Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-one

When Perkus began his herky-jerky dance, I worried. For Ava always responded, cantilevered onto rear legs and hurled herself with the single forelimb like a unicorn spear in the direction of his clavicle. Yet somehow Perkus always caught her, forepaw in his open palm like a ballroom partner’s clasp, and though he staggered backward at her weight, cheek turned to the hiccuping barrage of tongue-kisses she aimed at his mouth and nose, and though the record skipped on its turntable at the thud of his heels, and though other dogs in the neighboring apartments began a chorus of barking protests at the ruckus, he made it all part of the same frenzied occasion, the song, the one he had to hear twelve or fifteen times a day, and which when he heard he simply couldn’t sit still. The song was “Shattered,” by the Rolling Stones. His current anthem. He’d found both record and player ten days before when on both Sadie’s and Biller’s encouragement he’d begun rummaging through other dogs’ apartments besides Ava’s. “A dog doesn’t need a stereo, Chase! There’s all sorts of terrific stuff, they stock these apartments from auctions of the contents of abandoned storage spaces, I learned. Go figure! People dwindle to the point where they move their stuff into storage, then vanish entirely, this happens all the time, that’s the kind of world we live in.”

I didn’t force the implicit comparison to his own vanishing, nor the dwindled state he now seemed to occupy, nor the question of what had or was to become of his own possessions in the Eighty-fourth Street building. Other tenants had presumably been allowed to enter and reclaim at least a few valuables by now. But Perkus waved his hand. “I’ve got everything I need. Anyway, I suspect the management company has seized this opportunity to purge their rolls of all rent-controlled sublets like mine.” I tried pointing out that Richard Abneg, the city’s specialist in tenants’ rights, might continue as his guardian angel. “Hah! He couldn’t even keep his own apartment.” (All accounts of subway excavation devices apparently forgotten, the tiger and the eagles were for Perkus the same thing.)

If anything, Perkus seemed to feel he’d been liberated: Eighty-fourth Street couldn’t fire him, he quit! A lifetime’s collection of books and CDs couldn’t hold a candle to this one serendipitous vinyl talisman, fetched from a Labradoodle’s apartment, which now stood in for all he’d ever known or lost or cared for, even if it happened to feature a gouge that rendered “Miss You” unplayable. “Of all records, Chase, Some Girls! It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff ’n’ the Tears, the kind of albums you’d use for landfill. Look at this.” He insisted I admire the original die-cut cardboard jacket of the Stones LP, the band members’ lipsticked and wig-topped faces camouflaged among those of Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. “You can tell it’s the first pressing, because right afterward they had to withdraw this jacket-the Garland and Monroe estates sued. It’s incredible how much this music is steeped in the ambiance of the New York City of 1978. It’s as much a New York record as White Light/White Heat or Blonde on Blonde.” Well, I only half followed this, but I was glad to hear him back tracing tangible cultural clues, this being one thing that made him recognizably himself, under the sports warm-up jackets and other homeless-person outfits, and in the smoke-free-motel-room environs of Ava’s.

Only, as I learned over the course of a few visits, Perkus wasn’t really tracing his tangible cultural clue of Some Girls any place in particular, so much as worrying it like, yes, a dog with a bone. “Sh-sh-sh-shattered!” he’d declare, resetting the ancient player’s coarse stylus at the start of the track, which was, even before Perkus’s appropriation, already more a rant or riff than a proper song, its froggy, mocking guitar figure only a setting for Mick Jagger’s giddy nihilistic kiss-offs, success success success, does it mat-ter! This town’s been wearing tatters. Look at me! Round and round man and dog danced, one nearly as tall as the other, man urging the refrain on the dog as if wishing to teach her the lyrics, or at least the key word, I’ve been SHAT-tered! The dog loudly hiccuped, as if that might be her version of the same thought.

If dancing to the song was a kind of enactment, a show for me, it wasn’t a deceptive one. Rather, it was a show of what he’d really come to since I’d seen him last, and of how he honestly spent his time between my visits to him here at the Friendreth: in Ava’s arms. There were no books or magazines or newspapers in evidence, and no television or computer. Biller had offered Perkus a laptop and he’d refused, “Shattered” ’s microcosm of 1978 being as far as Perkus wished to descend into any virtual world. The rest was Ava. Ostensibly for her sake, Perkus wasn’t willing to visit my apartment or any restaurant. He ate mostly garbage from cans heated on a hot plate, or takeout sandwiches Biller or Sadie Zapping brought around, a step down from the bagels and burgers he used to lower into Biller’s alley, but not too far. He made quick exploratory raids on the other canine apartments, then retreated to Ava’s. He made do. Stripped of Eighty-fourth Street’s rituals and amenities, Perkus’s agoraphobia stood revealed-except for the ceaseless rounds with Ava, far beyond her bathroom needs and during which he braved the cold in layers of inadequate synthetic sweatshirts and Windbreakers until I bought him a secondhand woolen coat and told him it was from my own closet. In truth, my own would have been absurdly large on him; he must have known this, but said nothing. Perkus claimed that their itineraries had reverted, after the day he’d contacted me at the Mews, to Ava’s preferences, usually to the waterside, man and dog leaning into winds that swept up and down the East River, man and dog gazing across at archipelagoes of industry and construction, the perimeters of boroughs as effectively distant as the clouds scalloping overhead, man and dog moving along icy walkways in silent communion with traces vivid to them alone, not apparent to others.

February was as cold as January, maybe colder. The snows never melted, the city never breathed clear. That day Perkus reappeared I’d spotted the dog first, obscene cherry nose, twin coxcombs of spare flesh dripping from each corner of its grin, gusting breath steam onto the diner’s glass. Then the apparitional figure, bulky hooded sweatshirt pinned beneath a satiny baseball jacket, outsize dungarees hugely cuffed, over tan work boots showing a line where, soaked by slush, street salts had marked their high point in residue, like the tidal deposit of seaweed on a beach. Professional dog walker? No, worse. Homeless snow survivor, now tapping at the restaurant window, campaigning for me to emerge with a dollar to crumple in his gloved hand, or to get my leftovers to-go, in a doggie bag but not for Doggie. Despite bulky ragged dress the raving figure was small statured and possibly inconsequential, but the pit bull seemed threat enough. Then the person’s features, miming talk, made themselves known to me. The next instant Perkus plucked off his hood and startled me a second time, the hair that once swept back so proudly from his widow’s peak now cropped raggedly to inmate length, a half-inch from his skull everywhere.

Sadie Zapping had cut it. It was part of her regular duties in the Friendreth, to carry a pair of round-tipped scissors to trim obtrusive and untidy growth around the eyes and ears and anal glands of the shaggier residents, and so when between cribbage hands Perkus had complained that he needed a haircut she’d whipped them out. Perkus introduced me to the woman he called “Ava’s friend Sadie” the second or third time I came to see him there. We met in the lobby, her “Hello” more grunt than word as she aimed a tall black poodle out into the cold. I don’t think she was possessive of Perkus’s attention so much as gruffly worried that he’d broken the boycott on his former life. That, or she’d been banking on a card game that afternoon.

Didn’t Perkus want to see Richard Abneg? I wanted Richard to see Perkus and assess the situation, but I advanced this suggestion with an air of fun. The Three Musketeers should ride again. No. Perkus seemed distrustful and disappointed after seeing Richard in the lap of power, and the lap of the Hawkman. I told him about their pregnancy. This brought a cast of wistfulness to half of Perkus’s face-his divergent eye could never sit still for looking wistful. But even that look implied Richard was only more deeply compromised, lost to us. (Nothing in Perkus ever suggested any awareness we’d all been babies, once. You couldn’t get here from there.) Perkus remained obstinate. He’d prefer I didn’t mention him to Abneg.

Oona? I wasn’t foolish enough to try. I didn’t want to subject him, or myself for being here with him, to the risk of her scorn. More and more through February, as she pushed deeper into Noteless’s book, Oona had been daring me to view myself as her toy or tool-letting herself in after I’d given up and fallen asleep (I’d volunteered my apartment key, and cleared her with my doorman), blotting my wounded questions with urgent kisses, then departing before morning light. There was something almost depraved in her exhaustion, her bloodshot eyes, her grim fits of lust, and I’d have felt sorry for her if she’d given me the slightest opening. She never did.

In this, their refusal of my pity, she and Perkus again reminded me of each other. I snuck in as much food as I could, and made him swear not to give it all to Ava. Her head wasn’t much below the level of the kitchen table there, and sometimes with a plate of something in front of him Perkus would begin on some line of fevered free association and begin waving his hands and she’d plop her jaw on the table’s edge and begin tonguing the food sideways off his plate, three-bean salad, French fries, baba ghanoush, anything. Since he never reprimanded her, she showed no compunction. If the food came to her, why not? It was her place. By the time he’d wound up his rant Perkus’s plate might be empty, and he’d scrape it into the sink as if satisfied. I parachuted other care-package items into his life: a gift bag from a Condé Nast party, which I knew contained a bar of soap, a T-shirt, and a scented candle; a pair of rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves; a gold filter for his plastic one-cup coffeemaker (he’d been rinsing out, air-drying, and reusing the Melitta paper filters, a thrifty practice likely absorbed from Biller, but which saddened me); and a Sunday New York Times just to remind him his old enemies in the line of middlebrow reality placation were still in business, hoping to rile him back into curiosity about the life of the city. One day I reached into my coat pocket and found the Oonaphone, the old disposable cell that had never once rung. I thrust it on him, with its charger, and made him promise to use it in an emergency, or even just to let me know he was ready to have me help him transition back into himself-anything. He looked at it curiously and shoved it in a drawer with some other plastic objects he wanted to protect from being gnawed for dental exercise. I told him I didn’t remember the phone’s number anymore, but I’d try to find out. He raised his hand from where it scoured at Ava’s seashell ears, signaling me to stop. “Dogs don’t need numbers,” he said.

“You’re not a dog.”

“I know, Chase, but I’m living in their building. I was telling Sadie this just the other day, I think we should pry the digits off the apartment doors. The dogs have means of knowing when they’re at the right door.”

“Did Sadie agree?”

“She said it was fine if I wanted to waste my time that way, but that she’d kill me if I removed the buttons from the elevator, which I also suggested. In retaliation I told her I wanted her to find us a deck of playing cards without numbers, just the pips. It’s healthy for our animal minds to be able to count them at a glance, as easily as we tell the kings from queens, to eschew unnecessary symbolic languages.”

Wasn’t it autistic savants-Asperger’s types, like those rock critics from whom he wished to distance himself-who counted scattered things at a glance? Well, anything could be reversed in Perkus’s system. He who’d once layered his own linguistic chatter onto the urban environment’s screen now seemed to hope to peel such stuff away to reveal preverbal essences, Platonic forms. I suppose he’d decided in favor of the unadorned polar-bear broadside, if he even recalled that old conundrum. If anything, in Ava he seemed to have located his own personal polar bear in distress. Only rather than rescue her, he’d elected to merge with her, here on the floe of the Friendreth Apartments.

Despite the injunction, new objects did appear in Ava’s rooms from time to time, not all of them things dogs needed, some even laden with symbolic language, thanks to Perkus’s raids on the other apartments. One day I found him with a volume of Franz Kafka’s stories, a pale green paperback called The Great Wall of China. Perkus seemed to regard the item as a portent, like the Rolling Stones record. “I hadn’t read Kafka since I was a teenager, Chase, it’s incredible what I’d forgotten or taken for granted, it’s like he’s reading your mind! These storage-space people are a previous vanished tribe of New Yorkers, trying to make us understand something, if we’d only listen.” Perkus launched into narration from the first story, called “Investigations of a Dog”-apparently it was Ava’s mind that Kafka was reading. “How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! When I think back and recall the time when I was still a member of the canine community, sharing in all its preoccupations, a dog among dogs, I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment… that sometimes, no, not sometimes, but very often, the mere look of some fellow-dog of my own circle that I was fond of, the mere look of him, as if I had just caught it for the first time, would fill me with helpless embarrassment and fear, even with despair… Wait, listen, Chase, this part’s amazing, he gets to the heart of Ava’s ambivalence about other dogs: We all live together in a literal heap… nothing can prevent us from satisfying that communal impulse… this longing for the greatest bliss we are capable of, the warm comfort of being together. But now consider the other side of the picture. No creatures to my knowledge live in such wide dispersion as we dogs, none have so many distinctions of class, of kind, of occupation… we, whose one desire is to stick together… we above all others are compelled to live separated from one another by strange vocations that are often incomprehensible even to our canine neighbors, holding firmly to laws that are not those of the dog world, but are actually directed against it. You see, Chase? Kafka’s pointing us to what I couldn’t know until I met Ava, that a domesticated animal isn’t some wild free thing that happens to be living indoors. Thanks to years of interdependence it’s permanently fixed on a grid of human concepts, a microcosm of our own incoherent urban existence. Dogs are canaries in our evolutionary coal mine!”

“I never realized Kafka was such a Communist,” I joked.

He blinked away contempt for my wit. “I used to find it tragic that we turned these pack animals into paranoid hermits,” he said. “Now, living here, I see that dogs like having their own apartments.” Perkus was explaining himself, I thought but didn’t say. “What’s astonishing about Kafka is that reading this you’re suspecting he’s never even met a dog and at the same time it’s the greatest handbook to living with one I could ever imagine!”

This might be Perkus in a perfect nutshell, taking Kafka as a resource guide to pet ownership. “Does he say anything about how to cure her hiccups?” Ava’s hiccing seemed to be getting worse-or perhaps I should say more persistent, since it didn’t appear to bother the indomitable animal.

“She’s fine,” he said. “At night they go away so she can sleep. I hug her around the chest and sort of squeeze them away.”

“Is that prescribed in Kafka? Maybe we should take her to see Strabo Blandiana.” I teased, but again, it was Perkus I wanted to have Strabo take a stab at. Maybe the medicinalist knew the right points for a needle to enter the human body and trigger self-awareness, pride in one’s appearance, as well as species pride, the desire to rejoin the human race. Then I felt ashamed for preferring Perkus’s Beau Brummell phase to his present guise as a Staten Island garbageman-it wasn’t as if the first had been geared to impress others or me personally, or signaled any high regard for the opinions of the human race. What had drawn me to Perkus was his absence of any calculation, except in figuring how to persuade me of his next urgent theory or ephemeral fact.

Still, I worried about his health. I’d already snuck aspirin and floss into his bathroom. He boasted he was cluster-free since the hallucinatory and epochal headache that, with tiger and blizzard, had ushered him to this new life. He didn’t smoke pot-it was now as if he’d never smoked pot. I didn’t ask if ellipsis had departed him, too. Who was I to judge that he looked hungry, hunted, harrowed? Maybe being out of his apartment had only revealed an underlying truth, and I, fatally callow, had romanticized his former appearance. One thing I was sure of, Perkus’s temples looked flattened, dented, without the disguise of floppy hair. Once he’d had only the wrecked and reckless eye. Now his whole cranium looked imbalanced to me, though possibly this was birth trauma, a forceps impression. Perkus had, after all, gotten from there to here like the rest of us. But where was he going?

It was after the next snowstorm that I uncovered the fact that Biller and I weren’t Perkus’s only lifeline at the Friendreth anymore. The temperature locked in again, the skies white so that we could feel it coming for a day or two. Korean markets and bodegas and building superintendents everywhere had given up trying to pry up the baked black crusts on either side of narrow-carved walkways, and now laid down a desultory path of salts hoping to preserve just that width they’d struggled for. Only a couple of inches fell overnight, nothing more. By morning it was done and in the bright daylight you might feel you’d been largely spared, after that warning sky. Except now it was March and you felt something was wrong, or anyway different. Winter had stayed. Everyone joked about the weather, and the joke they joked was “Everyone does something about the weather, but nobody ever talks about it,” and it wasn’t funny.

The snowfall, though negligible, slowed the city into depression, a ceremonial plummet like a flag at half-mast. You could travel where you liked but people called in sick and battened themselves at home. I really only knew this by osmosis since the people I knew mostly had nowhere to go, by privilege or otherwise. But I ran into Susan Eldred, from Criterion’s noble offices, in her snow boots outside the Friendreth’s door, just leaving. I was arriving with East Side bagels, miraculously still a little hot in their paper sack. This was two in the afternoon-still, thanks not to Perkus but to Oona, my idea of first thing in the morning. (Perkus rose with Ava and the dawn for the first walk and first coffee of the day.) Susan and I looked at each other rather stupidly at first, as though we’d been caught and now had something to justify or confess.

“We must be calling on the same dog,” I joked, trying to dispel the air of needless guilt.

“Perkus has been bugging me to round up some stuff for him,” Susan explained, as if she had to. “Nobody’s going into the offices because of the snow, so I figured this would be a good day to drop by.”

“Bugging you how? Does he call?”

“He’s called a couple of times but honestly what lit a fire under me was when he showed up in the offices last week with Ava.”

“Well, I’m relieved he’s making the effort,” I admitted.

“I’d do anything for him, actually,” said Susan Eldred, with helpless sincerity. I filed it away as her promise if I needed it. It was too cold to shift to small talk, and so, in some embarrassment, I think, Susan moved past me on the sidewalk. I went inside.

“Were you hiding the fact that you’re in touch with Susan Eldred from me?” I asked after we three had devoured the bagels.

“Why would I do that?” Perkus said distractedly. Ava mounted his back and tongue-bathed his nape as he reached to the floor to display to me a new prize, which appeared to be a shabby boxed set of VHS tapes, decorated with constellations of stars and a giant disembodied eyeball in black and white.

“Did you call her on the cell phone?” A quick scan had revealed the Oonaphone’s charger, trailing from a socket on the kitchen counter.

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know you ever used it.”

“That’s what it’s for, right?”

“Why don’t you ever call me?”

“I don’t have to call, you just appear.” If he’d meant it as anything but a flat observation this might have seemed fairly hostile, but clearly the subject simply didn’t engage him. Once he’d welcomed me into the Friendreth my visits became predictable phenomena, regular as cribbage matches and Ava’s bowel movements. Perkus was engaged with deeper inquiries, into less obvious subjects. His tone left open the possibility that Perkus felt he was the one doing the caretaking in this friendship, but also that if I wanted to think it went the other way, he wouldn’t object. Far more important was this ancient black VHS cassette he now slipped into the ’80s-vintage Panasonic television with built-in player that had been integrated into Ava’s living-room ensemble.

“Where’d you get that thing?”

“From a Labrador. Dogs don’t need VCRs, Chase!”

“I doubt anyone needs them lately.”

“You do if you’re going to play VHS tapes,” he said, speaking as if to a child. “Can you stay for a bit? I’ve got something I want to show you, it’s less than half an hour long. Ouch, Ava! Ava, down now, get down, that’s a good girl, Ava, Ava down!” Ava, hell-bent on Perkus’s neck and ears as he crouched, nibbled and tongue-scrubbed him with increasing ferocity. Perkus, often surprisingly forceful with the dog, now gripped her one forepaw and twisted her onto her back, rear limbs cocked and twitching in submission while she writhed the mighty worm of her torso and neck under Perkus’s wrestler hold. I prayed for the dog never to exercise her full powers on him in return, having no doubt who’d prevail. Perkus seemed to whisper something directly into Ava’s mouth, then, still pinning her, returned to blandly pitching his discovery to me. “You might already have seen this, these shows are a part of the collective unconscious. But that’s the nature of this kind of material, Chase, it falls into the category of what D. W. Winnicott calls ‘the unthought known.’ You absorb a thing like this before you’ve assembled the context necessary to grasp it.” Ava hiccuped violently.

I lifted the package from the floor. A four-tape set, Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Platinum Collection. By process of elimination I determined the tape Perkus had inserted was Season Three. “More salvage from the storage-space people?”

“No. I spotted it in Eldred’s office, but she’d taken it home. I’ve been drooling after this item for years, it’s surprisingly scarce. CBS had to delete it, because they hadn’t gotten permission to include “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

I tried not to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, feeling more generally disgruntled that he’d presume to blow my mind with something as commonplace as The Twilight Zone. “I used to watch these things on late-night TV,” I said, though I couldn’t recall a thing beyond the opening narration, Serling seeming to mock his own stiletto delivery, which I mocked now. “There is a fifth dimension-”

“The easiest way to pass as a spy is to tell everyone you’re a spy,” Perkus pronounced gnomically. He loosed Ava, who twisted to her feet and began nosing at the box in my hands. “Once they think you’re a fool, you get away with anything.”

“Are we going to watch ‘The… Incident… at… Al’s Creek Bridge’?” I knew I’d gotten it wrong.

“No, we’re going to watch ‘The Midnight Sun.’”

“Is it about Japan?”

“No. Be patient.” Perkus held his forefinger to the VCR’s Fast-forward, which apparently needed to be continuously pressed, and not only moved with the speed of a man crawling across the desert but mimicked his groans as he died of thirst. I intertwined my fingers beneath Ava’s throat, keeping her corralled with me.

“Wait, I just guessed: it was directed by Morrison Groom, before he was famous.” I tried not to allow too sardonic a pronunciation to this last word.

“It wasn’t directed by anyone important.” Perkus had his selection cued, and now put on a kettle for more coffee.

I grew more peevish by the minute. At three in the afternoon the light outside wasn’t impressive, but it was daylight, sun fracturing off the fine new powder, however firmly Perkus kept Ava’s curtains drawn. This wasn’t one AM, we weren’t in the mental theater of Eighty-fourth Street, we’d smoked no Chronic nor Blueberry Kush, let alone Ice, and I wasn’t positive Perkus could enthrall me with creaky tapes of old television episodes this time around. The surround was just too tragically shabby and irrelevant to me all of a sudden. If Perkus couldn’t see he’d tumbled, I could. He’d misplaced the old heartbeat of his dissidence, wasn’t cutting across the grain of anything except himself (or so I thought at that moment). I wasn’t totally unaware that my judgments mingled with an irrational sense of betrayal that he’d summoned Susan Eldred, that the Friendreth apartments were turning into as much of a revolving door of acquaintances and contacts as his old apartment had been. I might have been smarting over his remark about the predictability of my visits, but for the first time I felt disappointed in him. Perkus’s ascetic phase had no more rules than had his libertinism-he made calls on mobile phones, watched old TV shows, and who knows, probably sneaked a joint now and again, only wouldn’t share it with me. I felt we were headed for our second fight (after “The Incident Concerning the Jackson Hole Waitress”) and I didn’t mind. I was glad now it was Susan Eldred and not me that had said aloud that she’d do anything for him. Right now I wanted to do nothing.

So what did I do? The day’s light graying behind those curtains, I joined Perkus on Ava’s couch, each with our fresh cups of coffee, and dutifully watched “The Midnight Sun,” from The Twilight Zone’s third season, on glitchy, burping videotape. Ava wedged herself between us to sit bolt upright regarding the television screen as if it were a window, her head darting at the blocking of the characters, growling once when a man holding a pistol pushed his way through a door (you couldn’t quibble with her prejudices), otherwise hiccuping at regular intervals.

The episode was set entirely in a New York apartment building. (I felt Perkus glance at me with satisfaction at this hint of relevance, but I ignored him, wedded to the grudging line I’d drawn in the sand: I’d watch it, but refuse to marvel over whatever he wanted me to marvel over.) The city is nearly abandoned, due to an end-of-the-world heat wave, Earth’s orbit declining toward the sun, which never exits the sky-hence the title. The few who cling to existence in the melting city, namely a young female painter (a Village bohemian in a 1950s sense) and an older woman in her building, are dependent on failing air-conditioning and a failing Frigidaire, which houses what may be the last pitcher of water in Manhattan. The man with the gun, at whom Ava snarled, is a thirst-maddened desperado who breaks in and swigs down this treasure, a scene played by the sweating women as if it were an allegory of rape. Then, thirst quenched, the intruder apologizes and departs in shame. The heat, reaching a peak, murders the older woman and causes a painting to melt off a canvas. Only after the young painter also collapses does the tale reveal its characteristic twist: she awakens from what is revealed to be a nightmare to find with relief that the sky is dark, the air cool, and outside, snow is falling, but relief gives way to the next horror-the Earth is moving away from the sun, not nearer to it, and Manhattan is locked in a fatal deepening freeze.

That I followed this narrative is a blooming miracle, however, as throughout our viewing Perkus was unable to keep from voicing a filibuster of interpretations. The twenty-odd minutes of black-and-white fable gave him innumerable opportunities to persuade me that Rod Serling was the zero point for the pure themes: Cold War fear! Conformity! Alienation! Collective and consensual delusion, the leakage of the dream life into the waking! The Twilight Zone, Perkus explained, was news that stayed news (I took this as rebuke of my gift of the Sunday Times), in this case speaking volumes about the true nature of the unnatural winter the city had been enduring. Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist.

“Remind you of anything?” he insisted afterward, scurrying to halt the tape’s progress to the next immortal episode.

Remember, I’d done television, too much of it. I mostly had just pitied the actors, forced to work on such an impoverished set and to be sprayed with glycerin between takes. Then again, these were pretty feeble actors.

“Lots of things,” I said. “What things did you have in mind?”

“The state of… everything. Your life, mine, the state of the weather.”

I played dumb. It couldn’t be a crime merely to exaggerate the role Perkus cast me in always. “Sure, it’s been a little cold. You think despite how it feels, it’s actually hot out?”

“Many things helplessly produce their own opposites.” Sensing my resistance, he half swallowed this manifesto line. I saw him squint, too, to keep his dodgy eye from embarrassing him. “I think I’m losing you.”

“It all feels a little plotty to me,” I said, dead set on disappointing him. “I was never one for plots.”

“Too bad, since you’re in one.”

“The newspaper is the news, too, at least on the day it’s published. Did you read about the crane collapse on Ninety-first? They think Abneg’s tiger might be to blame.”

“Fuck Abneg’s tiger, and fuck the newspaper.” Perkus began swearing, invoking Richard’s style. “The Times isn’t the commissar of the real, not anymore, not as far as I’m concerned. It’s the cover story.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Perkus. You don’t have to rely on it, like I do, for updates on your personal life!”

“Why are you yelling?”

I had gotten a little ventilated, without noticing. I felt tide-swamped with provocations: the serial bulging of Ava’s ribs as she hiccuped under my hand; the moldering smell and tawdriness of the Friendreth generally; the fine grounds the gold filter hadn’t kept from ending in the bottom of my cup and on the carpet of my tongue; the unrelenting March weather, which seemed to prove some arcane fact my loopy friend Perkus held over me like a threat, as though he could be right and I could be wrong about everything; that neither Perkus nor Oona ever called me on the phone-I was somehow a principle taken for granted, as much an item of decor in Perkus’s circle as I had been the chunk of handsome furniture at wealth’s table; that Mission Control hadn’t received a communication from Janice or Northern Lights generally for almost three weeks. Once upon a time Janice had peppered the newspapers with affectionate updates I guiltily speed-read; now I guiltily scoured the papers daily for hints of her existence which refused to appear. All of this seemed irreconcilable data, yet the ultimate provocation was the way Perkus arched his eyebrows at me as though I was supposed to grasp it as a whole.

“Janice might be dead,” I blurted, seeking his sympathy. “And I’m in love with Oona.”

“Have you ever found yourself exhausted by a friend whose problems simply never change? Here, Ava.” Perkus rattled her leash and she sprang from the couch to the door-her transitions, from placidity to avidity, were like jump cuts. Then he began bundling himself into outer layers I’d mostly purchased for him. Despite the uncanny truth The Twilight Zone episode had revealed, he’d protect himself from the cold outside. Perkus’s selfish certainties took my breath away. Yet I had to grant the distinction: he was, if nothing else, a person whose problems were never exactly the same twice. There is a war, I thought, between the ones who stagger from chaldron drunkenness to cohabitation with a three-legged pit bull, and those who try to keep up with them. I was losing the war. Chaldrons, for instance: Would they ever be mentioned again, or had they slipped from his scheme? Was it my duty, as I’d earlier assumed, to suppress uncomfortable facts, or was I somehow the stooge who couldn’t keep all the essentials in his head? I didn’t mind jigsaw puzzles, but this one seemed to have no edge pieces. Marlon Brando is dead! I wanted to shout after him as he departed, leaving me there alone in Ava’s digs.

I think!

I said nothing, as footfalls of man and dog waned to silence in the corridor. So much for the fight I’d planned. I was no match. Perkus’s transitions were as rapid as Ava’s, and if he was applying tough love it was fairly tough. On the other hand, his mysterioso style left my pride some wiggle room. Sure, I replied to Perkus’s absence, I have been exhausted by those people whose problems never change. Good thing there’s none of those around here! My own bedevilments seemed dynamic enough to me. If I stuck around and changed the subject I could pretend we’d never tangled. Only I might have to praise Rod Serling to get back in Perkus’s graces. That’s when I located my pride-I fled.

Well, if I’d felt betrayed by Perkus consorting with Susan Eldred, it was only a warm-up. I didn’t wander round to the Friendreth for three days after, making an interval of self-containment and restored private routine, like I’d established when Perkus went missing. There wasn’t any Oona to distract me, either. She counted the days to delivery of the Noteless manuscript. In this vacuum I reacquainted myself with the afternoon movie theaters of the Upper East Side, a good place not to think about the weather among other things. I scared myself, one day at the old United Artists on First Avenue and Eighty-fifth, imagining that a low rumble on the film’s soundtrack was the scraping of the mechanical tiger’s excavations beneath the theater-of course, it was only the noise of an army of Orcs grinding into battle, silly me.

At home after that endless afternoon movie I recalled the moment of worry, and took it as an intimation: if one of us was being hounded by that tiger, it probably wasn’t me. So I rushed to my computer to pull up TigerWatch, to make certain the Friendreth hadn’t been destroyed. It was the first time I’d ever condescended to visit the Web site, which had struck me previously as a sop to public prurience at misfortune, rather than an upstanding service. Anyway, I’d prided myself on having the inside scoop from Richard Abneg. What I found allowed me to breathe easy. At last reports the tiger was off the map of my companions entirely, in Spanish Harlem. But the scare made me want to overlook dignity’s boycott, and see Perkus. This was the very day Oona had said she’d be putting the book on her editor’s desk. Rather than waiting for whatever degree of celebration she’d deign to share, I elected not to be such a slave, or anyway such an obedient one. So it was a curiously mingled pride and pridelessness that saw me headed back out into the fresh night.

I heard Oona through the door to Ava’s apartment. She was in the midst of a self-lacerating harangue, in what I thought of as her single-malt voice. Sure enough, a bottle of twelve-year-old Oban sat between them, its gold essence at the halfway point, its discarded paper wrapper and shards of lead-foil cork wrapper on the table beside Oona’s handbag to prove the bottle’s halfwaying had been accomplished just now. Seeing an intoxicant other than coffee inside the walls of the Friendreth was as startling as seeing Oona (intoxicant to me). I’d come to think of the place as a rehab facility, though Perkus would have said, Dogs have no use for the twelve steps, Chase! But I hadn’t regarded it as my own hiding place from Oona until seeing it stormed by her. Oona and Perkus each held juice glasses, full with more than a finger, and smiled up at me guiltlessly. Perkus, curiously, held a small hardcover book in his lap, as though using it as a handy shield to protect his genitals. Ava knelt beneath Oona’s chair, head craned adoringly upward, obviously enthralled by that wiry, fitful little black-clad poppet, or Gnuppet, with the maniacal, winding voice. I knew Ava well enough now to gather she’d developed a quick crush. The dog might have been starved for female companionship, too. I was. Oona all at once called out a kind of Mickey Spillane urgency from me, I wanted to kiss her and take her away from there and I wanted to hit her for being there in the first place. And for getting Perkus drunk. And for knowing where to find him, and coming to find him instead of me. And. And. And.

Well, Oona was beating herself up, and quickly let me understand the occasion. “Oh, hello, Chase. We’re having an Irish wake for the greatest book I ever wrote or will write. I called it Pages from a Void, though I guess I figured that title was never going to fly with the sales force. Still, I like saying it aloud.”

“The editor didn’t love it?” I stepped in and shut the door behind me.

“Oh, the editor was always sure to hate this book. I didn’t get where I am today, Chase, relying on the integrity of a New York publishing syndicate. My mistake was imagining I had Noteless at my back. I thought the joke was on the editor for signing up a nihilist absolutist who’s made a career of treating the hand that feeds him like a plate of gravy fries. I climbed inside this project, I channeled that mofo’s tar pit of an aesthetic and served it to them chilled. Excuse the mixed metaphors, they’re strictly a symptom of alleviation from Laird’s black tunnel of suffocation and silence. I mix my metaphors so I know I’m alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem. Speaking of which, help yourself, darling.”

At this word Perkus couldn’t meet my eye. I took the opening and dug in Ava’s shelves for a glass, then siphoned off as much of the Scotch as it would hold, preventative measures. “So Noteless bit your hand instead? With or without his dentures?” I slugged back half of my bitter cup at one go.

“It turns out Laird was ready to commence licking asses instead. Just my luck to hook up with him at the moment his integrity plummets into one of his so-called bottomless ‘sculptures.’ Not luck, really. I was typecast. Noteless and Catherine Hamwright, that’s the editor, they hatched a scheme to sell him like everybody’s sinister uncle who’s really a barrel of laughs, another Emil Junrow, or the Edward Gorey of urban sinkholes. They were hoping I’d write Did You Really Say What I Think You Just Said, Mr. Noteless? Apparently, I’m who you enlist when you’re selling out in this town. Perkus here hasn’t said anything but I can tell he thinks this is my just deserts-my comeuppance, to use a Chase Insteadman word.”

Oona’s tiny bullets flew everywhere. Was I really notorious for my archaicisms? I’d taken worse blows. She’d earned only a little grace with me for using the word “darling;” I still wanted to know how she’d come to be here. She and Perkus never seemed like friends to me, no matter what they claimed. They seemed half enemies, half conspirators, relishing snickering complicity I was too innocent to share. Perkus, for his part, did show a wily, red-rimmed satisfaction at Oona in her amphetamine cups, but only from the vantage of his own. I’d never witnessed Perkus really bombed on alcohol before, but it seemed his recent bout of clean living made him a very cheap date. He swayed on his chair, with only the book for ballast. I suppose the dog’s life had been a bit less enthralling than he’d wanted to admit. I just wished I could dislodge him from his perches so easily as Oona.

“It’s really the best thing you’ve done?” I asked.

Perkus raised his eyebrows at her challengingly, as if he knew of something else lurking in a drawer somewhere, but still didn’t speak. In his dog’s haircut, lips softened by drink, he looked more and more the bit player from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Absolutely.”

“So forget what this editor thinks. It’ll get published somewhere else.”

“You don’t understand, it’s all written in the imperious voice of Deepster McHole-in-the-Ground. I steeped myself in his sources, and then spit them back out-it was like writing a graduate dissertation, something I’ve spent my life avoiding.” It wasn’t enough to mention sources, Oona had to begin listing them in a deliberate drone. “I read Deleuze and Guattari, I read John Gray and E. M. Cioran and Bernhard’s Correction, I read Mike Davis and Donna Haraway and John Baldessari, I read Ballard and Baudrillard, and by the way, I don’t care what anyone says, Ballard’s just Baudrillard without the u-d-r-i. I practically memorized The Writings of Robert Smithson, for god’s sake, which is the exact equivalent of ordering a month’s worth of meals at a restaurant where John Cage is the chef.”

“Good for you,” said Perkus, finally piping up. His voice was clotted, the words surfacing each like a bubble through a pot of oatmeal. I forgot for a moment which was his abstruse eye-both seemed to curl toward unseen dimensions. “A secret masterpiece is always best. It changes the world slightly. Everyone should have one, like one of those simulated worlds you were talking about, or an Ant Farm.”

Oona guffawed. “When I write my masterpiece it won’t have so many boring machines in it. That’s boring as in ‘What do we do with all the soil this boring machine has piled up?’”

I’d never put Noteless and Abneg’s tiger in conjunction until that instant. I looked at Perkus, sure he’d make the same leap, but either this was too obvious or I was no longer the target for his arched eyebrow. He was elsewhere. Ava whined and hiccuped quietly where she crouched below, but he seemed not to notice her, either. It was the longest I’d seen him go without caressing the dog since I’d come to the Friendreth. How predictable, my confusion: I was never able to appreciate one of his phases until they were vanishing, assuming wrongly I’d have a little while to get used to things. But this was Perkus’s trick, he shed orientations like skins. Yet he’d seemed so permanent when we met. Bogged in stasis, writer’s block elevated to a principle. I’d have to relegate this paradox to my growing pile of impossible questions, like why he and Oona Laszlo periodically shrugged off their enmity and converged, or whether Laird Noteless’s holes and the tiger’s were aspects of the same phenomenon, like Groom’s and Ib’s movies. I was sure of one thing: if Perkus wasn’t interested anymore, I refused to be. He could shrug off skins, but I wouldn’t wear them. Besides, I had an easy question: What was that book in his lap? I had it confused with Oona’s supposed masterpiece. But I knew enough not to embarrass myself-unpublished manuscripts weren’t bound in cloth and boards.

Oona answered for him. “That was my ticket of entry to this dog museum,” she laughed. “Perkus had me buy him a book on my way over here. I guess he and his new friend don’t darken the doors of Barnes & Nobles.”

It figured. Perkus had turned each of us into a version of Foster Watt, on call for the supplies he needed. Susan Eldred was his dealer in celluloid, Oona text. I’d been entrusted with nothing more cultural than bagels.

Perkus stirred himself from the mire to say, “Yeah, but you bought the wrong book.” He pushed it into my hands. Immaculate Rust, by Sterling Wilson Hobo. A volume of poetry, fifty or sixty pages, largely white space, strewn with paltry syllables. I never peeked / behind your bogus ducks / and lilies to see / the cogs and wheels concealed / or / everywhere your glamorous / falsified apples… “I asked for Obstinate Dust, by Ralph Warden Meeker,” Perkus continued. “How hard could that have been?”

“This looks about the same,” shrugged Oona. “Just mercifully shorter.”

“Hobo is a charlatan,” said Perkus, mustering energy for the dismissal. “A third-rate W. S. Merwin.”

“I got confused,” said Oona. “You’re lucky I didn’t come back with Adequate Lust, which is a how-to book. I might have written it, I forget.”

“Why not rely on communiqués from the storage-space people?” I said bitterly. “Anyway, didn’t you already give Obstinate Dust a go?”

“I wanted to try again,” said Perkus through a slurp at his glass. He felt no need to justify his whims. Why should he? He couldn’t imagine my regard for him was tipping into ruin. I felt he was a fraud, making theater of acquiring weighty books he’d never read.

I finished my glass and poured another, to catch up and to salve the aggravation of their banter. At this Oona showed a glance of panic, fearing her self-commiserating bottle would be drained without her help. She refilled not only her glass, but Perkus’s, seeming to incriminate me for rudeness. Ava wedged her cranium under my hand. She barely hiccuped at all, deferentially minimizing her presence, trying not to be displaced. With the prompting of the dog’s heightened instincts, I sniffed a lie in the air. There was a name for the flavor of mixed dislike and intimacy between Oona and Perkus. The two were exes, I was positive, no matter what I’d been told. So I added sexual jealousy to my roster of hurts and mysteries. It was simpler to manage, and blotted out the others, at least with the help of Oona’s Scotch. The evening blundered forward this way, until Perkus went into the back to urinate or lie down, I didn’t ask, Ava abjectly trotting after him. I demanded to know how Oona had ended up in the Friendreth, and heard my sibilants hiss.

“You weren’t home, so I called your cell, you idiot.”

“The Oonaphone,” I said stupidly.

“Right, the Oonaphone.”

“You never call in the daytime.”

“It was a special occasion, as you can see. I was making an afternoon booty call. Imagine my surprise.”

“I was at the movies.”

“For five hours?”

I didn’t care to say what effort had been required to topple Saruman and Sauron.

“Well, it hardly matters, since you gave your phone away.”

I brushed aside this line of inquiry, which was making me look foolish when I wanted to be fierce and prosecutorial. I was full of wild thoughts and convergences. In my brain Sterling Wilson Hobo was to Ralph Warden Meeker as Florian Ib was to Morrison Groom. Or maybe they were all the same person! Was Noteless involved in designing the tiger? But if paranoiac interpretation was a skin Perkus had shed and I’d involuntarily assumed, it fit awkwardly. If I thought I was close, I was nowhere at all. The secret lay outside my understanding. Oona Laszlo might have my existential puzzle’s edge pieces hidden on her person somewhere, but I’d never make her admit it. I could only formulate bizarre accusations: for instance, that Oona was preventing anyone from reading Meeker’s Obstinate Dust. This was obvious, since she’d tricked me into chucking one copy into Urban Fjord, and then pretended to forget the title when Perkus requested a second. What information was hidden in those pages? If that was idiotic, at least it was fancier than accusing her and Perkus of having been lovers. I felt sure something fancy was going on.

“Is there something you and Perkus aren’t telling me?” I kept my question vague, to invite any confession that might want to produce itself.

“What makes you think it’s one thing?” she teased. “Perkus and I might be not telling you completely different things. Why assume we’ve gotten our stories synced?”

“There are times when I think he’s trying to warn me about you.”

“I’d have returned the favor, but unfortunately by the time you and I met you’d already fallen completely into his clutches.”

At that point I did something regrettable. I used the only articulate weapon I had at my disposal: I threw my body at her. I’d been at full attention since the phrase “booty call” anyhow, rigid with intent in the one part of me capable of sustaining a clear thought. Maybe it could impart one, too. If I fucked Oona right, she might take my distress seriously at last, and blurt in the throes of ecstasy an explanation of why I’d felt so much more alive and at the same time so disassembled, so out of joint, since that day I’d walked into Perkus’s Eighty-fourth Street kitchen and seen her, since the time seven months ago when I’d fallen into both their clutches.

Oona was drunk enough that I could push her around easily, and soon enough we worked together on the same project. By the time Perkus and Ava strolled back into the kitchen I had Oona raised against the wall, her hands clutching my ass, though our pants were still on.

“Ava and I are going out,” said Perkus, marble-mouthed with drink and embarrassment. I turned to see him grappling to clip the leash to Ava’s collar, fingers evidently as anesthetized as his tongue. If I was the friend to Perkus I wanted to believe I was, I’d have insisted he not go out into the slippery night alone in that state. Let’s all walk the dog! We could have linked arms, like companions on the Yellow Brick Road (I knew which among us had straw for brains, and Ava made a nice Uncowardly Lion). Nobody spoke before he was through the door.

Nobody spoke after. Oona and I shut ourselves into Ava’s bedroom, shamelessly. Without comparing notes, the general thought was to finish before Perkus and the dog returned, but that was self-delusion. Somewhere in our throes we heard man and dog clunking and careening in the kitchen after their jaunt. Perkus made a show of cleaning up after our party and broke a glass in the sink. He bumped the stereo’s needle, making an agonized amplified scrape, finding the starting point of “Shattered.” Played the song to the end, then again, man and dog creaking the floorboards with their dance. Oona freed some groans while Mick Jagger covered our noise, but no revelatory exclamations or confessions. Soon the clunking and grappling on both sides of the bedroom door settled to silence. The light peeking underneath was switched off, and I heard Ava’s couch springs squeak as man and dog settled there together. My splitting of our foursome into the two couples I preferred had been decisive.

In the earliest light Oona staggered up to use the bathroom and stayed there a while, running water at the sink, gargling and spitting and so on. I took a turn after. When I emerged she’d dressed again, to stand waiting by the bed, an apparition in the granular light. Through my head-pounding sobriety I could see what I’d only smelled the night before, the layer of Ava’s white hairs that decorated the sheets we’d been sleeping and sweating upon. Oona’s glance, eyes pickled in regret, told me she wasn’t willing to slip back into that bed. The hairs already clung everywhere to her black clothing, so stark and abundant it was as if she was hoping to pass back through the front room in a pathetic dog costume.

“Buy me breakfast at your Mews,” she whispered hoarsely. “Just don’t force me to talk or think about anything, I couldn’t possibly.”

“Okay.”

“Whatever I might have said last night I take it all back,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I take it back anyway.”

We tiptoed through the front. Man and dog spooned on the couch, Perkus on the inside track, his back to the cushions, Ava nestled into the C of his stomach and knees with her spine, three legs fetally tucked, upraised snout against Perkus’s collarbone. Perkus still wore his corduroy pants and woolly socks, his muddy boots pried off just at the couch’s corner. Both slept with mouths drool-leakingly wide, eyes squeezed as if actively braving harsh light. There was none. Perkus might be the only person who’d keep his front room more firmly sealed against sunlight than the place where he usually slept. Oona and I didn’t stop to let our eyes adjust. We were self-sickened, wreathed in shame, certain we’d violated this place. There was no fucking in the Friendreth. If the dogs could keep themselves one to an apartment, what excuse did we have? We slipped through the unlocked front door, clicking it shut behind us as carefully as we could. On the other side we exhaled.

“Wow, listen to those hiccups,” said Oona.

“Yes, Ava’s got a bad case,” I said.

“That’s not the dog, Chase.”

I put my ear to the door. She was right.

March 19