Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Only, as I learned over the course of a few visits, Perkus wasn’t really tracing his tangible cultural clue of Some Girls any place in particular, so much as worrying it like, yes, a dog with a bone. “Sh-sh-sh-shattered!” he’d declare, resetting the ancient player’s coarse stylus at the start of the track, which was, even before Perkus’s appropriation, already more a rant or riff than a proper song, its froggy, mocking guitar figure only a setting for Mick Jagger’s giddy nihilistic kiss-offs, success success success, does it mat-ter! This town’s been wearing tatters. Look at me! Round and round man and dog danced, one nearly as tall as the other, man urging the refrain on the dog as if wishing to teach her the lyrics, or at least the key word, I’ve been SHAT-tered! The dog loudly hiccuped, as if that might be her version of the same thought.

If dancing to the song was a kind of enactment, a show for me, it wasn’t a deceptive one. Rather, it was a show of what he’d really come to since I’d seen him last, and of how he honestly spent his time between my visits to him here at the Friendreth: in Ava’s arms. There were no books or magazines or newspapers in evidence, and no television or computer. Biller had offered Perkus a laptop and he’d refused, “Shattered” ’s microcosm of 1978 being as far as Perkus wished to descend into any virtual world. The rest was Ava. Ostensibly for her sake, Perkus wasn’t willing to visit my apartment or any restaurant. He ate mostly garbage from cans heated on a hot plate, or takeout sandwiches Biller or Sadie Zapping brought around, a step down from the bagels and burgers he used to lower into Biller’s alley, but not too far. He made quick exploratory raids on the other canine apartments, then retreated to Ava’s. He made do. Stripped of Eighty-fourth Street’s rituals and amenities, Perkus’s agoraphobia stood revealed-except for the ceaseless rounds with Ava, far beyond her bathroom needs and during which he braved the cold in layers of inadequate synthetic sweatshirts and Windbreakers until I bought him a secondhand woolen coat and told him it was from my own closet. In truth, my own would have been absurdly large on him; he must have known this, but said nothing. Perkus claimed that their itineraries had reverted, after the day he’d contacted me at the Mews, to Ava’s preferences, usually to the waterside, man and dog leaning into winds that swept up and down the East River, man and dog gazing across at archipelagoes of industry and construction, the perimeters of boroughs as effectively distant as the clouds scalloping overhead, man and dog moving along icy walkways in silent communion with traces vivid to them alone, not apparent to others.

February was as cold as January, maybe colder. The snows never melted, the city never breathed clear. That day Perkus reappeared I’d spotted the dog first, obscene cherry nose, twin coxcombs of spare flesh dripping from each corner of its grin, gusting breath steam onto the diner’s glass. Then the apparitional figure, bulky hooded sweatshirt pinned beneath a satiny baseball jacket, outsize dungarees hugely cuffed, over tan work boots showing a line where, soaked by slush, street salts had marked their high point in residue, like the tidal deposit of seaweed on a beach. Professional dog walker? No, worse. Homeless snow survivor, now tapping at the restaurant window, campaigning for me to emerge with a dollar to crumple in his gloved hand, or to get my leftovers to-go, in a doggie bag but not for Doggie. Despite bulky ragged dress the raving figure was small statured and possibly inconsequential, but the pit bull seemed threat enough. Then the person’s features, miming talk, made themselves known to me. The next instant Perkus plucked off his hood and startled me a second time, the hair that once swept back so proudly from his widow’s peak now cropped raggedly to inmate length, a half-inch from his skull everywhere.

Sadie Zapping had cut it. It was part of her regular duties in the Friendreth, to carry a pair of round-tipped scissors to trim obtrusive and untidy growth around the eyes and ears and anal glands of the shaggier residents, and so when between cribbage hands Perkus had complained that he needed a haircut she’d whipped them out. Perkus introduced me to the woman he called “Ava’s friend Sadie” the second or third time I came to see him there. We met in the lobby, her “Hello” more grunt than word as she aimed a tall black poodle out into the cold. I don’t think she was possessive of Perkus’s attention so much as gruffly worried that he’d broken the boycott on his former life. That, or she’d been banking on a card game that afternoon.

Didn’t Perkus want to see Richard Abneg? I wanted Richard to see Perkus and assess the situation, but I advanced this suggestion with an air of fun. The Three Musketeers should ride again. No. Perkus seemed distrustful and disappointed after seeing Richard in the lap of power, and the lap of the Hawkman. I told him about their pregnancy. This brought a cast of wistfulness to half of Perkus’s face-his divergent eye could never sit still for looking wistful. But even that look implied Richard was only more deeply compromised, lost to us. (Nothing in Perkus ever suggested any awareness we’d all been babies, once. You couldn’t get here from there.) Perkus remained obstinate. He’d prefer I didn’t mention him to Abneg.

Oona? I wasn’t foolish enough to try. I didn’t want to subject him, or myself for being here with him, to the risk of her scorn. More and more through February, as she pushed deeper into Noteless’s book, Oona had been daring me to view myself as her toy or tool-letting herself in after I’d given up and fallen asleep (I’d volunteered my apartment key, and cleared her with my doorman), blotting my wounded questions with urgent kisses, then departing before morning light. There was something almost depraved in her exhaustion, her bloodshot eyes, her grim fits of lust, and I’d have felt sorry for her if she’d given me the slightest opening. She never did.

In this, their refusal of my pity, she and Perkus again reminded me of each other. I snuck in as much food as I could, and made him swear not to give it all to Ava. Her head wasn’t much below the level of the kitchen table there, and sometimes with a plate of something in front of him Perkus would begin on some line of fevered free association and begin waving his hands and she’d plop her jaw on the table’s edge and begin tonguing the food sideways off his plate, three-bean salad, French fries, baba ghanoush, anything. Since he never reprimanded her, she showed no compunction. If the food came to her, why not? It was her place. By the time he’d wound up his rant Perkus’s plate might be empty, and he’d scrape it into the sink as if satisfied. I parachuted other care-package items into his life: a gift bag from a Condé Nast party, which I knew contained a bar of soap, a T-shirt, and a scented candle; a pair of rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves; a gold filter for his plastic one-cup coffeemaker (he’d been rinsing out, air-drying, and reusing the Melitta paper filters, a thrifty practice likely absorbed from Biller, but which saddened me); and a Sunday New York Times just to remind him his old enemies in the line of middlebrow reality placation were still in business, hoping to rile him back into curiosity about the life of the city. One day I reached into my coat pocket and found the Oonaphone, the old disposable cell that had never once rung. I thrust it on him, with its charger, and made him promise to use it in an emergency, or even just to let me know he was ready to have me help him transition back into himself-anything. He looked at it curiously and shoved it in a drawer with some other plastic objects he wanted to protect from being gnawed for dental exercise. I told him I didn’t remember the phone’s number anymore, but I’d try to find out. He raised his hand from where it scoured at Ava’s seashell ears, signaling me to stop. “Dogs don’t need numbers,” he said.