Chronic City (32 page)

It was—surprise!—Perkus I felt concerned about. Here we were, his whole support group (I didn’t want to include Watt or Biller or Susan Eldred or anyone else right now in my desert-island fantasy), yet he’d shrunken to near-invisibility in our midst. Wrong restaurant, for a start. He fingered his burger like a skater toeing thin ice. Then, just as I’d alighted on my worry, ready to study him for minute indications, Perkus was on his feet. “We have to go.” One eye was out the door, the other pleaded with us. “I have to go.”

Sure enough, we went. Hand it to us, we at least understood we were a support group. Or lieutenants. Like that, we abandoned the meal, whisked back out into the cold, our visit to my own preferred restaurant unceremoniously interrupted—I wondered what it would take for me to burnish my favorites into myth like Perkus had done with Jackson Hole. Would he find another place? Well, we were
rushing out partly to see what he would do, to follow the plot of his fixations. I glanced back, projecting embarrassment onto my regular waiters in the Mews, but they bussed our unfinished meal as implacably as ever, scooping tips into apron pockets, enduring the curse of the twenty-four-hour restaurant, which by definition required machines, not men, for its operation. So they’d become machines, more expert and obedient than the unruly tunneling thing that had surfaced from under Second Avenue.

The site had evolved rapidly in our absence—most of all by becoming a “site” (or possibly a “zone”), by revealing the unnerving readiness of a familiar street to be revised in martial strife, like a gentle friend suddenly enlisted in war, then returned decorated, missing limbs, and with a hundred-yard stare. The tiger-oglers had been stretched to a wide quarantine, across Second and the intersection of Eighty-fourth, by police barricades now manned by officers in vigilant pairs, who spoke only to one another, mercilessly snubbing the barrage of citizen inquiries. Behind them, the crater and the surrounding street blazed white, lit by emergency spotlights that had been cranked into position to facilitate specialists crawling over rubble, perhaps sounding within it with stethoscopes for Morse tapping or cries. Within the cordon ambulances blinked, ricocheting amber off upper stories. Dust cycloned through the klieg lights, up into the strobe and shadow.

We flanked Perkus, taking his cues. This was his precinct, his inquiry to make. He made none, but as we craned our necks for views through the rows of heads, all with their breath steaming as they muttered rumors or perhaps prayers, another bystander, a fifty-ish woman with a leashed terrier clutched in her arms and shivering as it eyed us, a neighbor of Perkus’s perhaps, leaned in and announced, “If you live close by you’re safe now. It never strikes in the same place twice.”

Perkus only peered at her, the dog now growling low in its throat, perhaps at his suspicious eye. But Richard, patroller of civic logic, stepped up.

“Sorry?” he said. “What’s that you said?”

“The tiger doesn’t return to the same place twice, everyone knows.”

“It can’t fail,” Richard declared with instant exasperation, as if she weren’t with us. “The human brain is sick with superstition.” I was just glad he hadn’t come out with “old wives’ tale.”

“Are people dead?” Perkus asked bluntly, ignoring both dog and Richard.

The woman shrugged, grudging to be pushed beyond the prophetic range of her first remark, into dull specifics. “Some got out, they were talking to the news.” She nodded to the opposite side of the intersection, where two vans with satellite dishes on ladders had staked out an operation. “Two dead upstairs, and a girl from the restaurant, I think.” It was as if her syntax had collapsed into the spontaneous grave along with the bodies.

“What girl?”

Again the woman spoke with a nod of her chin. “The Korean at the deli, he knew her.”

We raced to the Korean, who stood measuring the spectacle, sheltered inside the flapped plastic tent covering his bins of produce and bundles of psychedelically pink-and-orange carnations. He’d seemingly been at his beer stash, cheeks red, eyes shiny, and also had a few rehearsals in his answer to Perkus’s question.
“Lin-Say,”
he reported, tsk-tsking as if we’d failed to pay attention the first dozen times he’d memorialized her. “A nice girl. A very nice girl. Came in every day, always smoke Camel Lights. I used tell her, ‘When you gonna quit?’” He shook his head at the fine irony he’d
dispensed, though it seemed to me second-rate, cribbed from a war movie.

We milled back into the traffic-stopped intersection, toward the cordon at the vent of Perkus’s block. It was too clear what it meant that the ambulances didn’t bother leaving the scene. Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn’t do any more for Perkus’s murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could a keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor. Our group, fortunately, was stupidly silent—I prayed Richard wouldn’t claim some memory of Lindsay, just to have something to say. For my part, I’d stay mum. How could I possibly explain to the others when Perkus had disclaimed any interest in her? He’d only treated her like a waitress. It now seemed awful to me that we’d bundled off to Gracie Mews, but I consoled myself with the reminder that Georgina had been a blood-sugar desperado. It wasn’t as if we’d have accomplished anything more out here in the chill and confusion, where our team now threatened to unmoor, each member to drift off like a bear on his or her own floe. Oona lagged behind us, inspired by the Korean’s remark to bum a cigarette of her own from a passing stranger. I’d never seen Oona smoke tobacco before, but given the precedent of her secret eyeglasses, I wasn’t too taken aback. Her personality had serial quitter in its DNA. Georgina hung back, too, while Richard and I tried to stick at Perkus’s elbows, as if our friend were a drunkard. Perkus seemed to want to go home.

Eighty-fourth Street’s traffic was stopped, too, and pedestrians were funneled by police to an entry point between two barricades on the north sidewalk, where many who approached were turned away. We waited our turn to meet the troll at this bridge, a towering grim older cop who spent as much time conversing with the radio Velcroed to his shoulder as with any mere citizens. “Street’s closed,” he
informed us. “Use Eighty-fifth to get to Third.” Each player on this stage of chaos had a line or two they were made to deliver ad infinitum, while we, the audience, filtered among them, gathering these coupons like stamps in an album.

“I
live
here.” Perkus almost whined, the cop’s size and clout reducing him to pipsqueak protest. I wanted to register my own claim of access, but couldn’t find the words.

“All of you, or just him?” The cop asked for Perkus’s identification, in order to check his address. Perkus handed it across numbly. The cop then sorted us out from him, the rest of us presumed guilty, rabble to be considered singly and subsequently, if at all. And before we could make any proper farewell, Perkus had been eased through the funnel’s mouth. We four watched him go, his shoulders rounded with the burden of acquiescence to the larger forces, the alteration of his street into dystopian tableau, his personality made tiny by his dealings with the cop. What else he carried on that gaunt-slumped frame, what sway the tiger’s close strike might have over his free associations, or the significance to his heart of the loss of Lindsay or that which she’d so ungrudgingly emissaried to his table, I feared presuming. On the sidewalk beyond, a clutch of Brandy’s patrons, not more than one or two likely to be legitimate residents of the block, had spilled out to watch the cop’s operation from behind his back, many with drinks still in their mitts. No fair, I thought.

CHAPTER
Sixteen

The ruinous night
had more to give. Richard and Georgina led us in retreat to a wine bar up Second Avenue, a place for grown-ups (and therefore, to me, usually invisible) called Pangaea. It was as if we were intent on dishonoring the occasion, as if one bottle of wine could drive the scent of catastrophe and sorrow, the ozone singe of an acetylene torch cutting in twisted rebar, from our nostrils. Yet after a perfunctory glass of Barbera the other couple quit the place, and it was then that Oona and I tumbled into a grotesque conflict. Like a member of an ensemble still working from an earlier draft of the appointed script, I’d clung to my fancy idea about the mayor’s party, and I now produced that creamy invitation from my pocket, slid it across the candlelit table between us.

“I’ve got one of those,” Oona said.

“You do?”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping we’d go together.” I winced at hearing myself reproduce the tones of some minor courtier, or possibly those of Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant. Oona’s hunched and
hunted posture suggested she felt uncomfortably public with me here, and that, in turn, seemed relevant to my dim proposal. Our skulking, I’d notice, was for Oona a highly local matter: West Side or Inwood okay, the East Side distinctly not. The mayor’s address was on Fifth Avenue. I’d pleased myself thinking she meant to spare me bad publicity, rather than avoid embarrassment with her friends. I could be wrong.

“I’ll be bringing Laird Noteless,” she told me. The unspoken insinuation I couldn’t keep from hearing was that she’d be sorry to see me there at all. The name she’d spoken revived an image of that shrine she kept over her desk, glowering Noteless and his portentous potholes, and threatened to give fly to every fearful accusation I’d kept partitioned for weeks simply out of gratitude that Oona would see me.

But I began coolly enough. “That reminds me, something happened downtown, I never had a chance to mention it with all this stuff. I don’t know if you heard, a man killed himself by jumping into Noteless’s memorial pit. As a result I never got to go on
Brian Lehrer.”

Everything I mentioned annoyed her. “That happens from time to time. It’s just one of those stories they like to make a big deal over. You know how many suicides there are in this city?”

“You mean… more than one person has thrown themselves into his memorial?”

“The memorial, and other things he built. If you build bridges people throw themselves off those, too.”

“I’m surprised there’s such a big hole downtown,” I said. “I was under the impression Noteless just got that commission.”

“You’re mistaken. Excavation started down there a long time ago.”

Sure, sure, I was always mistaken. To be so was my great role,
my Lear. Only I was less Learian than Othelloish at the moment. What was rising in me wouldn’t be so curtly swept aside whatever the mistaken facts surrounding excavations, fog, or suicide. I felt the sort of jealousy that wants to ruin all the things it doesn’t understand, because they suddenly made a picture of conspiracy. “This isn’t your usual piece of ghostwriting, is it?” I spoke as if I knew a remarkable amount about her regular work. At the moment I couldn’t recall the name of her raped power forward or defrosted Everest climber, but I fished up the one name that offered itself. “What is it about Noteless that’s so different from, say, Emil Junrow?”

“One important difference I can think of is that Emil Junrow has gone to meet his maker, whom he incidentally always referred to as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

“Does Noteless chase you around the desk like Junrow?”

“Oh, no, Noteless, strangely enough, employed handcuffs and chloroform.” Oona’s sarcasm was keyed precisely to the level of my righteousness, her tone ferocious enough to convey how little she cared to be questioned. We might ascend to a screaming match by this method, my accusations lucid while her chosen words remained all spaghetti monsters and other non sequiturs.

Seeing the trap, I was nonetheless doomed to the jealous interlocutor’s task: I needed to hear her deny
something
. “Why would you go as Noteless’s date? Is he some kind of extra boyfriend?”

“I’m not Laird’s plus-one, he’s mine. And here’s the funny thing: you don’t need an extra boyfriend when you don’t have one in the first place. Next time you spot our waitress, flag her down. I don’t like it here.”

The waitress had been keeping her eye on me, I’d happened to notice (that might be something Oona didn’t like about the place), so I extended my hands and made a scribbling motion on an invisible notepad. “Why am I not your boyfriend?” I said. I knew it was abject,
but there’s something about me, I like to think, that can carry off an abject line.

“That’s too easy: because I’m not your girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling, meaning outer space.

We’d reached another accustomed juncture: Oona pouring cold water on my romancing by means of a disconcerting allegiance to my fiancée. The waitress slipped a bill under the candlelight, and not wishing for Oona to pay, I slapped down a pair of twenties as if to trump it. One of many trumps I now intended to make. I wouldn’t think about Janice, or Noteless, instead turn my disadvantages, the whole night’s wretchedness, into adamancy, and opportunity. “Fair enough, but I’m your
something,”
I said slyly, quoting Oona to herself.

“For now we’ll leave it at that.”

“Let’s say I wanted to change the world all around.”

“Make day night, black white, that sort of thing?” She spoke distractedly, fidgeting into her coat.

“Why don’t we go back to your place?” I said. Oona only looked at me, but her crooked smile, lip caught on her teeth, might have admitted for the first time that I’d once appeared in that apartment. She let me guide her to the street again, to where it was cold and the only thing to do was to begin walking briskly somewhere. I couldn’t tell whether any of the people on the sidewalk were special visitors drawn to the neighborhood by the tiger’s attack. If so, they did nothing to give themselves away. We were two blocks north of it all. I didn’t think about Perkus, alone in his apartment. I meant to do some pair-bonding. Oona fell into step beside me, clearly on a bearing for my building, not so large a victory as I craved.

“Why can’t I visit there?” I pressed.