Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Perkus only peered at her, the dog now growling low in its throat, perhaps at his suspicious eye. But Richard, patroller of civic logic, stepped up.

“Sorry?” he said. “What’s that you said?”

“The tiger doesn’t return to the same place twice, everyone knows.”

“It can’t fail,” Richard declared with instant exasperation, as if she weren’t with us. “The human brain is sick with superstition.” I was just glad he hadn’t come out with “old wives’ tale.”

“Are people dead?” Perkus asked bluntly, ignoring both dog and Richard.

The woman shrugged, grudging to be pushed beyond the prophetic range of her first remark, into dull specifics. “Some got out, they were talking to the news.” She nodded to the opposite side of the intersection, where two vans with satellite dishes on ladders had staked out an operation. “Two dead upstairs, and a girl from the restaurant, I think.” It was as if her syntax had collapsed into the spontaneous grave along with the bodies.

“What girl?”

Again the woman spoke with a nod of her chin. “The Korean at the deli, he knew her.”

We raced to the Korean, who stood measuring the spectacle, sheltered inside the flapped plastic tent covering his bins of produce and bundles of psychedelically pink-and-orange carnations. He’d seemingly been at his beer stash, cheeks red, eyes shiny, and also had a few rehearsals in his answer to Perkus’s question. “Lin-Say,” he reported, tsk-tsking as if we’d failed to pay attention the first dozen times he’d memorialized her. “A nice girl. A very nice girl. Came in every day, always smoke Camel Lights. I used tell her, ‘When you gonna quit?’” He shook his head at the fine irony he’d dispensed, though it seemed to me second-rate, cribbed from a war movie.

We milled back into the traffic-stopped intersection, toward the cordon at the vent of Perkus’s block. It was too clear what it meant that the ambulances didn’t bother leaving the scene. Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn’t do any more for Perkus’s murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could a keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor. Our group, fortunately, was stupidly silent-I prayed Richard wouldn’t claim some memory of Lindsay, just to have something to say. For my part, I’d stay mum. How could I possibly explain to the others when Perkus had disclaimed any interest in her? He’d only treated her like a waitress. It now seemed awful to me that we’d bundled off to Gracie Mews, but I consoled myself with the reminder that Georgina had been a blood-sugar desperado. It wasn’t as if we’d have accomplished anything more out here in the chill and confusion, where our team now threatened to unmoor, each member to drift off like a bear on his or her own floe. Oona lagged behind us, inspired by the Korean’s remark to bum a cigarette of her own from a passing stranger. I’d never seen Oona smoke tobacco before, but given the precedent of her secret eyeglasses, I wasn’t too taken aback. Her personality had serial quitter in its DNA. Georgina hung back, too, while Richard and I tried to stick at Perkus’s elbows, as if our friend were a drunkard. Perkus seemed to want to go home.

Eighty-fourth Street’s traffic was stopped, too, and pedestrians were funneled by police to an entry point between two barricades on the north sidewalk, where many who approached were turned away. We waited our turn to meet the troll at this bridge, a towering grim older cop who spent as much time conversing with the radio Velcroed to his shoulder as with any mere citizens. “Street’s closed,” he informed us. “Use Eighty-fifth to get to Third.” Each player on this stage of chaos had a line or two they were made to deliver ad infinitum, while we, the audience, filtered among them, gathering these coupons like stamps in an album.

“I live here.” Perkus almost whined, the cop’s size and clout reducing him to pipsqueak protest. I wanted to register my own claim of access, but couldn’t find the words.

“All of you, or just him?” The cop asked for Perkus’s identification, in order to check his address. Perkus handed it across numbly. The cop then sorted us out from him, the rest of us presumed guilty, rabble to be considered singly and subsequently, if at all. And before we could make any proper farewell, Perkus had been eased through the funnel’s mouth. We four watched him go, his shoulders rounded with the burden of acquiescence to the larger forces, the alteration of his street into dystopian tableau, his personality made tiny by his dealings with the cop. What else he carried on that gaunt-slumped frame, what sway the tiger’s close strike might have over his free associations, or the significance to his heart of the loss of Lindsay or that which she’d so ungrudgingly emissaried to his table, I feared presuming. On the sidewalk beyond, a clutch of Brandy’s patrons, not more than one or two likely to be legitimate residents of the block, had spilled out to watch the cop’s operation from behind his back, many with drinks still in their mitts. No fair, I thought.

The ruinous night had more to give. Richard and Georgina led us in retreat to a wine bar up Second Avenue, a place for grown-ups (and therefore, to me, usually invisible) called Pangaea. It was as if we were intent on dishonoring the occasion, as if one bottle of wine could drive the scent of catastrophe and sorrow, the ozone singe of an acetylene torch cutting in twisted rebar, from our nostrils. Yet after a perfunctory glass of Barbera the other couple quit the place, and it was then that Oona and I tumbled into a grotesque conflict. Like a member of an ensemble still working from an earlier draft of the appointed script, I’d clung to my fancy idea about the mayor’s party, and I now produced that creamy invitation from my pocket, slid it across the candlelit table between us.

“I’ve got one of those,” Oona said.

“You do?”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping we’d go together.” I winced at hearing myself reproduce the tones of some minor courtier, or possibly those of Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant. Oona’s hunched and hunted posture suggested she felt uncomfortably public with me here, and that, in turn, seemed relevant to my dim proposal. Our skulking, I’d notice, was for Oona a highly local matter: West Side or Inwood okay, the East Side distinctly not. The mayor’s address was on Fifth Avenue. I’d pleased myself thinking she meant to spare me bad publicity, rather than avoid embarrassment with her friends. I could be wrong.

“I’ll be bringing Laird Noteless,” she told me. The unspoken insinuation I couldn’t keep from hearing was that she’d be sorry to see me there at all. The name she’d spoken revived an image of that shrine she kept over her desk, glowering Noteless and his portentous potholes, and threatened to give fly to every fearful accusation I’d kept partitioned for weeks simply out of gratitude that Oona would see me.

But I began coolly enough. “That reminds me, something happened downtown, I never had a chance to mention it with all this stuff. I don’t know if you heard, a man killed himself by jumping into Noteless’s memorial pit. As a result I never got to go on Brian Lehrer.”

Everything I mentioned annoyed her. “That happens from time to time. It’s just one of those stories they like to make a big deal over. You know how many suicides there are in this city?”

“You mean… more than one person has thrown themselves into his memorial?”

“The memorial, and other things he built. If you build bridges people throw themselves off those, too.”

“I’m surprised there’s such a big hole downtown,” I said. “I was under the impression Noteless just got that commission.”