Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

I culled it from the mass of junk in my brass mailbox on my way out that morning. Who knew how long it had spent there-I checked that box once a week or so, and then just to bundle the pointless catalogues and credit-card offers into the building’s handy recycling bins. The creamy rectangular envelope, my name and address hand-calligraphied, HIS HONOR JULES ARNHEIM embossed in the upper corner, had some mass or density that tugged downward, and so slipped from the garbagy sheaf, and into my attention, almost as in a card trick. For all that it telegraphed importance, I tucked the envelope into my coat’s inner breast pocket to open in the taxicab, worrying I’d be late. Then I forgot it there for a little while, disconcerted by the early hour and already regretting my awkward mission.

The previous Wednesday I’d emerged from the shower to find Oona with her head cocked, punching impatiently through the messages piled on my answering machine, whose digital readout had been blinking Full for a few days already. She turned to offer a crookedly sweet smile, unashamed at her prying. I suppose I was transparently hapless in this regard: Oona could feel confident she was my only secret, so what would she be prying after? She’d restored the volume so the messages were audible; the voice of my old publicist Foley leaked from the machine while Oona’s finger hovered over the Next button.

“You’ve got to do something about this,” said Oona, with an uncommon air of sympathy.

“About what?”

“You need to go out once in a while and represent,” she said gently. “It’s your only job.”

Oona tapped past the blipping first syllables of the last few unheard messages, the bulk of them Foley’s greeting, repeated in descending tones of resignation. I’d certainly known it was Foley’s calls I’d been ignoring, even after I lowered the machine’s volume. Janice’s diagnosis had brought a raft of media requests, mercifully channeled through my lecture agency. After so long having nothing for me, I suppose they might be a little frustrated I wasn’t pouncing on these fresh opportunities. What I couldn’t fathom was what Oona thought she was doing nudging my denial’s manhole cover and peeking underneath.

I toweled my hair, convenient cover. “I’m not an expert on decaying orbits or foot cancer, you know. They want me to wring my hands and talk about how much I love her.”

“Well, that’s easy then, since you do love her.”

I stared. I didn’t know why Oona insisted on it, but I was less sure of my love each time she did. Perhaps that was her reason.

“I’ll help you sort through these if you like.”

“I think if you hit Delete twice it erases them all.”

By the time I was dressed she’d cleared the machine, but had also written out, on a lined yellow pad she kept in her coat pocket, a list of the outlets requesting interviews, then begun crossing out the majority of them. “Don’t bother with these… this you’ve already missed… look, Chase, you should at least do the Brian Lehrer Show . It isn’t sensational or hysterical, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The whole city tunes in to WNYC, you get a lot of bang for your buck.”

“What if I want… no bang?”

“We all have to do our part.” Oona’s encouragement was strangely tender, like a cornerman exhorting a jittery boxer back into the ring. I found myself not wanting to let her down. If it was for Oona, I could talk about Janice once or twice, exhibit my heartbreak and confusion. No one would ever known how little I remembered, and if I wanted details I only had to read the newspaper.

“Call your friend Foley,” said Oona, tearing off the top sheet, on which she’d heavily circled the radio invitation she favored. She left it beside my phone, then reloaded her pockets and tugged her skinny leather gloves over her knuckles. “Bye for now.”

“Foley’s not my friend,” I said. “She’s my publicist.”

“Okay, call your publicist.”

“You’re my friend.”

“I’m your whatever.”

It wasn’t the twenty-minute segment of airtime to which I’d consented that unnerved me now. I could call on old vocal prowess; for me, voice-over had been the least difficult task in performance, while embodiment was the more esoteric art, and I was rusty. A voice issuing in the void could claim anything and persuade easily enough. If Brian Lehrer or his staff meanwhile wished to see through me, let them feel welcome. I’m sure they’d had bigger fakes than me on the premises. But once I’d heard where WNYC was headquartered, in the Municipal Building on Centre Street at Chambers, at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized I hadn’t been so far downtown since the gray fog’s onset. I didn’t think of myself as afraid, nor a recluse like Perkus. I just figured I hadn’t happened to go. But this morning I was afraid, perhaps an intimation of the evening to come. Foley had said she would meet me at WNYC’s offices and I was glad.

Wouldn’t you know it, giving flesh to my fear were distant sirens. You could hear these anywhere in the city, but they took on a different cast at the perimeter of that cloud bank that had settled on the island below Chambers. I glimpsed the fog’s rim in the crooked canyons from the windows of my cab. It swallowed daylight right up to the bridge’s on-ramp, hazy tendrils nestling into the greens around city hall. At that I recalled the envelope in my breast pocket, my fingers drifting in to confirm its presence, but too late, I’d arrived. I passed through the Municipal Building’s airport-style security, emptying pockets of change and keys for bored men in uniform, then rode the elevator twenty-five floors to meet my small public fate.

Foley found me at the station’s glass doors and ushered me in. The show was to consist of me and a female cancer doctor, an oncologist who’d been consulting with Mission Control on Janice’s case, and who greeted me a little coldly, I thought. We’d been seated at our microphones and prepped a little, supplied with drinking water and shown the Cough button, when Lehrer came in, trailing more of his staff, and Foley too, and made an apology: we weren’t going to go on the air after all, had been bumped. Those sirens weren’t irrelevant, something had happened, close by, and the station was shifting to live coverage, on the street. A man, one of the money people, instead of showing up at the offices of the brokerage house where he worked, had thrown himself and his briefcase into the giant excavation for Noteless’s memorial. It was all unfortunately too easy to do, creep close to that site, under cover of the gray fog. Lehrer explained all this in a wryly consoling voice I now realized I’d heard a hundred times before. “I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this as winter comes in,” he told us. “I think it’s that much harder to report for work down under that cloud every day when it’s so cold.” The doctor and I stood, rendered dumb. Everything about this confused me, but I didn’t want to take up anyone’s time. I felt I should be the apologetic one, sorry for my own dispensability, as though I’d let down Lehrer and Foley, Oona too. Yet confirmed in my own suspicion that I was generally a filler item, useful only on slow news days.

Foley led me downstairs to share a cab back uptown, shaking her head. I felt affectionately toward the small, intent publicist, making such effort always to keep her needless professional distance, forever on my side in any misunderstanding or disappointment, as though my cause was righteous or just, or was a cause at all. This absurdity, that Foley cared more than I did, kept me from ever knowing how to make conversation with her, despite all fondness. So I committed the discourtesy of opening the creamy envelope in front of her there, in the cab’s backseat. Jules Arnheim / Requests the Presence of You and Your Guest / At His Residence / For a Champagne Dinner / In Celebration of the Holidays . A separate tiny envelope, stamped, for RSVP, slipped out into my lap. The party was two days before Christmas, eight days from now. Despite the engraved elegance of the paperwork, the whole thing smacked of imperial impulsiveness. Arnheim was known for commanding celebrities to his table at whim.