Chronic City (51 page)

Perkus seemed to need Manhattan to be both a falsehood and in ruins
(“This town is wearing tatters”)
to make good on his intuitions. But Manhattan wasn’t shattered in the sense that Mick Jagger had indicated in 1978, the way Perkus needed it to be. By recent measures the city was orderly, flush with money, a little boring, even.
That was, if you trusted the complacent testimony of the millions who checked TigerWatch in the morning before donning their April snowshoes and subwaying to work as usual, then in the evenings filled the bars and restaurants, or stayed home to watch
The Sopranos
or the Yankees, speed-dialing to stir Chinese-delivery bicyclists to flight. There was Perkus’s point, proved: the slumbering millions who never pierced or even nudged the veil of dream. I was one of them, a born sucker, but at least I was here listening to his dire facts. Was he a conspiracy theorist? He spat like I’d said
rock critic
. The only conspiracy was a
conspiracy of distraction
. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law of complicity I should go back to the beginning and start again. When he said this, I thought of Susan Eldred’s office, my first sight of his antithetical eye.

There was another dire fact Perkus wanted me to know without telling me. Something too big to be told. The sky would come crashing down if he told it, so I had to absorb it by implication. In this mysterious matter I was intended to understand Perkus had spared me the worst (I thought he’d spread pretty bad tidings already), and that this secret had to do with women generally, or with Oona Laszlo specifically, or both. Yet he wanted to dance on the precipice of telling it. One day he passingly referred to Oona as “your chaldron,” by which he meant nothing good. I found him scratching this itch again the very last day I visited him by myself. That is to say, the day before the day Richard Abneg and I finally dragged him out of the Friendreth Canine Apartments, too late.

These days Ava would come rushing to the door as I came in, plainly eager for more company but also appearing to be concerned for Perkus, wishing to scoot me in to where he sat or sometimes lay on the carpet, twitching in glee over some storage-space flotsam like
the Warren Zevon LP
Excitable Boy
(he loved a song called “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) or, in this case, the latest find, a commercial videotape he’d rescued from a pug’s quarters, a Steve Martin comedy called
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
.

“Watch—” A hiccup destroyed this word, so he began again. “Watch this with me, Chase, it’s brilliant.”

“Have you eaten?” He looked disastrous: sallow, skeletal, un-shaved, exultant. “I brought sandwiches.” I stuck to his preferences, not daring to have some variation rejected, just wanting to see nutrition go in. So pastrami, Diet Coke, pickle spears. There was no coffee brewed. He’d suddenly abandoned coffee, too.

“It’s not sitting well.”

“What’s not?”

“Food.” Unspoken, but heard, was
You idiot!

The black-and-white
Dead Men Don’t Wear
Plaid was a satirical film noir, and a curious amalgam of twelfth-grade tit jokes and an elaborate intertextual trick: Steve Martin’s character, a stooge of a private eye, is allowed by the magic of editing to interact with a number of dead performers from ancient movies, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and so on. The element, practically an avant-garde gesture, was fascinating and stillborn, destroying any possible mood or rhythm. But incredibly to me, Perkus had located in
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
another sacred item. I guess Perkus identified with Martin’s detective, for the way he breezed in and out of the archival footage, reanimating his own pantheon of heroes. This was analogous to how Perkus saw himself moving amid Brando, Groom, Krim, Cassavetes, Mailer, Marplot, Serling, and all the others.

Or so I was thinking, as I sat trying to grasp Perkus’s intensity yet again. It was then we came to what it turned out he regarded as the key scene. Steve Martin, whose relations with the femme fatale
are absurdly abusive and overwrought, opens the cabinet behind his bathroom mirror and finds a note he’s taped there, intended to remind him on a daily basis of something he needs to know: “Guns Don’t Kill Detectives, Love Does.” Perkus spoke these words aloud as they appeared on the screen, forcing himself past the urge to hiccup at the cost of a wrenching shudder. “Guns! Don’t! Kill! Detectives! Love! Does! You
see
that, Chase?”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny about it?” Perkus’s voice was sharp. He was suddenly spoiling for trouble, an interpretive high noon. Ava got up on all threes and pointed her nose to the door, to meet whatever invader his tone signaled.

I tried, as ever, to meet his standard. “Well, I guess it distills Raymond Chandler’s lifework to a bumper sticker…” I’d personally always thought the hard-boiled mode wearisome to begin with, so its sending-up felt pretty fish-in-a-barrel.

“Sure, it does that, you’re right. But that’s not what kills me about this scene.”

What kills you?
I wanted to scream. What kills
me
is how you smell as if you haven’t showered any more recently than your pit bull friend, how your former impeccable suits have degenerated into the same New York Cosmos sweatshirt worn for weeks on end, how your haircut and speech and self-awareness have all gone as crooked as your eye, how your long intellectual voyaging has culminated in a Steve Martin flick. I wasn’t going to be swayed into this latest and least of epiphanies, I swore. The closer I looked the more I felt I’d been overlooking the obvious, my eye trained too incrementally on Perkus’s details to survey the whole grim trend. He was falling apart, falling down. I couldn’t believe I’d let him fall so far. Or that other eyewitnesses, guilty bystanders, hadn’t stepped in—I blamed them for what I hadn’t seen myself.

“Have you showed this film to Sadie Zapping?” I asked, craftily, I thought.

“Sadie quit coming around,” he said. His hand flipped up to flag contempt. “She kept wanting me to try these stupid cures. I swallowed so much water I bloated like a tick. What I love about this scene, Chase, isn’t simply that Martin’s epigraph cuts so deep into the heart of the matter, but that having arrived at such an essential admonition, he actually
forgets
it and needs to be reminded each day at his shaving mirror!”

I was glad I hadn’t suggested any of my own stupid cures. “What about Biller?”

“So, the point is how we forget the most basic fact of ourselves on a daily basis, even while we go around playing our parts, believing ourselves perfectly continuous. Yet a thing can be blotted from the very center of our vision and we won’t notice! Even the very thing we should most remember! It’s like when I tried to write a book, Chase. Practically every day I had to remind myself what it was even
about
, why I’d even started it! What do you mean, what about Biller?” Perkus’s gaps just kept on getting more frequent, and longer.

“I just wondered if he still comes around.”

“Biller’s busy making treasure.”

“Oh, sure, I forgot.” I’d also forgotten, if he’d actually mentioned it, that Perkus had ever tried to write a book. But no, he hadn’t mentioned it. That I would have remembered. It seemed such a simple and humble confession, and I was embarrassed for him for an instant, for burying the lede, slipping the fact into an aside. Then I returned to more root, more animal, worries. No Biller, no Zapping, Laszlo not since the misbegotten night, Abneg never seen in this vicinity, occupied entirely now with his pregnant girlfriend—I, Insteadman, was alone in charge of the faltering organism before me.

“Guns don’t kill detectives. Love does!
” The film had progressed beyond that moment, but Perkus hadn’t. He barked the line, seemingly at Ava, as if this were his new song, one he thought as compelling as a Rolling Stones riff, and they should jump up and dance. They didn’t jump up and dance. Perkus remained where he sat cross-legged on the floor, too close to the television, I thought, poised with his hand on the remote, his knobby spine showing where his sweatshirt rode to part from his threadbare corduroys. Ava, in a posture of readiness, had split the difference between us and the door, not wanting to miss a beat when the situation clarified. She cocked her head at Perkus with what seemed tender sympathy, but might only have been a yen for him to break into the ignored sandwiches.

“What does it mean to you, Perkus?” I asked gently. “I never thought of love as your big nemesis.”

“No, true enough, I’ve largely skirted that stuff.
Skirted—
ha! No, Steve Martin more reminds me of
you
, Chase. Oh, shit.”

“Did Ava—?” I started this question and stopped, for I’d craned to see that the dog remained poised where she’d been a moment before, the kitchen tile surrounding her clean on all sides, the scent deriving elsewhere.

“Excuse me,” said Perkus, swallowing the words. He pulled himself upright using the back of a chair for a ladder. He’d paused the film, an inadvertent screen-capture of Martin’s foolish, cross-eyed scowl frosted in a blizzard of static, and now turned his head from my view, to face the heavily draped window, around the edges of which blazing light leaked, the sky smashing its whiteness against the city. A major storm had been predicted to tumble in before nightfall, though I had no way of being certain Perkus, devoid of newspapers or neighborly gossip, knew this vindicating fact. All of us, Steve Martin, Ava, Perkus, myself, had revealed in the same
instant our pensive side, a moment of collective interspecies ellipsis that would have solemnized the occasion if it could have been solemnized. It couldn’t. Perkus hiccuped silently—I knew well enough by now when he’d hushed one. There was nothing to lose at this point, tensing against the spasm with the muscles of his gut, which had just untensed more than he’d intended. The smell expanded like a parachute, covering the apartment’s prevailing dull canine perfume.

“What happened?” I said, though the question was needless. I knew what had happened.

“I crapped myself,” said Perkus.

CHAPTER
Twenty-three

Anne Sprillthmar
, a brilliant young South African magazine writer, had been posted in London before being plucked away and hired by Tina Brown during her brief sensational tenure as editor of
The New Yorker
. When Brown had just as quickly moved on, Anne Sprillthmar stuck, endeared herself to the new regime at the famous weekly, and thrived, in her way a perfect Manhattanite, typical of the international elite who lately seemed more the island’s right inheritors than its ostensible natives. Sprillthmar was as tall as me and nicely immodest of that fact, standing up without concaving to shelter her breasts as too many tall women do. Bare of a hat, her long copperish hair carried a frosting of snow when she first appeared to shake my hand and say her name, in that faintly exotic, even scandalous accent—bearing its notes of historical shame but presented unshamefully—and when she came near enough I could spot pinpoint snowflakes perching on the tips of her peach-colored lashes. She was even nice-smelling. When we met she’d been shadowing Richard Abneg through his daily paces for four days, fly on the wall
as he transacted his duties, the vital errands of the Arnheim administration, and I doubt I’d ever been sorrier to learn that a beautiful and intriguing woman would be difficult to shake from my immediate company. In fact, it wasn’t exactly the first time Anne Sprillthmar and I had met. I hadn’t recognized her without her tall, long-snouted dog. My elevator girl.

Our recently long-lost friend Richard had found himself cast as bureaucratic firewall between city hall and the spiraling fiasco of the giant escaped tiger’s non-capture—of the mayor’s failure even to explain the circumstances and origins of the creature’s loosing upon Manhattan. So Richard had been shoved to the forefront, to dissemble and deflect in Arnheim’s place. This public scapegoat’s role had in turn aroused curiosity about the old semi-reconstructed squatters’ advocate, and the saga of his long rightward drift into legitimate power. Abneg as sweaty and pragmatic everyman in extremis had immediately struck Anne Sprillthmar as a type worth working up for a profile, in lieu of the access the mysterious mayor would never have granted. When Sprillthmar pitched him to her editors she’d been happily green-lit.

This explained why Richard Abneg wasn’t alone when he arrived at the curb of the Friendreth Canine Apartments that next day, in answer to my pleading call. He’d made a commitment to give the journalist access to one of his typical weeks on the go, and grudgingly quit making distinctions between personal and public destinations after she’d insisted she wanted to portray him “in the round.” Richard bolted from the taxicab, punching black shoe prints in the dusty covering that had begun to whirl from the sky, leaving the apparently unflappable journalist to pay their fare, and didn’t apologize or introduce her when she caught up to him under the Friendreth’s portico where I waited. Richard wore the splendid new coat
Georgina had purchased for him, and his shoes were fine now, too—he’d always signified his distance from formality by the rattiness of his footwear, but the Hawkman had lately banished all his favorites.