Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-five

I pushed the buzzer for O. LASZLO, just my second time in her building and I’d found the courage to actually buzz. While I waited I ran my eyes over the other names, and found a couple that meant something to me, A. SPRILLTHMAR and T. SLEDGE. Sledge lived on Oona’s floor, not a major surprise. Despite Perkus’s admonition to me, I’d never played a detective, hadn’t struck anyone, I suppose, in the brief duration of my post-childhood career, as deep or sad or crafty enough to be persuasive in that sort of role. I wondered if that would be different now. I buzzed Oona a second time and when I’d satisfied myself that no reply was coming I buzzed T. SLEDGE. The sandy little man hadn’t seemed the type to be wandering out the morning after a major snowstorm, and I was again unsurprised to hear his query to me on the intercom. I said my name and he let me inside the building. (A. SPRILLTHMAR I kept in my back pocket for the time being.)

Out of the elevator I looked to Oona’s door, wondering if she was somehow huddled silently inside, pretending not to be home for my benefit, but the door told me nothing-it wasn’t as if there were milk bottles set outside it. Then I examined myself in the mirror in the corridor there, as I suppose no detective would have. The muscles of my calves pinged from my night of trudging through unshoveled snow. I’d steered the grateful and untiring Ava north again, from the Friendreth, to my apartment, and introduced her to my own bed before collapsing there for a few dream-fuddled hours of sleep in morning glare. Ava had draped herself across my legs, and if she’d wondered about Perkus or this change in her circumstances she did nothing to show it. When she woke she pogoed on her forelimb to give my rooms close-sniffing inspection, then circled into my softest chair. I’d left her there, with only a bowl of water and a few slices of Muenster cheese, to go by myself on this new expedition. But first, prisoner of vanity, I’d showered, shaved, slicked my hair. Now, too vain not to use this mirror to judge the result, I couldn’t locate the disenchanted and fearsome character I wanted to believe the night had made me.

It was my curse to look unruined in my ruins. If the bereaved had no language for speaking to the unbereaved, my own bereavement had no language for making itself known on the outside of me. You’d cast this face as the astronaut’s ineffectual fiancé to the end. My solipsistic fugue might or might not be justified by the discoveries presently dawning on me (or perhaps force-fed, by Perkus, and finally, reluctantly, swallowed by myself). Anyway, I was interrupted by T. Sledge (Thomas? Theodore?), formerly known to me as Blurred Person, the pale sidekick presence lolling around Oona’s apartment waiting for delivery sandwiches the only time I’d been here before. He’d opened his door just a crack at the sound of the elevator’s ding, and now stood watching me with one eye. Now I understood he was more than Oona’s best friend. He was the model for “Sledge,” the gardener, the other American trapped aboard the space station with Janice Trumbull.

Sledge’s door was triply locked from the inside, including an iron bar extending to a slotted plate on the floor, to form a reinforcing buttress a battering ram couldn’t have overcome. Inside, I saw he had every reason to want to be sure a visitor was alone, not flanked by some team of DEA agents. The light inside was all artificial and warm, the smell sweetly fungal, like a rain-forest floor. Bulbs hummed and seeping watering systems chortled, bringing throbbing life to the hundreds of sprouting marijuana plants visible in long open tanks covering every spot of floor in the maze of rooms. The humid false summer here was as oblivious to the snowstorm outside the building’s walls as it would have been to a dry desert heat or the void of space. When I stepped inside I felt I was as near to entering an orbital station (one orbital station in particular) as I’d ever be. There didn’t look to be a bed or even a couch for sleeping. I suppose Sledge spent his nights in some small extra room in Oona’s spacious apartment. Possibly they’d nicknamed it the Attic.

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

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

“How did you know?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, gosh, I’d never ask her to pay.”

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

“Oona isn’t here, is she?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Not hidden in her apartment?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, thank you. I do.”

“Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Be kind to her if you can.”