Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Or was it in fear? Perhaps Richard felt Perkus’s guess had been off by a degree, that the tiger had come not for Perkus but for him. That absurd epithet Perkus had thrown at him, eagle-hunted- maybe tiger-hunted, too. Yet, how absurd and solipsistic. I’d begun to do Perkus’s thinking for him. As if the tiger had had to be hunting someone in our company, and it was only a matter of figuring who! As if it had to be hunting any one person. As if it was a tiger after all, and we hadn’t been given another explanation. Yet there must be some reason Richard and Georgina were so agitated, in contrast to Perkus’s zomboid numbness. I suppose I too might have seemed out of kilter, to the others-it was as if we’d all just climbed out of that crater, rather than merely wandering up to its periphery.

So we ordered and ate. The Hawkman consoled her nerves by gobbling the bowlful of dill halves our waiter plunked down to keep us while we waited for our meal. I didn’t point out to her that someone else might have wanted one. Instead I borrowed Richard’s cell phone, and dialed Oona’s number. When I entered the last digit and hit Call, the screen announced CALLING /OONA LASZLO.

“Oona’s in your phone?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I didn’t realize you even knew each other.”

Of all things, this snapped Perkus from his daze, just to snipe at my innocence. “You’re like the ultimate amnesiac American, Chase. You never can imagine anything actually happened before you wandered along.” This attack, both rote and gratuitous, was surely Perkus at his most mediocre. Under the circumstances I cut him slack-I had no reply to his jibe, anyhow.

I got Oona’s voice mail, as expected, and told her where we’d ended up. (Oona never answered her phone, that I’d seen. Just checked it constantly.) And she must have been near, for this brought her, so quickly that she beat the Mews’ kitchen, by a whisker. Our four burgers slid onto our place mats just after she’d crowded in between Georgina and Perkus. Oona signaled to the imperturbable waiter that she’d take one too, then added, “Medium rare.”

“Hello, Oona,” said Richard, a neutral greeting, devoid of clues for me to examine. “You haven’t met Georgina, I don’t think.”

The women managed a polite introduction, even as the Hawkman drowned her plate in ketchup and jammed a bouquet of fries into her mouth, still trying to outrun disaster’s appetite. Only now did it occur to me how by making the call, and then blurting the surprised question that elicited Perkus’s scolding, I’d widened the circle of conspirators-mine, and Oona’s-to include Richard and Georgina. This felt natural, in a life-during-wartime sort of way.

Seeing the company assembled here for the first time-four of us with our burgers, and now came Oona’s, too-I believed I was seeing my present life complete for what it was, or what I wished it to be. Like a foreign correspondent in a zone of peril, a Graham Greene protagonist, I was secretly thrilled that chaos had rearranged a few things. I had my people around me. There might be undercurrents of the undisclosed between us at that table-Oona’s ignorance of chaldrons, say (but then again, like the readout on Richard’s phone, nearly anything might be known to all but me), or the extra reason, quite beyond milk shakes, which I knew, but couldn’t risk saying, that Perkus might have to mourn the demolition of Jackson Hole. Yet these hesitations didn’t outweigh the solidarity of our team. That we existed against a backdrop of baffling and indistinct dangers gave us our shape.

Then again, utterly negating all this camaraderie was the gasp of jealousy I’d felt at spotting her name on Richard’s phone. This made me want to assert my place, at any risk to our secret. So I reached across the table and took Oona’s hand. She didn’t pull it away, but while I held it she wouldn’t meet my eyes. After a moment I let her go. I’d at least conveyed my unguilty pleasure at her arrival. Who knew I’d take such crazy comfort in the leavings of catastrophe? I might be giddy that something of my own had come along, to rival Janice’s melodrama.

“At least it’s on a Second Avenue axis, that’s the good news… maybe we should have been fueling the fucking thing with hamburgers to keep it underground…” Garrulous Richard carried on, and meanwhile the women seemed to be getting along splendidly over their burgers, Georgina buzzing through hers, using the bun to swab ketchup, Oona mostly tiptoeing around her own. Their talk was largely dropped names, the filling in of degrees of social separation, always fewer than you’d expect. I thought of them in those terms, as if I were a member of a frontier wagon train: “the women.” They shed grace on our table by fitting together so disparately well: the Hawkman towering above us, Euro-exotic and impeccable, despite her frantic chowing, and Oona, so raven-like and quarrelsome, a rib of Manhattan torn out to make a woman.

It was-surprise! — Perkus I felt concerned about. Here we were, his whole support group (I didn’t want to include Watt or Biller or Susan Eldred or anyone else right now in my desert-island fantasy), yet he’d shrunken to near-invisibility in our midst. Wrong restaurant, for a start. He fingered his burger like a skater toeing thin ice. Then, just as I’d alighted on my worry, ready to study him for minute indications, Perkus was on his feet. “We have to go.” One eye was out the door, the other pleaded with us. “I have to go.”

Sure enough, we went. Hand it to us, we at least understood we were a support group. Or lieutenants. Like that, we abandoned the meal, whisked back out into the cold, our visit to my own preferred restaurant unceremoniously interrupted-I wondered what it would take for me to burnish my favorites into myth like Perkus had done with Jackson Hole. Would he find another place? Well, we were rushing out partly to see what he would do, to follow the plot of his fixations. I glanced back, projecting embarrassment onto my regular waiters in the Mews, but they bussed our unfinished meal as implacably as ever, scooping tips into apron pockets, enduring the curse of the twenty-four-hour restaurant, which by definition required machines, not men, for its operation. So they’d become machines, more expert and obedient than the unruly tunneling thing that had surfaced from under Second Avenue.

The site had evolved rapidly in our absence-most of all by becoming a “site” (or possibly a “zone”), by revealing the unnerving readiness of a familiar street to be revised in martial strife, like a gentle friend suddenly enlisted in war, then returned decorated, missing limbs, and with a hundred-yard stare. The tiger-oglers had been stretched to a wide quarantine, across Second and the intersection of Eighty-fourth, by police barricades now manned by officers in vigilant pairs, who spoke only to one another, mercilessly snubbing the barrage of citizen inquiries. Behind them, the crater and the surrounding street blazed white, lit by emergency spotlights that had been cranked into position to facilitate specialists crawling over rubble, perhaps sounding within it with stethoscopes for Morse tapping or cries. Within the cordon ambulances blinked, ricocheting amber off upper stories. Dust cycloned through the klieg lights, up into the strobe and shadow.

We flanked Perkus, taking his cues. This was his precinct, his inquiry to make. He made none, but as we craned our necks for views through the rows of heads, all with their breath steaming as they muttered rumors or perhaps prayers, another bystander, a fifty-ish woman with a leashed terrier clutched in her arms and shivering as it eyed us, a neighbor of Perkus’s perhaps, leaned in and announced, “If you live close by you’re safe now. It never strikes in the same place twice.”