Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Darnell’s next hijink occurred after processing while we waited for removal to the basement cells, in the care of the senior detectives. Here, lined up at a wall facing the second-story window, we prisoners contemplated in silence the snow falling to earth with punishing steadiness. We couldn’t, however, see over the high window sill to chart its accumulation, which we judged instead by the inches piling improbably atop a streetlight at eye level. Making conversation to no one in particular, Darnell declared that he sold stock by telephone. “No shit?” said one of the detectives. When Darnell lavished a series of investing tips on the earnestly listening cops, he persuaded them. A few even took notes. When he promised he’d make the detectives wealthy if they called their brokers in the morning, one deadpanned, “Fuck that, in the morning I’m firing him, and you got the job,” and we all laughed, Darnell too. Yet he seemed to feel he’d earned no special treatment from the police. The credit Darnell had earned was with us, his natural peers, for having been entertaining.

He entertained us, too, during the interminable wait for fingerprinting in the windowless basement, before we’d even seen our cells, let alone been disbursed to them. He narrated what he’d been doing when arrested, cut loose due to his “call center” having closed early for the storm, he’d been going from one nightspot to another in the snow, trying to get laid -looking for some strange , was how he put it. Then he reassured us, mentioning the worse scrapes he’d been in in his days, the actual prison time he’d shrugged off. We should be happy to know we were in for nothing so bad tonight, we were so obviously just a load of fools harmless to one another and to society. We’d only been arrested to make numbers, to keep the mayor’s lifestyle imperatives satisfied. But we weren’t going home, we should be certain of that, too. No matter what they told us we’d still be here in the morning, and lucky to be seen by a judge before tomorrow afternoon. Like Darnell’s stock tips, this was, alas, persuasive.

Darnell’s final guise was as an angry sleep-talker, from his huddle on that bench. When Richard and I found we could sit together at the shared bars of our two cages, our backs to the wall, to talk, we did so, despite the crud on the floor and the disgruntled chorus coming from those on benches or with their heads propped in their hands, those wishing to soak quietly in their defeat. As my conversation with Richard became the only sound and our keepers even damped the lights, as if guiding a planeload of Atlantic crossers into one of those false, foreshortened overnights to London or Paris, Darnell began adding a keening commentary, his limbs twitching with each exclamation. These nightmare fragments seem to issue from his prisoner’s id. “Clock start the minute you walk in the place,” he warned. Then, “Boy don’t need a life preserver, boy need an ass preserver.” Once, he screamed, “Attica! Attica!”

Richard and I spoke of Perkus Tooth without mentioning his name. Richard’s rage was gone, worn or arrested out of him. He told me a few things I’d been unable to imagine, about Perkus in high school and the single year of NYU he’d managed, and about the birth of Perkus the broadsider, the invisible overnight fame he’d created for himself when the city had still been open to Beat or punk self-invention, that city Perkus had always chided me for failing to know: Frank O’Hara and Joe Brainard, Mailer and Broyard and Krim, Jane Jacobs, Lenny Bruce, Warhol and Lou Reed, all of it, including Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Jim Carroll, poets declaring themselves rock stars before they even had songs, Jean-Michel Basquiat writing SAMO, Philippe Petit crossing that impossible distance of sky between the towers, now unseen for so many months behind the gray fog. Richard left Perkus’s name unspoken but he named a lot of others, threw in a few of his own heroes, too, and if he didn’t mention Perkus’s the reason might be that it would have seemed too complete a processional, the sound of a door being quietly but firmly shut forever.

“Les Non-Dupes?” Richard repeated when I asked, then laughed to himself. “A joke. One day he told me it was the basis of our friendship: we weren’t dupes. The Two Non-Dupes of Horace Mann, he called us. Really he’d only flatter me to set up another teardown session, I’m guessing you know what I mean. He used to mock me for airing out my high-school French, so I insisted we call our gang Les Deux Non-Dupes . We’d shout Les Non-Dupes refusé! at boring assemblies, stupid bullshit like that. Or write it on our homework.”

Richard spoke of himself as much as of Perkus. In return I reminisced, too, of my life before I came to New York City, such as it was. I talked about Bloomington, about becoming an actor in junior high, my emancipation. (I only didn’t mention Janice Trumbull, for I found myself confused about her whenever I tried.) The two of us memorialized Perkus by talking of ourselves, talking simply, as we’d never done before. Murmuring through the bars of those two cells, we were careless about which ears might listen, for we each made certain to say nothing to betray him. Perkus was dead and we protected him the only way we still could, by not offering his secrets in this ashtray of human freedom, littered as it was with stubbed-out ends.

It was close to four when a weary detective came downstairs and began whispering to the pair of keepers that had been stationed here below. I caught a tone of sarcastic delight in their exchange. Then, without raising the lights, the keepers came to our two cells and curled a summoning finger at us where we sat.

“You really got some pull to go with your camel-hair coats,” said one of the cops, impressed despite his chafing tone. “I’d have sworn you was just another pair of bozos.”

“What’s going on?” asked Richard.

“Somebody got a judge out of bed,” said the cop. “So now, you tell me, who are you guys?”

“I’m not sure,” said Richard. “Let me see who got the judge out of bed and I’ll get back to you on that.”

In the booking area we discovered Arnheim’s short aide, the blonde I’d seen maneuvering the mayor at his party. She carried such an air of machinelike destructive efficiency that they should have set her to digging the Second Avenue subway tunnel and saved themselves a lot of heartache. She wore a comically practical parka, snow glistening in the furry unibrow of its hood, and creamy leather boots engulfing her tucked slacks to her knees. When she saw us coming, shuffling moronically, toes curled to keep our feet inside our laceless shoes, she shoved a BlackBerry into her purse, rolled her eyes at Richard, and stuck out her hand to me. “I’m Claire Carter,” she said, and before I could speak, added, “Believe me, I know who you are.”

“Sorry to have woken you. I appreciate your getting us out of here.”

“My driver’s waiting,” she said. “I’d give you both a lift uptown, but I’ve been informed you’ve got about half an hour’s worth of paperwork before they can decommission your shoelaces, so you’re on your own. I spoke to your pregnant common-law wife, Richard, she knows you’re not dead.”

“Claire, have I told you lately to go fuck yourself?”

“You’re welcome.” The smile she brandished was no less convincing than any I’d seen her produce.

A sleepy half hour later Richard and I stepped out, in shoes with laces, onto the white-smothered pavement. The snowfall had eased to a trickle, having satisfied itself to barrage the city beneath a foot or so. The moon was gone, dawn not close, the pillowscape of buried cars and newspaper boxes and trash cans lit only by street-lamp and the red warning blinkers of the scarce passing plows, which seemed as much to be tunneling for their own survival as breaking a useful path for anything that might follow. Nothing tried. The notion of a cab was too forlorn to speak the word aloud. Perkus Tooth was dead and we didn’t deserve a cab and none was given. We trudged, plowing with our feet in our laced soaked salt-ruined shoes six long blocks to the subway, the Lexington line. I wouldn’t have known how to find it, but Richard did. That underworld was steamy and ferocious and constant and a spectral empty car of the 4 train drew us up to Eighty-sixth Street.