Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Buy me breakfast at your Mews,” she whispered hoarsely. “Just don’t force me to talk or think about anything, I couldn’t possibly.”

“Okay.”

“Whatever I might have said last night I take it all back,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I take it back anyway.”

We tiptoed through the front. Man and dog spooned on the couch, Perkus on the inside track, his back to the cushions, Ava nestled into the C of his stomach and knees with her spine, three legs fetally tucked, upraised snout against Perkus’s collarbone. Perkus still wore his corduroy pants and woolly socks, his muddy boots pried off just at the couch’s corner. Both slept with mouths drool-leakingly wide, eyes squeezed as if actively braving harsh light. There was none. Perkus might be the only person who’d keep his front room more firmly sealed against sunlight than the place where he usually slept. Oona and I didn’t stop to let our eyes adjust. We were self-sickened, wreathed in shame, certain we’d violated this place. There was no fucking in the Friendreth. If the dogs could keep themselves one to an apartment, what excuse did we have? We slipped through the unlocked front door, clicking it shut behind us as carefully as we could. On the other side we exhaled.

“Wow, listen to those hiccups,” said Oona.

“Yes, Ava’s got a bad case,” I said.

“That’s not the dog, Chase.”

I put my ear to the door. She was right.

March 19

C.,

Forgive glitchos, I type in the dark. The screen’s backlighting’s shot, too. One of the leaf-cutter bees is crawling on my face, drinking sweat-hard not to interpret it as a mosquito and swat it away, but they’ll sting if incited and I’ve had my requisite bee stings for the week already. We’ve all taken to negotiating this lightless humid labyrinth in bare feet, or bare foot in my case, mostly in underwear or pajamas-if we had little enough motivation to impress one another with personal grooming before, the last is gone-and when I wedged my one foot below Keldysh’s console, to write you this letter, I stirred some growth both vine-tangled and mulchy, and up rose the vivid, unmistakable smell of fresh unfiltered apple cider, the kind with a simple label, from Vermont or Connecticut. It can’t possibly be apple cider.

It’s been a while, Chase, but I won’t apologize now for that. I’ve got more to tell than I’ll manage. Systems began domino-falling, one failure catalyzing another, mid-February. At some point Keldysh persuaded us to create a rotation of diagnostic maintenance shutdowns, isolating each in turn: climate, navigation, communications, orbital tracking, plumbing, and so on. Hardly attractive, but no one came up with a credible Plan B. Everything went swimmingly (some words are treacherous-what I’d give for a swim!) until the last time we switched off the central-core light banks, ten days ago now, and they wouldn’t come back on. They still haven’t. (Picture a Russian flipping a switch repeatedly, frowning in the dark.) We’re rationing the backup generator’s delegated functions, so we’re down to what illumination Sledge’s biospectrum grow lights can shed, as he places them here and there, a farmer rotating crops throughout the station. Keldysh warns this may be our last communications packet; he scheduled us each a one-hour session on the sole functioning keyboard-no luxury of writer’s block today! While morale is low, we have a kind of camaraderie at last. I suppose a similar peace may be gained by prisoners sharing death row. This is no time for settling scores. However, I want it on record, right here and now, that I never ever stole anything from the fridge, anyone else’s leftovers, or the Captain’s birthday cake.

Though black humor is the only functioning humor here, I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask if I could take Zamyatin’s keyboard hour. I suspect it’ll go unused, a symbolic silent communication, an aria of cosmic null-music to foreshadow the chorale the rest of us will soon chime in with. Zamyatin commandeered a landing module and kamikazied himself out of the air lock yesterday. As expected, he sparked one of the Chinese mines, making a tiny missing tooth in the dynamite smile that pins us on the far side of home. No one was certain what (more) was wrong when Klaxons sounded, but Keldysh inventoried the missing lander, and on doing a head count and finding Z. absent we rushed to the Library’s south window, which gives a panorama of Earth through a coy lace veil of mines, a view we usually avoid, just in time to see him flare and burn. We cheered wildly. It isn’t as though Zamyatin’s bid could be whitewashed as other than suicide-he’d have been baked Alaska on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere even if he had negotiated the mine layer. That would have been a purely symbolic triumph, where this we could call taking one for the team.

And then there were five. Our remaining lives are in Sledge’s hands. What little remains of them. I suppose our remains will be in his hands, too, in the sense that the whole of Northern Lights is being given over to the gardens, now expanded from the Greenhouse to wherever Sledge can get something green to cling or take root and get busy swapping our exhaled breath for something worth inhaling. So when this last brave stand collapses, and we asphyxiate in one collective heap, there’ll be no one left to give us interstellar funerals-instead we’ll rot in the dark mossy grotto we’ve left behind. At least we no longer fear starvation, as Sledge is always ladling up some horrible fruity or rooty stew-there’s plenty of spare biomass to consume, now that Sledge has been invited to turn the whole station into a throbbing wet garden. The ironies are rich. Trapped in the infinite cold of space, we bake like Russian mafiosi in a steam room. Technology expelled us from Earth’s garden and then, having shot its wad, gardening is left to take over. Similarly, runaway growth is eating me from within, yet Sledge encourages a runaway growth that may prolong my life, allowing me to die longer. The station has a kind of cancer, we smell it in the corridors everywhere, and trip over new growth every time we touch our blind appendages to the walls. As a girl, Chase, I always did get tubers and tumors confused.

Ordinarily, I’m exempted from my turn helping Sledge shift his banks of grow lights from one position to the next, but one day recently I was feeling vital and bored shitless enough to give it a go. In zero-G the task doesn’t involve any lifting, obviously, and even a one-footed lady can be useful nudging the arrays around corners and helping Sledge reorient them in a new zone. Sometimes in all this dark it’s pleasant to cling to those few yellowish lights, too. This day Sledge confessed to me the basis of his mastery of indoor agriculture: he once single-handedly ran the most profitable indoor marijuana farm on the whole island of Manhattan. The operation was tucked inside a four-room apartment on the Upper East Side, unknown not only to the authorities (kept off the scent by elaborately rerouted utility accounts, the massive electrical bills thrown to other addresses like a ventriloquist’s voice into a dummy’s body) but to even the closest neighbors, who regarded Sledge as an innocent, forgettable fellow tenant in the large and anonymous building. Sledge described it generously, the rooms teeming to the ceilings with bud-heavy green stalks, the floor cabled with water sprinklers, the walls lined with foil reflectors to maximize the ripening effects of the solar-spectrum lamps, the stereo chattering NPR-talk radio to cover the drone of the daytime light banks, and classical music to give the plants a cultural heritage through the cool damp night. In one large closet he kept what he called the “mother plant,” a grotesquely thickened and practically pulsing rope of marijuana from which he cloned seedlings, a fine-tuned specimen of THC. The result he spliced from her was the highest high-end “one-toke dope,” or so he bragged. He’d made himself and several confederates wealthy from the operation before a paranoid inkling triggered a violent two-day fit in which he completely disassembled the farm and eradicated its traces. It was those skills that now turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung. I suppose I am Sledge’s mother plant, the improbable thing he keeps alive in an unnatural cramped space.