Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

They found the false outback full of kangaroos, sprawled in textbook melancholia. Lucinda couldn’t tell at a glance whether Shelf was among them, or instead segregated in some kind of debriefing room elsewhere.

“Is she there?” Lucinda asked.

“Don’t you recognize her?”

“No,” she admitted.

So the episode ended, Shelf blending into the population at last. Matthew gazed stoically. No kangaroo returned his gaze. Perhaps Shelf had been cured of expectations after all.

The zoo offices, warned by Shelf’s reappearance, had seemingly been made ready for Matthew’s return. Though he crept in braced for ambush, the girl at the desk greeted him blithely. Lucinda waved and smiled, compensating for Matthew’s glum demeanor. Other vets or orderlies in white coats passed through, hailing him in friendly tones. He only grunted, clearing out his mailbox, sifting the recyclable memos into a bin, pocketing sealed envelopes. Then they turned to Dr. Marian’s office. There lay the one severe test.

“Mr. Plangent.” The zoo director turned her barrel-chested authority from her paperwork and scrutinized the two of them, her deep-pocketed eyes glistening.

“Dr. Marian. You’re looking well.”

“And yourself. But enough pleasantries. We’ve got creatures that require your attention.” Dr. Marian slapped a pile of folders that might have been prepared for this moment. “Duncan needs his claws recauterized, first thing.”

“Duncan?”

“The Taiwanese lynx. You remember.”

“Sure, sure.”

“And there’s a tenacious rhinovirus among the tufted capuchins. Just the two-year-olds.”

“We’ve seen that before.”

“Indeed we have.”

“I’ll schedule in some dropper work on their sinuses.”

“I never doubted you would.”

“I’ll just have to drive my friend home first, and get my locker key.”

“That’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

Lucinda felt invisible, a bystander to codes that had no need of her presence. She turned to leave, still unacknowledged, but Dr. Marian said, “Ms. Hoekke?”

“Yes?”

“I listened to the tape you sent me.”

Lucinda had almost forgotten. She waited, not wishing to presume.

“Some of it was very interesting.”

“It’s just a rehearsal tape. If we recorded in a studio the results would be much better.”

“Nonetheless, I found much to like. I’m still not clear on how you envision my role, however.”

Matthew busied himself examining the stack of files, displaying absolute neutrality, an unwillingness even to show surprise in this instance.

“There are, uh, elements which have shown an interest in the band,” said Lucinda. “Not exactly preying, but putting themselves forward obtrusively. Middle-aged men of a certain stripe. I somehow pictured that you might—keep them in line. Give us some breathing room.”

“Yes, I see.” Dr. Marian left no uncertainty that she was aware of the power deriving from her inverted pyramidal form and ramrod posture, from the white stripe in her raven hair. Male guilt crackled around her like Frankensteinian electricity.

“We’re playing live on the radio on Friday,” said Lucinda. “Four in the afternoon, on KPKD, a show called The Dreaming Jaw . You could come and observe.”

“I’ll have to clear some things on my schedule.”

“We’d be grateful.”

Lucinda and Matthew continued unspeaking back through the maze of the zoo, pausing over no animals, stalking their way to the parking lot. Matthew walked slightly ahead, perhaps managing embarrassment. No words passed between them until he tucked his Mazda under the curbside shadow of the Olive Street tower.

“You seem ticked at me,” said Lucinda.

“This whole thing’s just a little strange, that’s all.”

“What whole thing?”

Matthew glanced at the building, perhaps about to name the complainer, then thought better of it. “Just the way everything is totally rearranged and exactly the same. It’s depressing to see Shelf back inside. You know that feeling of wondering if something ever really happened? Of wondering if something was ever real in the first place?”

“It’s all real, Matthew.”

“I know.”

“You don’t like my new friend, that’s what you mean.”

“I like your new friend a lot, actually. I do think he looks a little fat onstage with the rest of us. I guess I’m not supposed to say that.”

“He’s not fat, he’s just a grown-up. We’re the ones who look strange. We’re anorexic, we’re ghosts, we’re tinder.”

“I thought we looked pretty good.”

“You don’t like him.”

“If there’s anything I don’t like it’s his effect on you. The way you act. I probably wasn’t supposed to say that, either.”

“You can say whatever you want.”

“Well, here’s one thing. I hope you never felt I was trying to suck dregs, or that there was any aspect of dreg-sucking going on between you and me, because I never did, not once.”

“I never felt that at all.”

“No matter how many times we broke up and then called each other late at night and then ended up in bed together again, I would never have described anything between us as a dreg suck.”

“I promise you, neither would I.”

“I don’t want to screw up anything with the band. I’m very excited about Friday.”

“So am I. You’re not screwing anything up, Matthew. Nothing could be screwed up.”

“Thanks for helping me today, Lucinda, I really appreciate it, and Shelf does too. I think I’m going to drive away now, if you want to get out of the car.”

the radio station’s unglamour was sobering. No one would have pictured Fancher Autumnbreast, paragon of bohemian taste, amid the bland commercial edifices and slickly nostalgic boutiques and dozy, off-brand policemen of Culver City. The band converged on Duquesne Avenue in three cars: Bedwin with Denise, Carl driving Lucinda’s Datsun, Matthew alone. Now they stood assembled in the vanilla-carpeted lobby of the station’s studio as if dragged into the day’s light for a medical procedure. Their misspelled names checked off in an appointment book by an unimpressed receptionist, they were led upstairs and abandoned to a greenroom full of surfing and cigar magazines, bottled water, and wicker cornucopia full of bruised grapes, coagulated brie, and sesame crackers.

“I’d like to explode a place like this with a bomb, if it could be okay to say that.”

“You need to build up your immunity. If we rocket to the top it’ll require a series of compromises with antiseptic environments.”

“Shouldn’t we have brought spray paint or a television set to push out a window?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to destroy a television set at a radio station.”

They glimpsed Autumnbreast only momentarily, a figure in a gray sweat suit with orange piping. He hailed them with a vigorous bout of silent winking and finger-snapping through a large window as they set up their instruments in a crowded booth. Only the complainer seemed free of the pall that eclipsed the group, the apprehension that they were the wrong band with the wrong song. They feared that they might be unready, or the opposite: they might be over-practiced, fallen out of synch, and had ruined the song. Maybe they’d gotten out of the wrong sides of their beds. Wasn’t four in the afternoon, anyway, a famous energy sink, a vortex of enervated human attention? Who would listen to the song, who would care? Or perhaps they’d arrived at the wrong time in the history of The Dreaming Jaw to make clear use of its indisputable influence on musical fashion. Maybe they’d even been tricked. This wasn’t the real KPKD, or the real Autumnbreast, but some obscure counterfeit. While they blunderingly tuned instruments in a glass-and-foam booth in Culver City some other band enjoyed glory that belonged rightly to them, in some other place that felt more encouragingly real.