Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Hello, Chase Insteadman.” She grinned up at me wryly and lowered her voice to a laconic drawl, as if playing the sheriff in a satiric Western.

“Hello, Oona.”

“Haven’t see you in a while.”

I suppose we weren’t counting that curtailed encounter in her apartment. It now seemed totally unreal. “Too long,” I said keeping it noncommittal.

“We’re making a poster,” she said. “For old times’ sake, while trying not to, you know, feel old.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It’s on the theme of isolation,” she said. At this Perkus tilted up one goonish eye, and one severe. “Excuse me,” Oona corrected. “It’s on the theme of bears.”

“Why feel the need to choose?” I said.

“Great point.” She slugged Perkus on the arm. “Bears and isolation.”

In my conception Perkus and Oona were enemies or contestants, yet I’d never known what was at stake. Now Perkus was wholly caught up in Oona’s ironic frolic, or frolicsome irony, whichever it was. He seemed cowed and catalyzed at once. I wondered if Oona was thrilled to reclaim her place as his Tweedledee, if the nostalgic gesture hadn’t opened some door into discarded possibilities, taking her by surprise. She might have set out to please Perkus just to please (and unnerve) me, then found herself pleased, too.

Or perhaps this was my projection. I might be crediting to Oona the thrill of relief I felt to reenter the Eighty-fourth Street sensorium, to hear Perkus’s strange music (if I asked what was playing he’d surely pretend to be shocked I didn’t know it), to step into his arena of exhaled fumes, knowing that soon enough I’d exhale plenty myself (I’d absentmindedly catalogued the presence of a fresh row of joints on the kitchen table, and one, half smoked, tipped into a tray), to see his information hectically distributed across the living-room afghan, a puzzle whose pleasure was its insolvability, to find myself restored to my small shelf in his collection. It had taken just one disinvitation to make me glimpse exile.

Perkus tried to fit a clipping containing a paragraph of small type into the white expanse surrounding the bear photo. Over his shoulder, I read: Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished … The way he shifted the clipping from spot to spot, intently evaluating, then rejecting, each position, suggested Perkus was trying to believe in the worthy coexistence of those words with the conundrum of the bear, almost as if hoping that the paragraph could comprise a rescue, make a bridge or raft back to the mainland the bear could hop across to safety. But no, the new element fell short, no matter where he placed it, and so Perkus swept it into a pile of others that lay to one side and behind him. I scanned the other tatters, until my eyes lit on a recent clipping from The New Yorker , a Talk of the Town describing the city’s tormented infatuation with Janice Trumbull’s medical saga. At this I turned away, not wanting to know what else might be auditioned to fit the theme of bears and isolation .

“Light up a smoke, if you want,” said Perkus, the eyes in the back of his head telling him I’d shifted back toward the kitchen. “We’ve got more on the way, actually,” he added. “Watt should be coming around any minute now, just so you know.”

“Waiting for Watt,” said Oona, in singsong, not looking up from the old magazine she browsed. She unfurled the centerfold from a crackling thick copy of Playboy , circa the early ’70s at the latest, given the model’s coy mascara and bobbed hair, and the Technicolor wrongness of her aureoles. “Who’ll tell us what’s what. And sell us some pot.”

“Oona only comes around here to score,” said Perkus cheerily, at last daring to jab back. “I no longer hold that against her.”

Foster Watt did come and lay out his wares, though not before we’d attempted to use up the last of the present supply. The poor pot dealer was shivering, still locked into his uniform of red vinyl jacket and no head covering, despite the cold, and he must have felt, coming into that kitchen, that he’d stepped onto a vaudeville stage. We were so high we finished each other’s lines like the Marx Brothers, even if the result was mostly a verbal version of a game of exquisite corpse. Perkus offered Watt a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, and Watt took it and struck a pose of claustrophobic cool by the door while the three of us slavered over his open case of goods, running our reddened and hysterical orbs over the rainbow fonts that differentiated the plastic boxes crammed full of fertile buds. Oona kept surprising me. I’d thought she flinched from direct encounters with the drug trade, but she seemed positively exuberant to see Watt, who enlarged the pool of victims for her global mockery.

“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me…” she said. “What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”

“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question. Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball. It was merely a question of which answer would come up. “Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”

“Ice,” said Perkus. “Where’s the Ice?”

“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”

“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed. “Very, uh, topical selection, Foster.”

“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt. “You ought to try it.”

Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table. Oona went on listing brand names. “Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”

Watt didn’t even trouble to shrug, just ignored her. I suspect she’d lost him at “topical.” Oona couldn’t let it go, though. “Somebody needs to get some of their own material,” she said again pointedly, as if she were a professor offering a plagiarizing student a first warning. Watt took it lightly enough. Yet even after he left, bearing away a large stack of our pooled twenties in return for eight of his Lucite containers-Perkus’s five portions of Ice, a couple of the old standby, Chronic, which vanished into Oona’s purse, and one Northern Lights I purchased as a morbid souvenir-Oona circled back to the topic. “Don’t you think Watt isn’t playing fair, Perkus?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”

“Tailoring his material to his audience like that,” she said. “It sort of breaks the illusion, don’t you think?” She kept calling it “material,” though it seemed to me an odd word for names snatched from the headlines.

“What illusion?” Perkus rolled a joint while he contended with her.

“That, you know, there’s an ancient and mighty marijuana tree somewhere in South America called El Chronic, named that by some Mayan priest a thousand centuries ago, for its special properties of transubstantiation-you know. It just doesn’t seem right some skanky Irish kid from Chelsea Clinton or wherever it is Watt lives to rename this ancient essence ‘Balthazar’ or ‘Derek Jeter’ just because he has a laser printer and a captive audience.”

“I don’t think it’s Watt,” said Perkus slyly, seeming to take her concern seriously. “He’s just a middleman. I think it’s someone else giving them names. Maybe actually even a Mayan priest, one who’s just, you know, keeping up with the news.”