Chronic City

CHAPTER Fourteen

Yet for all I felt bankrupt and stranded that day as I slumped back to my empty turret, a Rapunzel unbeckoned from below, not even raving sick and feverish anymore, just as natty clean and straight of posture and pointlessly deferential as I’d been before I’d ever met Perkus Tooth or Oona Laszlo, too noble to pursue strange redheads in elevators, not noble enough to live out my scripted role as Janice Trumbull’s betrothed, rather somewhere hopelessly between, I was, in fact, about to be rescued. As if they’d been testing me, Perkus and Oona gathered me back into the strange consolations of their company just before I petulantly flunked out of it.

In other words, I only had to stare at my telephone for a day and a half to will it to ring. It was Perkus who called, the following night at nine, but as if by miracle or design, Oona was in tow.

“So, where have you been?”

“Hello, Perkus.”

“You were sick? Why didn’t you call?” I knew him well enough to hear how his tone of grievance contained both an apology and a commandment to pretend our Second Avenue street squabble had never taken place.

“I was barely able to lift the phone. There was nothing anyone could do, I just had to sweat it out.”

“Why don’t you come over now?”

“Well-”

I was surely going to be convinced, but my sulkiness hadn’t quite dissolved. Then, behind Perkus, Oona’s voice chimed in to dissolve it. “Come on, Chase, get with the program!” As if I’d already missed an appointment.

“We’re hanging out,” said Perkus, now with a shade of chagrin, or even pleading, as if he really needed my presence to buffer Oona’s. Women, I began to think, embarrassed him per se, made him feel goofy or uneasy, when they didn’t make him furious. “It’s not the same around here without you.”

Well, it wasn’t the same around here, either, I wanted to joke. I did feel I’d vacated my life somehow. Instead I told him I’d be right over. Needless to say.

Doing so, rushing back to Eighty-fourth Street, I was steering into a storm’s eye. Things in Perkus Tooth’s apartment could never be as they were, because they’d never been any particular way for more than two evenings in a row, really. Nevertheless, I was to briefly reenter a dream I’d idealized. One of life’s oases, those moments that come less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.

That first night I was shocked to arrive and find them on Perkus’s living-room floor together, Perkus cross-legged like a kindergartener, scissors looped on thumb and forefinger as he browsed half-mangled magazines, Oona kneeling on folded knees, squinting at scraps of text, forgoing her glasses, I guessed, in anticipation of my arrival. They had a broadside in progress between them, one in the late manner, made entirely of collaged elements, devoid of Perkus’s distinctive scribbled hand, Oona resuming her glue duties-perhaps I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten nostalgic around here! Yet they’d only settled, so far, on a single image, smack in the center of a large sheet of drawing paper: the newsprint photo of the polar bear on his raft of ice, which Perkus had latched onto during our last visit. The image, raggedly clipped free of surrounding text, now sat smeared and wrinkling in an excess of rubber cement, worse for wear, bordered by the mute page. Oona’s hair was rubber-banded up into two blunt, irregular ponytails, as if to make an extra joke about my discovering the pair in their childish arrangement on the carpet.

“Hello, Chase Insteadman.” She grinned up at me wryly and lowered her voice to a laconic drawl, as if playing the sheriff in a satiric Western.

“Hello, Oona.”

“Haven’t see you in a while.”

I suppose we weren’t counting that curtailed encounter in her apartment. It now seemed totally unreal. “Too long,” I said keeping it noncommittal.

“We’re making a poster,” she said. “For old times’ sake, while trying not to, you know, feel old.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It’s on the theme of isolation,” she said. At this Perkus tilted up one goonish eye, and one severe. “Excuse me,” Oona corrected. “It’s on the theme of bears.”

“Why feel the need to choose?” I said.

“Great point.” She slugged Perkus on the arm. “Bears and isolation.”

In my conception Perkus and Oona were enemies or contestants, yet I’d never known what was at stake. Now Perkus was wholly caught up in Oona’s ironic frolic, or frolicsome irony, whichever it was. He seemed cowed and catalyzed at once. I wondered if Oona was thrilled to reclaim her place as his Tweedledee, if the nostalgic gesture hadn’t opened some door into discarded possibilities, taking her by surprise. She might have set out to please Perkus just to please (and unnerve) me, then found herself pleased, too.

Or perhaps this was my projection. I might be crediting to Oona the thrill of relief I felt to reenter the Eighty-fourth Street sensorium, to hear Perkus’s strange music (if I asked what was playing he’d surely pretend to be shocked I didn’t know it), to step into his arena of exhaled fumes, knowing that soon enough I’d exhale plenty myself (I’d absentmindedly catalogued the presence of a fresh row of joints on the kitchen table, and one, half smoked, tipped into a tray), to see his information hectically distributed across the living-room afghan, a puzzle whose pleasure was its insolvability, to find myself restored to my small shelf in his collection. It had taken just one disinvitation to make me glimpse exile.

Perkus tried to fit a clipping containing a paragraph of small type into the white expanse surrounding the bear photo. Over his shoulder, I read: Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished… The way he shifted the clipping from spot to spot, intently evaluating, then rejecting, each position, suggested Perkus was trying to believe in the worthy coexistence of those words with the conundrum of the bear, almost as if hoping that the paragraph could comprise a rescue, make a bridge or raft back to the mainland the bear could hop across to safety. But no, the new element fell short, no matter where he placed it, and so Perkus swept it into a pile of others that lay to one side and behind him. I scanned the other tatters, until my eyes lit on a recent clipping from The New Yorker, a Talk of the Town describing the city’s tormented infatuation with Janice Trumbull’s medical saga. At this I turned away, not wanting to know what else might be auditioned to fit the theme of bears and isolation.

“Light up a smoke, if you want,” said Perkus, the eyes in the back of his head telling him I’d shifted back toward the kitchen. “We’ve got more on the way, actually,” he added. “Watt should be coming around any minute now, just so you know.”

“Waiting for Watt,” said Oona, in singsong, not looking up from the old magazine she browsed. She unfurled the centerfold from a crackling thick copy of Playboy, circa the early ’70s at the latest, given the model’s coy mascara and bobbed hair, and the Technicolor wrongness of her aureoles. “Who’ll tell us what’s what. And sell us some pot.”

“Oona only comes around here to score,” said Perkus cheerily, at last daring to jab back. “I no longer hold that against her.”

Foster Watt did come and lay out his wares, though not before we’d attempted to use up the last of the present supply. The poor pot dealer was shivering, still locked into his uniform of red vinyl jacket and no head covering, despite the cold, and he must have felt, coming into that kitchen, that he’d stepped onto a vaudeville stage. We were so high we finished each other’s lines like the Marx Brothers, even if the result was mostly a verbal version of a game of exquisite corpse. Perkus offered Watt a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, and Watt took it and struck a pose of claustrophobic cool by the door while the three of us slavered over his open case of goods, running our reddened and hysterical orbs over the rainbow fonts that differentiated the plastic boxes crammed full of fertile buds. Oona kept surprising me. I’d thought she flinched from direct encounters with the drug trade, but she seemed positively exuberant to see Watt, who enlarged the pool of victims for her global mockery.

“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me…” she said. “What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”

“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question. Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball. It was merely a question of which answer would come up. “Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”

“Ice,” said Perkus. “Where’s the Ice?”

“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”

“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed. “Very, uh, topical selection, Foster.”

“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt. “You ought to try it.”

Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table. Oona went on listing brand names. “Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”

Watt didn’t even trouble to shrug, just ignored her. I suspect she’d lost him at “topical.” Oona couldn’t let it go, though. “Somebody needs to get some of their own material,” she said again pointedly, as if she were a professor offering a plagiarizing student a first warning. Watt took it lightly enough. Yet even after he left, bearing away a large stack of our pooled twenties in return for eight of his Lucite containers-Perkus’s five portions of Ice, a couple of the old standby, Chronic, which vanished into Oona’s purse, and one Northern Lights I purchased as a morbid souvenir-Oona circled back to the topic. “Don’t you think Watt isn’t playing fair, Perkus?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”

“Tailoring his material to his audience like that,” she said. “It sort of breaks the illusion, don’t you think?” She kept calling it “material,” though it seemed to me an odd word for names snatched from the headlines.

“What illusion?” Perkus rolled a joint while he contended with her.

“That, you know, there’s an ancient and mighty marijuana tree somewhere in South America called El Chronic, named that by some Mayan priest a thousand centuries ago, for its special properties of transubstantiation-you know. It just doesn’t seem right some skanky Irish kid from Chelsea Clinton or wherever it is Watt lives to rename this ancient essence ‘Balthazar’ or ‘Derek Jeter’ just because he has a laser printer and a captive audience.”

“I don’t think it’s Watt,” said Perkus slyly, seeming to take her concern seriously. “He’s just a middleman. I think it’s someone else giving them names. Maybe actually even a Mayan priest, one who’s just, you know, keeping up with the news.”

“Then it’s him I want a word with,” said Oona. “Can you get the Mayan priest’s beeper number?”

“So,” said Perkus, the key word signaling he’d become interested at last, had found something he could work with, “maybe we’ve got the polarities reversed. It’s crucial we remember to question basic assumptions.”

“Polarities reversed… how?” The hungry mind supplying this query was my own. Perkus’s paradoxes were just what I’d been starved of, no matter that they gave me a dangerous sense of reality slippage. I’d become an addict and needed replenishment, as much as Perkus had needed Watt’s visit.

“What if The New York Times is getting its material from Watt’s brand names, rather than the other way around?” said Perkus. At this, his revelatory eye exulted, though we’d no time to linger on the point-Perkus had reminded himself he had a sort of front page of his own to consider, an edition in progress. “Maybe the bear is enough,” he said to Oona, musingly. “Maybe the empty border around the picture says something nothing else could ever say…”

“We might not even need the bear,” said Oona.

That first night of reunion, and the ones that came after, turned out to be episodes hinged in the middle. A brief frigid walk back to my building and Oona and I were at it. Actually, that night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment. Our December fucks made what had come before seem like glimpses, tourist views from some highway pull-off-now we abandoned the car and climbed the guardrail and built a hut in that landscape below, where no one could see, to dwell for a while in a place from which, when we climbed out woolly-eyed and helplessly grinning afterward, we were astonished to find any highway so close, it was so primeval.

This wasn’t the sort of thing I was inclined to examine for causes, a gift horse, a windfall of sex like I’d known just a time or two before. I didn’t want to think my own intensity drew in any measure on what I’d turned from: Janice’s weird crises, off away in space. Oona and I pursued expression of something that had zip to do with anyone else, I tried to believe it desperately. As for what anyone else might judge, that was obvious, and irrelevant. However this chance had come, we’d taken it. We didn’t discuss it-after leaving Perkus’s place we barely spoke. If I was looking for causes, there might be one. A few hours with Perkus and all Oona’s mordancy was bantered out of her, and my need to play the dopey straight man used up, too. All talk could fall by the wayside.

We weren’t a secret from Perkus, though we kept our hands to ourselves in his company. I didn’t know whether Oona had spoken to him privately, or if our state was obvious after that first night. Perkus granted it, no more. Nothing said in hearing of all three, that might be the rule. He did acknowledge the fact to me alone, one early evening in the middle of the month, he and I under way at Watt’s product while Oona slaved to meet a deadline, her panicking editor having pleaded for some chapters, some evidence of progress on the Noteless book. But Perkus only arrived at the subject indirectly, as a passing remark during an alienated disquisition on what he called “pair bonding.”

“So, it’s not one hundred percent a received notion,” he began, as if a topic heading had been announced, or revealed on a banner only he could see. “I mean, I always used to feel critical of anyone who fell into pair-bonding, like they were failing the test of reimagining all the basic premises.”

“What basic premises?”

“The basic premises of existence,” he said impatiently. “But then, really, if you pay attention to animals, there’s tons of pair-bonding. I was thinking about Abneg’s eagles.”

“You’re saying, basically, birds do it, bees do it, even the, uh, Chinese do it…” I could never remember the finish of that lyric.

Perkus revealed no sign he took this as mockery. I’d merely shown I grokked. “Exactly! In that context, you really can’t blame people, can you? I mean, it tends to happen, even when you think you’re in one kind of arrangement, some other group or affiliation, but then members of your group keep sort of defaulting into these pairs… I guess you should never be surprised, huh?”

“I’d say no.” Was I falling into some trap?

“Like Abneg and the Hawkman,” he mused. A fuming joint between his knuckles, Perkus studied the wending smoke as if casting distantly for a second example, though it was certainly near enough at hand. “Or you and Laszlo. It’s the most natural thing in the world, I don’t know why I should be in any way surprised. Janice Trumbull is out of reach, and so far as the animal part of you is concerned, she might as well not exist. She’s only an idea, a whisper in your fore-brain. The rest of you was howling like one of those eagles for a mate. And so then came along Oona Laszlo. Like dancing, you look around the room, and take a partner.”

“I don’t think eagles howl,” I said. I took none of this personally. Oona and I were too ecstatic these days to be damaged by Perkus’s addled paraphrase. It was only interesting to hear him find a way to let me know he knew.

“We’ll see about that,” he said humorously, rising to his shelves. He dug out the tall blue Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey. “There’s something else I want to check anyhow.”

“What’s that?”

“Whether eagles are monogamous.”

Oh, Tooth. I watched him hunt in the book, as if it really held the clue he needed. It didn’t. That clue served as a bookmark in a P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves Omnibus on my bedside table: the wrinkled card on which Lindsay of Jackson Hole had scribbled her phone number. I didn’t dare mention it. That project had too much calamity in it, and I was selfishly willing to let Perkus go unlaid to keep the peace I now enjoyed. So we’d explore the dating profile of apartment eagles instead, or lapse into some other subject even more imaginary and arcane. Why was Perkus so determined to be sexually lonely? I asked this question of myself, not him.

One of these nights I came in and found them back at their nostalgic samizdat, organizing what looked like a finished project, in piles on the living-room floor. Someone had done some photocopying, and Perkus had apparently resolved the conundrum of the polar bear by creating two broadsides: one with only the bear, the other with the bear almost blotted out with a proliferation of other clippings, text excerpts, and illustrations (including, I noticed, at least one scientific diagram explaining Northern Lights’ possible procedure for docking an unmanned scow of medical supplies). Somewhere between these two lay the truth Perkus wished to unveil. The photocopies had none of the grandeur of his famous broadsides, arrayed in painful evidence throughout the apartment, but I was impressed that the edition even existed. Evidence of outside destinations for Perkus, other than Jackson Hole, was always startling, he was such a creature of that apartment. But that was the least of it, for now he and Oona were pulling on their winter coats, preparing for an old-school postering run. I found myself enlisted, after a quick smoke.

“Look out for the graffiti patrol,” said Perkus, once we’d bumped out into the cold streets with our freight of posters and masking tape. “They travel in black vans. Arnheim’s quality-of-life initiatives are no joke, ever since Gladwell and his fucking Tipping Point.” (Here was another of Perkus’s sacred enemies; I recalled one early rant blaming Gladwell for the “commodification of whim.”) Once Perkus declared this, black vans seemed to be everywhere, though if these held quality-of-life police they looked to me to have bigger fish to fry. Oona, unruffled, capriciously taped a poster, one of those in which the bear was jumbled over with other stuff, around a lamppost. Mostly, though, our trouble was we couldn’t find places to put the things. Perkus exhorted us to find construction sites, but the blocks between Second and Third Avenues didn’t have any of these. “This whole town used to be one big claptrap collage,” Perkus complained. “Nobody even removed posters, they were in too much of a hurry, they’d just layer them over with other stuff. Sometimes somebody would rip away a chunk and reveal seven or eight different layers, and I’d see something I put up six months or a year earlier resurface in a new context…”

It was cold for reminiscing, but I didn’t want to let him down too abruptly. “That was a… certain amount of time ago,” I said. “And a little farther downtown.”

Oona went on affixing posters wherever she could, her breath billowing steam as she warmed herself with the effort, her scrappy winding dance with the dispenser making her resemble a kind of bat in her black layers and loose hair. I felt I should take her example, but it seemed to me the bear-only version, which was what I carried, when bound to a lamppost looked far too much like a “lost dog” flyer, only one lacking a phone number and the promise of a reward.

“This way-” Perkus whisked us from block to block, searching, I think, for the door into 1988 or thereabouts. In lieu of this we slapped a desultory photocopy on a bus shelter or two, always lowering heads guiltily at the sight of passersby, ordinary Manhattanites whom I couldn’t keep from suspecting we’d typically meet at book parties or gallery openings-me and Oona, that is. But tonight we were enveloped in Perkus’s cloak of banditry. We should have been smoking cheroots and sporting eye patches. Whatever reputation Perkus might have once conjured for himself by his vigilante dissertations, these present scraps of visual noise couldn’t have been more meaningless on these walls if they’d been gum wrappers. The meaning resided in our gesture, silly as it was. Or there was no meaning. I began stuffing our posters into trash cans when the others weren’t looking. I would have liked to set them afire to warm our hands, but I suspected that might have finally drawn some quality-of-life-enforcement attention.

Circling back to Perkus’s at last, bankrupt of posters due to my illicit disposals, speaking with chattering teeth of the coffee Perkus was about to brew, we found ourselves confronted at his doorstep not by the usual Brandy’s drunks-it really was too chilly tonight-but by a weird sentinel presence planted in our path. He wore a long leather coat with a floppy buckle, a thick-ribbed purple turtleneck rising from inside the coat’s wide collar, and an absurd imperial fur tower of a hat, under which glared the whites of his eyes in a mask of darkness, making him resemble Orson Welles as Othello. But that mask wasn’t blackface. We all had been primed by Perkus to be met by some figure of authority, and Biller’s new costume looked anything but secondhand. He might have been deputized to arrest us, if the mayor’s graffiti squad had been configured on a Blaxploitation theme. Biller was famously boycotted from the building, but it was hard to imagine Perkus’s neighbors challenging him now. Somebody had laid out some money to dress the homeless man this way. Then I remembered that Biller wasn’t homeless anymore. The other day Perkus had been trying to explain Biller’s weird new apartment, where Biller lived, Perkus said, “with forty or fifty dogs.” I chalked the dogs up to exaggeration, and forgot about the apartment until now.

Before I could express my surprise, Perkus and Biller embraced, Perkus vanishing for an instant into the larger man’s clasp. “Come inside, it’s too cold,” said Perkus. “You want some coffee, Biller?”

“That would be nice.” His voice was still gentle, even meekly hesitant, but now you imparted to this gentleness a certain majesty, a noble restraint. The clothes made the man.

“You’re looking fantastic,” said Perkus, sweeping us all inside. If there was a grain of overcompensation in Perkus’s heartiness with Biller, I assumed this had less to do with any guilt toward the silent wandering figure than a relief that the timing of Biller’s appearance would blot out contemplation of the lame broadsiding session. (In fact, we’d never mention it again.) “So, you know Chase and Oona, don’t you?” Perkus asked belatedly. Well, Biller did or didn’t, but he nodded, taking us in together as Perkus’s introduction had suggested, ChaseandOona.

Indoors, we defrosted our paper-cut fingertips around stingingly hot mugs while Perkus prompted Biller to explain his new good fortune, the respectability he’d attained through the strange backdoor of his laptop computer, or explain it as well as he could, anyway, to us Internet primitives. Biller sat, his shiny leather coat and monstrous hat shed, resplendent in his purple sweater, commandingly patient with our stupidity. Had we heard of Yet Another World? No?

It was difficult to explain, and it didn’t help that Perkus tried to help Biller paint the picture while plainly not grasping it himself. Neither a video game nor an online community, exactly, Yet Another World was, in itself, only a set of templates and tools, “a place with stuff,” in Biller’s words. “A place where you can do things.” You might go there to build a virtual house, to furnish it with the virtual objects you liked. Much of it, according to Biller, was pretty much like the world out here-homes, with belongings inside. You also made yourself, there behind the screen, and the self you made was something Biller called an “avatar.” Again, many visitors to Yet Another World settled for realism in this regard, their avatars little more than digitally prettified versions of their usual selves, spines a little straighter, waists narrower, tits bigger, and so on. Many were content to shamble through this potential paradise in cliques of sexy avatars browsing virtual shops and cruising or flirting, as in a mall. “Man is born free,” Perkus offered, “and everywhere is in chain stores.”

Things got a little more interesting in other precincts, Biller went on to indicate. It was this infinity of possible selves and possible neighborhoods, the total and endless expansibility of Yet Another World, which gave it its magnificence. Deviants and avant-gardists could build neighborhoods as solid, in their way, as those of the suburbanites-kingdoms of barter, Dada, or rape, castles of chaos. Grown-ups masqueraded as children, men as women, and so on. Others created inhuman selves, gorgons, strolling penises, pornified Gnuppets. All ethics were local, and endlessly up for negotiation. Declaring whether Yet Another World was or wasn’t a game might be as difficult as declaring whether life was.

While I was mesmerized, Oona showed her typical impatience once she’d grasped the concept. Like a Noteless chasm, she’d glanced into the unusual thing and now wanted to get back to business, or have a drink and get laid, or whatever. It wasn’t that Oona wasn’t interested in infinity-she was, only just briefly. Possibly it was her ghostwriter’s instincts that made her wish to break the frame of the Escher drawing Biller and Perkus were elaborating before us, and examine it for fingerprints, find the human gist. “Biller,” she interrupted, “if you don’t mind my asking, how did all this admittedly marvelous virtual Communism buy you a real ocelot hat?” It was just like her to have nailed the breed of fur.

Biller understood her question perfectly, but he had to forage for language that would elucidate it to us one-worlders. “There’s a certain kind of stuff people like to collect,” he said. “They call it ‘treasure.’ It’s different from the other stuff in there, it isn’t easy to make. There’s a limit on how much you can make, and it takes a long time, people don’t like that. So you can buy someone else’s treasure, or you can steal it-”

“That’s what you do!” said Oona, exhilarated. “You’re a virtual thief. I love it.”

Biller shook his head, not insulted, just moving at a slower pace and unwilling to be hurried. “I manufacture treasure, and sell it. I’m a craftsman.”

“You mean you sell it to virtual people?” asked Oona.

“Real people,” said Biller. “They pay real money.”

“You’ve done awfully well for yourself.”

“I make good treasure. People pay a lot.”

“That’s what he was doing all that time in the alley,” said Perkus. “Making… virtual… treasure.” He seemed to find it pitiable.

“You mean you’re gainfully employed,” said Oona, not concealing disappointment, either. Here her radar for scandal wasn’t so unlike Perkus’s romance of dissidence-each was a little unthrilled at a secret life consisting of dull industry. Admittedly, this was something we all three had in common, for I’d surely done nothing in life except duck a day job.

Before Biller left he jotted down his new apartment’s address so Perkus could contact him, explaining that there was no telephone. Then he asked to use Perkus’s computer. We all shuffled in, assuming that we’d get some glimpse of Yet Another World, but after Perkus transferred his phone line, Biller instead logged on to the city’s Tiger Watch Web site. The monster had last been seen two days ago, on Sixty-eighth Street by a couple of Hunter undergraduates, rustling beneath an opened metal grating at a work site. There had been no casualties or damage, and the site ranked risk of an attack tonight as Yellow, or Low-to-Moderate. Biller sensed we were watching over his shoulder.

“I like to check before I go out.”

“That’s fine,” Perkus assured him.

“Do you want me to set up an alert on your desktop? It blinks if the code goes to Red.”

“That’s okay. I’m not online enough for it to matter.”

“Can you show us your… World?” said Oona.

“This computer’s too slow,” said Biller. He retopped his head with the ocelot, and was gone.

“I don’t want to worry anyone,” said Oona half an hour later, seemingly apropos of nothing, “but Biller’s little wonderland might eventually bring about the destruction of our universe.”

“Huh?” We’d been smoking marijuana, I’d been scheming on shifting Oona and myself out the door, shifting our evening to a more physical plane. Perkus had been auditioning CD tracks for us, airing rock groups he claimed as precursors to or missing links between other rock groups I’d never heard of. And I was confused before Oona had even spoken. When these evenings dragged into epics, I sometimes wished I could keep Perkus in better focus. Oona’s ferocities frequently nudged him to the margins here on his own main stage. But I had no option of asking her leave in order to be alone with Perkus, so I’d opt instead to remove her and myself. There were rewards.

“Have you heard of simulated worlds theory?” she asked both of us. “It’s something Emil Junrow was working on before he died, I actually wrote about it in I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of it,” said Perkus, voice conveying a defensive uncertainty. “What’s that got to do with Biller?”

“If you understand it, you must realize that the likelihood is that we’ll be shut down once we develop our own virtual worlds,” she said, plainly mocking. By using the word understand she meant to say she knew that Perkus, and certainly myself, didn’t.

“Please explain,” I said.

“Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it’s possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings, something like Biller’s avatars, who sincerely believe they’re truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you’d never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it.”

“Sure,” said Perkus. “Everybody knows that.” He tried to dismiss or encompass Oona’s description before she could complete it. “It’s common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares. I think science established that decades ago, for crying out loud. Your Junrow was-huh! — behind the curve on that one.”

“Right, right,” said Oona slyly. “But here’s the point. If we agree that the odds are overwhelming that it’s already happened, then we’re just one of innumerable universes living in parallel, a series of experiments just to see how things will develop. You know, whether we’ll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever. There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once.”

“Why couldn’t we be the original?” I asked.

“We could be,” said Oona. “But the odds aren’t good. You wouldn’t want to bet on it.”

I didn’t protest to Oona that we felt like the original, to me. I knew she’d say that every fake universe would feel like the original, to its inhabitants. Yet everything around me, every tangy specific in the simulation in which I found myself embedded, militated against the suggestion that it was a simulation: the furls of stale smoke and gritty phosphenes drifting between my eyes and the kitchen’s overhead light, the involuntary memory-echo telling me one of the rock bands Perkus had played was called Crispy Ambulance, a throbbing hangnail I’d misguidedly gnawed at and now worked to ignore, the secret parts of Oona Laszlo I’d uncover and touch and taste within the hour, if my guess was right.

“The problem,” she continued, “is that our own simulated reality might only be allowed to continue if it were either informative or entertaining enough to be worth the computing power. Or anyway, as long as we didn’t use too much, they might not unplug us. That’s assuming there remains some limit on that kind of resource, which all our physical laws suggest would be the case. So the moment we develop our own computers capable of spinning out their own virtual universes-like Yet Another World-we become a drastic drain on their computing power. It’s exponential, because now they have to generate all of our simulations, too. We wouldn’t be worth the trouble at that point, we’d have blown the budget allocated to our particular little simulation. They’d just pull our plug. I mean, they’d have millions of other realities running, they’d hardly miss one. But, you know, too bad for us.”

“By ‘they’ you mean God, I guess.” I was surprised to hear myself use the word.

“Let’s agree to call them ‘our simulators.’”

Now Perkus looked truly terrified. His good eye withdrew, his kooky one reeled. “What should we do?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” said Oona. “Except, if possible, keep our simulators really entertained.” With that she gave me a look. Lecture over. Something else to begin.

How did Perkus occupy himself, when Oona and I left him alone those December nights? Richard Abneg and I used to see him through to the dawn, until one or all of us were dozing in our chairs. Oona and I, on the other hand, typically whipped Perkus and ourselves into a frenzy, then vamoosed. I felt an extra pang this night, discharging him into the wake of Oona’s provocations. Her merry nightmare of simulated worlds was too much the sort of thing Perkus would gnaw over.

Yet he never seemed to begrudge our going. I wondered if Perkus might be bidding on chaldrons all alone, in the dark, after hours. He still hoarded Ice, used other name brands for social smoking. I could so easily picture him, padding in his socks to the CD player to insert the Sandy Bull disk, then lowering the lights and leaning his head into the cowl of the screen’s glow, fingers puttering without angst or undue wishfulness, all possessive lusts dispelled in past attempts, only entering a perfunctory bid for what he no longer imagined he’d win, content to seek the remote embrace of that inexplicable ceramic other-the only variety of pair-bonding Perkus Tooth allowed himself, so far as I could tell. Was this picture real? Who knew? Chaldrons, like Lindsay the waitress and whether Marlon Brando was alive or dead, had joined the list of things we no longer mentioned. Our silence on those subjects was just part of the price we’d paid to enter this oasis, this false calm that had carried me, carried all of us, if I can be trusted to speak for the others, to nearly the end of the year, to the day in late December when things changed again, that irreversible day which began with the mayor’s invitation arriving in the mail.