Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

At home after that endless afternoon movie I recalled the moment of worry, and took it as an intimation: if one of us was being hounded by that tiger, it probably wasn’t me. So I rushed to my computer to pull up TigerWatch, to make certain the Friendreth hadn’t been destroyed. It was the first time I’d ever condescended to visit the Web site, which had struck me previously as a sop to public prurience at misfortune, rather than an upstanding service. Anyway, I’d prided myself on having the inside scoop from Richard Abneg. What I found allowed me to breathe easy. At last reports the tiger was off the map of my companions entirely, in Spanish Harlem. But the scare made me want to overlook dignity’s boycott, and see Perkus. This was the very day Oona had said she’d be putting the book on her editor’s desk. Rather than waiting for whatever degree of celebration she’d deign to share, I elected not to be such a slave, or anyway such an obedient one. So it was a curiously mingled pride and pridelessness that saw me headed back out into the fresh night.

I heard Oona through the door to Ava’s apartment. She was in the midst of a self-lacerating harangue, in what I thought of as her single-malt voice. Sure enough, a bottle of twelve-year-old Oban sat between them, its gold essence at the halfway point, its discarded paper wrapper and shards of lead-foil cork wrapper on the table beside Oona’s handbag to prove the bottle’s halfwaying had been accomplished just now. Seeing an intoxicant other than coffee inside the walls of the Friendreth was as startling as seeing Oona (intoxicant to me). I’d come to think of the place as a rehab facility, though Perkus would have said, Dogs have no use for the twelve steps, Chase! But I hadn’t regarded it as my own hiding place from Oona until seeing it stormed by her. Oona and Perkus each held juice glasses, full with more than a finger, and smiled up at me guiltlessly. Perkus, curiously, held a small hardcover book in his lap, as though using it as a handy shield to protect his genitals. Ava knelt beneath Oona’s chair, head craned adoringly upward, obviously enthralled by that wiry, fitful little black-clad poppet, or Gnuppet, with the maniacal, winding voice. I knew Ava well enough now to gather she’d developed a quick crush. The dog might have been starved for female companionship, too. I was. Oona all at once called out a kind of Mickey Spillane urgency from me, I wanted to kiss her and take her away from there and I wanted to hit her for being there in the first place. And for getting Perkus drunk. And for knowing where to find him, and coming to find him instead of me. And. And. And.

Well, Oona was beating herself up, and quickly let me understand the occasion. “Oh, hello, Chase. We’re having an Irish wake for the greatest book I ever wrote or will write. I called it Pages from a Void , though I guess I figured that title was never going to fly with the sales force. Still, I like saying it aloud.”

“The editor didn’t love it?” I stepped in and shut the door behind me.

“Oh, the editor was always sure to hate this book. I didn’t get where I am today, Chase, relying on the integrity of a New York publishing syndicate. My mistake was imagining I had Noteless at my back. I thought the joke was on the editor for signing up a nihilist absolutist who’s made a career of treating the hand that feeds him like a plate of gravy fries. I climbed inside this project, I channeled that mofo’s tar pit of an aesthetic and served it to them chilled. Excuse the mixed metaphors, they’re strictly a symptom of alleviation from Laird’s black tunnel of suffocation and silence. I mix my metaphors so I know I’m alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem. Speaking of which, help yourself, darling.”

At this word Perkus couldn’t meet my eye. I took the opening and dug in Ava’s shelves for a glass, then siphoned off as much of the Scotch as it would hold, preventative measures. “So Noteless bit your hand instead? With or without his dentures?” I slugged back half of my bitter cup at one go.

“It turns out Laird was ready to commence licking asses instead. Just my luck to hook up with him at the moment his integrity plummets into one of his so-called bottomless ‘sculptures.’ Not luck, really. I was typecast. Noteless and Catherine Hamwright, that’s the editor, they hatched a scheme to sell him like everybody’s sinister uncle who’s really a barrel of laughs, another Emil Junrow, or the Edward Gorey of urban sinkholes. They were hoping I’d write Did You Really Say What I Think You Just Said, Mr. Noteless? Apparently, I’m who you enlist when you’re selling out in this town. Perkus here hasn’t said anything but I can tell he thinks this is my just deserts-my comeuppance , to use a Chase Insteadman word.”

Oona’s tiny bullets flew everywhere. Was I really notorious for my archaicisms? I’d taken worse blows. She’d earned only a little grace with me for using the word “darling;” I still wanted to know how she’d come to be here. She and Perkus never seemed like friends to me, no matter what they claimed. They seemed half enemies, half conspirators, relishing snickering complicity I was too innocent to share. Perkus, for his part, did show a wily, red-rimmed satisfaction at Oona in her amphetamine cups, but only from the vantage of his own. I’d never witnessed Perkus really bombed on alcohol before, but it seemed his recent bout of clean living made him a very cheap date. He swayed on his chair, with only the book for ballast. I suppose the dog’s life had been a bit less enthralling than he’d wanted to admit. I just wished I could dislodge him from his perches so easily as Oona.

“It’s really the best thing you’ve done?” I asked.

Perkus raised his eyebrows at her challengingly, as if he knew of something else lurking in a drawer somewhere, but still didn’t speak. In his dog’s haircut, lips softened by drink, he looked more and more the bit player from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest .

“Absolutely.”

“So forget what this editor thinks. It’ll get published somewhere else.”

“You don’t understand, it’s all written in the imperious voice of Deepster McHole-in-the-Ground. I steeped myself in his sources, and then spit them back out-it was like writing a graduate dissertation, something I’ve spent my life avoiding.” It wasn’t enough to mention sources, Oona had to begin listing them in a deliberate drone. “I read Deleuze and Guattari, I read John Gray and E. M. Cioran and Bernhard’s Correction , I read Mike Davis and Donna Haraway and John Baldessari, I read Ballard and Baudrillard, and by the way, I don’t care what anyone says, Ballard’s just Baudrillard without the u-d-r-i . I practically memorized The Writings of Robert Smithson , for god’s sake, which is the exact equivalent of ordering a month’s worth of meals at a restaurant where John Cage is the chef.”

“Good for you,” said Perkus, finally piping up. His voice was clotted, the words surfacing each like a bubble through a pot of oatmeal. I forgot for a moment which was his abstruse eye-both seemed to curl toward unseen dimensions. “A secret masterpiece is always best. It changes the world slightly. Everyone should have one, like one of those simulated worlds you were talking about, or an Ant Farm.”

Oona guffawed. “When I write my masterpiece it won’t have so many boring machines in it. That’s boring as in ‘What do we do with all the soil this boring machine has piled up?’”

I’d never put Noteless and Abneg’s tiger in conjunction until that instant. I looked at Perkus, sure he’d make the same leap, but either this was too obvious or I was no longer the target for his arched eyebrow. He was elsewhere. Ava whined and hiccuped quietly where she crouched below, but he seemed not to notice her, either. It was the longest I’d seen him go without caressing the dog since I’d come to the Friendreth. How predictable, my confusion: I was never able to appreciate one of his phases until they were vanishing, assuming wrongly I’d have a little while to get used to things. But this was Perkus’s trick, he shed orientations like skins. Yet he’d seemed so permanent when we met. Bogged in stasis, writer’s block elevated to a principle. I’d have to relegate this paradox to my growing pile of impossible questions, like why he and Oona Laszlo periodically shrugged off their enmity and converged, or whether Laird Noteless’s holes and the tiger’s were aspects of the same phenomenon, like Groom’s and Ib’s movies. I was sure of one thing: if Perkus wasn’t interested anymore, I refused to be. He could shrug off skins, but I wouldn’t wear them. Besides, I had an easy question: What was that book in his lap? I had it confused with Oona’s supposed masterpiece. But I knew enough not to embarrass myself-unpublished manuscripts weren’t bound in cloth and boards.