Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“You don’t know who you love.”

“You, you, you.”

“You’re confused. I’m a suitable secret, if you also have a glamorous dying astronaut. Without her, you’d see clearly that I’m a creep.”

Oona’s voice was small and steady in the dark. From this angle my window was half blocked by the Dorffl Tower, the bar of moonlight running across our naked bodies, to the curtain of shadow bisecting our stomachs. I’d have had to crane around to see my church spire. The birds were elsewhere at night. I figured they found shelter in another place, together or separately-tabulate this with the other mysteries.

“Why do you say she’s dying?”

“Isn’t that the story? My mistake, if not.”

“I hadn’t-” I couldn’t finish, my grandiose offering broken apart, shattered from underneath as a building might be wrecked by a burrowing tiger, by levels of despair opening within me. I mourned the passing of a restaurant; the premature death of an eager-to-party waitress named Lindsay, whose phone number in fact lay within reach, still bookmarking my bedside Wodehouse; the exile of Perkus Tooth from the pair-bonding I so yearned for on his behalf; the incommensurate, irreconcilable, unbereaved nature of all human relations, particularly the local sample now on display in my bed; I mourned too the collapse of my script, the skit of avowal I’d scripted while we fucked, and had vowed to enact afterward; I mourned it all except for Janice, who seemed remoter from me than ever. Perhaps the poisonous failure of my love had grown in her, and was now threatening to murder her, an abscess mimicking a tumor. In space you were meant to die by vacuum. I was the vacuum.

“I’m extremely tired of this conversation,” said Oona without mercy. Certainly she’d heard the shallows in my breathing as I strained not to weep. “If you love me, go on loving Janice. That’s what I need you to do.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Pretend.”

“I’m having a crisis of authenticity.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t?”

“I just wouldn’t recommend that type of crisis for a person in your position. You’ve got little enough authenticity to spare, I wouldn’t use up any of your precious supply on a crisis.”

Before I knew it Oona was dressed. Some nights she stayed, others crept away, but she’d always before hovered in our afterglow at least a while. I’d driven her away. I scrambled to don pajama bottoms, looking to dignify the early exit, mask it as normal.

“Do I have any questions left?”

“Nineteen,” she said, rather tenderly now. “I keep my promises.”

“A few weeks ago, did you happen to notice either a sweet chocolate smell or a high ringing sound?”

“Neither,” she said. “I was busy working.”

“Okay,” I said. I padded after her as she retraced the path of our strewn clothing, finally to the still-dark entranceway where she reclaimed her coat and heels.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Are you really going to the mayor’s with Noteless instead of me?”

“You have your own invitation. I’ll see you there. It’s just a dinner party.”

“Not a date.”

“Not a date.” Every word Oona gave me before slipping away was generosity, drops of water in the desert. “I don’t date old men. Not around Christmastime, anyway. Too depressing.” The light from the outside corridor fell in around her as she readied her escape, casting her in doorway silhouette. I crossed my arms over my naked white chest, feeling the typical humbleness of the shirtless and barefoot before the dressed. At that moment, out of that vulnerability, I understood my assignment. What Oona had asked of me was simple, only I’d refused to understand until now, believed her arcane or perverse. The answer was love. My job was not only to endure and thrive in the impossible situation but to make myself into a kind of chaldron, to generate a love field broad enough to enclose our fear. This was no time for parsimony. If my love was enough to reach Janice in orbit it would ipso facto cover Oona as well, and anyone else who needed to feel it, most particularly Perkus in his desolate rooms. I had nothing to protect or defend. I only had to do my job. This is what Oona wanted me to know, I was sure of it. I uncrossed my arms, stepped into the light so she could see the tender face that had just fitted itself between her thighs. All the talk since was like wind rattling the windows, outside of what mattered.

“You can bring someone, too, you know,” she said.

“I’ll bring Perkus,” I said. “He needs to get out more often.”

December 18

My darling Chase,

Now comes the winter of my discombobulation. Of course we have no winter here, it’s always cold out and filthy hot sweaty moist oxygenless inside, but hey, I notice the pages flying off the calendar, Santa’s loading his sleigh! Hope he gets through the minefield okay! We’ve reverted to believing in Santa, Chase. Don’t tell me different. Saint Nick is one of the cultural touchstones up here, something Sledge and I and the Russians can all get behind, whereas E. Bunny and T. Fairy are too American apparently, hence comprise terra incognita. As is, come to think of it, terra! But we believe in mythical things here, like Earth and Santa. After all, we have invisible enemies-CO2, cancer, gravity. So heck, why not invisible friends?

Each bout of chemo is worse than the last. My days (“days”) a dull cycle of recovery until I’m strong enough to suck the poison again. During my latest bouts of helplessness I’ve been installed in the Nursery, which in a kind of moron pun has become a sickroom, and everyone aboard’s a nurse now, all too adept at tapping one of my veins and inserting an IV, not to mention swabbing my puke from where it’s drifted into my hair and so on. I suppose we’re enjoying a faint resurgent solidarity, at last obeying Mission Control psychiatric guidelines that we gather for meals and meetings every other day. The Captain is a captain again, his melancholic depression no contest for my cancer-yes, I feel like a winner, Chase. I may have bought a lottery ticket out of here, as it happens, and once in a while Keldysh or the Captain can’t keep from peering at me with a sympathy that includes a trace of morbid fascination at the strange journey I’ve managed to undertake from within our orbiting stasis, and perhaps even envy for my possible destination (Mstislav is too devoted an attending physician ever to reveal such a sentiment, and Zamyatin, the angry cosmonaut, too much of a bastard). It’s almost as if I’ve broken a pledge we’d made to one another and to our audience on Earth: that we’d live forever here, mascots of futility.

Most astonishing of all, though, is the effect on poor Sledge. The dawning signs of this transformation we credited to circumstance: with Mstislav giving so much of his time to my care, the Greenhouse was neglected, worse than usual, I mean, and so Sledge began to grope his way out of the Attic back into a share of his old duties, tending the wheatgrass and cabbages and hives as if he’d never abandoned them, and really producing some miraculous results. Sledge is a more instinctive and sympathetic gardener than Mstislav, something we all, perhaps even Sledge, had forgotten. Without even appearing to try he’s reversed a degree of the CO2 slide. He’s also a better cook. The two roles are intertwined. He offers me broths of freshly harvested sweet-potato greens and baby bok choy, and though the air we breathe in here is itself a kind of broth, I sip them gratefully.

There’s more. You’ll say he’s got some kind of vampiric jones for suffering, but Sledge has become a tender companion in my worst hours, vigilant over my fevers, an entertainer when I can bear entertainment. Whether in stoicism or hostility, we’d long since quit sharing personal stories up here, but during quiet hours when everyone else is sleeping and the toxins inflaming my veins won’t let me rest, Sledge has been disburdening to me tales of collegiate mayhem in the Pacific Northwest, at Evergreen College. How a pale secret fag (did I just let that slip?) made his way first amid those blustery, sunburned hippie biology majors, then here to patriotic doom with me and the Russians, God only knows. If half the amount of crystal meth and threesomes he claims in his youthful annals are factual, sleepy old Sledge truly belonged in the Warhol Factory. Never underestimate anybody, Chase (I think you often do).