold to shift to small talk, and so, in some embarrassment, I think, Susan moved past me on the sidewalk. I went inside.

“Were you hiding the fact that you’re in touch with Susan Eldred from me?” I asked after we three had devoured the bagels.

“Why would I do that?” Perkus said distractedly. Ava mounted his back and tongue-bathed his nape as he reached to the floor to display to me a new prize, which appeared to be a shabby boxed set of VHS tapes, decorated with constellations of stars and a giant disembodied eyeball in black and white.

“Did you call her on the cell phone?” A quick scan had revealed the Oonaphone’s charger, trailing from a socket on the kitchen counter.

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know you ever used it.”

“That’s what it’s for, right?”

“Why don’t you ever call me?”

“I don’t have to call, you just appear.” If he’d meant it as anything but a flat observation this might have seemed fairly hostile, but clearly the subject simply didn’t engage him. Once he’d welcomed me into the Friendreth my visits became predictable phenomena, regular as cribbage matches and Ava’s bowel movements. Perkus was engaged with deeper inquiries, into less obvious subjects. His tone left open the possibility that Perkus felt he was the one doing the caretaking in this friendship, but also that if I wanted to think it went the other way, he wouldn’t object. Far more important was this ancient black VHS cassette he now slipped into the ’80s-vintage Panasonic television with built-in player that had been integrated into Ava’s living-room ensemble.

“Where’d you get that thing?”

“From a Labrador. Dogs don’t need VCRs, Chase!”

“I doubt anyone needs them lately.”

“You do if you’re going to play VHS tapes,” he said, speaking as if to a child. “Can you stay for a bit? I’ve got something I want to show you, it’s less than half an hour long. Ouch, Ava! Ava, down now, get down, that’s a good girl, Ava, Ava down!” Ava, hell-bent on
Perkus’s neck and ears as he crouched, nibbled and tongue-scrubbed him with increasing ferocity. Perkus, often surprisingly forceful with the dog, now gripped her one forepaw and twisted her onto her back, rear limbs cocked and twitching in submission while she writhed the mighty worm of her torso and neck under Perkus’s wrestler hold. I prayed for the dog never to exercise her full powers on him in return, having no doubt who’d prevail. Perkus seemed to whisper something directly into Ava’s mouth, then, still pinning her, returned to blandly pitching his discovery to me. “You might already have seen this, these shows are a part of the collective unconscious. But that’s the nature of this kind of material, Chase, it falls into the category of what D. W. Winnicott calls ‘the unthought known.’ You absorb a thing like this before you’ve assembled the context necessary to grasp it.” Ava hiccuped violently.

I lifted the package from the floor. A four-tape set,
Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Platinum Collection
. By process of elimination I determined the tape Perkus had inserted was Season Three. “More salvage from the storage-space people?”

“No. I spotted it in Eldred’s office, but she’d taken it home. I’ve been drooling after this item for years, it’s surprisingly scarce. CBS had to delete it, because they hadn’t gotten permission to include “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

I tried not to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, feeling more generally disgruntled that he’d presume to blow my mind with something as commonplace as
The Twilight Zone
. “I used to watch these things on late-night TV,” I said, though I couldn’t recall a thing beyond the opening narration, Serling seeming to mock his own stiletto delivery, which I mocked now. “
There is a fifth dimension—
”

“The easiest way to pass as a spy is to tell everyone you’re a spy,” Perkus pronounced gnomically. He loosed Ava, who twisted to
her feet and began nosing at the box in my hands. “Once they think you’re a fool, you get away with anything.”

“Are we going to watch ‘The … Incident… at… Al’s Creek Bridge’?” I knew I’d gotten it wrong.

“No, we’re going to watch ‘The Midnight Sun.’”

“Is it about Japan?”

“No. Be patient.” Perkus held his forefinger to the VCR’s Fast-forward, which apparently needed to be continuously pressed, and not only moved with the speed of a man crawling across the desert but mimicked his groans as he died of thirst. I intertwined my fingers beneath Ava’s throat, keeping her corralled with me.

“Wait, I just guessed: it was directed by Morrison Groom, before he was famous.” I tried not to allow too sardonic a pronunciation to this last word.

“It wasn’t directed by anyone important.” Perkus had his selection cued, and now put on a kettle for more coffee.

I grew more peevish by the minute. At three in the afternoon the light outside wasn’t impressive, but it was daylight, sun fracturing off the fine new powder, however firmly Perkus kept Ava’s curtains drawn. This wasn’t one AM, we weren’t in the mental theater of Eighty-fourth Street, we’d smoked no Chronic nor Blueberry Kush, let alone Ice, and I wasn’t positive Perkus could enthrall me with creaky tapes of old television episodes this time around. The surround was just too tragically shabby and irrelevant to me all of a sudden. If Perkus couldn’t see he’d tumbled, I could. He’d misplaced the old heartbeat of his dissidence, wasn’t cutting across the grain of anything except himself (or so I thought at that moment). I wasn’t totally unaware that my judgments mingled with an irrational sense of betrayal that he’d summoned Susan Eldred, that the Friendreth apartments were turning into as much of a revolving door of acquaintances and contacts as his old apartment had been. I might
have been smarting over his remark about the predictability of my visits, but for the first time I felt disappointed in him. Perkus’s ascetic phase had no more rules than had his libertinism—he made calls on mobile phones, watched old TV shows, and who knows, probably sneaked a joint now and again, only wouldn’t share it with me. I felt we were headed for our second fight (after “The Incident Concerning the Jackson Hole Waitress”) and I didn’t mind. I was glad now it was Susan Eldred and not me that had said aloud that she’d do anything for him. Right now I wanted to do nothing.

So what did I do? The day’s light graying behind those curtains, I joined Perkus on Ava’s couch, each with our fresh cups of coffee, and dutifully watched “The Midnight Sun,” from
The Twilight Zone
’s third season, on glitchy, burping videotape. Ava wedged herself between us to sit bolt upright regarding the television screen as if it were a window, her head darting at the blocking of the characters, growling once when a man holding a pistol pushed his way through a door (you couldn’t quibble with her prejudices), otherwise hiccuping at regular intervals.

The episode was set entirely in a New York apartment building. (I felt Perkus glance at me with satisfaction at this hint of relevance, but I ignored him, wedded to the grudging line I’d drawn in the sand: I’d watch it, but refuse to marvel over whatever he wanted me to marvel over.) The city is nearly abandoned, due to an end-of-the-world heat wave, Earth’s orbit declining toward the sun, which never exits the sky—hence the title. The few who cling to existence in the melting city, namely a young female painter (a Village bohemian in a 1950s sense) and an older woman in her building, are dependent on failing air-conditioning and a failing Frigidaire, which houses what may be the last pitcher of water in Manhattan. The man with the
gun, at whom Ava snarled, is a thirst-maddened desperado who breaks in and swigs down this treasure, a scene played by the sweating women as if it were an allegory of rape. Then, thirst quenched, the intruder apologizes and departs in shame. The heat, reaching a peak, murders the older woman and causes a painting to melt off a canvas. Only after the young painter also collapses does the tale reveal its characteristic twist: she awakens from what is revealed to be a nightmare to find with relief that the sky is dark, the air cool, and outside, snow is falling, but relief gives way to the next horror—the Earth is moving away from the sun, not nearer to it, and Manhattan is locked in a fatal deepening freeze.