Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“I thought you knew,” she said, a defensive near-apology.

He didn’t want to appear sarcastic-did Sadie think Ava had told him? — so said nothing, and let her come out with the tale, which, together with her age and the names of her former owners and other facts Perkus couldn’t know, Sadie had spied in Ava’s paperwork upon transfer to the canine dorm. Three-year-old Ava was a citizen of the Bronx, it turned out. She’d lived in the Sack Wern Houses, a public development in the drug dealers’ war zone of Soundview, and had been unlucky enough to rush through an ajar door and into the corridor during a police raid on the apartment next door. The policeman who’d emptied his pistol in her direction, one of three on the scene, misdirected all but one bullet in his panic, exploding her shank. Another cop, a dog fancier who’d cried out but failed to halt the barrage, tended the fallen dog, who, even greeted with this injury, only wanted to beseech for love with her tongue and snout. Her owner, a Dominican who may or may not have considered his pit bull ruined for some grim atavistic purpose, balked at the expense and bother of veterinary treatment, so Ava’s fate was thrown to the kindly cop’s whims. The cop found her the best, a surgeon who knew that she’d be better spared cycling the useless shoulder limb, its groping for a footing it could never attain, and so excised everything to the breastbone. It was the love-smitten cop who’d named her, ironically after the daughter whose terrified mom forbade their adopting the drooling sharky creature into a household that already made room for two Norwich terriers. So Ava came into the Friendreth Society’s care.

“She’s got hiccups,” Sadie pointed out another day, a cold one but then they were all cold ones, toward the end of February now. “She” was forever Ava, no need to specify. The dog was their occasion and rationale, vessel for all else unnameable Perkus Tooth and Sadie Zapping had in common. Anyway, it was her apartment, they were only guests. He spotted the start card she’d revealed, the jack of clubs, and shifted his peg two spaces-“Two for his heels,” she’d taught him to say.

“Yeah, on and off for a couple of days now.” The dog had been hiccing and gulping between breaths as she fell asleep in Perkus’s arms and then again often as she strained her leash toward the next street corner. Sometimes she had to pause in snorting consumption of the pounds of kibble that kept her sinewy machine running, and once she’d had to cough back a gobbet of bagel and lox Perkus had tossed her. That instance had seemed to puzzle the pit bull, yet otherwise she shrugged off a bout of hiccups as joyfully as she did her calamitous asymmetry.

“Other day I noticed you guys crossing Seventy-ninth Street,” she said. On the table between them she scored with a pair of queens. “Thought you never went that far uptown. Weren’t there some people you didn’t want to run into?”

He regarded her squarely. Sadie Zapping’s blunt remarks and frank unattractiveness seemed to permit if not invite unabashed inspection, and Perkus sometimes caught himself puzzling backward, attempting to visualize a woman onstage behind a drum kit at the Mudd Club. But that had been, as Sadie earlier pointed out, another time and place. It was this attitude that made her the perfect companion for Perkus’s campaign to dwell in the actual. The perfect human companion, that was, for on this score no one could rival Ava.

Perkus played an ace and advanced his peg murmuring “Thirty-one for two” before shrugging and pulling an elaborate face in reply to her question. “We go where she drags us,” he said. “Lately, uptown.” This only left out the entire truth: that at the instant of his foolish pronouncement a week ago, enunciating the wish to avoid those friends who’d defined the period of his life just previous, he’d felt himself silently but unmistakably reverse the decision. He was ready to see Chase Insteadman, even if he didn’t know what to say or not to say to his actor friend about the letters from space. Ever since, he’d been piloting Ava, rudder driving sails for once, uptown along First Avenue to have a look in the window of Gracie Mews, searching for Chase. Never Second Avenue-he didn’t want to see the barricaded apartment building (regarding which Biller had promised to give him notification if it either reopened or crumbled into the pit of its foundations). Only as far as the pane of the Mews, never farther, and never inside the restaurant, just peering in searching for the actor, of whom he found himself thinking, in paraphrase of a Captain Beefheart song that hadn’t come to mind in a decade or more, I miss you, you big dummy . And Perkus yearned for Chase to meet Ava. The two had certain things in common: root charisma, a versatile obliviousness, luck for inspiring generosity. The hiccuping dog could tell soon enough that they were on a mission, and pushed her nose to the Mews’ window, too, looking for she knew not what, leaving nose doodles, like slug trails, that frosted in the cold.

When Perkus began his herky-jerky dance, I worried. For Ava always responded, cantilevered onto rear legs and hurled herself with the single forelimb like a unicorn spear in the direction of his clavicle. Yet somehow Perkus always caught her, forepaw in his open palm like a ballroom partner’s clasp, and though he staggered backward at her weight, cheek turned to the hiccuping barrage of tongue-kisses she aimed at his mouth and nose, and though the record skipped on its turntable at the thud of his heels, and though other dogs in the neighboring apartments began a chorus of barking protests at the ruckus, he made it all part of the same frenzied occasion, the song, the one he had to hear twelve or fifteen times a day, and which when he heard he simply couldn’t sit still. The song was “Shattered,” by the Rolling Stones. His current anthem. He’d found both record and player ten days before when on both Sadie’s and Biller’s encouragement he’d begun rummaging through other dogs’ apartments besides Ava’s. “A dog doesn’t need a stereo, Chase! There’s all sorts of terrific stuff, they stock these apartments from auctions of the contents of abandoned storage spaces, I learned. Go figure! People dwindle to the point where they move their stuff into storage, then vanish entirely, this happens all the time, that’s the kind of world we live in.”

I didn’t force the implicit comparison to his own vanishing, nor the dwindled state he now seemed to occupy, nor the question of what had or was to become of his own possessions in the Eighty-fourth Street building. Other tenants had presumably been allowed to enter and reclaim at least a few valuables by now. But Perkus waved his hand. “I’ve got everything I need. Anyway, I suspect the management company has seized this opportunity to purge their rolls of all rent-controlled sublets like mine.” I tried pointing out that Richard Abneg, the city’s specialist in tenants’ rights, might continue as his guardian angel. “Hah! He couldn’t even keep his own apartment.” (All accounts of subway excavation devices apparently forgotten, the tiger and the eagles were for Perkus the same thing.)

If anything, Perkus seemed to feel he’d been liberated: Eighty-fourth Street couldn’t fire him, he quit! A lifetime’s collection of books and CDs couldn’t hold a candle to this one serendipitous vinyl talisman, fetched from a Labradoodle’s apartment, which now stood in for all he’d ever known or lost or cared for, even if it happened to feature a gouge that rendered “Miss You” unplayable. “Of all records, Chase, Some Girls! It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff ’n’ the Tears, the kind of albums you’d use for landfill. Look at this.” He insisted I admire the original die-cut cardboard jacket of the Stones LP, the band members’ lipsticked and wig-topped faces camouflaged among those of Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. “You can tell it’s the first pressing, because right afterward they had to withdraw this jacket-the Garland and Monroe estates sued. It’s incredible how much this music is steeped in the ambiance of the New York City of 1978. It’s as much a New York record as White Light/White Heat or Blonde on Blonde.” Well, I only half followed this, but I was glad to hear him back tracing tangible cultural clues, this being one thing that made him recognizably himself, under the sports warm-up jackets and other homeless-person outfits, and in the smoke-free-motel-room environs of Ava’s.