Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Then it’s him I want a word with,” said Oona. “Can you get the Mayan priest’s beeper number?”

“So,” said Perkus, the key word signaling he’d become interested at last, had found something he could work with, “maybe we’ve got the polarities reversed. It’s crucial we remember to question basic assumptions.”

“Polarities reversed… how?” The hungry mind supplying this query was my own. Perkus’s paradoxes were just what I’d been starved of, no matter that they gave me a dangerous sense of reality slippage. I’d become an addict and needed replenishment, as much as Perkus had needed Watt’s visit.

“What if The New York Times is getting its material from Watt’s brand names, rather than the other way around?” said Perkus. At this, his revelatory eye exulted, though we’d no time to linger on the point-Perkus had reminded himself he had a sort of front page of his own to consider, an edition in progress. “Maybe the bear is enough,” he said to Oona, musingly. “Maybe the empty border around the picture says something nothing else could ever say…”

“We might not even need the bear,” said Oona.

That first night of reunion, and the ones that came after, turned out to be episodes hinged in the middle. A brief frigid walk back to my building and Oona and I were at it. Actually, that night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment. Our December fucks made what had come before seem like glimpses, tourist views from some highway pull-off-now we abandoned the car and climbed the guardrail and built a hut in that landscape below, where no one could see, to dwell for a while in a place from which, when we climbed out woolly-eyed and helplessly grinning afterward, we were astonished to find any highway so close, it was so primeval.

This wasn’t the sort of thing I was inclined to examine for causes, a gift horse, a windfall of sex like I’d known just a time or two before. I didn’t want to think my own intensity drew in any measure on what I’d turned from: Janice’s weird crises, off away in space. Oona and I pursued expression of something that had zip to do with anyone else, I tried to believe it desperately. As for what anyone else might judge, that was obvious, and irrelevant. However this chance had come, we’d taken it. We didn’t discuss it-after leaving Perkus’s place we barely spoke. If I was looking for causes, there might be one. A few hours with Perkus and all Oona’s mordancy was bantered out of her, and my need to play the dopey straight man used up, too. All talk could fall by the wayside.

We weren’t a secret from Perkus, though we kept our hands to ourselves in his company. I didn’t know whether Oona had spoken to him privately, or if our state was obvious after that first night. Perkus granted it, no more. Nothing said in hearing of all three, that might be the rule. He did acknowledge the fact to me alone, one early evening in the middle of the month, he and I under way at Watt’s product while Oona slaved to meet a deadline, her panicking editor having pleaded for some chapters, some evidence of progress on the Noteless book. But Perkus only arrived at the subject indirectly, as a passing remark during an alienated disquisition on what he called “pair bonding.”

“So, it’s not one hundred percent a received notion,” he began, as if a topic heading had been announced, or revealed on a banner only he could see. “I mean, I always used to feel critical of anyone who fell into pair-bonding, like they were failing the test of reimagining all the basic premises.”

“What basic premises?”

“The basic premises of existence,” he said impatiently. “But then, really, if you pay attention to animals, there’s tons of pair-bonding. I was thinking about Abneg’s eagles.”

“You’re saying, basically, birds do it, bees do it, even the, uh, Chinese do it…” I could never remember the finish of that lyric.

Perkus revealed no sign he took this as mockery. I’d merely shown I grokked. “Exactly! In that context, you really can’t blame people, can you? I mean, it tends to happen, even when you think you’re in one kind of arrangement, some other group or affiliation, but then members of your group keep sort of defaulting into these pairs… I guess you should never be surprised, huh?”

“I’d say no.” Was I falling into some trap?

“Like Abneg and the Hawkman,” he mused. A fuming joint between his knuckles, Perkus studied the wending smoke as if casting distantly for a second example, though it was certainly near enough at hand. “Or you and Laszlo. It’s the most natural thing in the world, I don’t know why I should be in any way surprised. Janice Trumbull is out of reach, and so far as the animal part of you is concerned, she might as well not exist. She’s only an idea, a whisper in your fore-brain. The rest of you was howling like one of those eagles for a mate. And so then came along Oona Laszlo. Like dancing, you look around the room, and take a partner.”

“I don’t think eagles howl,” I said. I took none of this personally. Oona and I were too ecstatic these days to be damaged by Perkus’s addled paraphrase. It was only interesting to hear him find a way to let me know he knew.

“We’ll see about that,” he said humorously, rising to his shelves. He dug out the tall blue Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey . “There’s something else I want to check anyhow.”

“What’s that?”

“Whether eagles are monogamous.”

Oh, Tooth. I watched him hunt in the book, as if it really held the clue he needed. It didn’t. That clue served as a bookmark in a P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves Omnibus on my bedside table: the wrinkled card on which Lindsay of Jackson Hole had scribbled her phone number. I didn’t dare mention it. That project had too much calamity in it, and I was selfishly willing to let Perkus go unlaid to keep the peace I now enjoyed. So we’d explore the dating profile of apartment eagles instead, or lapse into some other subject even more imaginary and arcane. Why was Perkus so determined to be sexually lonely? I asked this question of myself, not him.

One of these nights I came in and found them back at their nostalgic samizdat, organizing what looked like a finished project, in piles on the living-room floor. Someone had done some photocopying, and Perkus had apparently resolved the conundrum of the polar bear by creating two broadsides: one with only the bear, the other with the bear almost blotted out with a proliferation of other clippings, text excerpts, and illustrations (including, I noticed, at least one scientific diagram explaining Northern Lights’ possible procedure for docking an unmanned scow of medical supplies). Somewhere between these two lay the truth Perkus wished to unveil. The photocopies had none of the grandeur of his famous broadsides, arrayed in painful evidence throughout the apartment, but I was impressed that the edition even existed. Evidence of outside destinations for Perkus, other than Jackson Hole, was always startling, he was such a creature of that apartment. But that was the least of it, for now he and Oona were pulling on their winter coats, preparing for an old-school postering run. I found myself enlisted, after a quick smoke.

“Look out for the graffiti patrol,” said Perkus, once we’d bumped out into the cold streets with our freight of posters and masking tape. “They travel in black vans. Arnheim’s quality-of-life initiatives are no joke, ever since Gladwell and his fucking Tipping Point.” (Here was another of Perkus’s sacred enemies; I recalled one early rant blaming Gladwell for the “commodification of whim.”) Once Perkus declared this, black vans seemed to be everywhere, though if these held quality-of-life police they looked to me to have bigger fish to fry. Oona, unruffled, capriciously taped a poster, one of those in which the bear was jumbled over with other stuff, around a lamppost. Mostly, though, our trouble was we couldn’t find places to put the things. Perkus exhorted us to find construction sites, but the blocks between Second and Third Avenues didn’t have any of these. “This whole town used to be one big claptrap collage,” Perkus complained. “Nobody even removed posters, they were in too much of a hurry, they’d just layer them over with other stuff. Sometimes somebody would rip away a chunk and reveal seven or eight different layers, and I’d see something I put up six months or a year earlier resurface in a new context…”