Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Perkus, what’s going on? What time is it? Are you okay?”

Silence.

“I tried to call, five or six times.”

“I had cluster,” he said after a moment, the grandiosity leaked from his voice. “I turned the ringer off.”

“I rang your doorbell.”

“I know. It sounded like an atom bomb, whistling toward the Nagasaki of my brain.” Perkus tittered at his own joke, his voice seeming to fall away from the receiver. Having failed the Brando test, I was losing him.

“Have you been in all week? When did you last eat something?”

“I don’t know…”

“Can I come over?” I asked, astounding myself. He didn’t answer. “I’ll stop at H&H and grab some bagels and stuff.” Now I bargained, pathetically.

“Go to East Side Bagel, they’ve got better whitefish spread.”

“Okay.”

“And Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Get some extra for Biller. I haven’t had anything for him for a couple of days.”

It might have taken me an hour to rally myself, get bagels, and arrive to ring Perkus’s bell. This was a day or two before Halloween, the morning fiercely cold, a first taste of winter. I worried for a long chilly moment on his doorstep that Perkus had changed his mind, but no, without troubling with the intercom he buzzed me through. His door was unlocked when I tried the handle, and a sour smell escaped to the corridor. Inside, Perkus’s tightly managed chaos had tipped into squalor, his sink’s basin like a geological site, heaped with unrinsed cups and a rain of grounds emptied out of his gold filter, ashtrays too, their contents muddily mixed with the coffee, his living-room floor a mad tatter of clippings, books with spines pressed open by whatever lay to hand-more coffee cups, a stapler, a brown banana, a pot of rubber cement-and with their pages mutilated, paragraphs excised and stickily transferred to gigantic cardboard backings, collaged into wild conjunctions, like vast scholarly punkrock liner notes. I’d never seen Perkus destroy a book. Rather they were holy objects, whose safety he compulsively patrolled when he placed them in your hands, forehead veins bulging in panic if you turned one down on its open face, though he reserved the right to do this himself. But no more. Now his precious collection was only fodder on some quest. Perkus sat on the floor amid this disaster, his hair dripping wet, his chin and throat peppered with a week’s beard, his expression smashed and dark. He wore a green sharkskin three-piece suit’s pants and vest, nothing else-I suppose he’d made a lastminute effort to neaten up for me and could locate no clean shirts. His chest was, somehow, scrawnier than I’d allowed myself to imagine. The television screen was frozen on a stop-motion frame of Marlon Brando, smiling ominously as he scratched a large blue felt-and-fur tree-sloth Gnuppet behind its ears. I turned from him to the kitchen, pushed aside heaps of ancient magazines, Rolling Stone, Playboy , and Esquire , to clear a spot on his table for the bag of bagels and spreads, then went back in and confronted him.

“Perkus, tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m trying to reconstruct an epiphany.”

“An epiphany? I thought you had a headache.”

“I don’t know if the cluster’s passed, but I had a great ellipsis a few days ago, between episodes, really revelatory. I couldn’t do anything about it then, I was so fucked up. I could barely walk for two days at the peak, Chase! The blot on my vision was like an elephant in my apartment this time, crowding to the edges of the room, I felt like I could stroke its pebbly hide.” He spoke in a feverish rasp, all the while concentrating on piloting scissors to free a few sentences from their surrounding page. “Then the epiphany came, I could see everything, the whole landscape at once, like it was lit by the moon. This enormous undescribed thing in every detail, I have to get hold of it while I can, I don’t know how long I’ll be allowed this time.”

“Get hold of the epiphany, you mean?” The Venn diagram of ellipsis, epiphany , and episode of cluster was already too much for my mind’s eye. I feared what I would never again dare suggest: that it was All One Thing. The pebbly hide of the elephant and the moonlit landscape, the first so close it was oppressive and useless, the other so distant he’d never reach it even if he grew wings, One and the Same.

“Yes.”

“So that’s what all this is?” I indicated the project arrayed on the floor. “An… epiphany… from last week?” I craned my neck to read the filleted sentences draped in Perkus’s hand- The Beatles family goes back to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. They want to get to American freedom; they don’t understand that American freedom is itself horribly complicated and conflicted … Another slip continued, There’s also a kind of Less Than Zero thing about being the Beatles; they’re not quite the Beats. There’s a kind of Bret Easton Ellis about the whole Beatle phenomenon, and that has to do with the tragedy of John Lennon. Being a kind of Beetle, being a kind of insect in a way … And then a third excerpt, in a different font: But in truth, moderns live in a world-order in which the primitive “physics” or “chemistry” of things (“reality,” the measurable and controllable thingliness of things strictly taken) is overwhelmingly eclipsed, reduced nearly to negligibility by the power-relations or actualities that have strategized and shaped the thing-complexes among which moderns live …

“Not last week,” said Perkus, patiently straightening me out. “Last week, I told you, I was in a death glaze, mostly. I’m reconstructing an epiphany from five years ago, at least. Probably ten.”

I wanted many things, but for starters I wanted us to quit saying the word epiphany . “What do you want on your bagel?”

“Let’s make coffee.”

When I’d performed what triage I could on his kitchen and we sat with coffee in fresh cups and pumpernickel halves frosted with whitefish, Perkus said, “So, what about Brando?”

What about sleep? I wanted to reply. “I honestly think it’ll be difficult to get hold of him.”

“Sure, but we have to try.” Between starved attacks on his bagel, gobbets of pureed fish and mayonnaise dripping from between his fingers, Perkus named Brando as the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era. His lordly vulnerability, his beauty overwritten with bulk, his superbly calibrated refusal to oblige, all made Marlon Brando the name of that principle which nemeses as varied as Mayor Jules Arnheim, the War on Drugs, Jack Nicholson’s museum-defacing scene as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman , and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had conspired to unname.

“You know Brando’s single most crucial moment?” Perkus quizzed me.

“Uh, not On the Waterfront?”

“Not even close. Too compromised by McCarthyism.”

I hated this game. “ Apocalypse Now?”

“Well, that’s an important one, with the whole Heart of Darkness subtext, but what I have in mind is when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Oscar in his place. I mean, it’s the most amazing conflation of the American Imaginary, just think about it! In one gesture Brando ties our rape of the Indians to this figure of our immigrant nightmare, this Sicilian peasant doing the American dream, capitalism I mean, more ruthlessly than the founding fathers could have ever dreaded. We’re as defenseless against what Don Corleone exposes, the murderous underside of Manifest Destiny, as the Indians were against smallpox blankets. And in the vanishing space between the two, what? America itself, whatever that is. Brando, essentially, declining to appear . Because the party’s over.” Here Perkus hesitated for breath, like a jazz soloist tipping his horn to one side. His unruly eye tested the bounds of its socket. He also snuck in another bite of whitefish and pumpernickel-at least I was getting some calories into him. “By refusing to show up Brando took on the most magnificent aspect, it’s as if Toto sweeps the curtain aside and the great and powerful Oz has absconded, leaving you to contemplate the fact that behind the illusion there’s nothing . The Oz of American history, for all its monstrousness, is all we’ve got. Brando could have done anything at that moment. Come home to us, instead of remaining in exile. He should have run for mayor of New York.”