Chronic City (59 page)

The part I didn’t tell Richard was this: the summer before I began high school—my last year in Bloomington, it would turn out—and had begun to draw the attention of the high-school girls, even the graduated seniors with their college destinies turning them into forms drifting out of reach before our eyes, the most extraordinary and fierce and unforgettable of those girls was one named Janice Trumbull. She was leaving Bloomington forever three or four weeks after the day she acknowledged me, though later I’d know that she’d been aware of me a while before.

At the time I thought it was by not swimming to the raft that I’d gotten Janice Trumbull’s attention. Turtles was well behind her by then. She’d been goaded to swim there that day by two of her friends for whom it was an ironic act of instant nostalgia. Their future was more real than their present and they shone with it, most particularly Janice Trumbull, who had won a scholarship to MIT and none of us had any idea what that meant, not the sun-blazed afternoon they came through the crevice and began swimming among us with their insane bodies, these girls who were more like floating hallowed names than real persons in the life of the high school I was supposed to attend.

They weren’t going to board the raft, they certainly weren’t going to do that. Janice’s two friends swam out and around it, performed mocking leg splits and whirlies to an awed contingent, and Janice came back to where I paddled at the sheer granite wall, sole member of my refusal society. She asked me my name and I told her, and then she said in so many words that I was in a quiet hell here in Bloomington and I should know to get out. She told me I looked as if
I knew but she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t say so. I didn’t explain what I couldn’t have, my dreams and certainties, of which this encounter with her made a perfect harbinger. Was struck dumb by even my own dumb standards. Janice Trumbull then told me where to meet her that night. It was a few months into my freshman autumn that I’d learn, through the younger-sister grapevine, how Janice had told her friends she’d have me before she left for college, and that they’d brought her to Turtles that day partly or even largely to call her bluff, which was no bluff. For the last weeks of that summer she taught me how to swim to the raft of a woman’s body and what to do there. Then she went to Massachusetts and eventually into space, to die. I never met her after that summer, though I did watch her triumphant launch to join the Russian crew, on television. In fact, I’m almost certain—as certain as I can be of anything—that Janice Trumbull was killed, with all her compatriots, within a few hours of the distribution of the Chinese mines into their orbit path, rather than living on for so many months, and doing space walks, tending gardens, writing letters.

The day after meeting with Claire Carter I’d done as she suggested, and traced the origin of the surplus flooding my checking account. The signatory was the treasurer of the Manhattan Reification Society, that shadowy philanthropic trust appointed to enact the city’s little Gnuppet shows. I suppose the callow producers who’d long ago enlisted me to play the part of myself as astronaut-fiancé were on their payroll, too, and Oona Laszlo, the writer. When it had been decided to give the remote and perished astronaut a lease on life—to take the cruel and stunted tale of the space station’s collision with the Chinese mines and distend it into an enthralling melodrama of foot cancer and orbital decay—they elected also to humanize Janice Trumbull by awarding her a mopey earthbound boyfriend.
(It took a lot of melodrama to keep the War Free edition from seeming a tad thin, I guess.)

So how did they come to pick me? I suppose the footnote of our crossed paths as teenagers, mentioned here and there in magazine profiles, must have bobbed to the surface in Oona’s research, once she took the job. The ghostwriter had surely found it irresistible—as though a pair of Gnuppets had conspired in the distant depths of their Midwestern past to make their Gnuppeteer’s fiction that much more lively and persuasive. (It wasn’t that I’d ever mentioned that Janice Trumbull and I were teenage lovers, but Oona had guessed this, or decided to make it up.) If I was faithful to the dead astronaut it made a fine sentimental motif; if I betrayed her, fine too, sentimental in the other direction. I could do no wrong.

CHAPTER
Twenty-nine

Perkus Tooth’s sister
was a twin sister, that was the major surprise. It was Sadie Zapping who’d put together the memorial gathering at the Friendreth, in Ava’s former apartment. I suppose in some way I thought of Sadie Zapping as Perkus’s twin, his female half, now that Oona Laszlo had been disqualified, turning out to be something so much more baited and treacherous than the sibling she first resembled. But no, Perkus had a real twin sister, June Tooth, named for the month of their birth and the month of the gathering at which we met.

June Tooth lived in West Haven, Connecticut; managed what was left of their deceased folks’ silver and pewter works, Tooth Knife and Fork; was divorced and with a kid “on the spectrum” who was wonderful and brilliant but nonetheless sucked up all of her time and attention, ran her ragged with his endless devotion to railway maps and timetables, like some nutty train scholar at twelve years old, and who’d demanded she take a digital photograph at each station stop on her Amtrak journey here today. She’d had to switch off her cell phone so he wouldn’t call her every five minutes to check
that she had. As stoical and earthbound and modest as Perkus was anything else, both of her eyes meeting ours in tandem, June nonetheless evoked Perkus in her voice and form, some little swerving energy she couldn’t rein in though she didn’t acknowledge, a part of her, like him, an arrow aimed into the infinite obsessive, but in her, unlike him, curtailed. She’d been there all along, tucked into the middle distance of the tristate area, cutting Perkus regular checks from the sturdy little forge works that was their shared legacy (a riddle: How many benefactors did it take to keep one Perkus on the Upper East Side?), proof enough if Perkus had wanted it that his Manhattan’s-a-Black-Iron-Prison theory wasn’t concretely true, that
some
kind of life went on being lived across the bridges and tunnels connecting us to the mainland and the other islands—or at least not true enough to exclude the persistence both of the Connecticut suburbs and of a small but sustaining North American market for hand-forged pewter fittings and furnishings.

I wondered, but didn’t ask, whether they made anything resembling a chaldron. In truth, I found June Tooth too painful, too much his spitting image, to do more than be introduced and express the passingest of condolences, so the majority of her story I gathered eavesdropping as she explained herself to others in rattling Toothian monologues, making herself known and visible to the astonished others for whom Perkus had always rendered her unknown and invisible, unnamed. Besides her, the party consisted of myself and Biller and Sadie Zapping and Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji, now ruddy-cheeked and protruding and huge with the kid forming inside her, plus a couple of scrappy old comrades whose names I’d caught in Perkus rants but never expected to greet in the flesh, Seidenberg, Breithaupt, Roe, men failing in their upkeep, whose idea of funeral garb was black sneakers and practically braidable nose hairs, men keeping the contract with squalor that Richard
Abneg had only denoted when I’d met him and now under Georgina’s guidance had voided completely. I didn’t talk to these men, either, I found I wasn’t interested and couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if I had been. Besides Richard and Georgina I talked mostly to Biller and Sadie Zapping. I should add that the party consisted also of a number of dogs—I’d brought Ava to see her old place one last time, while Sadie culled a few genial creatures who had apparently also been guests here. Perhaps some were the former owners of
Some Girls
and
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
. If so they couldn’t tell me.

Sadie was garrulous and funny and did the talking for both of us. She told me what I didn’t know about Perkus’s Friendreth afternoons—she was a kind of obverse witness to what I knew, presiding as she had over his new daily rituals, dog shit and cribbage and hot chocolate, adamantly impatient as she was with his theories, which had waited for my visits to explode into life. With sudden frankness she told me of their disenchanting rift, a squabble over her attempted hiccup cures, then confessed that she’d believed them headed beyond cribbage. “I felt something was developing between us. Did he ever mention it?” I told her he was shy about such things, and didn’t reciprocate her frankness with the facts about just
how
shy I meant. I pictured Sadie Zapping attempting a pass at Perkus over mugs of Swiss Miss—would it have even been legible to him? Had Sadie Zapping been, to use Perkus’s word, “rebuffed”? Well, I didn’t need to know.

After the others left, I stayed with Sadie Zapping and Biller, gathering the paper plates and plastic cups in a garbage bag, scraping Mallomar crumbs to the floor for Ava to snuffle. It was then that Biller told me what he’d learned from Perkus about Claire Carter’s brother. Linus, the hoard of chaldrons Linus had bestowed on Claire, and the far castle where they lay under supposedly impregnable defenses.
Though Biller had never been, as Oona once accused, a “virtual thief,” he had lately spent some time in avatar form casing the joint, and believed he’d located an imperfection in the redoubt’s security.
We could take them
, he told me simply.

That was two months ago. We’ve only had two snows in August so far. The newspapers are calling it summer, and mostly I find people are content to do the same. There’s only so much you can listen to yourself complain about snow. Ava is mine now, in the sense that she lives with me, eats on my floor, and sleeps in my bed, and that I walk her three times a day (you might as well say that I’m hers). Sometimes I think I hear her hiccup once or twice, and it sends my heart racing. In those moments I always think of the advice to
keep your enemies close
. Yet I don’t think it is right to be paranoid about dogs. Perkus was murdered as he’d always expected to be, not by Ava or hiccups but by complicity, by having one of his theories, his worst suspicions, come wandering in and befriend him. So the real enemy is one I could never do other than keep close.

I’ve been seeing a bit of Anne Sprillthmar. I try not to be ashamed of my habits, or my fate, which always seems to come in the form of another woman, each to follow the last more quickly than I ever learn to expect. We do all have our ways of moving through the world, our regular situations. Ava gets along splendidly with Anne’s Afghan hound, a fixed male named Century. The two frequently tussle to exhaustion over woolen socks knotted into a chewy rope, then climb onto my bed and wend themselves into a fond, seven-limbed canine pretzel. This is not so different from how Anne Sprillthmar and I like to spend time, when the bed is available. She and I and the dogs stick to my place. I avoid Anne’s building for the risk of running into others who live there, though I suppose it is eventually inevitable. I suppose, too, that Oona Laszlo will regard it as an act of minor vengeance, that I should take up with a woman in
her very own building, but I know myself well enough to say I don’t have a vengeful bone in my body. One recent afternoon while Anne and I were fucking I found myself unable to keep from laughing hysterically, to an extent that put a crimp in the proceedings. I tried to explain to her what had popped into my head, that my friend Perkus Tooth might have called what I was doing
riding the hegemonic bulldozer
, but Anne didn’t seem to get the joke, or maybe just didn’t find it funny. That she didn’t know Perkus is, most days, a relief.

Richard Abneg, when he heard about me and Anne Sprillthmar, was properly infuriated. I’d guess that despite the new life that has enclosed him, Richard’s competitive ire told him Anne was rightfully
his
, least compensation he could expect for the indignity of his profile being killed by Anne’s editors at
The New Yorker
, who finally didn’t concur that Richard was so signal a figure in the present life of the city. (I didn’t explain that I’d noticed her first, figuring it would only irritate a sore point.) As for the escaped giant tiger, it hasn’t been captured or killed, nor bent to the purpose of digging subway tunnels, and goes on wrecking only things it seems to me the city can spare. Rumors abound of late-night standoffs with worshipful mobs, but mainstream coverage has fallen off, more enamored lately with the coyotes that have been terrorizing joggers at the Central Park Reservoir. I do find it hard to believe the wrecking-tiger is the same one Richard and I met in the fresh-fallen snow, but I’ve never tested this two-tiger theory on him, and have no plans to. Anne Sprillthmar mentioned that a friend at the
Times
claimed they were market-testing a Tiger Free edition. I don’t know whether she was joking or not.

I spend a lot of my time on the computer now (I bought myself a new one). Apart from frequent visits to Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia page, where controversy over the truth or rumor of his death remains
fresh and interesting, I’m mostly immersed in Yet Another World. There, under Biller’s leadership, my newborn avatar has joined a commando unit, made of dozens of others, volunteers or mercenaries hidden behind their contrived personae, which has been readying itself to storm Claire Carter’s redoubt and seize her cache of chaldrons. I’ve spent not a little of my own money (Reification Society stipends, that is, as well as genuine
Martyr & Pesty
residuals) compensating the weapon and armor-makers’ guilds for what outfitting our force requires, to ensure success in the coming battle. Our existence is a tightly held secret at the moment, but Biller promises me that if we succeed no one in Yet Another World will fail to hail our name:
Les Non-Dupes
. What exactly we’ll do with the extravagance of chaldrons once they’ve been liberated remains to be seen. Biller speaks of opening a virtual museum, placing the treasure into a public trust, where all and any may commune with the impossible objects, but I suspect this would only be to inspire marauders more powerful than ourselves. As well, it may be a mistake to assume that our confederation will hold at the seams once the chaldrons are in our hands. There’s no honor among thieves.