Chronic City

CHAPTER Four

The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty. As the idealistic and dreamy boy intern to Gordon Pesty, the fulminating lawyer extraordinaire, I seemed, to myself and others, to embody… something. The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception, was unaccountably “soulful.” Or, not I, but Warren Zoom, born on the wrong side of the tracks, single child of glamorous widowed mom, persistently seeking fatherly mentoring from the irate and disarmed Pesty. This Warren Zoom struck the viewer (or at least a critical mass of teenage girls, and a number of their mothers) as possessing some quantity of life outside the cold frame of the screen, beyond the rigid limits of what shadow plays could be mounted within that half-hour frame in the usual attempt to placate, amuse, and sell what needed selling. Short novels, geared to the teenage girls, were hurriedly commissioned by Ballantine Books (written, I suppose, by the eighties equivalent of Oona Laszlo), decorated with my face, and offered on drugstore and supermarket racks-new stuff to sell, exploding out of the old, the great dream. At one point, I remember, I had the cover of TV Guide and People in the same week. Everyone wanted to know or be Warren Zoom! And I was he! This all evaporated rather (extremely) quickly.

Now Warren Zoom and I have suffered a permanent rupture. We go our separate ways, he trapped in his rounds, ever youthful, pushed deeper and deeper into cable television’s circles of hell (where I accidentally glimpse him from time to time, and hurriedly surf away). Me, aging, but not too badly, playing these other roles in my life here in Manhattan, for which Warren floats the checks, an elegant arrangement of mutual support and indifference. Or no, that’s not true. I do nothing nowadays to support Warren Zoom. I’d say he owes me everything, but I’m not sure he’d agree.

I no longer act, that is unless you’d call my every waking moment a kind of performance. Apart from errands of good taste, like recording the Criterion voice-overs for Susan Eldred, I’m untempted. To be honest, few lately have sought to tempt me. A year ago I took a strange meeting with a couple of producers, young men with the bullish slickness of newly recruited spies or secret agents. They even dressed oddly, in twin black suits that cried for tailoring. Over an expensive meal the two propositioned me with the glib confidence available, it seemed to me, to those who not only had never known failure but were also spending someone else’s money. They sketched, vaguely, “the role of a lifetime.” I no longer remember the details of the pitch, or even the milieu-in truth, I wasn’t listening carefully. I tried to tell them I no longer auditioned, didn’t even bother to keep a relationship with an agent. My childhood fame had made me impossible to cast, and relieved me of the burden of ambition. I’d been returned to civilian life, I joked. They, in turn, proposed that it was my residual career, and my existence as a Manhattan gadabout, that made me so very perfect for the role in question. Defeated, I told them I’d be willing to look at a script. They promised it would arrive soon.

That was the last I heard from them. The encounter puzzled me.

I live in capital’s capital, but I root against the Dow. I feel an instinctive lizard-thrill on those days when it collapses. I know I’m meant to feel we’re all in something together, especially after the gray fog stretched out to cover the lower reaches of the island. I ought to feel sympathy for the moneymen, ashen and dim in aspect, forgetful, sleepy, never quite themselves anymore, like Reggie Spencer. Yet if I’m honest with myself, I’d like to see them stripped even of their fog-gray suits, reduced to suspenders and barrels, put out of their misery at last. Sometimes this Dow-enmity of mine seems like the worst secret I could disclose. I don’t.

Though I do dwell among the money people, that’s incidental to what I like about the Upper East Side, and to the matter of why I rarely go anywhere else. The secret of this place is its quarantine from the boom-and-bust of Manhattan’s trends and fashions. Maybe someday, if the rumors are true, they’ll build a Second Avenue subway line and all of this will change. For now, what’s here is entrenched and immutable. The shopping-cart ladies and the fur ladies and the black-cocktail-dress girls, the preying, tie-loosened twenty-three-year-old junior partners, the reverse-slumming off-duty policemen, none has to glance at the others and wonder whether this place rightly belongs to them or anyone. The resonances and layers here are mysterious without being unduly impressed with themselves. (A few of the shopping-cart ladies will still roll up their sleeves and show you a bluish line of concentration-camp numerals, if you want to get your self-pity casually smashed.) Money has been here so long it’s a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead. Much hides behind what’s assumed about the East Side, even if what’s assumed is true. There are things beyond what’s assumed and true. East Eighty-fourth Street, the entrance beside Brandy’s Piano Bar, and those who live there. Not only Perkus Tooth, though he’s a fine example.

Biller, too. The homeless man lives here, at least sometimes, if it isn’t more correct to say he lives in another world entirely.

I’m more and more a day sleeper. This trend, inaugurated before my friendship with Perkus Tooth, was certainly aggravated by it. The angle of light in my apartment makes it awfully easy: there’s a sort of afternoon “dawn” as the sun at last breaks past the edge of the Dorffl Tower. (My building’s board fought hard to prevent or modify the Dorffl, and lost. I never go to those meetings.) Like a restaurant worker I abide with the life of Manhattan as it slakes itself on sundown pleasures, as it dines and smokes and boozes, then I tuck it in for the night and go on. What’s served with cocktails-a handful of wasabi cashews, a nice black-market unpasteurized fromage oozing off its board-is frequently my lunch if not breakfast. On this denatured island if I crave “breakfast” Gracie Mews Diner will gladly serve me two poached with bacon, and home fries with shiny bits of onion and green pepper, at four in the morning, before bed. That’s when I crave it, if I do.

I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade-to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I’m like fudge. Or maybe I’m like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was, I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate. He wouldn’t have meant it kindly.

In that margin of sky granted to my apartment by the Dorffl Tower is visible another tower, a church spire three or four blocks away, something built in the nineteenth century. I don’t know the name of the church, despite how easy it would be to discover. I’d only have to ask a neighbor. Or walk over. I know nothing about architecture, but I think the style may be Gothic. To confirm this, I’d simply need to pluck White and Willensky’s Architectural Guide to Manhattan from the place where I noticed it, in the bottom row on Perkus Tooth’s living-room shelf. I never did.

The point about the church spire is that I take a moment every day on waking to glance at it to see whether the birds are there. It is a flock of… something-gulls? swallows? — with feathers white on top, darker underneath, that wheels and races in unrepeatable patterns around and underneath the spire, for sessions lasting usually fifteen minutes, sometimes as much as half an hour. I try to count the birds and settle, uneasily, at eleven, twelve, or thirteen. They dive, figure-eight, the flock’s density bunching and stretching as it turns. They shoot left of the spire, tilting, seeming about to abandon the landmark, then abruptly turn, white tops flipping to gray undersides as if at a cursor’s clicking, and recover their orbit. Sometimes, rarely, a sole bird turns the wrong way, parts from the group, and has to wheel in a phantom operation until it is swept up again in the flock. It is terribly easy to blink or look away and miss their unceremonious finishing, for whatever reason it is that they finish. They merely tilt and are gone from the spire, and from my slice of sky.

My ignorance of natural history keeps me from gaining traction on puzzles attaching to the birds themselves (Why that number? Why not eight, or fifteen? Do they live together all day and night, or gather only for these missions? What do they do on days when they don’t visit the tower? Have Richard Abneg’s eagles ever fed on this flock?), so I drift to truly unanswerable questions. Did the church attract birds when it was first built? Did the builders know it would? Did they intend it? The relation between those birds and that tower feels both deep and impossible. The longer one stares, the more the persistence of the vaguely medieval spire in the sky over Second Avenue seems to evidence a mystery in itself. If I could plumb it I’d perhaps begin to know why I live in this place and what it consists of. Instead I get about as near as those birds. Yet they’re carefree, and I’m not.

On some days, while I’m watching the flock loop at the spire, a passing airplane putters at high layers past the top of my window frame, leaving a faint contrail. (This happened to be the case on that first morning after Emil Junrow’s funeral, when Oona Laszlo crept from my bed and left me sleeping there.) A planeload of people on their way to somewhere from somewhere else, having as little to do with birds or tower as birds or tower have to do with each other. I am the only witness to their conjunction. The privilege of my witnessing is limited to that fact: there’s nothing more I grasp. I suppose if, somewhere in the stratosphere beyond, Janice Trumbull’s irretrievable space station could be seen in its orbit, it would have again as little awareness of or relation to airplane, birds, and tower as airplane, birds, and tower have to one another. Or, if relation exists, I don’t fathom it.

November 4

Dearest Chase,

I am trying to “feel” November, yours and mine. I’ll make an imaginary diorama, like something from grade school, an attempt to win a secret science fair of the heart: Janice and Chase’s November. A mind’s-eye miniature I can peer into. (I won’t mention this project to the Captain, or the Russians, anyone. We all know too much about one another’s little projects up here.) Is it cold yet? Is Manhattan beautiful? Have they put up the Christmas tree, or is it too soon? (I know you loathe Rockefeller Center.) Do you ever go to the Chinese garden at the Met, with the tiny gurgling waterfall, where we once went and laid our heads together on a stone and fell asleep? (I don’t know whether I want to know if you go there without me or not, so don’t answer that question.) Do I sound idiotic? Forgive me, I’m going a little bonkers up here at last. Since the antifreeze leak-explosion, really-things have not been right. I should organize my thoughts. It always helps put my feelings back in order, to write them to you. I’m sure Mission Control will have tried to keep any panic to a minimum, that’s in their training, and even more, it’s in their nature. (Hello, Ted! And how are you, Arun? Are you sipping Ceylon as you read this?) Even among us six, we’ve quit discussing the incident-there’s always the new day’s tasks to think of. But in truth we nearly lost both the Den and the Greenhouse. And without the Greenhouse, no food. And no air. No us. Northern Lights just an elaborate mausoleum, or perhaps a floating lab for an experiment in zero-gravity mummification.

Mstislav, the most dedicated gardener among us now that Sledge rarely emerges from the Attic, has been tinkering with the carbondioxide balance, a dangerous but crucial sport. At six or seven hundred parts per million, the air in here is dreadful but sustains life. Regular jiggering of organic functions are needed to keep the ratio from ballooning to something deadly. To make a long story short, after an alarmingly high reading, Mstislav discovered a mound of rotting mangrove fronds under a seemingly healthy hillock of wheatgrass-a camouflaged nightmare of poison-leaching compost. Endgame for us here could be that simple, that foolish. Everyone, even the Captain and Sledge, was required to take up pitchforks in an emergency campaign to clear the fermenting stew into garbage stockings, which then had to be banished from our air space, pronto. Now, for months Keldysh has been stuffing waste into one of the emergency modules, a reasonably nifty solution, with the notion that we’d eventually test our ability to launch the module and dump its contents at the edge of the Chinese scatter field. Perhaps our garbage, drifting slowly into Earth’s gravity, could even take out some of the Chinese mines that keep us trapped here. A fantasy, perhaps. We’d have to eliminate hundreds for Mission Control even to begin to discuss reaching us with a shuttle. But we dream, why not? If Keldysh’s scheme fell short, the worst would be to see a garbage-stuffed module destroyed on passage through the scatter field. We’ve got two other modules.

Well, this surplus of mulch-bulging stockings forced our hand, before Keldysh had any chance to chart a launch plan. Zamyatin was enraged at Keldysh for attempting the early launch, but we’d all encouraged him, Zamyatin included. And in truth, we were all exhausted from twelve hours of what Mstislav laughingly called “serf toil,” one of the rare jokes among the Russians that even Sledge and I could get. Also the last laugh we’d have for a while. Keldysh crashed the module. It rebounded off solar panel V, snapped off an antenna, and then clanged disastrously against the Den’s exterior tile. Glued to the video feed like teenagers watching a horror film, we saw the module tumble unbraked through, yes, the Chinese mines. Then flare and vanish. (Honestly, I do think by then Keldysh had his head in his hands, and could have reversed course if he hadn’t been so despondent at the earlier impacts. Mission Control will delete this parenthetical before releasing this letter. Howdy again, fellas.) Farewell to excess compost, to unrecyclable plastic waste, to irredeemably shameful diapers, and to the module itself. The flume of mute fire another warning, if we needed it, to recalibrate orbital decay daily. Like flossing. (I joke to keep your attention during the dry technical passages, my darling distractible Chase.) I don’t think anyone thought to inspect the Den’s interior for damage until we smelled the antifreeze, a skunk’s reek speeding through Northern Lights’ tiny atmosphere.

It was Mstislav who had the foresight to remotely seal the Den, then insist we don oxygen masks and investigate. Forget for now any damage to the interior-we were predisposed to concern ourselves with the rocket ship’s hull, every spaceman’s concern! By the time we reached the Den we’d lost Sledge somewhere, but the remaining five of us went in wearing masks and discovered the wrecked antifreeze line spewing turquoise blobs, which floated and shattered to paint every surface of the Den’s interior. Mstislav and Zamyatin clamped the line. Then, fresh off our serf toil in the Greenhouse, we space janitors now set to scrubbing and sponging and wringing the blue goo into containers, a task much like the pursuit of Dr. Seuss’s Oobleck. (I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At the finish our uniforms were coated. Mstislav, champion of this episode, reasonably pointed out that any droplet of the pollutant we exported from the Den was destined for circulation and, ultimately, our mucous membranes. Our bloodstreams. So we stripped and trashed the clothes. Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of shock, squeezing last beads of antifreeze from our hair. (Don’t be jealous. They’ve seen me naked before. Anyway, on our present diet I’m shrunken to a ten-year-old’s gaunt outlines, not exactly turning heads. My periods have stopped, too. And yes, again, I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At last, and ignoring various bruises and scrapes that first-aid protocols would have had us tend immediately, we all slunk away to our various hidey-holes, each to strap ourselves to a wall for some desperately needed sleep. Starved as we were, I don’t think anyone emerged for ten hours or more.

I won’t tell you what Sledge was up to in the interval while we scrubbed the Den. I’m too tired.

Even omitting that, I can’t imagine, having written it out now, that Mission Control will release too much of this report. Still, when our media-digest packet turns up (there’s always so much demand for our scrawny bandwidth, so many technical transmissions in line ahead of anything personal, that the packet is usually delayed a week or two), I’m startled at how many columns they devote to us. How fascinating can we really be? They’ll forget us soon. We’ve practically forgotten ourselves. That’s why I rely on you, Chase, to believe in me. As I drift, you anchor me in reality. On Earth. In Manhattan, where you sit reading this, perhaps in that fake-French coffee shop (is it really called Savoir Faire?) with the amazing almond croissants you pretend to allow yourself only once or twice a month but in truth devour at least twice a week. That’s where I picture you, Chase. With powdered sugar on your fingers as you open Mission Control’s overnight envelope. The sugar on your lips and fingers and possibly on your nose, too-that sweet dust is me, your astronaut, your lostronaut, your Janice.