Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

Sledge and I stood in the only bare zone, around his kitchen table, a sort of processing station that included a digital scale for weighing buds and two Tupperware bins full of Lucite boxes, one loaded with empties, the other with those already bulging with zesty-looking wreaths and braids of dope. Between our feet rolled several empty Starbucks to-go cups and crumpled white delicatessen bags. I wouldn’t have been shocked to have a leaf-cutter bee alight on my knuckle, but none did.

“I’m sorry about your friend Perkus.” As before, Sledge seemed to be half asleep, a nodding dormouse. His words squeaked, as if they slipped past unguarded sentries on tiptoe. I wondered if it was possible to die of yawning, as one died of hiccups.

“How did you know?”

“Apparently somebody notified the Times . Their fact-checker called Oona this morning about some details in the obituary.”

I wasn’t interested in having Oona’s reaction to the news, at least not in Sledge’s paraphrase, so I changed the subject. I plucked up one of the full Lucite boxes. Though unlabeled, it had a familiar weight and ambiance. “Do you do business with someone called Foster Watt?”

Sledge pursed his lips in mild gray surprise. “Among others…” He spoke almost introspectively, as though I’d forced him to realize he did business with anyone at all.

“Why doesn’t Oona buy directly from you?”

“Oh, gosh, I’d never ask her to pay.”

I suppose Oona would have been glad to have Perkus cheat her on the back end and pocket the difference, as I’d always suspected he did. It was Oona’s way of throwing Perkus a periodic donation without causing him to lose face. I wondered if she even smoked as much as she purchased, or whether she simply ferried it back to Sledge to recycle into his supply, a trick to give her pity gesture double value.

“Oona isn’t here, is she?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Not hidden in her apartment?”

“Do you want to have a look? I have the key.” Sledge’s air was slyly apathetic, as if he might be curious himself to see if she was there, and felt no more loyal to her than to me at the moment. “I was just going in to see if she had some orange juice, anyway. Would you like a glass of orange juice?”

“No, thank you. Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Oh, she left a message. She told me to tell you to meet her at the museum at four o’clock.”

It was just after two. I’d have time to return to my apartment and walk Ava. First, though I believed I understood my instructions, I needed to be sure. “The museum?”

“The Metropolitan,” said Sledge. He scratched his invisible left eyebrow with the tip of his thumb, gently. His whole body seemed a kind of eraser. I imagined if he rubbed himself too hard he’d crumble away. Perhaps I found myself prickly confronted with one of life’s obvious Gnuppets, being confirmed as one myself. “She said you’d know where.”

“Yes, thank you. I do.”

“Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Be kind to her if you can.”

By the time I crossed Park and Madison, retracing the tiger’s park-ward pilgrimage of the night before, the city had accustomed itself, struggled to a half-life, snow dredged right and left, most parked cars only sculpture. The four o’clock sun was already in submission to the high wintry haze over the Hudson, the light feeble, and when I found myself at the foot of the mountainous museum, the park behind made a dark screen only relieved by a pale-blue snowy band, bright filling in an ominous sandwich of night. The Metropolitan, though mostly uninhabited, was open for business as usual, collecting its imperial “suggested donation” and handing out its little tin badges of entry, the whole engine not so much resolute as indomitable or blithe. The great building housing the art museum was an island city itself, or a virtual universe or space module, operating according to its own necessities, perhaps with its own mayor, and it wasn’t hard to picture it plunging onward unchanged though the surrounding city might be in ruins, as Perkus Tooth had imagined New Jersey or Staten Island already to be. Treasures lived in these vaults never seen except by curatorial guildsmen; a given human form drifting beneath these monumental ceilings was of no consequence to the larger story of the building as it pushed through time.

I knew my way through the echoing maze to the Asian galleries, and within them, to the Chinese Garden Court, though I couldn’t say whether I’d passed this way a handful of times or hundreds, whether last week or not in years. (What I couldn’t remember could fill a book, one written by a ghostwriter.) The court had a smell, one I’d just now previewed in Sledge’s pot factory, of controlled indoor growth. The museum’s internal weather, its vast thermostatic lungs, carried this scent along the neighboring corridors, and if I’d been lost I might have followed it to the place where Oona waited, in the shadow of the teak bower and slate-shingle roof, looking down onto the tiny curved bridge and the arranged rock garden, all the marvelous stuff that had been shipped here and re-created with such immaculate fakery. I wasn’t lost. My footsteps were full of intent, of personal purpose. What made a better model of free will than a walker in the city? I could have gone anywhere, even hailed a taxicab and asked to be taken across one of the bridges, or through the Lincoln Tunnel, to call Perkus’s bluff.

But I was tired of models, even ones as cute and complete as the Chinese Garden Court. I didn’t want to model free will, I wanted to embody it. What I’d learned was that I didn’t. Even if every worst suspicion Perkus had urged on me was untrue (they couldn’t all be), I’d been forced to understand I was an actor in a script. As according to my long training, in my only avocation. And I was a less-out-of-work actor than I’d believed. Those obnoxious young producers I’d lunched with had enlisted me in the role of my lifetime, after all. I was wrong to think their script had never arrived. I’d obviously memorized my part so well that I could lose myself inside it, forget it was a script, live it as my own life. I was the ultimate Method actor, better than Brando-or as bad, I suppose, as any performer on Jerry Springer who, having agreed to pretend to be defiantly astounded by some cartoon version of their life, then feels the emotions surge in him for real when the red light blinks on and the studio audience begins hooting. My script’s updates arrived periodically in The New York Times in the form of Janice’s letters, and all of Manhattan was my studio audience.

I wanted to think I was here to enact free will at last, as I came to where Oona stood at the railing, overlooking the lily pads and bamboo in the court’s shallow waters. So far, so good: my footsteps had carried me all this way into the museum, the blocking quite perfect, but when it came time to speak I found my lines were missing. Then I recalled I’d been supplied with my line the night before, in the hospital waiting room.

“Perkus told me a riddle, but he wouldn’t give me the answer,” I said.

“Shoot,” said Oona. She raised her hands to make a little mime show of it, surrendering to my nonexistent weapon.

“Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet?”

“Oh, sure,” said Oona, not meeting my eye. “She fucked the writer.”

“Ah.”

“Everyone knows that one.”

“Maybe in your circle,” I said defensively. It would be as near as I’d come to saying to her that I couldn’t try to live anymore inside her boundary, her circle , or glancing against it, as I mostly had been-that with Perkus’s release from his hiccups, and having read and reread the last weakening report from Janice Trumbull, those words Oona could only risk letting me hear through her forlorn devices, I now found myself also released, into a different life, however unknown. Post-Oona, post-Janice, now that I knew the two were one and the same.