Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Yes, we know all about it,” said Arjuna Danzig, her eyes brimming. “You poor, poor man.”

“We want you to know it’s a wonderful thing, what you’re doing for this city,” said Rossmoor. “People sit up and notice a thing like this. I want you to be assured that Mayor Arnheim personally appreciates it.”

“He does?”

“Oh, certainly. He’ll find some way of conveying his gratitude. For the time being, we’re conveying ours.”

“She’s got cancer,” I said helplessly, as if they might not have completely understood. “If they can’t find a way to bring the crew down, she might die up there.”

“Oh, she’ll be all right,” said Rossmoor. “It’s you we need to worry about. You must take care of yourself.”

“I’m cheating on her. I have a lover.”

“Well, that’s fine, too,” said Rossmoor benevolently. “You mustn’t tell anyone, of course. But anything you do is just fine with us.”

I looked to Arjuna, who only nodded her sympathy.

“She’s got a tumor in her foot,” I said, wanting it to mean something to them, something more than it meant to me.

Arjuna Danzig took my hand. “Perhaps it was the space walk,” she suggested, with gentle solicitude.

“The space walk?”

“Well, it can’t be sheer coincidence,” reasoned Arjuna. “First, a walk in space. Next…” She appeared sorry to say it aloud, but after a moment’s silence, reluctantly connected the dots. “Next a cancer in her foot.”

“I’m not sure a space walk works the way you’re thinking.” At that moment my levees were breached again by the uncanny chocolate smell, catalyzing with the egg and lobster medley already fogging my sinuses. I staggered out of my chair and backward from the table, out of the golden circle, frittata steam rising into the cone of spotlight. “Do you… smell… that?” I asked.

“Smell what?” said Arjuna.

“He means the chocolate,” said Rossmoor.

“Yes, yes, a kind of chocolate smell,” I said. “It’s been happening for days-”

“I told you!” said Rossmoor to Arjuna.

“For me it’s been more of a tone,” said Arjuna, sounding truly puzzled. “It just began again, now that you mention it, a kind of ringing-”

I was cheered to think Perkus wasn’t completely alone. I’d find a way to let him know. But now I had to flee the mingled odors, flee Rossmoor’s silk sleeves and toxic munificence, Arjuna’s pity. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go, I’m not feeling well…” Invisible waiters rustled nearby. I envied their simple, anonymous lives. “Please,” I called into the darkness, “please… get me a taxicab.” I flagged with both hands, struggling for balance, as if a cabbie could somehow see me here, and veer inside from the street. My eyes misting, the table before me fragmented into kaleidoscopic glints. “Sorry-” I said again.

“It was lovely seeing you,” said Arjuna.

“Stay strong!” woofed Rossmoor.

Enduring a flu alone in an apartment has always included a certain psychedelic aspect, it seems to me. But it is a psychedelia of the body, not the mind. A sustained, sapping fever is a reeducation in the true weight of a blunt human collection of arms and legs, of a lollipop head wobbling on a woozy neck, and in the sensation of a throw pillow’s scrape against ribs as sensitive as a lover’s lips. To taste, in that condition, Tom Kha Gai, a white cardboard quart of which may be easily summoned to your door, there handed over by a Thai delivery boy who’s left his bicycle with the doorman downstairs, is to feel coconut-sweet chicken and tomato broth flood your ravaged pipes as succor, the soup replacing lost spinal fluids directly with each mouthful. The distances between bathroom and couch, then back to huddle within womb of mattress and duvet, becomes an epic slog, full of feeble triumphs. Comfortably arranging for oneself a clean glass of water, a paperback or magazine, and a television remote, a magician’s feat. Crossing a room to lift a ringing phone’s receiver, an Everest ascent.

I was sick for a week and a half. That first night I just managed to drag myself home and call Oona Laszlo to cancel, even as I fell into a teeth-chattering swoon. Oona wasn’t vastly sympathetic, told me to find her when I felt better-at that point I still credited my illness to the events of the day before. It all seemed mixed up with cheeseburgers, champagne, and chocolate, at least for the first Swenty-Cour hours, which I spent mostly shivering over my toilet. After I’d racked myself dry, the sickness decamped from my gut and percolated outward, to the very ends of my fingertips and eyelids, which felt thick and sodden as ravioli when I shut them over my poor eyes.

Oona did pass through on the second day, but she wasn’t much in the way of a nursemaid, and I was hardly company. She didn’t remove her coat, just unloaded a batch of recycled magazines, Vanity Fair, People, The New York Observer , onto the couch, where I lay cocooned in a stained blanket, surrounded by half-finished mugs of Theraflu. In the wavery depths of my fever I recall monologuing to her all about chaldrons, unburdening myself totally, but I’m not convinced she was really present for the confession. I might have been babbling at Oona-phantasms, perhaps not even speaking aloud. On the fourth day I’d begun feeling stronger, possibly hungry for the first time, and capable of self-pity, and I rang her number, mildly surprised she hadn’t checked up on me a second time, after witnessing my early dejection.

“You sound better,” she said uncomfortably.

“I’m horrible,” I said.

“Look, Chase, sick isn’t my thing. You should call your friends.”

On that chilly note we ended the call. I’d have liked to think she meant we were something more than friends, though nothing in her tone had encouraged me to think she meant anything but less. Perhaps she’d only visited the first time to be sure I wasn’t malingering. I’d never even been inside Oona’s apartment and now I wondered whether she’d be inside mine again. All I had to show for my illicit love was wrinkled magazines, and the copy of People had turned out to be a poison pill, containing a one-page piece on Janice’s diagnosis called “Adversity in the Sky.” I left it untouched on my couch. Oona must have spotted the item herself, and what she meant by bringing it into my apartment I couldn’t guess.

Perkus didn’t find me, but Susan Eldred did. The occasion was the arrival in her office of the first finished DVD copies of The City Is a Maze . When Susan learned I was sick she used her lunch hour to visit, showing no fear of taking away my infection, bearing in roast lentil soup and a jar of a remedy she swore by, a mossy-smelling horse tablet called Wellness Formula. (These reminded me exactly of what Strabo Blandiana might prescribe; in the next days I’d choke down as many of the pills as I could stand.) Along with the early copy of Von Tropen Zollner’s film, Susan also brought a cache of Criterion booty, the cheeriest items, she claimed, on their list: William Powell and Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey , a British romance called I Know Where I’m Going! , and what Susan advertised as “Godard’s only musical,” A Woman Is a Woman . This was the fifth or sixth day of my quarantine, my strength returning, and Susan struck me as a vision of what a sane, female version of Perkus Tooth might resemble: you didn’t have to be mad to care for mad stuff. Maybe Susan would stay and ladle me soup and educate me on the outer reaches of the Criterion list, and I could forget Perkus and Oona both. My self-pity was opening to a more acquisitive phase (sometimes, reinstated in my body by illness, in the grip of weakening fevers I woke to paradoxically vital erections), but Susan Eldred had a fiancé, as did Janice Trumbull, a fact everyone knew. So I let her get away unmolested.