Chronic City (46 page)

If anything, Perkus seemed to feel he’d been liberated: Eighty-fourth Street couldn’t fire him, he quit! A lifetime’s collection of books and CDs couldn’t hold a candle to this one serendipitous vinyl talisman, fetched from a Labradoodle’s apartment, which now stood in for all he’d ever known or lost or cared for, even if it happened to feature a gouge that rendered “Miss You” unplayable. “Of all records, Chase,
Some Girls!
It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff ’n’ the Tears, the kind of albums you’d use for landfill. Look at this.” He insisted I admire the original die-cut cardboard jacket of the Stones LP, the band members’ lipsticked and wig-topped faces camouflaged among those of Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. “You can tell it’s the first pressing, because right afterward they had to withdraw this jacket—the Garland and Monroe estates sued. It’s incredible how much this music is steeped in the ambiance of the New York City of 1978. It’s as much a New York record as
White Light/White Heat
or
Blonde on
Blonde.”
Well, I only half followed this, but I was glad to hear him back tracing tangible cultural clues, this being one thing that made him recognizably himself, under the sports warm-up jackets and other homeless-person outfits, and in the smoke-free-motel-room environs of Ava’s.

Only, as I learned over the course of a few visits, Perkus wasn’t really tracing his tangible cultural clue of
Some Girls
any place in particular, so much as worrying it like, yes, a dog with a bone. “Sh-sh-sh-shattered!” he’d declare, resetting the ancient player’s coarse stylus at the start of the track, which was, even before Perkus’s appropriation, already more a rant or riff than a proper song, its froggy, mocking guitar figure only a setting for Mick Jagger’s giddy nihilistic kiss-offs,
success success success, does it mat-ter! This town’s been wearing tatters. Look at me!
Round and round man and dog danced, one nearly as tall as the other, man urging the refrain on the dog as if wishing to teach her the lyrics, or at least the key word,
I’ve been SHAT-tered!
The dog loudly hiccuped, as if that might be her version of the same thought.

If dancing to the song was a kind of enactment, a show for me, it wasn’t a deceptive one. Rather, it was a show of what he’d really come to since I’d seen him last, and of how he honestly spent his time between my visits to him here at the Friendreth: in Ava’s arms. There were no books or magazines or newspapers in evidence, and no television or computer. Biller had offered Perkus a laptop and he’d refused, “Shattered” ’s microcosm of 1978 being as far as Perkus wished to descend into any virtual world. The rest was Ava. Ostensibly for her sake, Perkus wasn’t willing to visit my apartment or any restaurant. He ate mostly garbage from cans heated on a hot plate, or takeout sandwiches Biller or Sadie Zapping brought around, a step down from the bagels and burgers he used to lower into Biller’s alley, but not too far. He made quick exploratory raids on the other canine
apartments, then retreated to Ava’s. He made do. Stripped of Eighty-fourth Street’s rituals and amenities, Perkus’s agoraphobia stood revealed—except for the ceaseless rounds with Ava, far beyond her bathroom needs and during which he braved the cold in layers of inadequate synthetic sweatshirts and Windbreakers until I bought him a secondhand woolen coat and told him it was from my own closet. In truth, my own would have been absurdly large on him; he must have known this, but said nothing. Perkus claimed that their itineraries had reverted, after the day he’d contacted me at the Mews, to Ava’s preferences, usually to the waterside, man and dog leaning into winds that swept up and down the East River, man and dog gazing across at archipelagoes of industry and construction, the perimeters of boroughs as effectively distant as the clouds scalloping overhead, man and dog moving along icy walkways in silent communion with traces vivid to them alone, not apparent to others.

February was as cold as January, maybe colder. The snows never melted, the city never breathed clear. That day Perkus reappeared I’d spotted the dog first, obscene cherry nose, twin coxcombs of spare flesh dripping from each corner of its grin, gusting breath steam onto the diner’s glass. Then the apparitional figure, bulky hooded sweatshirt pinned beneath a satiny baseball jacket, outsize dungarees hugely cuffed, over tan work boots showing a line where, soaked by slush, street salts had marked their high point in residue, like the tidal deposit of seaweed on a beach. Professional dog walker? No, worse. Homeless snow survivor, now tapping at the restaurant window, campaigning for me to emerge with a dollar to crumple in his gloved hand, or to get my leftovers to-go, in a doggie bag but not for Doggie. Despite bulky ragged dress the raving figure was small statured and possibly inconsequential, but the pit bull seemed threat
enough. Then the person’s features, miming talk, made themselves known to me. The next instant Perkus plucked off his hood and startled me a second time, the hair that once swept back so proudly from his widow’s peak now cropped raggedly to inmate length, a half-inch from his skull everywhere.

Sadie Zapping had cut it. It was part of her regular duties in the Friendreth, to carry a pair of round-tipped scissors to trim obtrusive and untidy growth around the eyes and ears and anal glands of the shaggier residents, and so when between cribbage hands Perkus had complained that he needed a haircut she’d whipped them out. Perkus introduced me to the woman he called “Ava’s friend Sadie” the second or third time I came to see him there. We met in the lobby, her “Hello” more grunt than word as she aimed a tall black poodle out into the cold. I don’t think she was possessive of Perkus’s attention so much as gruffly worried that he’d broken the boycott on his former life. That, or she’d been banking on a card game that afternoon.

Didn’t Perkus want to see Richard Abneg? I wanted Richard to see Perkus and assess the situation, but I advanced this suggestion with an air of fun. The Three Musketeers should ride again. No. Perkus seemed distrustful and disappointed after seeing Richard in the lap of power, and the lap of the Hawkman. I told him about their pregnancy. This brought a cast of wistfulness to half of Perkus’s face—his divergent eye could never sit still for looking wistful. But even that look implied Richard was only more deeply compromised, lost to us. (Nothing in Perkus ever suggested any awareness we’d all been babies, once. You couldn’t get here from there.) Perkus remained obstinate. He’d prefer I didn’t mention him to Abneg.

Oona? I wasn’t foolish enough to try. I didn’t want to subject him, or myself for being here with him, to the risk of her scorn. More and more through February, as she pushed deeper into Noteless’s
book, Oona had been daring me to view myself as her toy or tool—letting herself in after I’d given up and fallen asleep (I’d volunteered my apartment key, and cleared her with my doorman), blotting my wounded questions with urgent kisses, then departing before morning light. There was something almost depraved in her exhaustion, her bloodshot eyes, her grim fits of lust, and I’d have felt sorry for her if she’d given me the slightest opening. She never did.

In this, their refusal of my pity, she and Perkus again reminded me of each other. I snuck in as much food as I could, and made him swear not to give it all to Ava. Her head wasn’t much below the level of the kitchen table there, and sometimes with a plate of something in front of him Perkus would begin on some line of fevered free association and begin waving his hands and she’d plop her jaw on the table’s edge and begin tonguing the food sideways off his plate, three-bean salad, French fries, baba ghanoush, anything. Since he never reprimanded her, she showed no compunction. If the food came to her, why not? It was her place. By the time he’d wound up his rant Perkus’s plate might be empty, and he’d scrape it into the sink as if satisfied. I parachuted other care-package items into his life: a gift bag from a Condé Nast party, which I knew contained a bar of soap, a T-shirt, and a scented candle; a pair of rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves; a gold filter for his plastic one-cup coffeemaker (he’d been rinsing out, air-drying, and reusing the Melitta paper filters, a thrifty practice likely absorbed from Biller, but which saddened me); and a Sunday
New York Times
just to remind him his old enemies in the line of middlebrow reality placation were still in business, hoping to rile him back into curiosity about the life of the city. One day I reached into my coat pocket and found the Oonaphone, the old disposable cell that had never once rung. I thrust it on him, with its charger, and made him promise to use it in an emergency, or even just to let me know he was ready to have me help him transition
back into himself—anything. He looked at it curiously and shoved it in a drawer with some other plastic objects he wanted to protect from being gnawed for dental exercise. I told him I didn’t remember the phone’s number anymore, but I’d try to find out. He raised his hand from where it scoured at Ava’s seashell ears, signaling me to stop. “Dogs don’t need numbers,” he said.

“You’re not a dog.”

“I know, Chase, but I’m living in their building. I was telling Sadie this just the other day, I think we should pry the digits off the apartment doors. The dogs have means of knowing when they’re at the right door.”

“Did Sadie agree?”

“She said it was fine if I wanted to waste my time that way, but that she’d kill me if I removed the buttons from the elevator, which I also suggested. In retaliation I told her I wanted her to find us a deck of playing cards without numbers, just the pips. It’s healthy for our animal minds to be able to count them at a glance, as easily as we tell the kings from queens, to eschew unnecessary symbolic languages.”

Wasn’t it autistic savants—Asperger’s types, like those rock critics from whom he wished to distance himself—who counted scattered things at a glance? Well, anything could be reversed in Perkus’s system. He who’d once layered his own linguistic chatter onto the urban environment’s screen now seemed to hope to peel such stuff away to reveal preverbal essences, Platonic forms. I suppose he’d decided in favor of the unadorned polar-bear broadside, if he even recalled that old conundrum. If anything, in Ava he seemed to have located his own personal polar bear in distress. Only rather than rescue her, he’d elected to merge with her, here on the floe of the Friendreth Apartments.

Despite the injunction, new objects did appear in Ava’s rooms
from time to time, not all of them things dogs needed, some even laden with symbolic language, thanks to Perkus’s raids on the other apartments. One day I found him with a volume of Franz Kafka’s stories, a pale green paperback called
The Great Wall of China
. Perkus seemed to regard the item as a portent, like the Rolling Stones record. “I hadn’t read Kafka since I was a teenager, Chase, it’s incredible what I’d forgotten or taken for granted, it’s like he’s reading your mind! These storage-space people are a previous vanished tribe of New Yorkers, trying to make us understand something, if we’d only listen.” Perkus launched into narration from the first story, called “Investigations of a Dog”—apparently it was Ava’s mind that Kafka was reading.
“How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment… that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow-dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair
… Wait, listen, Chase, this part’s amazing, he gets to the heart of Ava’s ambivalence about other dogs:
We all live together in a literal heap … nothing can prevent us from satisfying that communal impulse … this longing for the greatest bliss we are capable of, the warm comfort of being together. But now consider the other side of the picture. No creatures to my knowledge live in such wide dispersion as we dogs, none have so many distinctions of class, of kind, of occupation… we, whose one desire is to stick together… we above all others are compelled to live separated from one another by strange vocations that are often incomprehensible even to our canine neighbors, holding firmly to laws that are not those of the dog world, but are actually directed against it
.
You see, Chase? Kafka’s pointing us to what I couldn’t know until I met Ava, that a domesticated animal isn’t some wild free thing that happens to be living indoors. Thanks to years of interdependence it’s permanently fixed on a grid of human concepts, a microcosm of our own incoherent urban existence. Dogs are canaries in our evolutionary coal mine!”

“I never realized Kafka was such a Communist,” I joked.

He blinked away contempt for my wit. “I used to find it tragic that we turned these pack animals into paranoid hermits,” he said. “Now, living here, I see that dogs
like
having their own apartments.” Perkus was explaining himself, I thought but didn’t say. “What’s astonishing about Kafka is that reading this you’re suspecting he’s never even met a dog and at the same time it’s the greatest handbook to living with one I could ever imagine!”