Chronic City (60 page)
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Tags: #General, #Literary, #Fiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Psychological fiction, #Psychological, #Rich & Famous, #Manhattan (New York; N.Y.), #Critics, #Celebrities
Speaking of Biller, I’ve acquired another paperback copy of Ralph Warden Meeker’s
Obstinate Dust
. Though it’s hardly easy going, I’m doing my best to push through to the finish line, in Perkus’s memory. I read it on the subway, another new imperative in my life—I’ve renounced taxicabs. Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker’s bulky masterpiece in their hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell.
Two days ago I left Ava at home and went to visit Richard and Georgina on Park Avenue, in Georgina’s penthouse, less than a week home from the hospital. If I thought the brown stripe had unraveled Richard Abneg’s cynical poise, that was a mere preview of coming
attractions. Richard hovered over his new family with tiny plates of prepared foods, tomatoes heaped on cottage cheese and laced with balsamic vinegar, a small, dubious feat of cooking of which he was unduly proud, explaining to me how many calories Georgina needed to sustain her breast-feeding. In his enthusiasm he tipped the plate and dripped balsamic down the infant’s neck, but Georgina only ever basks in his brutish attentions, and the three seemed bound in some human energy field impossible to deny, as if glimpsed in the core of a flame. The boy looked in my direction but seemed to see right through me, an effect both parents assured me was in every sense typical, in no sense a judgment upon my status as Cheese Unperson. His name is Ayhar, meaning Ruler of the Moon. Ayhar’s brow is blotched with evidence of his birth, a ruddy archipelago the doctors say will fade. He has the Hawkman’s eyes.
I let Ava lead me where she wants to go, finding traces on the snow-scraped pavement where she or some acquaintance (though many are only scent-acquaintances, inhabitants of a virtual world inside Ava’s snout) has made some statement that needs to be footnoted or overwritten. It was only a week or so ago when it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care. She’s flying under the radar, not a bad trick.
Yesterday Ava and I went out walking, and she tugged me to an unfamiliar block, Ninety-fourth Street, beyond First Avenue, almost to York. There we discovered a street corner where a flock of gray-jacketed, white-bellied birds were scattered like jimmies over a mound of snow, a mound some custodian must have heaped up in the process of clearing the gated courtyard where it lay—a church courtyard, when I looked up to see. The birds pecked at seed strewn
over the icy heap, until Ava, uncharacteristically, and despite the heavy black iron that divided them, made a leash-snapping charge and scattered the birds to the sky. It was as if she wanted them in the air. Only after they found the altitude they liked, that which made them feel safe or free or whatever it was birds found in their places in the sky, and began wheeling, passing between buildings and repeatedly in and out of view, did I judge the shape of the church’s spire and knew that these were my birds, that we stood at the foot of my tower.
We watched a while and then headed home, and when we had ridden up in the elevator and gone inside and I’d freed Ava from the leash I went to my window for the first time in two months to see if they were still aloft, to catch a bit of the aerial pandemonium ballet it now seemed to me I’d been heedlessly neglecting. The birds were there, still satisfyingly continuous in their asymmetries and divergences, as if I’d been abiding with them through all these weeks and days. But I noticed something else as well. The Dorffl Tower had shifted a little to the right, shaving another margin from my window’s view. I don’t know how this can be possible, but then again there are so many things that escape me. It’s still a view I can live with. I only hope it doesn’t get any smaller.
Note
With gratitude I return the tiger to Charles Finney,
The Unholy City;
“In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved,” to Saul Bellow,
Humboldt’s Gift;
“The Beatles family goes back to Jack Kerouac, etc.,” to George W. S. Trow,
My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies 1950–1998;
“But in truth, moderns live in a world-order in which the primitive, etc.,” to Kenneth Smith,
The Crypto-Revolution of Our Age XX. Power Versus Reality (Comics Journal
no. 185); “Perhaps such secrets… in which the person perished,” to James Baldwin,
Another Country; The New York Times
as “the commissar of the real,” to Seymour Krim,
What’s This Cat’s Story?;
“I want it on record, right here and now … Captain’s birthday cake,” to Jane Poynter,
The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere
2; everything else to everywhere else forever and ever amen.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lethem
All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following:
The New Yorker
and
The Book of Other People
, edited by Zadie Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
Tiger image © 2009 Jupiterimages Corporation
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lethem, Jonathan.
Chronic city / by Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E8544C47 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009007587
eISBN: 978-0-385-53215-0
v3.0
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