Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Well, after clinging to our telescopic guide-rods in a riot of metaphysical horror for upward of twenty minutes, our eyes locked on each other’s while Zamyatin and Mstislav gently beckoned in our ears to explain, please, why we weren’t moving a muscle to make the needed repairs to the tile, Keldysh and myself completely mute, we finally managed to bluff ourselves into taking one step into the void, and then another, until like brain-locked automatons we began executing the commands we’d rehearsed. The repair consisted of little beyond the clipping of a hangnail of tile and the application of a sealant (think: Krazy Glue) to the gash the misdirected module had carved into the Den’s upper sill. One crumpled signal dish was judged irretrievable; we detached it and let it spin off, down toward the minefield. I think it got through, the reward being, of course, immolation upon reaching the atmosphere-a small blessing of fire sent down in your direction, my Chaseling. My heroism, such as it was, lay in persuading poor Keldysh, who after seeing the dish spiral away, pooped his drawers and reverted to panic, clinging to the tile in a bear hug, to free himself from the ship’s exterior and let the guiderod telescope him home to safety. I had to whisper into Keldysh’s private channel for another five minutes or so, the others on the ship all stymied, waiting for us to budge, before I got him to go.

Now, love, for the bad news. A few days after the space walk, Mstislav, in his dutiful way (he’s keeping the whole place running!), scheduled checkups for both myself and Keldysh, a routine caution we’d generally neglected for too long. We both came up clean for effects from the walk, but Mstislav seemed puzzled by my white-blood-cell profile. We ran a few successive days’ counts, just to be sure we had a meaningful sample, Mstislav trying not to say what he feared he was on the trail of, me gamely offering various bogus notions of female physiology reacting differently to the Greenhouse’s oxygen deprivation, joking that Mstislav had gone too long without a lady patient. Eventually our efforts devolved to a sit-down for the ever-humbling medical questionnaire, Mstislav narrating me through a series of self-exams, a drill we’d practiced on the ground but hoped never to see put to use. None of us much like dwelling on the slow erosion of our bodies in this environment, bone-density decay, the pale starved skeletons we’ve substituted for our old selves. I liked even less what Mstislav guided me toward: acknowledgment that I’d been managing an uncanny pain in my right foot’s arch for weeks, at least. Do you remember I said I was having a problem with cramping? That cramp was a tumor, Chase. Funny, huh? Oh, you should have seen the looks on the faces of the Russians, and Sledge. Even Sledge. I think they realized too late that I was a sort of mascot here, their woman. The whole mother-earth thing, unavoidable. Now a good-luck charm with cancer. Not to say, you know, that we don’t all still hate one another.

That was yesterday. I’ll know more soon, but I doubt we’ll be able to much delay a leak to the media, and I wanted to tell you before you learned by other means. (Oh, this is going to be a mess, this is going to be hell.) Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma may apparently drain the exultation from one’s prose.

Remember (please remember) the Chinese garden at the Met, that unlikely bit of outdoors indoors? It shouldn’t feel so expansive, yet somehow it does. My favorite place in Manhattan, I think. Remember that we went there together, Chase? Did I already ask this? One of our first days in New York, we were so tired and drunk on sex and the sense of recognition of those early days of our love, and we meandered into the Met, not with any plan, and the suffocating heaviness of those endless European oil paintings made us drowsy and we escaped (I never remember the path exactly, always have to rediscover it) to the Chinese Garden Court, and were nearly alone there, and anyway the gurgling of the water and the rustling of the grasses, the bamboo, seemed to cover any human sound, and we lay down there on that stone that had been chiseled out and shipped from its ancient source and no guard troubled us and soon with our heads tipped together on that dark slate we fell coolly asleep, dozed for who knows how long. Do you remember, Chase? I remember, too, when we woke, and turned to look into the pool beside our heads, and you thought you saw a fish, a little black darting goldfish-type fish, but it was only the reflection of my glasses, a black shimmering reflected shape that had separated, for an instant, from the reflection of my head and from the rest of my glasses, and seemed a separate darting thing, a fish, or a tadpole. Please remember Chase remember please remember, I adore you, my terrestrial saint, my angel wandering avenues, I’m your cancerous angel adrift,

Janice

Then came the weird pervasive chocolate smell that floated like a cloud over Manhattan. At first you thought it was local, you’d passed an unseen bakery, smelled something wafting, chocolate-sweet, stirring cravings and memories both. You’d scan the area, find nothing, continue on, but the smell was with you everywhere, with you in your apartment, too, though the windows were tight. On the street again, you’d see others glancing up, sniffing air, bemused. And soon confirming: yes, they smelled the same thing. It had been downtown, too, someone said, quite nervously. Another said even in the subway. Lexington Avenue sidewalks, normally muffled in regular hostility, broke out suddenly in Willy Wonka comparisons, one passerby saying, I thought of a sundae, another replying, No, syrup on crepes. Or, a tad melancholy: I haven’t wanted ice cream like this in forty years. Someone said that the mayor had already given a statement, enigmatically terse, maybe hiding something. The chocolate cloud tugged Manhattan’s mind in two directions, recalling inevitably the gray fog that had descended or some said been unleashed on the lower part of the island, two or three years ago, and that had yet to release its doomy grip on that zone. Theories floated in the sweetened breeze, yet no investigation could pin a source for the odor. And yet the scent was chocolate, ultimately yummy and silly. It brought merry chocolate comparisons out of everyone remarking on it. The mayor’s comment, when you heard it repeated on the news, included as fine a joke as had ever crossed those forbidding lips: he’d called it the sweet smell of success .

The chocolate weather came, too, as a moment of relief in a strange, hunkered, hungover time, winter killing. We’d already woken one November morning to the first snow, an overnight inch that glazed every sidewalk and windshield, all the twenty-four-hour markets hurrying to raise plastic tents around their outdoor goods, the citrus and bouquets, the rest of us digging in hallway-closet-floor shopping bags for last winter’s gloves and scarves, or else shelling out for on-the-spot sidewalk-stand purchases of same, abandoning hope that the portents of warming were real enough, this year, to thwart this local early-onset frost. No such luck, the wind slapped around the tall corners, tilting citizens into stoic silence under daylight’s hastening exit. On the amok calendar’s wheel Manhattan found itself damned again to holidays and influenza. So a chocolate mystery reminded us that we all dwelled in Candyland, after all. It was a news item the exact size of our childish wishes: So much for the deliberate terrors advancing on our shores, let alone our complicity with any wider darkness. We were, it turned out, a whole island of crimeless victims, survivors of nothing worse than a cream pie in the face, which, hey, tasted pretty good!