Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Do you switch the labels?” I said, barely containing my impatience.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“Sure, I switch them around. There’s usually about three or four different grades. Chronic and Ice, that’s the same dope. Same as AK-47 too, usually. Ice used to be called Bubonic for a while, then someone told me what that means. Anyway, I’m not even always with the same supplier.” He squinted at the red digital glow of his beeper. “No offense, but you picked out what you want?”

“It doesn’t… mean… anything-?”

Nothing left to be defensive about, Watt could afford to show his own impatience. “Some smoke sweet, some a little skunkier. They all get you high, or you get your money back.”

I’d felt a creeping sympathy for Watt, summoned up into the lap of luxury to find himself good-and-bad-copped by surly customers, but now his rap was only infuriating. “How much Ice have you got?” I asked, in blatant defiance of his confession that the brand meant nothing. I couldn’t refuse that knowledge, but I could try to keep it from Perkus, if I ever had that chance.

Watt found four of the Lucite boxes labeled ICE. I had Richard empty his wallet to help me afford them, then we discharged Watt back into the first morning of the new year. Richard and I smoked some-there wasn’t anything else to do-and in the fading hour as we sat together I felt that though we didn’t speak of it directly, he’d both forgiven me the clumsy zeal of my investigation and made it clear the lengths he could (and, mostly, couldn’t) go in assisting me. He cared about Perkus, had for years before I was on the job. Georgina was pregnant. The two facts seemed balanced one against the other. If there was yet something else lingering unsaid, I chalked it up to the feeling Richard Abneg was always wanting to impart, that he had responsibilities I couldn’t imagine.

So Perkus was gone. It was all I thought about that January, except when I thought about something else, or nothing at all, watching my birds circle, munching eggs alone at Gracie Mews, trudging through refrozen slush to catch afternoon matinees on Eighty-sixth Street, all the prestige pictures that clung to one screen on the East Side and one on the West, waiting for Oscars to give them immortality or at least get them into the black. Days spent waiting for Oona or for not-Oona, it was always a toss-up. It occurred to me that I worried about Perkus because the case of his vanishing was simple, as opposed to the two women I should be troubled over, one present in absence, the other the reverse, or something like that.

Perkus was gone, Perkus was lost, and I spent weeks wandering in circles, but before that, for one instant, I’d actually been thrilled inside my fear, even proud. It was the first afternoon following the party, when, thinking I’d visit and at the very least hear some wild tale of his ejection from the mayor’s residence, I found myself approaching the barricade at Eighty-fourth Street to find policemen everywhere, their lights blipping and radios crackling with the fizz of a fresh emergency. My initial thought was that it had something to do with the blizzard, and in a way it did. The streets everywhere were stopped in white, every hard edge rounded or heaped into softness, lanes empty apart from sanitation plows scudding their blades, groping for the buried asphalt. The sky, its white and gray pressed claustrophobically near the day before, now gaped infinite blue, as though awestruck at what it had belched out onto the city.

When I got to the limit and saw the senior detectives, weathering the cold in their knit caps, filtering in and out of Perkus’s very entranceway, there came one thrilling moment when I was sure he’d done it. The cocky fool stole the mayor’s chaldron! And oh, what confirmation of the treasure’s value, that fuzz swarmed in all directions, even helicoptering overhead, and had had to set up a cordon! The story I told myself in those brief seconds of misunderstanding veered from disbelief to giddy terror: Had he outsmarted them, or was he caught? Would I be implicated? You can think a lot in a microsecond, a fact I never seem to notice except when I’m all wrong.

“Who are they looking for?” I asked, cagily, I thought, of the nearest cop at the barricade where I stood, in a tramped-down section of snow. Very little of Perkus’s block had been shoveled, but there were several places where it appeared a flare had burned down through the drifts during the night. God, they’d really been on him almost instantly, I thought. I hoped he’d never returned here with the chaldron at all, but was sealed with the treasure in fugitive ecstasy, in some unguessable neutral site.

“Step back from the line, sir, thank you.”

“Did they already apprehend him?” The cop I addressed had a face like a bowl of pudding someone had thrown his features at, and they’d barely stuck. The features claimed experience, attitude, cynicism, but the medium in which they’d embedded was impossibly raw and blank.

“Uh, I’m not at liberty to discuss cases with you, sir. Are you a resident of one of the buildings here? If not, I’ll have to ask you to go on about your business.”

“I’m a regular visitor to one of the buildings, that one. I’d like to go say hello to my friend, if you don’t mind.”

“Your friend’s not in that building, sir. This whole area is unsafe to occupy. Our orders are to clear this area.”

Perkus’s dwelling, holy diorama of possibility and encounter, had been bureaucratically shrunken to a mere area. The police presence had nothing to do with Perkus or where we’d been the night before, that was just my lowly brain connecting the nearest available dots. When I sorted out my confusion, I learned it was the weight of the snowfall and the erosion of street salt on the century-old foundations accessible within the Jackson Hole crater that brought about the wider damage which made Perkus’s building, and the others, unsafe. The word infrastructure came to mind. This city was always on the brink, hardly needing an excavating tiger’s help to fail.

So Perkus was gone. The Ice I’d bought with Richard’s money, on New Year’s Eve, I sunk deep into my freezer, where I thought it belonged, though that January I could have kept it as consistently frozen on my windowsill. But if that cache of Lucite boxes could be a kind of homing device, it was Perkus I meant to call home, not pigeons.

Perkus Tooth had twenty-four hours alone in the apartment before Ava arrived. Biller kept close tabs on all the vacancies there and said it was the best way. The intended result being that the dog would take him for granted, detect his traces on the floors and walls and in the bed and then unquestioningly settle in as a roommate. So Perkus spent the first night on the surprisingly soft bed alone, half awake in the dark, and up to pace the rooms at first light. He dwelled in the space alone just long enough to posit some conjunction between his new self, shorn of so many defining accoutrements, dressed in an ill-fitting, lumpish blue-and-orange sports sweatshirt with an iron-on decal name, presumably of some star player, his right temple throbbing with cluster, a really monstrous attack, its eighth or ninth day in a row now, ebbing steadily in its fashion but still obnoxious, yet also, somehow, his brain awoken from some long-fogging dream, with a blind spot in sight, yes, but peripheral vision around the occlusion’s edges widened, refreshed-some conjunction between this new self and the apartment in which he’d strangely landed, the apartment which had been fitted, like his body, with hand-me-downs, with furnishings and decor that would be rejected even by a thrift shop. The presumption being if he puzzled at the weird decrepit paintings and prints hung over the decaying living-room set, the framed Streamers poster, or the blue-period Picasso guitarist sun-faded to yellow over the nonworking stove in the dummy kitchen, he should be able to divine from his surround what sort of person he’d become since the last time his inquiries turned inward. (That as opposed to issuing from a resolute self, to interrogate a malign and slippery world requiring constant vigilance.) Who he was seemed actually in the meantime to have slipped Perkus’s mind.