Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Perkus had plunked back into his chair. He relit the joint, and scrabbled in a pile of loose CDs, then shoved one into the boom box. “So,” he said. Slumping beneath the bridge of his own templed hands, he drew on the joint centered in his lips so that it crackled, then pinched it from his mouth and waved it free. “I got sent a dub of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn , it’s eighteen minutes longer than the release cut, some kind of early assembly, maybe we should watch it-” Perkus spoke as if to one of us alone, only I was unsure which. Was he resuming a conversation with Oona or beginning one with me? All talk was a resumption. I couldn’t remember who Pontecorvo was, though I knew I was supposed to.

Perkus pounced, as ever, on my hesitation. “Pontecorvo. He did The Battle of Algiers . You know, Burn , with Brando.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Yeah, this is pretty much how I pictured it,” said Oona Laszlo. She gathered up a sweater, also black, from the back of her chair. “You guys are pretty sweet, and I’m going to go now.”

“Sweet how?” I asked. “What’s so sweet about us?”

“Just, you know, watching old Brando movies together in the afternoon, then deconstructing the universe for dessert. It’s like you’re helping Perkus with his homework.”

“See you later,” said Perkus. He was, I understood, very eager to have Oona leave, to avoid having us here together. Which made me eager for the opposite. Oona Laszlo’s little jibe at Perkus made me understand that they weren’t lovers, at least not anymore. She and I shared a protective impulse toward him. Also, an unrelated insight, I’d begun to find Oona beguiling, despite her pointed gawking. It was a little boyish around here, now that she’d pointed it out. She could be the cure.

“Why don’t you stay and watch with us?” I said.

“I would, but I just saw that movie, and Perkus hates it when I shout out the dialogue just before the actors say it.”

“Oh?”

“That was a joke. Forgive me. There’s something about running into you here that’s making me babble.”

“You don’t have to be so self-conscious.”

“No, actually, I do. I’m one of those subtext-on-the-outside people, which is why I should really go.”

She then surprised me by gathering up one of the Lucite boxes of White Rhino and shoveling it into her purse. And then was gone. Perkus barely glanced after her.

“She took your pot.”

“It was hers,” he said, not glancing at the table either. “I scored it for her, as a favor. She doesn’t like to deal with Watt.” He invented tasks for himself, sweeping imaginary crumbs into his cupped palm, fiddling with the volume, jumping up to rinse a glass, seeking, with his whole being, to exorcise the obvious subject. I didn’t allow him.

“An old girlfriend?”

Perkus shook his head. “Just a friend.”

“She’s a funny one. How’d you meet her?”

“Oona’s great, when you’re in the mood. She used to be a kind of intern of mine, I guess that’s what you’d call it. She answered an ad I placed at the New School, she used to help me pasting up broadsides…” His voice trailed, even as his desublimated eyeball zipped to walls of the living room, rolling wildly to indicate the framed and unframed manifestos of his youth.

“Oona was your glue-girl!” I said.

“Something like that. My apprentice.”

“Every mad scientist needs an apprentice.”

“Fuck you.”

“She didn’t want to change the world, I suppose? Or what did she call it-deconstruct the universe.”

“There was this editor from Viking Penguin, uh, Paul somebody. He proposed to do a compilation of the broadsides, and took us out for drinks. I didn’t care to do the book, but Oona ended up with a job in publishing. She was looking for a writing career, and I guess she felt it was her way in.”

“Why didn’t you do the book?”

“We differed on… context.”

“He saw you as a rock critic?”

Perkus nodded.

“So she’s in publishing?”

“Oona?” he asked, as if we’d dropped the subject hours earlier. He stood and put his back to me, fussing at his coffeepot. “Nope, she’s a freelancer. A self-admitted hack.”

“I’m interested in hacks, Perkus, being one myself. What does she write?”

“Nothing under her own name. She ghostwrites. Autobiographies of people who can’t write their own. She brought one around once-here.” He’d poured us fresh coffees. Now he clapped these, with a pair of spoons, on the table before me, then moved into the living room, to burrow into a stack of unsorted books at the foot of a shelf.

The hardcover Perkus delivered into my hands was unexpectedly garish and grim: Across Foul Lines , by Rose Arbogast, the memoir of a seven-foot-tall WNBA center who as a high-school star had been abducted and serially tortured by a teenage gang, then rescued by a federal agent she’d married a decade later. “This is shit,” I blurted.

“Read the inscription.”

“What?”

“On the title page.”

Someone, Oona Laszlo, had printed in a stenographically precise hand To Perkus Tooth, who taught me to lay up, not lie down, warmly, R.O./O.L . “She’s become a specialist in traumatized athletes, frostbitten Everest climbers who have to wear plastic noses, etcetera, a narrow field she dominates. She fully knows it’s shit. How she gets through her days is another question.”

“The same way you do,” I suggested. “White Rhino.” I nodded at the remaining container.

Perkus ignored me. I learned nothing further about Oona Laszlo that day, nor did Perkus and I get around to viewing the early-assembly dub of Pontecorvo’s Burn , though the videotape sat talismanically before us through the afternoon and into the evening. For lately, with the addition of Richard Abneg, my Perkus afternoons had distended into Perkus-and-Richard nights. I’d begun to let other priorities shrivel in favor of these bouts of epic squalor. It was easy to drop out of my drifting existence. The Eighty-fourth Street apartment was a container bigger on the inside than the outside, and days there might seem to hold thirty or forty hours, yet more and more I reeled home in dawn light, along a Second Avenue mostly vacated, the downtown stream of empty wishful taxicabs all veering to toot their horns at me until I waved them off, pavement deliveries of Italian loaves and kaiser rolls and bundles of tabloids under way-the clocks outside hadn’t stopped, after all. Richard Abneg was the one among us with an office, a morning agenda shackled to those unstopped clocks, yet he drove us maniacally through the night, toward daybreak, as much as Perkus (or his coffeepot, or dope supply) or myself, more perhaps.

Was the afternoon when Oona first appeared the third or fourth Richard and Perkus and I spent together? Or the hundredth? I can’t say. In the swamp of memory I can only confidently fix that occasion to Richard Abneg’s eagles, and that only because of A Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey which lay propped open on the table from which Oona retrieved her stash before vanishing. I was always foolish to slight any clue at Perkus’s kitchen table, for what seemed to happen to occupy space there was always destined to colonize my brain soon enough. (I suppose I could say the same about Oona. Soon. Soona.)

Richard Abneg came in enraged about eagles. He liked to come in enraged about something. Hadn’t I read the front page of the Metro section? The answer was no. Richard found this incredible. My neglect of the headlines was practically as egregious as the birds themselves. Richard nearly slammed down his bottle of wine, Rioja in a paper sack. He always arrived with one in tow. Not a gift, since Perkus wouldn’t touch red wine, a trigger, he claimed, for his cluster migraines. Richard and I would drink it later, in the smaller hours. For now it sat.