Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Perkus was alert to my fascination. “I’ll introduce you,” he said. “He’s just shy at first.”

Marijuana might have been a constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java heisted. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: “Oh caffeine!/you contemporary fiend screen/into your face I’ve seen/into my face/through my face-” And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.

I pictured the fugue that resulted in this writing being interrupted by a seizure of migraine, the pen dropping from Perkus’s hand as he succumbed to one of his cluster headaches. It was impossible not to picture it this way because of the day I walked in on him in the grip of a fresh one. He’d called to invite my dropping by, then fell victim. The door was unlocked and he beckoned me inside from where he lay on his couch, in his suit pants and a yellowed T-shirt, with a cool cloth draped over his eyes. He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he’d so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache.

“It’s a bad one,” he said. “The first day is always the worst. I can’t look at the light.”

“You never know when it’s coming?”

“There’s a kind of warning aura an hour or two before,” he croaked out. “The world begins shrinking…”

I moved for his bathroom, and he said, “Don’t go in there. I puked.”

What I did I will admit is unlike me: I went in and cleaned up Perkus’s vomit. Further, seeking out a sponge in his kitchen sink I ran into a mess there, a cereal bowl half filled with floating Cheerios, cups with coffee evaporating to filmy stain rings. While Perkus lay on the couch breathing heavily through a washcloth, I quietly tinkered at his kitchen, putting things in a decent order, not wanting him to slip into derangement and unhealth on what it had suddenly occurred to me was my watch -he appeared so disabled I could imagine him not budging from that couch for days. Not counting Biller, who’d stayed outside the window, I’d never seen another soul in Perkus’s apartment except for his pot dealer. The dinette table was scattered with marijuana, half of it pushed through a metal strainer, the rest still bunchy with seeds. I swept it all back into a plastic box labeled FUNKY MONKEY and scooped the joints Perkus had completed into the Altoids tin he kept for that purpose. Then, growing compulsive (I do keep my own apartment neat, though I’d never before felt any anxiety at Perkus’s chaos), I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. It was certainly the case that blundering in on Perkus’s headache had made me self-conscious and pensive, but I felt I couldn’t go. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and Perkus offered no comment, apart from the slightest moan. But after I’d been clattering at his compact discs for a while he said, “Find Sandy Bull.”

“What?”

“Sandy Bull… he’s a guitarist… the songs are very long… I can tolerate them in this state… it gives me something to listen to besides this throbbing…”

I found the disk and put it in his player. The music seemed to me insufferably droning, psychedelic in a minor key, suitable more for a harem than a sickroom. But then I really know nothing about music or headaches.

“You can go…” said Perkus. “I’ll be fine…”

“Do you need food?”

“No… when it’s like this I can’t eat…”

Well, Perkus couldn’t eat one of Jackson Hole’s fist-size burgers, I’d grant that. I wondered if a plate of some vegetable or a bowl of soup might be called for, but I wasn’t going to mother him. So I did go, first lowering the lights, but leaving the creepy music loud, as Perkus wished. I found myself strangely bereft, discharged into the vacant hours. I’d come to rely on my Perkus afternoons, and how they turned into evenings. The light outside was all wrong. I realized I couldn’t recall a time I’d not come back through his lobby, brain pleasantly hazy, into a throng of Brandy’s Piano Bar patrons ignoring the sign and smoking and babbling outside on the pavement, while piano tinkling and erratic choruses of sing-along drifted from within the bar to the street. Now all was quiet, the stools upturned on Brandy’s tables. And all I could think of was Perkus, stilled on the couch, his lids swollen beneath the washcloth.

The next time I saw Perkus I made the mistake of asking if his tendency to veer into ellipsis was in any way connected to the cluster migraines. He’d been bragging the week before about his capacity for shifting into that satori-like state; how, when he ventured there, he glimpsed bonus dimensions, worlds inside the world. Most of his proudest writing, he’d explained, was born of some glimpse of ellipsistic knowledge .

“There’s no connection,” he said now, where we sat in our Jackson Hole booth, his distaff eye bulging. “Cluster’s a death state, where all possibilities shut down… I’m not myself there… I’m not anyone. Ellipsis is mine , Chase.”

“I only wondered if they might somehow be two sides of the same coin…” Or two ways of peering out of the same skull, I thought but didn’t say.

“I can’t even begin to explain. It’s totally different.”

“I’m sorry,” I said spontaneously, wanting to calm him.

“Sorry for what?” He’d spat out a gobbet of burger in his fury at refuting me.

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“Ellipsis is like a window opening, Chase. Or like-art. It stops time.”

“Yes, you’ve said.” The clot of chewed beef sat beside his napkin, unnoticed except by me.

“Cluster, on the other hand-they’re enemies.”

“Yes.” He’d persuaded me. It hadn’t taken much. I wanted to persuade him , now, to see an Eastern healer I knew, a master of Chinese medicine who, operating out of offices in Chelsea, and with a waiting list of six months or more, ministered to Manhattan’s wealthy and famous, charming and acupuncturing away their ornate stresses and decadent ills. I promised myself I’d try, later, when Perkus’s anger cooled. I wanted so badly for him to have his ellipsis, have it wholly and unreservedly, wanted him to have it without cluster-however terribly much I suspected that one might be the price of the other. I wanted this selfishly, for, it dawned on me then, Perkus Tooth-his talk, his apartment, the space that had opened beginning when I’d run into him at Criterion, then called him on the telephone- was my ellipsis . It might not be inborn in me, but I’d discovered it nonetheless in him. Where Perkus took me, in his ranting, in his enthusiasms, in his abrupt, improbable asides, was the world inside the world. I didn’t want him smothered in the tomb-world of migraine. Perkus was the opposite of my distant astronaut fiancée-my caring for him could matter, on a daily basis.

Perkus Tooth was right. I may as well acknowledge I function as an ornament to dinner parties. There’s something pleasant about me. I skate on frictionless ball bearings of charm, convey a middling charisma that threatens no one. As a retired actor I evoke the arts, yet feature no unsettling aura of disgruntlement, striving, or need. Anyone can grasp in a single word- residuals -where my money comes from and that I have enough of it. People with money don’t want to wonder, in their private evenings, whether their artist friends have enough (or worse, be certain they don’t have). It was during one of these evenings at their most typical, swirling with faces I’d forget the morning after, that I came to be introduced to Richard Abneg.