Chronic City

CHAPTER Fifteen

I culled it from the mass of junk in my brass mailbox on my way out that morning. Who knew how long it had spent there-I checked that box once a week or so, and then just to bundle the pointless catalogues and credit-card offers into the building’s handy recycling bins. The creamy rectangular envelope, my name and address hand-calligraphied, HIS HONOR JULES ARNHEIM embossed in the upper corner, had some mass or density that tugged downward, and so slipped from the garbagy sheaf, and into my attention, almost as in a card trick. For all that it telegraphed importance, I tucked the envelope into my coat’s inner breast pocket to open in the taxicab, worrying I’d be late. Then I forgot it there for a little while, disconcerted by the early hour and already regretting my awkward mission.

The previous Wednesday I’d emerged from the shower to find Oona with her head cocked, punching impatiently through the messages piled on my answering machine, whose digital readout had been blinking Full for a few days already. She turned to offer a crookedly sweet smile, unashamed at her prying. I suppose I was transparently hapless in this regard: Oona could feel confident she was my only secret, so what would she be prying after? She’d restored the volume so the messages were audible; the voice of my old publicist Foley leaked from the machine while Oona’s finger hovered over the Next button.

“You’ve got to do something about this,” said Oona, with an uncommon air of sympathy.

“About what?”

“You need to go out once in a while and represent,” she said gently. “It’s your only job.”

Oona tapped past the blipping first syllables of the last few unheard messages, the bulk of them Foley’s greeting, repeated in descending tones of resignation. I’d certainly known it was Foley’s calls I’d been ignoring, even after I lowered the machine’s volume. Janice’s diagnosis had brought a raft of media requests, mercifully channeled through my lecture agency. After so long having nothing for me, I suppose they might be a little frustrated I wasn’t pouncing on these fresh opportunities. What I couldn’t fathom was what Oona thought she was doing nudging my denial’s manhole cover and peeking underneath.

I toweled my hair, convenient cover. “I’m not an expert on decaying orbits or foot cancer, you know. They want me to wring my hands and talk about how much I love her.”

“Well, that’s easy then, since you do love her.”

I stared. I didn’t know why Oona insisted on it, but I was less sure of my love each time she did. Perhaps that was her reason.

“I’ll help you sort through these if you like.”

“I think if you hit Delete twice it erases them all.”

By the time I was dressed she’d cleared the machine, but had also written out, on a lined yellow pad she kept in her coat pocket, a list of the outlets requesting interviews, then begun crossing out the majority of them. “Don’t bother with these… this you’ve already missed… look, Chase, you should at least do the Brian Lehrer Show. It isn’t sensational or hysterical, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The whole city tunes in to WNYC, you get a lot of bang for your buck.”

“What if I want… no bang?”

“We all have to do our part.” Oona’s encouragement was strangely tender, like a cornerman exhorting a jittery boxer back into the ring. I found myself not wanting to let her down. If it was for Oona, I could talk about Janice once or twice, exhibit my heartbreak and confusion. No one would ever known how little I remembered, and if I wanted details I only had to read the newspaper.

“Call your friend Foley,” said Oona, tearing off the top sheet, on which she’d heavily circled the radio invitation she favored. She left it beside my phone, then reloaded her pockets and tugged her skinny leather gloves over her knuckles. “Bye for now.”

“Foley’s not my friend,” I said. “She’s my publicist.”

“Okay, call your publicist.”

“You’re my friend.”

“I’m your whatever.”

It wasn’t the twenty-minute segment of airtime to which I’d consented that unnerved me now. I could call on old vocal prowess; for me, voice-over had been the least difficult task in performance, while embodiment was the more esoteric art, and I was rusty. A voice issuing in the void could claim anything and persuade easily enough. If Brian Lehrer or his staff meanwhile wished to see through me, let them feel welcome. I’m sure they’d had bigger fakes than me on the premises. But once I’d heard where WNYC was headquartered, in the Municipal Building on Centre Street at Chambers, at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized I hadn’t been so far downtown since the gray fog’s onset. I didn’t think of myself as afraid, nor a recluse like Perkus. I just figured I hadn’t happened to go. But this morning I was afraid, perhaps an intimation of the evening to come. Foley had said she would meet me at WNYC’s offices and I was glad.

Wouldn’t you know it, giving flesh to my fear were distant sirens. You could hear these anywhere in the city, but they took on a different cast at the perimeter of that cloud bank that had settled on the island below Chambers. I glimpsed the fog’s rim in the crooked canyons from the windows of my cab. It swallowed daylight right up to the bridge’s on-ramp, hazy tendrils nestling into the greens around city hall. At that I recalled the envelope in my breast pocket, my fingers drifting in to confirm its presence, but too late, I’d arrived. I passed through the Municipal Building’s airport-style security, emptying pockets of change and keys for bored men in uniform, then rode the elevator twenty-five floors to meet my small public fate.

Foley found me at the station’s glass doors and ushered me in. The show was to consist of me and a female cancer doctor, an oncologist who’d been consulting with Mission Control on Janice’s case, and who greeted me a little coldly, I thought. We’d been seated at our microphones and prepped a little, supplied with drinking water and shown the Cough button, when Lehrer came in, trailing more of his staff, and Foley too, and made an apology: we weren’t going to go on the air after all, had been bumped. Those sirens weren’t irrelevant, something had happened, close by, and the station was shifting to live coverage, on the street. A man, one of the money people, instead of showing up at the offices of the brokerage house where he worked, had thrown himself and his briefcase into the giant excavation for Noteless’s memorial. It was all unfortunately too easy to do, creep close to that site, under cover of the gray fog. Lehrer explained all this in a wryly consoling voice I now realized I’d heard a hundred times before. “I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this as winter comes in,” he told us. “I think it’s that much harder to report for work down under that cloud every day when it’s so cold.” The doctor and I stood, rendered dumb. Everything about this confused me, but I didn’t want to take up anyone’s time. I felt I should be the apologetic one, sorry for my own dispensability, as though I’d let down Lehrer and Foley, Oona too. Yet confirmed in my own suspicion that I was generally a filler item, useful only on slow news days.

Foley led me downstairs to share a cab back uptown, shaking her head. I felt affectionately toward the small, intent publicist, making such effort always to keep her needless professional distance, forever on my side in any misunderstanding or disappointment, as though my cause was righteous or just, or was a cause at all. This absurdity, that Foley cared more than I did, kept me from ever knowing how to make conversation with her, despite all fondness. So I committed the discourtesy of opening the creamy envelope in front of her there, in the cab’s backseat. Jules Arnheim / Requests the Presence of You and Your Guest / At His Residence / For a Champagne Dinner / In Celebration of the Holidays. A separate tiny envelope, stamped, for RSVP, slipped out into my lap. The party was two days before Christmas, eight days from now. Despite the engraved elegance of the paperwork, the whole thing smacked of imperial impulsiveness. Arnheim was known for commanding celebrities to his table at whim.

This was a surprise. I recalled some prediction from Rossmoor Danzig, a mention of the mayor’s gratitude. But that whole episode was like a cameo in fever. So it was as if my own illness had arranged to introduce me to Mayor Arnheim. Anyway, I must have concealed my amazement well enough from Foley. Her face fell. She thought I’d been shunning her calls because I’d wandered into fabulousness. Realms a mere PR girl daren’t imagine. I had no way to explain how wrong she was, that I’d in fact stumbled into squalor and marginal romance. I shouldn’t mention Oona and I couldn’t describe Perkus. Foley dropped me off at my door, so we could both forget the errand’s conundrum, my near miss with publicity. I was only relieved. That part of my life could go on without me for all I cared, was as distant as the space station.

I had to kill a few hours before I could descend into my well of squalor and romance again. What I failed to note was how those sirens in the fog had sounded a note of disaster that cold morning. I was diverted from contemplation of harbingers by Christmas decorations on Second Avenue and the mayor’s invitation burning a hole in my pocket all through the day’s empty hours. I’ll confess I did feel a little fabulous about it. I became fixated on taking Oona to the mayor’s, flaunting our secret affiliation in a semipublic place from which I could be positive the media would be banished. Nobody was as guarded as Jules Arnheim, never more so than in his private domain. I wanted to present this fun to Oona in person, like a Valentine. Yet I knew she was hammering at her chapters and wouldn’t reward interruption. I also expected she’d find me at Perkus’s later if I was patient.

The phone rang an hour or so after I’d appeared at Eighty-fourth Street myself, but it wasn’t Oona. “It’s Abneg,” Perkus reported to me, holding the receiver aside. “They’re in a cab a few blocks away. He says Georgina’s having a craving for burgers, he wonders do we want to meet them at Jackson Hole?”

There was only one possible reply. I wasn’t worried, Oona could find us there easily enough, at that restaurant which was like an annex to Perkus’s kitchen. We grabbed our coats-even Perkus had at last admitted winter’s irreversibility, and dug out of his closet a moth-eaten maroon stadium coat, half its wooden-peg fasteners missing, and a black captain’s cap, which made him resemble an Irish folksinger or terrorist. We were just downstairs and in the building’s doorway when we felt the crack and shudder beneath our feet, a wrenching seizure in the earth below the tile of the corridor, the foundations of the building, the pavement of the street. I don’t know if there was truly a roaring sound or if it was merely the disconcerting roar of silence that followed, an instant afterward.

Whatever had snapped beneath the world, beam or bone, wasn’t in our imagination. The cars crawling up the street each braked, and the piano inside Brandy’s halted too, the sing-along stilled. Then, as we stood trying to fathom it, a bubble of laughter and mock-shrieks erupted within the bar, the uncurious singers only relieved to be alive, and the piano resumed its strolling tune, and a ragged harmony of voices resumed, too. The cars picked up their crawl. Perkus and I rounded the corner of Second, hungry and habitual (and yes, freshly stoned).

Neither of us spoke, and in that heartbeat’s moment of bogus imperturbability, like the interval before blood wells in a deep-sliced fingertip, it seemed not impossible we’d take our booth at Jackson Hole and never mention it. Except the gaudy burger joint had just an instant before been demolished, the building wholly wrecked from underneath, the recognizable shards of exterior window frame and signage and also the chrome-and-vinyl booths and bar and stools of the interior sagging together, under the crushing weight of the roof and the yellow-painted brick of the upper stories, into a groaning trench, a ragged black smile in the concrete that was meant never to betray us, with tiny waterfalls of pulverized drywall like chalk trickling into the corners of that new mouth. Stepping up entranced with others on the sidewalk, Perkus and I found ourselves transformed into first members of a mob of rubberneckers, gathered at the outskirts of a crime or disaster, the nearest layer of the concentric amazed staring from windows and out of stopped vehicles. Then the sirens came, as if replying to those in the morning’s fog, and converged on us where we swayed stupefied in the blossoming dust.

Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji joined us there, milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparking red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades. I’d read of this, an unintended consequence of the city’s Tiger Watch Web site, that hundreds with vicarious investment in the activities of the predator, citizens superstitious or worshipful, others disbelieving, seeking to confirm conspiracy explanations for the shutdowns and ruin, others armed with cameras or concealed weaponry, others hoping to pillage wrecked stores, all had been flocking in increasing numbers to the coordinates of reported sightings, their numbers growing, their response times unnervingly sharp. Then again, by any outward measure Perkus and I were part and parcel, members of the Tiger Stalkers’ Union.

Richard, when he and Georgina located us, linked each of his arms into one of ours, breaking the spell of disaster a little, divorcing us from the spectating group mind. He and Georgina were bundled into their cold-weather finery, returning, I suppose, from another of their endless sequence of formal occasions. Richard, since meeting Georgina, seemed to have shelved his irreverence toward ceremony.

“Hey,” Richard said. “I talked to a cop, he says they’re pretty sure it tunneled back uptown. We aren’t likely to hear anything about survivors for a while yet. It’s pretty cold out here-maybe we ought to get something to eat?” He spoke embracingly, as though escorting mourners from a graveside, toward the consolations of the wake. “This’ll be waiting when we get back, it’s not going anywhere.”

“Did this happen because of us?” said Perkus hollowly. “In another minute we would have been inside.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Richard.

“I think if I don’t eat a meal soon I will vomit,” said Georgina. “Please. I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t there another place around here for a burger?” said Richard. He must know he risked hamburger heresy. It might be worth the grievance if it drew Perkus back from the brink of total identification with the mauled restaurant. There’d be no cheeseburger deluxes originating there anytime soon. As for any further losses, we were numbed, unable to think. Or at least, if Perkus thought of them, he didn’t speak.

I said, “We could go to Gracie Mews.” I worried about missing Oona, but then again, unlike Richard Abneg, Oona was hardly likely to come browsing for us in this mad scene.

Now it was Georgina who clutched my arm. “Please-anything.” She really did look a bit green. Actually, there was an unhealthy sheen of agitation to the Hawkman and Richard Abneg both, as though it had been too hot in their taxicab, or they’d been making out in it. By the time we’d nudged Perkus out of his spell enough to filter out of the crowd, walked to First Avenue, and gotten ourselves seated under the grilling fluorescents of the Mews, I saw they were both perspiring, their eyes raccoonish. Richard’s blustery good cheer, which I’d taken as concern for Perkus’s fragility, now seemed to me an almost frantic heartiness in response to the disaster. “This looks really bad,” he chirruped. “There’s certainly fatalities this time out!” He might be overcompensating, out of some sense of culpability.

Or was it in fear? Perhaps Richard felt Perkus’s guess had been off by a degree, that the tiger had come not for Perkus but for him. That absurd epithet Perkus had thrown at him, eagle-hunted-maybe tiger-hunted, too. Yet, how absurd and solipsistic. I’d begun to do Perkus’s thinking for him. As if the tiger had had to be hunting someone in our company, and it was only a matter of figuring who! As if it had to be hunting any one person. As if it was a tiger after all, and we hadn’t been given another explanation. Yet there must be some reason Richard and Georgina were so agitated, in contrast to Perkus’s zomboid numbness. I suppose I too might have seemed out of kilter, to the others-it was as if we’d all just climbed out of that crater, rather than merely wandering up to its periphery.

So we ordered and ate. The Hawkman consoled her nerves by gobbling the bowlful of dill halves our waiter plunked down to keep us while we waited for our meal. I didn’t point out to her that someone else might have wanted one. Instead I borrowed Richard’s cell phone, and dialed Oona’s number. When I entered the last digit and hit Call, the screen announced CALLING /OONA LASZLO.

“Oona’s in your phone?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I didn’t realize you even knew each other.”

Of all things, this snapped Perkus from his daze, just to snipe at my innocence. “You’re like the ultimate amnesiac American, Chase. You never can imagine anything actually happened before you wandered along.” This attack, both rote and gratuitous, was surely Perkus at his most mediocre. Under the circumstances I cut him slack-I had no reply to his jibe, anyhow.

I got Oona’s voice mail, as expected, and told her where we’d ended up. (Oona never answered her phone, that I’d seen. Just checked it constantly.) And she must have been near, for this brought her, so quickly that she beat the Mews’ kitchen, by a whisker. Our four burgers slid onto our place mats just after she’d crowded in between Georgina and Perkus. Oona signaled to the imperturbable waiter that she’d take one too, then added, “Medium rare.”

“Hello, Oona,” said Richard, a neutral greeting, devoid of clues for me to examine. “You haven’t met Georgina, I don’t think.”

The women managed a polite introduction, even as the Hawkman drowned her plate in ketchup and jammed a bouquet of fries into her mouth, still trying to outrun disaster’s appetite. Only now did it occur to me how by making the call, and then blurting the surprised question that elicited Perkus’s scolding, I’d widened the circle of conspirators-mine, and Oona’s-to include Richard and Georgina. This felt natural, in a life-during-wartime sort of way.

Seeing the company assembled here for the first time-four of us with our burgers, and now came Oona’s, too-I believed I was seeing my present life complete for what it was, or what I wished it to be. Like a foreign correspondent in a zone of peril, a Graham Greene protagonist, I was secretly thrilled that chaos had rearranged a few things. I had my people around me. There might be undercurrents of the undisclosed between us at that table-Oona’s ignorance of chaldrons, say (but then again, like the readout on Richard’s phone, nearly anything might be known to all but me), or the extra reason, quite beyond milk shakes, which I knew, but couldn’t risk saying, that Perkus might have to mourn the demolition of Jackson Hole. Yet these hesitations didn’t outweigh the solidarity of our team. That we existed against a backdrop of baffling and indistinct dangers gave us our shape.

Then again, utterly negating all this camaraderie was the gasp of jealousy I’d felt at spotting her name on Richard’s phone. This made me want to assert my place, at any risk to our secret. So I reached across the table and took Oona’s hand. She didn’t pull it away, but while I held it she wouldn’t meet my eyes. After a moment I let her go. I’d at least conveyed my unguilty pleasure at her arrival. Who knew I’d take such crazy comfort in the leavings of catastrophe? I might be giddy that something of my own had come along, to rival Janice’s melodrama.

“At least it’s on a Second Avenue axis, that’s the good news… maybe we should have been fueling the fucking thing with hamburgers to keep it underground…” Garrulous Richard carried on, and meanwhile the women seemed to be getting along splendidly over their burgers, Georgina buzzing through hers, using the bun to swab ketchup, Oona mostly tiptoeing around her own. Their talk was largely dropped names, the filling in of degrees of social separation, always fewer than you’d expect. I thought of them in those terms, as if I were a member of a frontier wagon train: “the women.” They shed grace on our table by fitting together so disparately well: the Hawkman towering above us, Euro-exotic and impeccable, despite her frantic chowing, and Oona, so raven-like and quarrelsome, a rib of Manhattan torn out to make a woman.

It was-surprise! — Perkus I felt concerned about. Here we were, his whole support group (I didn’t want to include Watt or Biller or Susan Eldred or anyone else right now in my desert-island fantasy), yet he’d shrunken to near-invisibility in our midst. Wrong restaurant, for a start. He fingered his burger like a skater toeing thin ice. Then, just as I’d alighted on my worry, ready to study him for minute indications, Perkus was on his feet. “We have to go.” One eye was out the door, the other pleaded with us. “I have to go.”

Sure enough, we went. Hand it to us, we at least understood we were a support group. Or lieutenants. Like that, we abandoned the meal, whisked back out into the cold, our visit to my own preferred restaurant unceremoniously interrupted-I wondered what it would take for me to burnish my favorites into myth like Perkus had done with Jackson Hole. Would he find another place? Well, we were rushing out partly to see what he would do, to follow the plot of his fixations. I glanced back, projecting embarrassment onto my regular waiters in the Mews, but they bussed our unfinished meal as implacably as ever, scooping tips into apron pockets, enduring the curse of the twenty-four-hour restaurant, which by definition required machines, not men, for its operation. So they’d become machines, more expert and obedient than the unruly tunneling thing that had surfaced from under Second Avenue.

The site had evolved rapidly in our absence-most of all by becoming a “site” (or possibly a “zone”), by revealing the unnerving readiness of a familiar street to be revised in martial strife, like a gentle friend suddenly enlisted in war, then returned decorated, missing limbs, and with a hundred-yard stare. The tiger-oglers had been stretched to a wide quarantine, across Second and the intersection of Eighty-fourth, by police barricades now manned by officers in vigilant pairs, who spoke only to one another, mercilessly snubbing the barrage of citizen inquiries. Behind them, the crater and the surrounding street blazed white, lit by emergency spotlights that had been cranked into position to facilitate specialists crawling over rubble, perhaps sounding within it with stethoscopes for Morse tapping or cries. Within the cordon ambulances blinked, ricocheting amber off upper stories. Dust cycloned through the klieg lights, up into the strobe and shadow.

We flanked Perkus, taking his cues. This was his precinct, his inquiry to make. He made none, but as we craned our necks for views through the rows of heads, all with their breath steaming as they muttered rumors or perhaps prayers, another bystander, a fifty-ish woman with a leashed terrier clutched in her arms and shivering as it eyed us, a neighbor of Perkus’s perhaps, leaned in and announced, “If you live close by you’re safe now. It never strikes in the same place twice.”

Perkus only peered at her, the dog now growling low in its throat, perhaps at his suspicious eye. But Richard, patroller of civic logic, stepped up.

“Sorry?” he said. “What’s that you said?”

“The tiger doesn’t return to the same place twice, everyone knows.”

“It can’t fail,” Richard declared with instant exasperation, as if she weren’t with us. “The human brain is sick with superstition.” I was just glad he hadn’t come out with “old wives’ tale.”

“Are people dead?” Perkus asked bluntly, ignoring both dog and Richard.

The woman shrugged, grudging to be pushed beyond the prophetic range of her first remark, into dull specifics. “Some got out, they were talking to the news.” She nodded to the opposite side of the intersection, where two vans with satellite dishes on ladders had staked out an operation. “Two dead upstairs, and a girl from the restaurant, I think.” It was as if her syntax had collapsed into the spontaneous grave along with the bodies.

“What girl?”

Again the woman spoke with a nod of her chin. “The Korean at the deli, he knew her.”

We raced to the Korean, who stood measuring the spectacle, sheltered inside the flapped plastic tent covering his bins of produce and bundles of psychedelically pink-and-orange carnations. He’d seemingly been at his beer stash, cheeks red, eyes shiny, and also had a few rehearsals in his answer to Perkus’s question. “Lin-Say,” he reported, tsk-tsking as if we’d failed to pay attention the first dozen times he’d memorialized her. “A nice girl. A very nice girl. Came in every day, always smoke Camel Lights. I used tell her, ‘When you gonna quit?’” He shook his head at the fine irony he’d dispensed, though it seemed to me second-rate, cribbed from a war movie.

We milled back into the traffic-stopped intersection, toward the cordon at the vent of Perkus’s block. It was too clear what it meant that the ambulances didn’t bother leaving the scene. Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn’t do any more for Perkus’s murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could a keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor. Our group, fortunately, was stupidly silent-I prayed Richard wouldn’t claim some memory of Lindsay, just to have something to say. For my part, I’d stay mum. How could I possibly explain to the others when Perkus had disclaimed any interest in her? He’d only treated her like a waitress. It now seemed awful to me that we’d bundled off to Gracie Mews, but I consoled myself with the reminder that Georgina had been a blood-sugar desperado. It wasn’t as if we’d have accomplished anything more out here in the chill and confusion, where our team now threatened to unmoor, each member to drift off like a bear on his or her own floe. Oona lagged behind us, inspired by the Korean’s remark to bum a cigarette of her own from a passing stranger. I’d never seen Oona smoke tobacco before, but given the precedent of her secret eyeglasses, I wasn’t too taken aback. Her personality had serial quitter in its DNA. Georgina hung back, too, while Richard and I tried to stick at Perkus’s elbows, as if our friend were a drunkard. Perkus seemed to want to go home.

Eighty-fourth Street’s traffic was stopped, too, and pedestrians were funneled by police to an entry point between two barricades on the north sidewalk, where many who approached were turned away. We waited our turn to meet the troll at this bridge, a towering grim older cop who spent as much time conversing with the radio Velcroed to his shoulder as with any mere citizens. “Street’s closed,” he informed us. “Use Eighty-fifth to get to Third.” Each player on this stage of chaos had a line or two they were made to deliver ad infinitum, while we, the audience, filtered among them, gathering these coupons like stamps in an album.

“I live here.” Perkus almost whined, the cop’s size and clout reducing him to pipsqueak protest. I wanted to register my own claim of access, but couldn’t find the words.

“All of you, or just him?” The cop asked for Perkus’s identification, in order to check his address. Perkus handed it across numbly. The cop then sorted us out from him, the rest of us presumed guilty, rabble to be considered singly and subsequently, if at all. And before we could make any proper farewell, Perkus had been eased through the funnel’s mouth. We four watched him go, his shoulders rounded with the burden of acquiescence to the larger forces, the alteration of his street into dystopian tableau, his personality made tiny by his dealings with the cop. What else he carried on that gaunt-slumped frame, what sway the tiger’s close strike might have over his free associations, or the significance to his heart of the loss of Lindsay or that which she’d so ungrudgingly emissaried to his table, I feared presuming. On the sidewalk beyond, a clutch of Brandy’s patrons, not more than one or two likely to be legitimate residents of the block, had spilled out to watch the cop’s operation from behind his back, many with drinks still in their mitts. No fair, I thought.