Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Unspeaking now, Richard scrambled to bid. He got it up to thirty-four thousand, a heroic labor of blunt hairy fingers, tooth-grinding jaw visible even through his beard. His white shirt was widely stained under the arms and stank fiercely. The effort took two minutes, more. At forty-eight seconds another veiled bidder drove it to thirty-six thousand, then another, with five seconds to spare, took the jewel at an even forty grand. I think we all three groaned as if gutshot, but it was well covered by Sandy Bull’s thrumming music. Georgina Hawkmanaji then punctuated our stunned silence with a long whining exhalation, gleaning disappointment in her sleep. I examined the page, the image there, for any trace of psychedelic vigor I could draw on for repair, but nothing reached me now. Perkus, likely familiar with the effect, spared us, reaching past Richard’s numbed hands to click on a box and close the window.

The convocation found its end there, human fragments amid the ashtrays and crumpled rolling papers, Mallomar crumbs, shed evening clothes. The three of us left Georgina in the dark with the screen-saver raccoons, and retreated to the place where we used to thrive, a month or so before, around Perkus’s kitchen table. Perkus changed the music, to a band called Souled American, and I didn’t know whether it was my imagination or the band’s special distinction that they sounded as unspooled as we felt, the bass player and guitarist and singer each absently mumbling their contribution seemingly with no regard for the others.

It was after Perkus fished out a dusty, half-filled bottle of single-malt Scotch, twelve-year-old Caol Ila, something Richard had left behind some ancient evening before I’d made their acquaintance, and we began sipping the amber poison from juice glasses, that Richard, uncorking some deeper material from himself as if in reply to the booze, began his disquisition on the tiger. At the start his tone was as diffuse as Souled American’s music, so that I almost might have imagined he was singing along. “It’s pretty goddamn funny that everyone calls it a tiger in the first place,” he said. “Even those of us who know better have fallen into the habit… a testament to what Arnheim likes to call the power of popular delusions and the madness of crowds…” Perhaps this was Richard’s way of consoling us with distraction, as Perkus had before. Yet his words took on the urgency of a confession. “That it’s a problem I’d never deny. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, but it’s become partly my responsibility to deal with it, that’s fine, it’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be good at…” Neither of us had spoken, let alone challenged him, yet it was as if Richard were negotiating, to persuade not only Perkus and myself but whole invisible balconies of skeptics. “When the Transit Authority began researching ways to build the Second Avenue line, you see, they brought in the engineers who’d built the Channel tunnel, in England-I mean between England and France. They’d built these machines that went underground and burrowed through bedrock. They’d had good luck with them, but ours went a little out of control-”

“You’re saying the tiger is a machine?” said Perkus.

Richard nodded glumly, and sipped from his juice glass. “A machine, a robot, that’s right, for digging a subway tunnel. The thing is, in Europe they had two of them. One started in France, the other in England.” He raised and spread his hands to model this for us in the air in front of his face. “Two identical machines, they’d never met, but they went underground and began digging toward each other.” His hands progressed downward, toward a meeting point at his chest, clawing like moles at the imaginary earth. “Day and night, just digging that tunnel for months, these two woebegone creatures moving ever incrementally closer-”

“What happened when they met?” I asked. Déjà vu clung to Richard’s description; I felt as if I recognized it from some baleful fairy tale or allegorical medieval painting. Our evening had drifted into another register, a fatigued postlude, the air in Perkus’s apartment impossible to clear of stale smoke and unnameable regret. Each of us leaned back in his chair as if not conversing but enacting a kind of disconsolate séance, Richard’s voice punctuating our trance like a deathbed dictation.

“Well, they were… retired, I suppose that’s the word for it, when the tunnel was completed. It would have been too expensive to drag them out, so they’re buried there together, deep under the ocean, off to one side of the passage. We made a mistake, though. We cut corners when we commissioned our own project. We only had them build a single machine, just digging in one direction, with nothing coming from the other side. I guess the thing got lonely-”

“That’s why it destroys bodegas?” asked Perkus.

“At night sometimes it comes up from underneath and sort of, you know, ravages around.”

“You can’t stop it?” I asked.

“Sure, we could stop it, Chase, if we wanted to. But this city’s been waiting for a Second Avenue subway line for a long time, I’m sure you know. The thing’s mostly doing a good job with the tunnel, so they’ve been stalling, and I guess trying to negotiate to keep it underground. The degree of damage is really exaggerated. Anyway, a certain amount of the buildings it’s taken out were pretty much dead wood in the first place-”

“That’s how urban renewal works,” Perkus mused. “You find an excuse to bulldoze stuff so that the developers can come in. Richard’s career in civic service is founded on that kind of happy accident.”

“Fuck you, Tooth.”

I worked to put my mind around all he’d told us. “So the mayor’s cover story is that this… machine… is an escaped tiger? I can’t understand why anyone would accept that.”

“It’s not a cover story, or maybe it is now, but we completely backed into it. After last year, you remember when that coyote wandered across the George Washington Bridge and took up residence in Central Park, and you know, with all this recent talk about displacement of species, including, yes, okay, the fucking eagles, blah blah blah, I guess some old lady saw it and told the news that it was a tiger and the image just colonized the public imagination. It happens that way sometimes, we don’t control all this stuff, Chase, no matter how Machiavellian you might think we are.”

Was it possible Richard Abneg was somehow mistaken or misled? Might he be unwittingly propagating a cover to a cover, a story he’d been handed himself? “Have you ever actually seen it, Richard?” I asked.

“I’ve seen footage.”

“The Daily News had footprints on page three the other day,” said Perkus distantly. “This cop was standing in the tiger’s footprint, this huge thing with giant claws, it was like ten times longer than the cop’s shoe.”

“Not footprints, footage . Any footprints are a total hoax.”

“Doesn’t seem like you people have a lot of ground to stand on, calling things hoaxes,” said Perkus, refilling his glass with Scotch. His wild eye wasn’t wild. It maundered instead.

“I don’t know why I ever try explaining anything to you two,” said Richard affectionately. He yawned without covering his mouth. “I hate to be the party pooper but I think it’s time to extricate the Hawkman from this slough of despond.”

I felt a slippage toward vertigo, as though if I allowed Richard Abneg to leave too soon something would be lost. Not my intervention, I’d given up that scheme. But after all we’d come through, we’d arrived at a sort of summit between us, a summit in doubt, even dismay. Who knew how, the name of the treasure we’d sought and lost already seemed hard to recall, the fact of it violently unlikely, yet in that weird quest we’d passed through our everyday delusions, to a place of exalted uncertainty. Perkus, though he might not wish to admit it, had surrendered Marlon Brando. His last layer of cultural armor laid aside or at least suspended. Richard, relinquishing his sinister pretense of confidentiality, had clued us in about the tiger. That he’d done so made me love him. No one pitted themselves against my cherished illusions here, but I felt they should. I needed to carve my way into Perkus’s and Richard’s good faith by surrendering up some secret, too. I feared to be untouched or unseen.