Chronic City (48 page)

That I followed this narrative is a blooming miracle, however, as throughout our viewing Perkus was unable to keep from voicing a filibuster of interpretations. The twenty-odd minutes of black-and-white fable gave him innumerable opportunities to persuade me that Rod Serling was the zero point for the pure themes: Cold War fear! Conformity! Alienation! Collective and consensual delusion, the leakage of the dream life into the waking!
The Twilight Zone
, Perkus explained, was news that stayed news (I took this as rebuke of my gift of the Sunday
Times)
, in this case speaking volumes about the true nature of the unnatural winter the city had been enduring. Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist.

“Remind you of anything?” he insisted afterward, scurrying to halt the tape’s progress to the next immortal episode.

Remember, I’d done television, too much of it. I mostly had just pitied the actors, forced to work on such an impoverished set and to be sprayed with glycerin between takes. Then again, these were pretty feeble actors.

“Lots of things,” I said. “What things did you have in mind?”

“The state of… everything. Your life, mine, the state of the weather.”

I played dumb. It couldn’t be a crime merely to exaggerate the role Perkus cast me in always. “Sure, it’s been a little cold. You think despite how it feels, it’s actually hot out?”

“Many things helplessly produce their own opposites.” Sensing my resistance, he half swallowed this manifesto line. I saw him squint, too, to keep his dodgy eye from embarrassing him. “I think I’m losing you.”

“It all feels a little plotty to me,” I said, dead set on disappointing him. “I was never one for plots.”

“Too bad, since you’re in one.”

“The newspaper is the news, too, at least on the day it’s published. Did you read about the crane collapse on Ninety-first? They think Abneg’s tiger might be to blame.”

“Fuck Abneg’s tiger, and fuck the newspaper.” Perkus began swearing, invoking Richard’s style. “The
Times
isn’t the commissar of the real, not anymore, not as far as I’m concerned. It’s the cover story.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Perkus. You don’t have to rely on it, like I do, for updates on your personal life!”

“Why are you yelling?”

I had gotten a little ventilated, without noticing. I felt tide-swamped with provocations: the serial bulging of Ava’s ribs as she hiccuped under my hand; the moldering smell and tawdriness of the Friendreth generally; the fine grounds the gold filter hadn’t kept from ending in the bottom of my cup and on the carpet of my tongue; the unrelenting March weather, which seemed to prove some arcane fact my loopy friend Perkus held over me like a threat, as though he could be right and I could be wrong about everything; that neither Perkus nor Oona ever called me on the phone—I was somehow a principle taken for granted, as much an item of decor in Perkus’s circle as I had been the chunk of handsome furniture at
wealth’s table; that Mission Control hadn’t received a communication from Janice or
Northern Lights
generally for almost three weeks. Once upon a time Janice had peppered the newspapers with affectionate updates I guiltily speed-read; now I guiltily scoured the papers daily for hints of her existence which refused to appear. All of this seemed irreconcilable data, yet the ultimate provocation was the way Perkus arched his eyebrows at me as though I was supposed to grasp it as a whole.

“Janice might be dead,” I blurted, seeking his sympathy. “And I’m in love with Oona.”

“Have you ever found yourself exhausted by a friend whose problems simply never change? Here, Ava.” Perkus rattled her leash and she sprang from the couch to the door—her transitions, from placidity to avidity, were like jump cuts. Then he began bundling himself into outer layers I’d mostly purchased for him. Despite the uncanny truth
The Twilight Zone
episode had revealed, he’d protect himself from the cold outside. Perkus’s selfish certainties took my breath away. Yet I had to grant the distinction: he was, if nothing else, a person whose problems were never exactly the same twice. There is a war, I thought, between the ones who stagger from chaldron drunkenness to cohabitation with a three-legged pit bull, and those who try to keep up with them. I was losing the war. Chaldrons, for instance: Would they ever be mentioned again, or had they slipped from his scheme? Was it my duty, as I’d earlier assumed, to suppress uncomfortable facts, or was I somehow the stooge who couldn’t keep all the essentials in his head? I didn’t mind jigsaw puzzles, but this one seemed to have no edge pieces.
Marlon Brando is dead!
I wanted to shout after him as he departed, leaving me there alone in Ava’s digs.

I think!

I said nothing, as footfalls of man and dog waned to silence in
the corridor. So much for the fight I’d planned. I was no match. Perkus’s transitions were as rapid as Ava’s, and if he was applying tough love it was fairly tough. On the other hand, his mysterioso style left my pride some wiggle room. Sure, I replied to Perkus’s absence, I
have
been exhausted by those people whose problems never change. Good thing there’s none of those around here! My own bedevilments seemed dynamic enough to me. If I stuck around and changed the subject I could pretend we’d never tangled. Only I might have to praise Rod Serling to get back in Perkus’s graces. That’s when I located my pride—I fled.

Well, if I’d felt betrayed by Perkus consorting with Susan Eldred, it was only a warm-up. I didn’t wander round to the Friendreth for three days after, making an interval of self-containment and restored private routine, like I’d established when Perkus went missing. There wasn’t any Oona to distract me, either. She counted the days to delivery of the Noteless manuscript. In this vacuum I reacquainted myself with the afternoon movie theaters of the Upper East Side, a good place not to think about the weather among other things. I scared myself, one day at the old United Artists on First Avenue and Eighty-fifth, imagining that a low rumble on the film’s soundtrack was the scraping of the mechanical tiger’s excavations beneath the theater—of course, it was only the noise of an army of Orcs grinding into battle, silly me.

At home after that endless afternoon movie I recalled the moment of worry, and took it as an intimation: if one of us was being hounded by that tiger, it probably wasn’t me. So I rushed to my computer to pull up TigerWatch, to make certain the Friendreth hadn’t been destroyed. It was the first time I’d ever condescended to visit the Web site, which had struck me previously as a sop to public
prurience at misfortune, rather than an upstanding service. Anyway, I’d prided myself on having the inside scoop from Richard Abneg. What I found allowed me to breathe easy. At last reports the tiger was off the map of my companions entirely, in Spanish Harlem. But the scare made me want to overlook dignity’s boycott, and see Perkus. This was the very day Oona had said she’d be putting the book on her editor’s desk. Rather than waiting for whatever degree of celebration she’d deign to share, I elected not to be such a slave, or anyway such an obedient one. So it was a curiously mingled pride and pridelessness that saw me headed back out into the fresh night.

I heard Oona through the door to Ava’s apartment. She was in the midst of a self-lacerating harangue, in what I thought of as her single-malt voice. Sure enough, a bottle of twelve-year-old Oban sat between them, its gold essence at the halfway point, its discarded paper wrapper and shards of lead-foil cork wrapper on the table beside Oona’s handbag to prove the bottle’s halfwaying had been accomplished just now. Seeing an intoxicant other than coffee inside the walls of the Friendreth was as startling as seeing Oona (intoxicant to me). I’d come to think of the place as a rehab facility, though Perkus would have said,
Dogs have no use for the twelve steps, Chase!
But I hadn’t regarded it as my own hiding place from Oona until seeing it stormed by her. Oona and Perkus each held juice glasses, full with more than a finger, and smiled up at me guiltlessly. Perkus, curiously, held a small hardcover book in his lap, as though using it as a handy shield to protect his genitals. Ava knelt beneath Oona’s chair, head craned adoringly upward, obviously enthralled by that wiry, fitful little black-clad poppet, or Gnuppet, with the maniacal, winding voice. I knew Ava well enough now to gather she’d developed a quick crush. The dog might have been starved for female companionship, too. I was. Oona all at once called out a kind of Mickey Spillane urgency from me, I wanted to kiss her and take her away from there
and I wanted to hit her for being there in the first place. And for getting Perkus drunk. And for knowing where to find him, and coming to find him instead of me. And. And. And.

Well, Oona was beating herself up, and quickly let me understand the occasion. “Oh, hello, Chase. We’re having an Irish wake for the greatest book I ever wrote or will write. I called it
Pages from a Void
, though I guess I figured that title was never going to fly with the sales force. Still, I like saying it aloud.”

“The editor didn’t love it?” I stepped in and shut the door behind me.

“Oh, the editor was always sure to hate this book. I didn’t get where I am today, Chase, relying on the integrity of a New York publishing syndicate. My mistake was imagining I had Noteless at my back. I thought the joke was on the editor for signing up a nihilist absolutist who’s made a career of treating the hand that feeds him like a plate of gravy fries. I climbed inside this project, I channeled that mofo’s tar pit of an aesthetic and served it to them chilled. Excuse the mixed metaphors, they’re strictly a symptom of alleviation from Laird’s black tunnel of suffocation and silence. I mix my metaphors so I know I’m alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem. Speaking of which, help yourself, darling.”

At this word Perkus couldn’t meet my eye. I took the opening and dug in Ava’s shelves for a glass, then siphoned off as much of the Scotch as it would hold, preventative measures. “So Noteless bit
your
hand instead? With or without his dentures?” I slugged back half of my bitter cup at one go.

“It turns out Laird was ready to commence licking asses instead. Just my luck to hook up with him at the moment his integrity plummets into one of his so-called bottomless ‘sculptures.’ Not luck, really. I was typecast. Noteless and Catherine Hamwright, that’s the editor, they hatched a scheme to sell him like everybody’s sinister
uncle who’s really a barrel of laughs, another Emil Junrow, or the Edward Gorey of urban sinkholes. They were hoping I’d write
Did You Really Say What I Think You Just Said, Mr. Noteless?
Apparently, I’m who you enlist when you’re selling out in this town. Perkus here hasn’t said anything but I can tell he thinks this is my just deserts—my
comeuppance
, to use a Chase Insteadman word.”

Oona’s tiny bullets flew everywhere. Was I really notorious for my archaicisms? I’d taken worse blows. She’d earned only a little grace with me for using the word “darling;” I still wanted to know how she’d come to be here. She and Perkus never seemed like friends to me, no matter what they claimed. They seemed half enemies, half conspirators, relishing snickering complicity I was too innocent to share. Perkus, for his part, did show a wily, red-rimmed satisfaction at Oona in her amphetamine cups, but only from the vantage of his own. I’d never witnessed Perkus really bombed on alcohol before, but it seemed his recent bout of clean living made him a very cheap date. He swayed on his chair, with only the book for ballast. I suppose the dog’s life had been a bit less enthralling than he’d wanted to admit. I just wished I could dislodge him from his perches so easily as Oona.

“It’s really the best thing you’ve done?” I asked.

Perkus raised his eyebrows at her challengingly, as if he knew of something else lurking in a drawer somewhere, but still didn’t speak. In his dog’s haircut, lips softened by drink, he looked more and more the bit player from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

“Absolutely.”

“So forget what this editor thinks. It’ll get published somewhere else.”

“You don’t understand, it’s all written in the imperious voice of Deepster McHole-in-the-Ground. I steeped myself in his sources, and then spit them back out—it was like writing a graduate dissertation,
something I’ve spent my life avoiding.” It wasn’t enough to mention sources, Oona had to begin listing them in a deliberate drone. “I read Deleuze and Guattari, I read John Gray and E. M. Cioran and Bernhard’s
Correction
, I read Mike Davis and Donna Haraway and John Baldessari, I read Ballard and Baudrillard, and by the way, I don’t care what anyone says, Ballard’s just Baudrillard without the
u-d-r-i
. I practically memorized
The Writings of Robert Smithson
, for god’s sake, which is the exact equivalent of ordering a month’s worth of meals at a restaurant where John Cage is the chef.”

“Good for you,” said Perkus, finally piping up. His voice was clotted, the words surfacing each like a bubble through a pot of oatmeal. I forgot for a moment which was his abstruse eye—both seemed to curl toward unseen dimensions. “A secret masterpiece is always best. It changes the world slightly. Everyone should have one, like one of those simulated worlds you were talking about, or an Ant Farm.”