Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Excuse me,” I said to the wolfish producer. “I’ve got to go… over there.”

“Talk later?”

“You bet,” I said to brush him off.

I elbowed in toward the mayor, in time to collide with a shortish thirtyish attractive blonde in tense eyeglasses, who though well dressed seemed unfestive, no guest. I could feel agendas humming around her head, as though she were checking prioritized lists in the very air. Though her glance sliced me into a pie chart, I assumed we were on the same side here, had come to chaperone and disentangle. I’d be happy to get my introduction some other time. I edged Perkus from the mayor just as the blonde, recovering from our little tangle, power-pointed Arnheim in another direction.

“Come with me, my little purple friend,” I said. “Help me find Oona.”

Perkus held an emptied Prosecco flute-a first warning I should heed, since he always refused Richard Abneg’s fine red wines, and I doubted he could hold the stuff-and now waved it overhead as if toasting or blessing the whole crowd. His mood was already electric, though it might have nothing to do with meeting the mayor. “I’ll help you find Oona, sure,” he said. “But after that we have to go talk to Russ Grinspoon. I just saw him come in.”

“Russ Grinspoon the singer? He’s here?” I thought of Grinspoon as the lamer half of a well-forgotten seventies smooth-rock duo, Grinspoon and Hale. I was surprised Perkus much cared.

“He’s Manhattan’s arts commissioner,” said Perkus chidingly. “You of all people should know that. He’s at Arnheim’s elbow at the gala openings of museum wings and restored opera houses and so on.”

“Is that how you see me?” I asked. “A hack among hacks?” A snippet of “The Night Takes Back What You Said,” the act’s early, Dylanesque hit and one tolerable song, ran now through my brain. Grinspoon was the guy doing the high lilting harmonies, not the “genius” one who’d written the lyrics-sort of the girl in the act, I’d always thought. But then by some lights I was probably the girl in Insteadman and Tooth. “I resent your notion of me as a specialist in superficial occasions.” No tone of irony was enough to secure my protest, not here.

Perkus was after bigger game than my pride, anyhow. “Forget what you know of his music,” he said. “In another lifetime Grinspoon hung out with the Semina Culture guys in L.A. He was an extra in that Monte Hellman movie I was telling you about, Two-Lane Blacktop . He’s actually one of only two actors to be directed by both Morrison Groom and Florian Ib, the director of The Gnuppet Movie.”

“I know you’re going to tell me who the other one is.”

“Marlon Brando,” he said with maximum satisfaction.

So the game was afoot. Tonight, I gathered, we’d attempt to penetrate one or several vital questions, pertaining to Marlon Brando’s aliveness or lack thereof, his Gnuppet interlude and its sinister importance, as well as Morrison Groom’s suicide: Faked, or Not? I felt involuntary jubilation and horror. Here was what I’d conducted Perkus into this midst for, unknowingly. I was an instrument, and among my duties was to resound with excitement at mad quests I couldn’t comprehend. Semina and Hellman, for instance, were names I hadn’t retained, but they carried with them a scent of summer, of Perkus as I’d first met him, and a time when, I now realized, my life changed totally. I’d never pass a pop quiz, yet these obsessions felt as rich to me as sexual pursuits, and hence it seemed perfectly appropriate that Perkus had bargained one for the other.

“I’m amazed that Arnheim’s not more wary of letting a Brando mole like Grinspoon this deep into his organization,” I teased. “Seeing as how Brando’s about to topple Arnheim for mayor of New York. But I suppose that’s the typical arrogance of power, to taunt a rival by stealing his people.”

Perkus put his finger to his lips to silence me, his severity seeming to ratify even my looniest implication. Meanwhile, his mugwump eye was busy elsewhere.

“Okay,” I said, before I lost my chance, seeing Perkus eager to reel off along his own foggy trail. “But Oona first.” I wasn’t going to let him off my leash, but I couldn’t bear to think of Oona and Noteless working this room unpatrolled by me. In my mind’s eye they looked as complacently coupled as Abneg and the Hawkman.

Then, as though I’d really needed him for my dowsing rod, Perkus took my elbow and steered me right into them, the party opening like a door. Noteless stood, tall and imposing as in one of his iconic photographs, shoulders square in loose black linen, face crevassed with significant doubts, hair a platinum flume. I had to admit I saw why the man had gone into sculpture. Oona, at his side, was the bird perched on the alligator’s fang. In a room where we all frolicked with bubbly wine, she’d somehow cadged a perfect-looking twist martini.

Perkus dashed the silence. It turned out he had a program here, too. “So, I’ve been wanting to speak with you, Laszlo,” he said.

“Yes?” said Oona. They hadn’t seen each other since the tiger’s destruction of Jackson Hole. I’d barely seen Perkus since, and not once at his place. Eighty-fourth Street was still cordoned while the city engineers measured structural damage beneath the blocks adjacent to the crater. He and I had met for a couple of feeble, pot-deprived encounters at Gracie Mews, Perkus giving my haunt a desultory audition.

“I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about simulated worlds,” Perkus launched in. “About the simulators shutting us off if we started running our own simulations, because it might use too much juice…” For Perkus every meeting was only tabled, every ruling merely given a continuance (for this reason, if no other, Marlon Brando could never die).

“Right, sure, what of it?” Oona slurped at her martini, awfully blithe about apocalypse. That might be because she shepherded apocalypse in gelled human form through the world at the moment, and for her living presently took His dictation. Noteless, maker of chasms, swayed gently, perhaps tracking Perkus’s eye, his whole looming form like a nudged metronome. The party seemed to have receded around us, or perhaps that was only my sensation of its unimportance, the mayor and all the flies in his web of no relevance now that I had Perkus beside and Oona before me.

“Here’s my second thought,” said Perkus. “The fact that we develop simulations of our own only drains their computing power if the way they simulate is to make everything exist whether we look at it or not . If, on the other hand, the simulators only trouble to put stuff where we’re going to look at it, then the amount of effort and energy is exactly the same.”

“I don’t get you,” said Oona.

“It’s like this. Picture a man in a library. The books are all blank, until he picks one out. Then the simulator-or whatever-fills in that book, only for as long as he leafs through it, inscribing the minimum number of words, just in time for his eyes to meet the page. If he drops that book and selects another, the simulator’s efforts go to making that book exist. But the preponderance of the library is a bluff, just a lot of book spines that wouldn’t even have titles if you didn’t look too closely.”

“Probably the man only goes there because he thinks the librarian is hot,” said Oona.

“The point is, Biller’s computer universe might not make any difference to these guys at all. Our little simulated brains have got to be paying attention to something . Who says it’s any harder for them to put some virtual-reality gobbledygook in front of our eyes than it is to, I don’t know, persuasively cobble up a visit to the Cloisters or a cheeseburger deluxe.”