Chronic City (50 page)

Though black humor is the only functioning humor here, I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask if I could take Zamyatin’s keyboard hour. I suspect it’ll go unused, a symbolic silent communication, an aria of cosmic null-music to foreshadow the chorale the rest of us will soon chime in with. Zamyatin commandeered a landing module and kamikazied himself out of the air lock yesterday. As expected, he sparked one of the Chinese mines, making a tiny missing tooth in the dynamite smile that pins us on the far side of home. No one was certain what (more) was wrong when Klaxons sounded, but Keldysh inventoried the missing lander, and on doing a head count and finding Z. absent we rushed to the Library’s south window, which gives a panorama of Earth through a coy lace veil of mines, a view we usually avoid, just in time to see him flare and burn. We cheered wildly. It isn’t as though Zamyatin’s bid could be whitewashed as other than suicide—he’d have been baked Alaska on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere even if he had negotiated the mine layer. That would have been a purely symbolic triumph, where this we could call taking one for the team.

And then there were five. Our remaining lives are in Sledge’s hands. What little remains of them. I suppose our remains will be in his hands, too, in the sense that the whole of
Northern Lights
is being given over to the gardens, now expanded from the Greenhouse to wherever Sledge can get something green to cling or take root and get busy swapping our exhaled breath for something worth inhaling. So when this last brave stand collapses, and we asphyxiate in one collective heap, there’ll be no one left to give us interstellar funerals—instead we’ll rot in the dark mossy grotto we’ve left behind. At least we no longer fear starvation, as Sledge is always ladling up some horrible fruity or rooty stew—there’s plenty of spare biomass to
consume, now that Sledge has been invited to turn the whole station into a throbbing wet garden. The ironies are rich. Trapped in the infinite cold of space, we bake like Russian mafiosi in a steam room. Technology expelled us from Earth’s garden and then, having shot its wad, gardening is left to take over. Similarly, runaway growth is eating me from within, yet Sledge encourages a runaway growth that may prolong my life, allowing me to die longer. The station has a kind of cancer, we smell it in the corridors everywhere, and trip over new growth every time we touch our blind appendages to the walls. As a girl, Chase, I always did get tubers and tumors confused.

Ordinarily, I’m exempted from my turn helping Sledge shift his banks of grow lights from one position to the next, but one day recently I was feeling vital and bored shitless enough to give it a go. In zero-G the task doesn’t involve any lifting, obviously, and even a one-footed lady can be useful nudging the arrays around corners and helping Sledge reorient them in a new zone. Sometimes in all this dark it’s pleasant to cling to those few yellowish lights, too. This day Sledge confessed to me the basis of his mastery of indoor agriculture: he once single-handedly ran the most profitable indoor marijuana farm on the whole island of Manhattan. The operation was tucked inside a four-room apartment on the Upper East Side, unknown not only to the authorities (kept off the scent by elaborately rerouted utility accounts, the massive electrical bills thrown to other addresses like a ventriloquist’s voice into a dummy’s body) but to even the closest neighbors, who regarded Sledge as an innocent, forgettable fellow tenant in the large and anonymous building. Sledge described it generously, the rooms teeming to the ceilings with bud-heavy green stalks, the floor cabled with water sprinklers, the walls lined with foil reflectors to maximize the ripening effects of the solar-spectrum lamps, the stereo chattering NPR—talk radio to cover the drone of the daytime light banks, and classical music to
give the plants a cultural heritage through the cool damp night. In one large closet he kept what he called the “mother plant,” a grotesquely thickened and practically pulsing rope of marijuana from which he cloned seedlings, a fine-tuned specimen of THC. The result he spliced from her was the highest high-end “one-toke dope,” or so he bragged. He’d made himself and several confederates wealthy from the operation before a paranoid inkling triggered a violent two-day fit in which he completely disassembled the farm and eradicated its traces. It was those skills that now turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung. I suppose I am Sledge’s mother plant, the improbable thing he keeps alive in an unnatural cramped space.

I don’t know why I’m wasting so much of my keyboard time paraphrasing Sledge’s tale, except that it was as if I’d visited the place myself. We’re prone to transporting visualizations now, in our darkened station, not to mention vivid olfactory hallucinations like the apple cider presently rising to my nostrils. The Russians talk about their childhoods incessantly, when they talk at all. Mstislav, drifting in the dark like a dreamer in a sensory-deprivation tank, has spontaneously offered several wistful accounts of cutting his bare foot on a sickle while pursuing a goat, and while we’ve many creatures roaming the station now that the Greenhouse doors have been thrown open, I’m fairly certain there’s no goat on our roster. For me, it isn’t juvenile pastoral to which I revert, but moments between us, Chase, daydream flashes I prefer not to believe I’ve cobbled out of wishful thinking and damp air. (Did you know we can’t even properly gaze at the stars, now? Our breath fogs any window we turn to. We’re moisture, Chase, we’re returning to dew.) I know I’ve got a lot of gall questioning your existence when it’s my own that’s so transparently dubious, or dubiously transparent, or something. But you never write, you never call, ha ha ha. So each time I roam the corridors of the Met
in my imaginings, seeking that Chinese garden where our cool thrilling birdlike kisses were exchanged, finding that oasis of stone and fern and skylight, bowing my head to see our twinned reflections in the rippling pool there, the museum and the Chinese garden and the mirror of water grow clearer and clearer while you begin to pale, I see only myself and a shimmer beside me, you’re nothing now but an urgent elusive talisman, an object glimpsed but unseen, a fish’s lure in the deep, a reason to go on living. And I do that, Chase. At someone’s command, and I prefer to believe it is yours, my friend, I go on living.

Love,
J
.

CHAPTER
Twenty-two

Hiccup-afflicted
, Perkus began to oscillate like his own eye, as though some internal compass was being again and again jostled out of its usual operation. Or perhaps it was more as if a needle was bumping on a scuffed LP, like his salvaged copy of
Some Girls
, and skipping from track to track. Not that Perkus had ever seemed particularly compassed—it took the onset of hiccups to make me see the relative continuity of his earlier passages. Now he reeled. He’d revive his old mode of whirlwind intertextual eurekas, citing Mailer’s
The White Negro
, Seymour Krim calling Lenny Bruce “the Jazz Circuit Hegel,” the expulsion of Richard Hell from Television,
The Man Who Was Thursday
, the aphorisms of Franz Marplot, Colin Wilson on Gurdjieff, Dennett’s theory of mind-as-computer, Borges’s “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” a Cassavetes appearance on
The Gnuppet Show
, all in a flurry, relying on shorthand—a glimpse of turrets in mist where once he would have drawn a whole castle in the air before me. Or he’d launch a manic exposé—something to do with Claire Carter, the mayor’s right hand and Richard Abneg’s bête noire, having a nerd-king brother who’d invented chaldrons—but run aground,
mutter into his fist, begin discoursing on the progress of Ava’s bowel movements mid-sentence, or otherwise, before gaining any momentum, lose his way. If his arguments were once brakeless vehicles he could ride a mile or two before veering into a ditch—a listener climbing aboard if they dared—now they seemed compacted on arrival in one of those junkyard car-crushing machines, recognizable for their former purpose but undrivable.

Then he’d reverse himself, plunge into the newer vein, aping Ava’s doggish absolutes, renounce proliferating interpretation and context, all the cultural clues. Too much news or manufactured opinion was distraction from the deeper soundings to be conducted at a level of pure experience: Ava’s sniffing walkabouts, the corroded jape of Keith Richards’s guitar, the juicy platonic ideal of a pastrami sandwich he’d isolated at a coffee shop on York Avenue. And the weather, he was devoted to the snow and cold, the uncanny force of it, as he was to the legend of the tiger, his own personal destroyer. He preferred what defied or needed no explanation. “Alan Watts said you mustn’t concern yourself with information from outside your immediate village. People, like dogs, make demimondes for the purposes of sensory sanity. Nobody—that’s
no body
—really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe. Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe.” These harangues I’d begun to think of as the Friendreth Purities, though really they’d begun earlier, with the floe-borne polar bear, whose profundity had shamed a broadside into silence. Now he published a daily War Free edition of the mind. What a dog couldn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

Whatever the pursuit, I was his student again, reenlisted. It was as though we’d wasted time enough on misunderstandings of a personal nature. Perkus seemed in a hurry, too eager for our connection to resume his sporadic cruel needling. Apparently I gave him something
Ava or Sadie Zapping couldn’t. He had their ears, but mine were more attuned to Perkus’s vocabulary, his field of reference, even if he claimed he wished to vacate that field. Biller was invisible, so far as I could tell, and Sadie treated me as an incidental presence, when we overlapped. Oona didn’t turn up in the Friendreth again. The Oonaphone was silent, or used secretly.

First, though, it had to be admitted that he
had
a chronic case. When I saw him the first time, two days after Oona and I had made our dawn escape, Perkus was covering his mouth, belching once or twice, or pausing in his speech, turning his head—covering, in other words, any way he could, rather than confessing the situation. At last a sonically undeniable
hiccup
, the world’s most onomatopoetic utterance, brazened its way from his lips while Perkus faced me directly, nowhere to hide.

“Runs in the family,” I suggested.

He glared a little warning to me not to get too cute. “Not Ava anymore.”

“Have you had them continuously?” I didn’t add,
since that night
.

“On and off.” He breezed a hand to dismiss the topic, but even as he did I saw him clench and swallow, stifling another.

“Trouble sleeping?”

“No,” he lied.

Her hiccups shed, Ava thrived, though it couldn’t be just my projection that she seemed more orderly, less bounding, as though the dog were every much as concerned as I was, fearing she’d somehow sap Perkus’s energies now that he’d taken her malady upon himself. Their relationship had entered another phase (I don’t know why I should find this remarkable, knowing Perkus). Ava seemed to pride herself on deferentially coiling at his feet, energies banked until Perkus made a grab for her leash or beckoned her to the dance.
She’d never climb his back now, never hurl herself between his knees to trip his steps to the door. She stole less food from the table, perhaps only because she’d observed how rarely Perkus finished a meal anymore, losing interest in trying to fit in bites of egg-and-cheese or pastrami sandwiches between his grunting contractions, and how certain it was he’d push a substantial remainder her way at the end. It was as if Perkus had been training her, but when I asked he denied it, said he’d never wanted to compel her into any such Nietzschean slave-master bond. “She and I talk, Chase”—here he hiccuped, leaving a gap, which we ignored except for his wheeling eye, which seemed to search the room’s walls for the missing words—“just talk, nothing more.”

Ava also seemed a key to one of Perkus’s new motifs, a disquisition in progress on the constructed nature of all consciousness. He worked repeatedly to perfect the thought aloud, seeming to believe he and I had both been persuaded we lived in a virtual reality, and needed to feel better about it. We might as
well
live in a concocted environment, according to his new epiphany, since our awareness was a sort of virtual construction to begin with. No baseline reality existed to worry over. “All memories are replacements, Chase, I read about this, it’s the latest neurological breakthrough.” Why the hermetic skeptic should credit fresh scientific dispatches I didn’t know, but never mind. I obliged by asking him to explain. “Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored ‘original.’ We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. We have no sugar mountain to journey backward toward, Chase! Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, and imagine you feel its weight at your back. All we’ve
got is our working draft, no more final than the last, just as ready to be discarded. Memory is rehearsal for a show that never goes on!”

Fair enough, but what did this have to do with the dog? “Each day Ava traces the scent map of the real, beyond which nothing matters to her. She’s aware that the world requires reassembly each time through it. And think of what Manhattan is to a
dog
, Chase! If she can endure living in our daydream, we should be able to tolerate living in someone else’s!” Now that Perkus hiccuped openly before me, with evident relief he allowed the gasping intervals to open in his speeches, ellipsis made audible. The asynchronous music of his potholed speech united the Friendreth Purities with their opposite, those floodgates of paranoiac explanation that periodically opened. “Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A
theme park
, really! Meant to halt time’s encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. So these disjunctions appear, and we have to explain them away, as tigers or epic sculpture. If Noteless didn’t exist the city would have had to invent him, Chase!” The more Perkus fleshed this theory the more the holes in his speech began to seem a kind of necessary reply to the temporal lacunae he felt the city had fallen into, as well as to Laird Noteless’s bottomless pits and absent structures.