Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

I know, my foolish darling, how you like to root for improbable heroes on unlikely quests, so I’ll make you party to a secret. Sledge has been sneaking leaf-cutter bees out of the Greenhouse, one at a time, in a mason jar. It’s his wild theory that their stings immunize against cancer, and so once or twice a day, on top of my official poisons, I roll up a pants leg and allow Sledge to bully a bee into injecting its venom into my shin. The dead bees he then lines up on the Nursery’s doorjamb, facing outward, their dry little feet affixed with rubber cement so they won’t drift. Fifteen or twenty now, keeping vigil while I nod. If the Russians have noticed, they’ve said nothing.

I’m sparing you, sparing us both, my pining evocations, refusing this time to rhapsodize on your appetite for pastry, the slightly ashy skin of your earlobes, any days spent failing to rouse ourselves beyond your bedroom threshold, or other days wandering museums, gazing in indoor fountains, startled by the sight of our own innocent faces in rippling pools. None of this. If I beckon you to remember me, Chase, I fear you’ll slip to some image of another, for I suspect I’m beginning to dissolve, can barely remember myself anymore. But I remember you, Chase, I really do. I see you before me, like that mute Greek chorus of bees.

Your lost one,

Janice

The first globs had begun drifting to earth three hours before the mayor’s party, not so much flakes as frost-spun jigsaw chunks rotating themselves into view as if an invisible examiner were hoping to puzzle them together on arrival. None of these were pure six-pointed specimens, those famously symmetrical and fingerprint-unique skic-halet-wallpaper darlings, instead rough amalgams of three or four or six that had clotted together somewhere above the city, assembling into eerie contours, snow-cartoon images of docking spacecraft or German coffeemakers or shattered Greek statuary. This advance wave melted so smoothly it was as though ghosts slid through the wet pavement’s screen to some realm below. Then, abruptly, the stuff quadrupled and began to lodge, the ghosts denied entry to the subterranean world, too many to welcome there, their bodies heaping uselessly against the former portal.

Then suddenly the drifting globs had gone torrential, bidding to replace the windless air itself entirely with white material, undertaking a crazy campaign to outline every contour in Manhattan, each sill and rearview mirror, each knuckle of crossing-signal plumbing, each midget newspaper dispenser, all the things too dumb to scurry through the cold. Perkus and I, we’d dashed from our taxicab, which had plodded its way down Park Avenue to Sixty-fourth Street, its tires chewing along the echo-deafened streets. The steps of the wide, curved stoop of the mayor’s town house had been scraped and salted; our footing confident, we took them two at a time, eager to get out of the suffocating clots of white that swarmed into our noses and clung to our lashes, and though we’d both have denied it, each buzzing with adrenaline at the occasion of the party. Perkus, the practical one for once, wore a black toque decorated with a knit patch depicting the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, something likely exhumed from deep in his collection, its wool everywhere pilled and knobbed, like a scalp showing beginnings of dreadlocks. I’d had to pray he’d stuff the hat into his coat pocket the moment we were through the door. For myself, I’d been vain about my haircut, left my head bare, and so had meltage trickling through my sideburns and behind my ears for the party’s first half hour.

Now we mingled in the mayor’s vast parlor, a scene of glowing golds and browns against monumental windows showing blizzard, backdrops blue and silent as aquarium views. We’d entered into a scrum of arrival, another type of blizzard, guests busy emptying flutes of Prosecco and vodka shots and trays of tiny sushi and blini shopped among us by the catering staff, all of us tabulating faces we knew and others we recognized, all awed beneath a thirty-foot-high plaster scrollwork ceiling painted and lit to resemble buttercream icing on an inverted wedding cake. Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji stood in one corner pleasantly receiving admiration as though they themselves were the gathering’s hosts, Richard in his renovated elegance, shined shoes where he’d have ordinarily flown Converse high-tops as his freak flag, even his beard trimmed closer than I’d seen it, exposing a disconcerting chinlessness; Georgina lordly and tall, her dress an unrevealing cone of black, her silver earrings and piled hair imparting aspects of Gothic Christmas tree. I also saw, at a first survey, Strabo Blandiana (no surprise, he knew everyone), Naomi Kandel, Steve Martin, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, David Blaine, and Richard’s co-op-board enemy and my sitcom mom, Sandra Saunders Eppling, accompanied by a graying distinguished man who was not Senator Eppling. Mayor Arnheim had decorated his party with a cultural crowd, for the holidays. I couldn’t find Oona and Laird Noteless, but my search was compromised by trying to keep tabs on my own “date.”

Perkus had treated us to the airing of another secret costume for the occasion, a purple velvet suit, the velvet either intentionally “crushed” or badly stored and in need of pressing-I really didn’t know which-over a crimson shirt and matching tie. I thought it would be simple to follow the purple velvet, but Perkus flitted after someone or something, his thin shoulders vanishing sideways through some brief entranceway through the crowd that shut to me as simply as subway doors. I’d lost him. Assorted pleasantries imposed themselves, a round of reintroductions that wouldn’t make the next round any less necessary, followed hard and fast by those evermore-dire condolences for Janice’s sickness. I gulped Prosecco, too much right off the bat, trying to keep from screaming in their faces that though I appreciated their good wishes I didn’t have cancer, personally-that in fact every possible human tumor was geographically nearer to us, here where we stood, than Janice’s, and didn’t they find that odd? And incidentally, had they seen a doctor themselves anytime lately?

I remembered my vows, though, to disburse a field of love to enclose all within my range, which certainly should include the walls of this parlor. Oona might be watching, after all. So I gathered their well-wishes and their sadness to me, took their hands in mine, and thanked them. If you plumb into a person’s eyes at an occasion like this one, you can usually spook them in a moment or two, and be done. The trick was not to try to break the circuit too soon but to wait, until they’d had their tiny fill. Trying to manage the migration of my gaze elsewhere from the persons it should be attending, I felt like Perkus even as I searched for him, an acolyte to his brand of double and wandering vision.

A young man in a tuxedo and obnoxiously slicked-back hair was suddenly before me, putting a finger in my chest.

“Chase!”

“Yes?” Now I recognized but couldn’t place him.

“How do you like the script?”

He was one of that pair of “producers” that had tried, so long ago, to enlist me in their dream project. The role of my lifetime, they’d promised.

“I didn’t get it,” I said.

“I love it, you didn’t get it . There’s nothing to get, Chase!”

I felt irritated, even beyond my anxiousness that Perkus had slipped free of my caretaking. “I mean it never arrived, I never received it.”

“That’s a good one, you’re a riot, Chase. Just keep on doing what you’re doing-”

Then I heard Perkus’s voice, in full harangue, rising out of the gregarious babble: “…rock critics are like little animals that live in holes… they defend themselves by scraping up fortifications of dirt and shit and regurgitated food…” Someone must have introduced him as a former famous Rolling Stone columnist, so Perkus was elaborating his standard defense. I tipped up on my toes to locate him. Perkus stood not far off, his back to me. He addressed his spiel to Mayor Arnheim, who looked to be listening. It was the first time I’d seen the mighty billionaire in person. I tried to believe he was nothing more than another graying operative in a suit, but like other truly powerful men Arnheim seemed a bit of gravitational sinkhole, a place where other men’s hopes had gone to die. His eyes and teeth gleamed with bonus luminosity, his stance and posture arranged to support an extra density. Arnheim might in truth be many men crushed together, like a diamond.