Chronic City (7 page)

“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” I said.

“I would, but I just saw that movie, and Perkus hates it when I shout out the dialogue just before the actors say it.”

“Oh?”

“That was a joke. Forgive me. There’s something about running into you here that’s making me babble.”

“You don’t have to be so self-conscious.”

“No, actually, I do. I’m one of those subtext-on-the-outside people, which is why I should really go.”

She then surprised me by gathering up one of the Lucite boxes of White Rhino and shoveling it into her purse. And then was gone. Perkus barely glanced after her.

“She took your pot.”

“It was hers,” he said, not glancing at the table either. “I scored it for her, as a favor. She doesn’t like to deal with Watt.” He invented
tasks for himself, sweeping imaginary crumbs into his cupped palm, fiddling with the volume, jumping up to rinse a glass, seeking, with his whole being, to exorcise the obvious subject. I didn’t allow him.

“An old girlfriend?”

Perkus shook his head. “Just a friend.”

“She’s a funny one. How’d you meet her?”

“Oona’s great, when you’re in the mood. She used to be a kind of intern of mine, I guess that’s what you’d call it. She answered an ad I placed at the New School, she used to help me pasting up broadsides…” His voice trailed, even as his desublimated eyeball zipped to walls of the living room, rolling wildly to indicate the framed and unframed manifestos of his youth.

“Oona was your glue-girl!” I said.

“Something like that. My apprentice.”

“Every mad scientist needs an apprentice.”

“Fuck you.”

“She didn’t want to change the world, I suppose? Or what did she call it—deconstruct the universe.”

“There was this editor from Viking Penguin, uh, Paul somebody. He proposed to do a compilation of the broadsides, and took us out for drinks. I didn’t care to do the book, but Oona ended up with a job in publishing. She was looking for a writing career, and I guess she felt it was her way in.”

“Why didn’t you do the book?”

“We differed on… context.”

“He saw you as a rock critic?”

Perkus nodded.

“So she’s in publishing?”

“Oona?” he asked, as if we’d dropped the subject hours earlier. He stood and put his back to me, fussing at his coffeepot. “Nope, she’s a freelancer. A self-admitted hack.”

“I’m interested in hacks, Perkus, being one myself. What does she write?”

“Nothing under her own name. She ghostwrites. Autobiographies of people who can’t write their own. She brought one around once—here.” He’d poured us fresh coffees. Now he clapped these, with a pair of spoons, on the table before me, then moved into the living room, to burrow into a stack of unsorted books at the foot of a shelf.

The hardcover Perkus delivered into my hands was unexpectedly garish and grim:
Across Foul Lines
, by Rose Arbogast, the memoir of a seven-foot-tall WNBA center who as a high-school star had been abducted and serially tortured by a teenage gang, then rescued by a federal agent she’d married a decade later. “This is shit,” I blurted.

“Read the inscription.”

“What?”

“On the title page.”

Someone, Oona Laszlo, had printed in a stenographically precise hand
To Perkus Tooth, who taught me to lay up, not lie down, warmly, R.O./O.L
. “She’s become a specialist in traumatized athletes, frostbitten Everest climbers who have to wear plastic noses, etcetera, a narrow field she dominates. She fully knows it’s shit. How she gets through her days is another question.”

“The same way you do,” I suggested. “White Rhino.” I nodded at the remaining container.

Perkus ignored me. I learned nothing further about Oona Laszlo that day, nor did Perkus and I get around to viewing the early-assembly dub of Pontecorvo’s
Burn
, though the videotape sat talismanically before us through the afternoon and into the evening. For lately, with the addition of Richard Abneg, my Perkus afternoons had distended into Perkus-and-Richard nights. I’d begun to let
other priorities shrivel in favor of these bouts of epic squalor. It was easy to drop out of my drifting existence. The Eighty-fourth Street apartment was a container bigger on the inside than the outside, and days there might seem to hold thirty or forty hours, yet more and more I reeled home in dawn light, along a Second Avenue mostly vacated, the downtown stream of empty wishful taxicabs all veering to toot their horns at me until I waved them off, pavement deliveries of Italian loaves and kaiser rolls and bundles of tabloids under way—the clocks outside hadn’t stopped, after all. Richard Abneg was the one among us with an office, a morning agenda shackled to those unstopped clocks, yet he drove us maniacally through the night, toward daybreak, as much as Perkus (or his coffeepot, or dope supply) or myself, more perhaps.

Was the afternoon when Oona first appeared the third or fourth Richard and Perkus and I spent together? Or the hundredth? I can’t say. In the swamp of memory I can only confidently fix that occasion to Richard Abneg’s eagles, and that only because of
A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey
which lay propped open on the table from which Oona retrieved her stash before vanishing. I was always foolish to slight any clue at Perkus’s kitchen table, for what seemed to happen to occupy space there was always destined to colonize my brain soon enough. (I suppose I could say the same about Oona. Soon. Soona.)

Richard Abneg came in enraged about eagles. He liked to come in enraged about something. Hadn’t I read the front page of the Metro section? The answer was no. Richard found this incredible. My neglect of the headlines was practically as egregious as the birds themselves. Richard nearly slammed down his bottle of wine, Rioja in a paper sack. He always arrived with one in tow. Not a gift, since
Perkus wouldn’t touch red wine, a trigger, he claimed, for his cluster migraines. Richard and I would drink it later, in the smaller hours. For now it sat.

Perkus tossed the relevant section into my lap and resumed rolling a joint to welcome and soothe Richard, to whatever extent he could be soothed. Richard jabbed his finger at a newsprint photograph, so my attention wouldn’t wander. A pair of enormous birds perched on the massive lintel of a prewar building’s entranceway, each with a beak-borne branch. Between them stood the object of their efforts, a conical structure of twigs and leaves.
HOMECOMING OF MATING PAIR REWARDS 78TH STREET FAITHFUL
. “Okay,” I said.

“Not okay,” said Richard, poking harder at the newspaper on my knee. “That’s my fucking window.”

“You live there?” I asked, trying to catch up.

“My headboard’s against that wall. Right above the scratching, whining, gobbling fiends themselves. They don’t sound like you’d think eagles should sound, Chase. They sound like vampires. Vampires at a buffet of dying rodents.”

A joke occurred to me. “Well, you know what they say. Go to bed with the Hawkman, wake up with the eagles.” It was now three weeks past our fateful introduction at the Woodrows’ Park Avenue duplex, and Richard Abneg had surprised me, and perhaps himself, by persisting in an affair with Georgina Hawkmanaji, Turk heiress. He called her, in his irascible way, Georgie Hawkman. Or the Hawkman, or the Hawk. The complicity between us, my having seen him infringe on Georgina’s rectitude the first time, formed the backdrop to our new friendship, a ready-made history we could allude to. If Richard seemed to bristle when I mentioned her, this was only ritual. He loved being reminded I knew of his conquest. Perkus was the one whom mentions of the Hawkman truly provoked. Perkus was a
possessive friend, true enough. But he also cringed at evidence of my migrations, or Richard’s, through a milieu he viewed as corrupt.

Richard only glowered. “It’s not funny. I’ve been spending nights at the Hawkman’s just to sleep. She thinks I can’t get enough of her.”

“If it’s your window, can’t you have the nest removed?”

“You really live in a cloud, don’t you?”

Perkus had done tonguing the new joint’s glue, and he handed the result to Richard. “So, about six weeks ago Richard opened his window and pushed the whole mess into the street. The eagles went into mourning, started wheeling around crying, and all the TV news stations picked it up. The eagles flew off to Central Park, I guess. It seemed like it was going to blow over, but then the other apartments got together and held a press conference saying they loved the eagles, that the lone pusher didn’t speak for the building’s wishes. Richard got hung out to dry. That’s what they called him,
the lone pusher.”

“The president of the co-op board didn’t give my name, mercifully. But I’ve had to creep in and out of the building for weeks. The
Post
published a telephoto picture of me in my Fruit of the Looms. Now the feathered monsters are beginning again with the nest, and everybody’s so thrilled. I’m totally stuck. There’s this bored old television star on the eighth floor, she’s made the eagles her whole raison d’être.”

“What television star?” I had an odd feeling I knew.

“You know, what’s her goddamn name?” Richard slurped air around the joint’s tip, waved his hand.

“Sandra Saunders Eppling,” supplied Perkus. “She was married to Senator Eppling for a while. She was the one who spoke at the press conference.”

“Sandra Saunders played my mom on
Martyr & Pesty,”
I said.
I felt, as I often do at those rare times I actually choose to speak of my child stardom, as if I was boring my listeners with information too familiar to mention, and yet also evoking a distant pocket realm no living human could imagine. In either case, the result felt as though I were being humored. Possibly I did live on a cloud.

“She was in an Elvis movie,” said Perkus, frowning at me for not citing the more salient fact. I’d noticed—this may have been when I first noticed it—how Perkus didn’t browbeat Richard Abneg for his cultural illiteracy. He had me for that.

“Right, that’s the one,” said Richard, uninterested in anything but his nest. He seized the newspaper section from me now. “These days she’s a kind of fundamentalist vegetarian eagle-advocate. It’s horrendous luck for me she doesn’t have a real career to keep her busy. My whole building’s brimming with mediocrities and has-beens.”

“The whole
island’s
brimming with them,” said Perkus agreeably.

“Yes, but your bedroom isn’t full of the smell of moldering underbrush and the death screams of squirrels and pigeons and sewer rats,” said Richard. “Look at this.” He handed the fuming joint to me and raised the newspaper for us to consider, folded to the photograph of the eagles and their startlingly large construction. “It’s obscene. It’s practically… pubic.”

“Yes,” said Perkus. “Your building is definitely wearing a merkin.”

“That’s a
polite
word for it.” Richard stroked his beard, perhaps unconsciously making an association.

“I don’t think merkin is the polite word for something,” I said. “It’s more specific than that—”

“Read it to me,” interrupted Richard. Perkus had taken up the book, the
Field Guide
. I now saw it lay flapped open to the entry on
eagles, Perkus having already delved into study on Richard’s behalf. “I’ve got to find some way to eradicate them that can’t be traced back to me …”

“I guess if you got a dog it would bark at them.” This was my pallid contribution, while Perkus studied the pages, tilting the book to favor his orderly eye.

“No, it can’t be inside my apartment, it has to be something that will crawl up the front of the building. Besides, I hate dogs.” We were deep into crime melodrama, a caper, Richard and Perkus collaborating on the perfect interspecies murder. “I’m going to need an alibi, too. I can’t be anywhere in the vicinity when those eagles go. That building is ready to come after me with torches and pitchforks.”

“So, here’s the thing.” Perkus held up a finger proclaiming
Eureka!
He was forever ferreting out the key, always distilling essences.
“Majestic in his privilege,”
he narrated from the
Field Guide, “the bald eagle knows no natural enemy apart from Man.”

“What a freight of shit,” said Richard.

“Why?”

“There’s something totally insane about saying a frigging psychotic serial killer has no natural enemy! What they
mean
is the eagle’s enemies don’t stand a chance. All those mice and squirrels and pigeons, believe me, they’d
gladly
define themselves as enemies in that instant before the talons tore through their hearts.”

“In nature I think a thing doesn’t qualify as your enemy if it can’t fight back,” I said. “It’s just a victim.”

“Maybe we could corral a whole bunch of mice and squirrels and pigeons together,” suggested Perkus. “If they somehow were all run up the side of the building at once, when the eagles were sleeping…” He flipped eagerly through the
Guide’s
back pages, perhaps scanning the index for some precedent.

“No.” Richard leaned forward, grabbing for the joint I still held. He took it and drew in a puff and shook his shaggy head. “No, it won’t do.” His grave tone suggested real deliberation. “Prey is prey, I’m sorry to have to disenchant you two dreamers. You total Communists. If you’d heard them whimper and die, the way I have, you’d understand. A
million
mice couldn’t do it.”