Chronic City (14 page)

“Here.” I shoved one of the two mustardy dogs, in its crenellated paper sleeve, at Biller. He received the steaming gift in fingers bared by a woolen glove with cutoff tips, and only nodded. His eyes were as gentle as I recalled. So much so I couldn’t discern whether they were also puzzled. He seemed to be forgiving me for the hot dog, even as he lifted it for a first bite.

“I’m Perkus’s friend,” I said. “Chase.”

“Okay,” said Biller.

“Those are some of his books you’re selling, I see.”

“He gave them to me.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

“I read them first.”

“I’m sure.”

This was small talk, but even as I made it, one title caught my eye, raised above the others by the book’s thickness.
Obstinate Dust
, by Ralph Warden Meeker, the tome Perkus had had on his kitchen table or at his bedside the last few times I’d visited. Now, as though an involuntary detective action had been triggered in me by Biller’s defensiveness, I also noticed the bookmark, a smoothed Ricola cough-drop wrapper, hanging like a tongue just a quarter or fifth of the way through the volume’s heft. Perkus’s bookmark, I knew it. Perkus sucked the Ricola drops to coat his fume-seared gullet, another of his self-medications—like papaya beverages to smooth the passage of frankfurters, it occurred to me now.

Oona tugged at my arm and scowled. I handed her the hot coffee, as though she’d requested it. Then continued with Biller, a little helpless to quit what had become an interrogation. I put my finger on
Obstinate Dust
. The book must have been a thousand pages long.

“You finish that one? Perkus didn’t.”

If I’d caught Biller in a lie, he wasn’t chagrined. His attitude was still sympathetic, as though I’d come to him somehow penitently, to right a small wrong. Or perhaps the air of sympathy was directed at the absent Perkus.

“Mr. Tooth gives me books he can’t finish,” he said. “He’s not reading a lot these days, I don’t think.”

“
Chase,”
said Oona, butting her forehead against my shoulder, then closing to me for warmth. The sidewalk entrepreneurs to the right and left of us each jogged in place, fists deep in pockets. They eyed the transaction between myself and Biller, plainly envious to
think the bookseller, of all people, had a customer in the impossible weather.

“Okay, I’ll take that one.” I had the wild thought I’d read it, and surprise Perkus. Maybe I could recapture his interest from chaldrons. I hadn’t seen Perkus for three days, but we’d spoken on the phone. He’d reported that the going price of chaldrons was skyrocketing, not that he’d had a chance to pay it—he’d bid in seven auctions and lost them all. Before I could remind him of the joke about the restaurant-goer who complained that the food was bad and the portions small, he’d hustled me off the phone so he could resume scouring eBay for sellers. There were obsessions I could adore in Perkus, others which in their thinness broke my heart. I didn’t want him to give up his books.

Biller quoted a price. “Ten dollars.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Half price.”

I handed Biller a twenty. He told me I was his first buyer of the day, and that he had no change. I waved it off, and shoehorned the brick of pages into my coat pocket. As if aping me, Biller crammed the last third of the hot dog into his mouth, then raised his half-gloved hand in salute, bare fingertips gripping the air, while Oona and I slanted off toward the subway entrance.

Oona’s plan, which she claimed was impeccable, involved shooting downtown in order to go uptown. We took the Lexington line to Forty-second Street, then boarded the shuttle, in order to get on the 1 train up into Harlem and beyond, to the parklands alongside the Harlem River, where Noteless had constructed his
Fjord
. I couldn’t imagine why we’d needed to cross to the West Side if our destination had been in the east all along, and after our second train began pleading with Oona to be reasonable and exit the system, but she ignored me, continued dragging me through passages like a
ferret with a captured hare in its jaws. The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier. This is why I always take taxicabs. Nevertheless, we eventually boarded the uptown Broadway local, which poked its way unsteadily into unknown parts of Manhattan.

“closing in dream the somnolent city—
”

“Wait, wait, that’s the first sentence?”

I began again. “
closing in dream the somnolent city—”

“No, stop, that’s enough.”

I’d unwedged
Obstinate Dust
from my coat’s pocket and begun narrating its opening to Oona once we’d found seats on the local. Now she grabbed the book from me. Our subway car held a scattering of faces, none, after 125th Street, white as our own, and none interested for more than a glance-worth in Oona’s and my own agitation. I am always nervous, I’ll admit, in Manhattan’s triple digits. (In my defense, I’m nervous in the single digits, too.) Fidgeting with the big paperback, we were out of place and to be ignored, painted over with everyday disdain. The train was clammily warm and malodorous. Riders sat with coats loosened, nodding in rhythm to earbuds or just the robot’s applause of wheels locating seams in ancient track.

“No, no, no,” chanted Oona, flitting through a few pages. “Not lowercase italics, they can’t be serious, it’s like
poetry!
Next thing you know the characters’ names will be X, Y, and Z. I can’t even
find
any character names.”

“Maybe that’s just a kind of overture,” I suggested. “It can’t really stay like that all the way through.” I felt a kind of wilting despair, as though my plan to read the book was a real one, on which any hopes for Perkus’s stability was contingent.

“Impossible. I don’t want to know about it. I didn’t get where I am today reading thousand-page prose poems. Please, sorry, but no.”

This was one of Oona’s recurring jokes:
I didn’t get where I am today
. She never said, of course, where it was she claimed she’d gotten—the ghost, the invisible girl. I suppose that was the joke. That she’d gotten who knows where, but still had some standards. What I noticed now was how near she held the book to her face. I’d never before seen her reading.

“Do you need glasses?”

Oona replied idly, as if musing to herself. “Sometimes I wear glasses, but never in front of you. My god, it’s
all
like this.” She thrust the book in my lap, and I resumed the survey she’d abandoned. True enough, the look of the pages was consistent…
he struggled to interest them in the concretization of listenality
… Why italicize an entire book? Was the whole of
Obstinate Dust
meant to be taken as a kind of parenthetical fugue, or as an aside to something else? And if so, what? Ralph Warden Meeker’s other novels? Literature per se? The reader’s mundane existence?

Doubt swallowed my fantasy. Even if I somehow managed to get through
Obstinate Dust
, and then to resuscitate Perkus’s interest in it, was reading Meeker’s opus in any way preferable to surfing eBay for chaldrons? Nonetheless, I felt I’d incurred a responsibility, was somehow doomed to the book. Biller had tricked me into taking a hot potato off his hands, just as Susan Eldred had booby-trapped her office by introducing me to Perkus in the first place.

“Is ‘listenality’ a word?” I asked Oona.

“So do you have, like, this whole network of spies on street corners giving you regular updates on Perkus Tooth’s mental health?”

“I realize this sounds weird, but Biller lives in the air space behind Perkus’s kitchen… part of the time, at least…” I attempted to explain the whole unlikely fact that Perkus had a dependent in this world. Meanwhile our train rattled out of the 145th Street station. The unfamiliar tunnels grew stained and decrepit, the tile more and
more resembling Roman or Greek mosaic, those fragments entombed at the Met in dim vacant rooms one hurries through en route to the latest exhibition of Bacons or Arbuses.

Oona didn’t mask her impatience. “I’ve seen him lowering leftovers out his window. But what’s your role? Did you agree to keep buying back the junk Perkus gives Biller? A little triangular economy of pity?”

“I thought I’d return the book,” I said, feeling pathetic. “I thought Perkus might have given it to him … by mistake.”

“Tried to put Humpty together again,” she possibly muttered, her voice engulfed in the train’s clangor.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

“Why would pity be
triangular?”
I heard myself ask. “Perkus shouldn’t pity me. Or Biller.”

“Nobody pities you, Chase.”

“Why are you angry all of a sudden?”

“I’m not angry. It’s just I thought you and I were sneaking around behind
her
back.” Oona jabbed a finger upward. Though we sped through an underground tunnel in a dingy earth rocket, anyone would understand she meant Janice Trumbull, the sky’s noble captive. It was in the nature of orbit that Janice’s presence blanketed the planet, overhead of any given location. She was like a blind god, one helpless at our lies, deceived effortlessly.

“We are,” I told Oona, though I really barely did more than mouth the words, feeling dangerous stating it aloud. My guilt was as large as the sky, and I couldn’t escape it underground.

“Really? Because it mostly feels to me like we’re cheating on Perkus. Whenever you mention him, which is constantly, I feel like you’re talking about your wife and kids and dog, waiting in a suburban home where you’ll inevitably return.”

“I’m
concerned
about Perkus,” I blurted.

“Why aren’t you concerned about your girlfriend? She’s stranded in orbit with four horny cosmonauts, plus one American horticulturalist who’s begun barking like a dog and won’t come out of the storage attic. The plants are dying, the air’s full of carbon dioxide, and now she’s got these unspecified medical symptoms—”

My betrayal of Janice was compounded by Oona’s details. “What medical symptoms?”

“You really should read the letters more carefully.”

What had I missed? My shame took its place in a vast backdrop of shames—oxygen-starved astronauts, war-exiled orphans, dwindling and displaced species—against which I puttered through daily life, attending parties and combating hangovers, recording voiceovers and granting interviews to obscure fan sites, drinking coffee and smoking joints with Perkus, and making contact with real feeling unpredictably and at random, at funeral receptions, under rain-sheeted doorways.

Yet through shame and guilt I felt a sudden joy. Oona was jealous. To be jealous was to be in love. Oona would deny this on the spot, but the two were continuous territories on any emotional map I’d ever known. The realization unleashed delight in me, but Oona didn’t seem delighted. She was gnarled in herself, peevish. Maybe she was sorry she’d mentioned Janice. I wanted to embrace and protect her, but she’d angled from me on the seat. How odd, really, that Oona felt pitted against Perkus. With their small bodies and large heads, their persnickety outfits and smoke-tinged tenors, I’d first taken them for siblings or lovers. Even now, in their vibrant wit and impatience, and for their revitalizing effect on my own life, I associated the two, no matter that each spoke dismissively of the other. I’d certainly fallen into this skulking romance partly because it sprang from the magical site of the Eighty-fourth Street kitchen. But it was
obvious that poor Oona had displaced her jealousy: to directly compete with the stranded astronaut was too abysmal, so she projected the feelings onto Perkus instead. Yet under the circumstances, it didn’t seem strategic to say so.

I had barely a chance to dwell on the dismaying cityscape as the train soared aboveground, the slate-brown monolithic prewar tenements, the rusted Coca-Cola—sponsored bodega signs, the glass-strewn lots full of twisted ailanthus shrubs, before we’d abandoned the elevated views and descended to that unfriendly map ourselves. I felt a little overwhelmed, being one who flinches from any wider world but prefers to feel at home in Manhattan, to glimpse the island’s own provinces and badlands, its margins. The bitter wind had died, and the pavements were full of drifting souls, men in porkpie hats leaning on parked cars or arrayed in beach chairs, packets of schoolchildren not in school. Oona knew just where she was headed, putting the commercial avenues behind us, and then the tenements, too, as we crossed Fort George Avenue, into the parklands at the island’s edge. I had to pee, but wasn’t too tempted by the prospect of any restroom I’d find if we backtracked. Anyway, Oona was impossible to slow. Consulting some inner compass, she drew us to the cyclone-fenced perimeter of a wild steep slope, the ground tangled with underbrush, nothing like the tended river’s edge I knew. A cleared ball field, its home plate caged to manage fouls, was partly visible below us, but I saw no evidence of a trail that would get us to it.

“We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?”

“We just have to find the entrance. Come on, Chase. Your shoes will be fine.”

“I wasn’t worrying about my shoes.”

“Then stop looking at them.”

That was when they appeared, on the trail through the brush
the way we’d come: two black kids, boys rather than teenagers, not threatening in any way, though one carried a stick, picking along as if with a shepherd’s crook. One wore a puffy fake-down coat, gold scuffed with black, and the other a New York Jets warm-up jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. They fell in with us easily, local guides to the forsaken zone, masking their curiosity with shrugging familiarity.

“Hey.”

“Hey to you,” said Oona.

“You lookin’ for the Ford?”

“Fjord—yes.”

“Fee-ord,” repeated Puffy Coat, lightly mocking. “You goin’ the wrong way.”

“So take us the right way.”

They steered us back uphill. The beaten trail at the base of the fence forced us into single-file, Oona ahead of me, the boys bracketing us protectively. It was Puffy Coat who led, foraging ahead with his broomstick crook. The one at my back, New York Jets, tapped my elbow.