Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Now Warren Zoom and I have suffered a permanent rupture. We go our separate ways, he trapped in his rounds, ever youthful, pushed deeper and deeper into cable television’s circles of hell (where I accidentally glimpse him from time to time, and hurriedly surf away). Me, aging, but not too badly, playing these other roles in my life here in Manhattan, for which Warren floats the checks, an elegant arrangement of mutual support and indifference. Or no, that’s not true. I do nothing nowadays to support Warren Zoom. I’d say he owes me everything, but I’m not sure he’d agree.

I no longer act, that is unless you’d call my every waking moment a kind of performance. Apart from errands of good taste, like recording the Criterion voice-overs for Susan Eldred, I’m untempted. To be honest, few lately have sought to tempt me. A year ago I took a strange meeting with a couple of producers, young men with the bullish slickness of newly recruited spies or secret agents. They even dressed oddly, in twin black suits that cried for tailoring. Over an expensive meal the two propositioned me with the glib confidence available, it seemed to me, to those who not only had never known failure but were also spending someone else’s money. They sketched, vaguely, “the role of a lifetime.” I no longer remember the details of the pitch, or even the milieu-in truth, I wasn’t listening carefully. I tried to tell them I no longer auditioned, didn’t even bother to keep a relationship with an agent. My childhood fame had made me impossible to cast, and relieved me of the burden of ambition. I’d been returned to civilian life, I joked. They, in turn, proposed that it was my residual career, and my existence as a Manhattan gadabout, that made me so very perfect for the role in question. Defeated, I told them I’d be willing to look at a script. They promised it would arrive soon.

That was the last I heard from them. The encounter puzzled me.

I live in capital’s capital, but I root against the Dow. I feel an instinctive lizard-thrill on those days when it collapses. I know I’m meant to feel we’re all in something together, especially after the gray fog stretched out to cover the lower reaches of the island. I ought to feel sympathy for the moneymen, ashen and dim in aspect, forgetful, sleepy, never quite themselves anymore, like Reggie Spencer. Yet if I’m honest with myself, I’d like to see them stripped even of their fog-gray suits, reduced to suspenders and barrels, put out of their misery at last. Sometimes this Dow-enmity of mine seems like the worst secret I could disclose. I don’t.

Though I do dwell among the money people, that’s incidental to what I like about the Upper East Side, and to the matter of why I rarely go anywhere else. The secret of this place is its quarantine from the boom-and-bust of Manhattan’s trends and fashions. Maybe someday, if the rumors are true, they’ll build a Second Avenue subway line and all of this will change. For now, what’s here is entrenched and immutable. The shopping-cart ladies and the fur ladies and the black-cocktail-dress girls, the preying, tie-loosened twenty-three-year-old junior partners, the reverse-slumming off-duty policemen, none has to glance at the others and wonder whether this place rightly belongs to them or anyone. The resonances and layers here are mysterious without being unduly impressed with themselves. (A few of the shopping-cart ladies will still roll up their sleeves and show you a bluish line of concentration-camp numerals, if you want to get your self-pity casually smashed.) Money has been here so long it’s a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead. Much hides behind what’s assumed about the East Side, even if what’s assumed is true. There are things beyond what’s assumed and true. East Eighty-fourth Street, the entrance beside Brandy’s Piano Bar, and those who live there. Not only Perkus Tooth, though he’s a fine example.

Biller, too. The homeless man lives here, at least sometimes, if it isn’t more correct to say he lives in another world entirely.

I’m more and more a day sleeper. This trend, inaugurated before my friendship with Perkus Tooth, was certainly aggravated by it. The angle of light in my apartment makes it awfully easy: there’s a sort of afternoon “dawn” as the sun at last breaks past the edge of the Dorffl Tower. (My building’s board fought hard to prevent or modify the Dorffl, and lost. I never go to those meetings.) Like a restaurant worker I abide with the life of Manhattan as it slakes itself on sundown pleasures, as it dines and smokes and boozes, then I tuck it in for the night and go on. What’s served with cocktails-a handful of wasabi cashews, a nice black-market unpasteurized fromage oozing off its board-is frequently my lunch if not breakfast. On this denatured island if I crave “breakfast” Gracie Mews Diner will gladly serve me two poached with bacon, and home fries with shiny bits of onion and green pepper, at four in the morning, before bed. That’s when I crave it, if I do.

I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade-to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I’m like fudge. Or maybe I’m like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was, I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate . He wouldn’t have meant it kindly.

In that margin of sky granted to my apartment by the Dorffl Tower is visible another tower, a church spire three or four blocks away, something built in the nineteenth century. I don’t know the name of the church, despite how easy it would be to discover. I’d only have to ask a neighbor. Or walk over. I know nothing about architecture, but I think the style may be Gothic. To confirm this, I’d simply need to pluck White and Willensky’s Architectural Guide to Manhattan from the place where I noticed it, in the bottom row on Perkus Tooth’s living-room shelf. I never did.

The point about the church spire is that I take a moment every day on waking to glance at it to see whether the birds are there. It is a flock of… something-gulls? swallows? — with feathers white on top, darker underneath, that wheels and races in unrepeatable patterns around and underneath the spire, for sessions lasting usually fifteen minutes, sometimes as much as half an hour. I try to count the birds and settle, uneasily, at eleven, twelve, or thirteen. They dive, figure-eight, the flock’s density bunching and stretching as it turns. They shoot left of the spire, tilting, seeming about to abandon the landmark, then abruptly turn, white tops flipping to gray undersides as if at a cursor’s clicking, and recover their orbit. Sometimes, rarely, a sole bird turns the wrong way, parts from the group, and has to wheel in a phantom operation until it is swept up again in the flock. It is terribly easy to blink or look away and miss their unceremonious finishing, for whatever reason it is that they finish. They merely tilt and are gone from the spire, and from my slice of sky.

My ignorance of natural history keeps me from gaining traction on puzzles attaching to the birds themselves (Why that number? Why not eight, or fifteen? Do they live together all day and night, or gather only for these missions? What do they do on days when they don’t visit the tower? Have Richard Abneg’s eagles ever fed on this flock?), so I drift to truly unanswerable questions. Did the church attract birds when it was first built? Did the builders know it would? Did they intend it? The relation between those birds and that tower feels both deep and impossible. The longer one stares, the more the persistence of the vaguely medieval spire in the sky over Second Avenue seems to evidence a mystery in itself. If I could plumb it I’d perhaps begin to know why I live in this place and what it consists of. Instead I get about as near as those birds. Yet they’re carefree, and I’m not.