Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Further inside, the encounter I’d willed was taking place, Perkus startled into semi-accountability as only Richard Abneg’s implicit reproach could startle him. He’d been huddled on the couch, with Sterling Wilson Hobo’s Immaculate Rust in scissored remnants all around him, shattered like everything else that met Perkus’s interested eye, digested in his own personal mashup. At first I thought to protest-hadn’t Perkus said Hobo wasn’t his sort of poet? — and then I saw the pages and verses had been reduced past even Hobo’s minimalist intentions, the words and even letters dismembered from one another. Perkus had the single syllable fal stuck to his cheek. Here was the final destination of all of Perkus’s languages: the ransom note. Perkus, kidnapped by his own theories, had then suffered Stockholm syndrome, in which one preferred a jailer to oneself.

Or maybe I was unfair. Maybe hiccups wrecked him. Anyhow, he’d wrecked, chin shadow become an unkempt whitish beard, scruff become inane wisps spilling over his ear tops, disarray become dereliction. Perkus wasn’t the only startled person on the scene. Richard Abneg was silenced, too. I saw Perkus through his eyes, miles deep in self-dungeoning since their farewell on Eighty-fourth Street. I recalled they’d been boys together, that unimaginable land of brilliant New York childhood I’d been made to feel ashamed I lacked. I’d given Richard no chance even to understand what the Friendreth Apartments were about-he probably credited the malodorous decor entirely to Perkus. Close enough. Everything stood for itself. Perkus hiccuped violently to rupture the silence and an exclamation mark of drool decorated his chin.

Richard didn’t speak to him at first, but turned back to me, the rage and hurry leached from his voice. “You have a doctor waiting?” he asked. I nodded, and he said, “Take Anne back into the kitchen.” Anne Sprillthmar, with Ava nuzzling up into her kneading hand, had come in behind me, and now stood shocked. Perkus gawked back at her. “I’ll talk to him for a minute,” said Richard, as if neither Perkus nor the journalist could hear him. “We should have kept a cab waiting. There won’t be many in this goddamn cul-de-sac.”

“We’ll go downstairs and find a cab and be waiting for you.” I was grateful for Richard’s command, eager to expand on my usefulness in return for his taking responsibility for what happened next, perhaps even what had happened to begin with.

“Get two and send her back to the Condé Nast building.”

The snows were wilder than even ten minutes earlier, though these were still the sort of brittle pinprick flakes I had trouble imagining accumulating much, not because they’d melt-it was too cold for that-but because they’d whirl and drift and be whisked into piles, never adhering to anything, not even one another. If cab-hailing could be called street smarts, Richard’s were unerring: Anne Sprillthmar and I had to walk to the corner of First for a taxi. We rode it back while I explained to her that Richard wanted her gone.

“What is that place?”

“Only dogs are supposed to live there. If you Google under Friendreth you’ll find out all about it.”

“I’m guessing this has nothing to do with the tiger.”

“No, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Nothing to do with Richard’s official responsibilities.”

“Who is that dismal person?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Would I know the name?”

“I doubt it.” I could excuse dismal , which was easily justified. Yet I felt an obligation to be as flinty as Richard, on his and Perkus’s behalves, rather than to act as sentimentally undone as I felt, under the twin sway of the disastrous watershed occasion-I was as amazed at myself for waiting so long to put Perkus Tooth into a framework of emergency as I was that I had finally done so, and that it had, seemingly, worked-and my irrelevant and inappropriate responsiveness to Anne Sprillthmar’s voice, height, and scent.

She made one last bid for conversation. “Amazing about this weather, don’t you think?”

“I guess-yes.” I didn’t want to think about the snow, though in our cab we were surrounded at all sides by a theater of white chaos. The snow seemed to be thinking about us. That would do for now. Anne Sprillthmar got out and found herself another cab, smiling placidly through a wiped porthole in my window to let me know I’d done no damage to her undamageable serene curiosity about me and other things.

Richard Abneg stuffed Perkus into the cab just a moment later. He’d got him into several layers of charity sports-gear junk to insulate his skeleton from the cold, and a fleabag hat I thought I’d never seen, until I recognized it as the fur tower Biller had once sported, now crushed and matted, as if Ava had been regularly humping it. Ocelot, I remembered. Perkus seemed to be waking from a spell, slowly. “Who was that woman, Chase?”

“You better ask Richard.”

Richard pushed in at Perkus’s door, securing Perkus on the hump seat, hands cradling his knobby corduroy knees. A few bits of language, words and letters jaggedly snipped from their contexts, still clung to his pants amid the melting snowflakes. The cabby’s lush incense didn’t blot a certain doggy, pukey, unshowered smell. I told him where to take us.

“Is that your new girlfriend, Richard? What happened to the Hawkman?”

Richard might have known better than to try to wait him out.

“You make a beautiful pair. Beautiful coats.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a journalist doing a profile.” Before Perkus could pry it from him, Richard added, “For The New Yorker.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Is Avedon going to take your picture?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Perkus was disturbingly gleeful through his debris and hiccups. His eyes were thrilled, one with Richard, the other with the surrounding scene. “So you’ve done it, Abneg! How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“How does it feel to finally ride the hegemonic bulldozer?”

Richard let this line die in silence. Our cab got lucky shooting downtown, then made slow sticky progress crossing west on Thirty-fourth Street. Perkus, unanswered, ground into his silent management of the jarring hiccups, sometimes seeming to murmur between them to himself, not daring to speak. “I need to walk Ava,” he said suddenly.

“Chase will go back and walk Ava,” said Richard, smoothly delegating.

“Maybe you should call Sadie Zapping,” Perkus mused. He spoke as if conjuring a figure in mist, some fallen Valkyrie or minor archangel.

“I’ll do that,” I said. I had no idea if this was possible, but I’d be willing to try. I didn’t plan on abandoning Perkus anytime too soon. The Friendreth’s volunteers, Sadie or another, would certainly look in on the dog before long.

“Perkus is probably wondering what kind of doctor he’ll be seeing,” said Richard, his voice weary, as he craned his head at the snow-clotted traffic. He’d fallen into a queer oblique habit of addressing us each through the other, perhaps a measure of how badly he’d been rattled by Anne Sprillthmar’s questions.

“Strabo Blandiana,” I said. “They’ve met before. He’ll be familiar with Perkus’s history.”

“The Romanian quack,” said Richard darkly. “I know who he is.”

“He’s a Chinese practitioner,” I said.

“Chase must think I’m out of balance,” said Perkus humorously.

“Ironic,” said Richard.

“No, it is ironic,” said Perkus, his voice an ember reigniting in a damp bonfire, cheek muscle frogging beneath his Unabomber beard. “Given all that’s off balance around here!” He was revving up another of his hiccologues. “Seriously, I’ve got to talk with you, Richard. A lot of this, uh, stuff I’ve been working on is completely lost on Chase.”