Chronic City (22 page)

“You’re saying the tiger is a
machine?”
said Perkus.

Richard nodded glumly, and sipped from his juice glass. “A machine, a robot, that’s right, for digging a subway tunnel. The thing is, in Europe they had two of them. One started in France, the other in
England.” He raised and spread his hands to model this for us in the air in front of his face. “Two identical machines, they’d never met, but they went underground and began digging toward each other.” His hands progressed downward, toward a meeting point at his chest, clawing like moles at the imaginary earth. “Day and night, just digging that tunnel for months, these two woebegone creatures moving ever incrementally closer—”

“What happened when they met?” I asked. Déjà vu clung to Richard’s description; I felt as if I recognized it from some baleful fairy tale or allegorical medieval painting. Our evening had drifted into another register, a fatigued postlude, the air in Perkus’s apartment impossible to clear of stale smoke and unnameable regret. Each of us leaned back in his chair as if not conversing but enacting a kind of disconsolate séance, Richard’s voice punctuating our trance like a deathbed dictation.

“Well, they were … retired, I suppose that’s the word for it, when the tunnel was completed. It would have been too expensive to drag them out, so they’re buried there together, deep under the ocean, off to one side of the passage. We made a mistake, though. We cut corners when we commissioned our own project. We only had them build a single machine, just digging in one direction, with nothing coming from the other side. I guess the thing got lonely—”

“That’s why it destroys bodegas?” asked Perkus.

“At night sometimes it comes up from underneath and sort of, you know, ravages around.”

“You can’t stop it?” I asked.

“Sure, we could stop it, Chase, if we wanted to. But this city’s been waiting for a Second Avenue subway line for a long time, I’m sure you know. The thing’s mostly doing a good job with the tunnel, so they’ve been stalling, and I guess trying to negotiate to keep it underground. The degree of damage is really exaggerated. Anyway, a
certain amount of the buildings it’s taken out were pretty much dead wood in the first place—”

“That’s how urban renewal works,” Perkus mused. “You find an excuse to bulldoze stuff so that the developers can come in. Richard’s career in civic service is founded on that kind of happy accident.”

“Fuck you, Tooth.”

I worked to put my mind around all he’d told us. “So the mayor’s cover story is that this… machine … is an escaped tiger? I can’t understand why anyone would accept that.”

“It’s not a cover story, or maybe it
is
now, but we completely backed into it. After last year, you remember when that coyote wandered across the George Washington Bridge and took up residence in Central Park, and you know, with all this recent talk about displacement of species, including, yes, okay, the fucking eagles, blah blah blah, I guess some old lady saw it and told the news that it was a tiger and the image just colonized the public imagination. It happens that way sometimes, we don’t control all this stuff, Chase, no matter how Machiavellian you might think we are.”

Was it possible Richard Abneg was somehow mistaken or misled? Might he be unwittingly propagating a cover to a cover, a story he’d been handed himself? “Have you ever actually seen it, Richard?” I asked.

“I’ve seen footage.”

“The
Daily News
had footprints on page three the other day,” said Perkus distantly. “This cop was standing in the tiger’s footprint, this huge thing with giant claws, it was like ten times longer than the cop’s shoe.”

“Not footprints,
footage
. Any footprints are a total hoax.”

“Doesn’t seem like you people have a lot of ground to stand on,
calling things hoaxes,” said Perkus, refilling his glass with Scotch. His wild eye wasn’t wild. It maundered instead.

“I don’t know why I ever try explaining anything to you two,” said Richard affectionately. He yawned without covering his mouth. “I hate to be the party pooper but I think it’s time to extricate the Hawkman from this slough of despond.”

I felt a slippage toward vertigo, as though if I allowed Richard Abneg to leave too soon something would be lost. Not my intervention, I’d given up that scheme. But after all we’d come through, we’d arrived at a sort of summit between us, a summit in doubt, even dismay. Who knew how, the name of the treasure we’d sought and lost already seemed hard to recall, the fact of it violently unlikely, yet in that weird quest we’d passed through our everyday delusions, to a place of exalted uncertainty. Perkus, though he might not wish to admit it, had surrendered Marlon Brando. His last layer of cultural armor laid aside or at least suspended. Richard, relinquishing his sinister pretense of confidentiality, had clued us in about the tiger. That he’d done so made me love him. No one pitted themselves against my cherished illusions here, but I felt they should. I needed to carve my way into Perkus’s and Richard’s good faith by surrendering up some secret, too. I feared to be untouched or unseen.

“I don’t … I can’t really remember Janice Trumbull,” I said aloud.

Richard had projected himself from his chair, into the other room. Over the loopy music I heard him rustling in the mound of coats and Georgina, heard her dopey murmur as he got her on her feet and into her heels. I looked to Perkus. He’d passed out where he sat, nose tipped back, lips parted as he silently snored, his juice glass hovering above his banker’s-pinstripe lap like a bucket swinging in a well. I freed it from his damply clinging fingers and set it on the table.

“I mean, I feel like I remember falling in love with her, but somewhere after that I can’t remember anything at all.”

From the other side of the wall came sounds of panting and then chortling, as if in the course of helping the Hawkman into her coat Richard and Georgina had fallen into a clinch and begun dancing again, or perhaps making out.

“Sometimes I can’t even remember what she looks like.”

The music ran out and for an instant all was calm and silent in the apartment except for a hint of cheeping, like a bird’s peep, presumably from Georgina. Involuntarily I pictured Richard running his hands inside her dress, goosing a quick orgasm from her with his clubby fingers, a wake-up call. Hearing this, or imagining I did, I pined for the wrong woman, the clandestine part of my own life. Whatever the facts, after another instant the two of them, fully restored in their evening’s glamour apart from Richard’s missing bow tie, scooted arm in arm through the kitchen and out, Richard delivering a farewell bow to me as if at the close of a theatrical performance, Georgina only widening her eyes slightly, and parting her lips. They were gone, my confession unheard.

A draft whistled in around the kitchen window frame and I shivered. The digital clock on Perkus’s stove read 3:33. I stood and reached for the overhead light’s pull string, darkening the kitchen, then helped Perkus gently to his feet, my arm cradling his thin bony shoulders. He shrugged me off. I trailed him into the living room, lit only by his screen saver’s treed raccoons, the couch now cleared of the bed of coats, except for mine. Perkus sat again at the computer and clicked up his Web browser, calling up the dumb beep of digits, then the electronic squirt-and-wheeze of a portal’s opening. I was terribly afraid Perkus would summon another auction. I doubted I
could stand it. But no. He scrolled into his browser’s history and refreshed the Wikipedia entry on Marlon Brando. So he’d been listening after all, had only ostensibly stuck his head out of his window looking for Biller to avoid giving Richard the satisfaction of knowing he’d heard. He scrolled impatiently through the page, squinting close to the screen in the dark room, his thin figure in his chair like a lighthouse on some storm-racked shore. He’d been holding his breath, and now he exhaled deeply, ending, to my surprise, in a satisfied snort, even a bitter little chuckle. He pointed and I read over his shoulder.
The rumors of Brando’s death circulated in the summer of 2004 and again in early 2005, in both instances triggering a wave of mourning and tributes both on the Internet and in major media outlets
… At the top of the page, a boxed notice read:
The truthfulness of this article has been questioned. It is believed that some or all of its contents may constitute a
hoax…
Elements of this article may be deleted if this message remains in place for five days
…

“You see,” said Perkus. “Richard doesn’t know everything.”

I didn’t want to have to try to understand all I’d seen tonight, this perhaps least. Perkus shut down his computer and scuffed through his bedroom’s French doors with weary finality. He waved without turning, a lighthouse now crumbling into the sea. “Make sure the door locks when you go.” I took my coat and went into the dark kitchen. The rising wind still whistled through the kitchen’s back window. I saw that it remained open, just a crack, and as I moved to shut it more firmly I now spotted a black electrical extension cord rising up across the sill, and threaded outside, to drape down into the courtyard. There, below, was Biller. He squatted in a corner of the courtyard, sheltering from the wind, wearing a shiny silver down-stuffed parka with a fake-fur-lined hood, different from the black wool coat he’d worn just this morning, when I’d handed him a hot dog and twenty dollars and confiscated
Obstinate Dust
.
(Perhaps I’d financed the new coat.) The cord from Perkus’s window trailed to a small white laptop computer, its screen brightly lit, though I couldn’t make out whether that screen showed text or images or what. Biller, his back to the window, breath misting in steady bursts from his nostrils, pale moons of his fingernails themselves like ten floating cursors protruding from the darkness of his fingerless black-wool gloves streaming on the laptop’s tiny keyboard keenly, unhesitatingly, with all apparent expertise.

November 14

Dearest Chase,

I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Ha ha ha ha ha, imagine please my convulsive laughter. (I read this opening line aloud to Zamyatin, who happens to be running on a treadmill in the room as I type this letter to you, and he found it as hilarious as I did. Moments like these are all we have to savor anymore, please don’t begrudge them.) The good news, surely, you will have read in the newspaper and perhaps even seen on some cable news station (except I can’t for one instant imagine you bothering with cable television—last I recall you were searching for your remote and failing to find it, then accusing the housekeeper of hiding it in a drawer or throwing it out): we survived the space walk to repair the tile damaged in Keldysh’s botched module launch. Better than survived, the space walk was a thrilling success. I myself was even the heroine of the incident, and
Northern Lights
will carry on, to drift unmoored in orbit for another day, or month, or however long until we are rescued or choose to destroy ourselves by a deliberate collision with the Chinese mines, which I suspect could happen any minute now, especially if I am judging the Captain’s and Keldysh’s moods correctly—but pardon me, I was telling you the
good
news! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Suffice to say no straws were drawn because no one wanted to see Sledge anywhere near the air lock; our dour Captain asserted the leadership he’s lately so much abrogated, tapping myself and Keldysh for the walk, Mstislav and Zamyatin for on-board mission guidance, and inventing some kind of make-work for Sledge which did or didn’t get done, something back in the Greenhouse, something to do with Mstislav’s doomed reclamation project involving the leaf-cutter bees, those expert pollinators. (We’ve been ignoring our bees.) I find myself unwilling to bother with the technical stuff, which I’m certain makes your eyes glaze over. Such labors as the forty-eight hours that the walk’s mission preparation entailed are wearisome enough to get through, let alone describe for a bored boyfriend. Anyhow, preparation’s a poor word. Nothing had or could have prepared myself and Keldysh for the sensations that overcame us upon ejecting from the air lock. Essentially, of falling, like Wile E. Coyote, off a cliff, into a bottomless well of darkness and silent velocity.