Chronic City

CHAPTER Six

Oona Laszlo was bizarrely productive. She seemingly did nothing, when out of my sight, but dash off books. The week previous we’d strolled together though the Barnes & Noble on Lexington and, serene and deadpan, she’d pointed out three she’d written just among the new releases. (Then again, she could have told me she’d written anything in the shop. Her name wasn’t on the books.) Now she’d taken a new assignment, covert as ever: an autobiography of Laird Noteless, who’d received the commission for the Memorial to Daylight popular sentiment had demanded in reply to the gray fog downtown.

Noteless, legendary for his unbudging exile stance, his stark antihumanist vision, his clashes with borough presidents and local preservationist groups in attempting to mount his abysmal spectacles, was experiencing the kind of late-blooming legitimacy this town sometimes accorded to avant-gardists who stuck around long enough. It might be the case that in this era of gray fog we’d caught up to Noteless’s stark antihumanist vision, even found some flinty comfort there. Or perhaps it was simply that Noteless’s Ivy League undergraduate friends were finally, four decades later, running the world, as they were always meant to. (Legitimacy settles on us in various ways.) Anyhow, Noteless was too occupied with the big controversial commission to pen his own memoir, so his publisher had found reliable, versatile Oona. Now she’d persuaded me to travel this morning to 191st Street, to have a look at Urban Fjord. Unembarrassed to inform me or the publisher that she paid contemporary art little attention, Oona wanted to gaze on a few of Noteless’s works, to get a feel. She was at least that thorough, though she promised me she’d be concocting the book without much consultation with Noteless or his assistants, and that she preferred it so. She also bragged or confessed that she wrote with the television on, mostly Top Chef or Next Year’s Model. This was the third morning we’d woken together. I’d still never crossed the threshold of her apartment building.

Despite all global rumors, the city was suffering a ferocious November. In a kind of wardrobe shock, nobody could locate their January gear, and on the street all hobbled like crooked insects, stunned by the knifing winds. Oona and I made it as far as Eighty-sixth and Third before ducking into the nearest shop, a Papaya Czar on the corner there.

“Why don’t we take a cab?” I said.

“The subway goes right to it,” said Oona. “Let’s just warm up for a minute. We haven’t had breakfast anyway.”

“Fabulous suggestion,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere for breakfast.” I gestured at the hot dogs browning on the grill, the dented tureens of sickly tropical beverage, covered with garish signage, that lined the walls, hoping my point was self-evident. I had good visions of a bowl of latte, something crumbly in my fingers, hot dough and caffeine. Then a U-turn route to my bed, which we’d vacated too soon for my taste, driven here by Oona’s workaholic jitters. My own priorities would have kept us indoors, fugitive and warm, out of public view.

I wanted Oona in the morning. I could still conjure her slippery smoothness in my arms (and divergent cuppable breasts in my palms, where they left ghost trails of a peach’s weight), but Oona had kept dunning lights and pulling curtains, and dressing and undressing stealthily, while I was at the sink or refrigerator, or asleep. When I asked, Oona informed me she was too skinny to look at. She might even be invisible, she joked. After I looked clear through her I’d see there was no one there at all. Well, I suspended judgment. Meanwhile, I campaigned to get her nude in a bed flooded with daylight. I really felt no call to visit any Fjord in this weather.

“This is a good breakfast right here.”

“You’re kidding.” Oona had a thing for dodging my suggestions of bars or restaurants, I’d noticed. She’d claimed she lived on roast chestnuts and knishes from sidewalk carts, and takeout Chinese. Really, I think I’d seen only white wine, good Scotch, and Häagen-Dazs cross her lips.

“Papaya’s fantastic for the lower intestine,” said Oona. “I think it reverses cancer, too.” She ordered herself a cup of orange stuff from an imperturbable Hispanic man in a white smock and mustache. Lodged beneath the glowing coils of ceiling-mounted heater, he might have been on some faraway beach, vending to bathers. Outside the shop window, a cyclonic wind had roiled a discarded Times into a kind of whirligig, one which pedestrians had to dodge, with their hands protecting their faces.

“Have some. It really is an aid to digestion, it says so on this sign.”

“Yes, that’s why they sell it with hot dogs.”

“Poor Chase. Is capitalism too paradoxical for you?”

“I’ll take a black coffee,” I told the counterman. Then I pointed at the hot dogs. “And two, with mustard.”

“You’re the astronaut’s man,” said the counterman suddenly, breaking what I thought had been a fourth wall between us.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Don’t give up,” he said, his tone conveying stoical solidarity. “She needs you, man.”

“Thank you.” I shook his hand awkwardly before accepting the hot dogs and coffee.

Oona and I stepped out to brave the wind again. It was then that, without trying, I spotted him, second from the corner in a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries, pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down Eighty-sixth Street, the way we’d come. Biller. Oona and I had likely passed him once already, obliviously bantering, our elbows not linked but jostling together, on our way into the Papaya Czar. Biller’s little card table was loaded edge to edge with trade paperbacks; literary titles, unusual ones, it seemed to me, even as it dawned that they must be Perkus Tooth’s books. Stopped there, my dumb cardboard tray of coffee and dogs between us, I felt a strange guilt that Biller should catch me and Oona together. Perkus was in the dark about us, so far as I knew. (Confronted with a vagrant, my mind also fled to vagrant guilts: that wind-whipped Times surely must contain the latest update on Northern Lights’ damaged tiles, and the space walk the trapped astronauts had scheduled to tend them.) Whether Oona recognized Biller or not I couldn’t guess.

“Here.” I shoved one of the two mustardy dogs, in its crenellated paper sleeve, at Biller. He received the steaming gift in fingers bared by a woolen glove with cutoff tips, and only nodded. His eyes were as gentle as I recalled. So much so I couldn’t discern whether they were also puzzled. He seemed to be forgiving me for the hot dog, even as he lifted it for a first bite.

“I’m Perkus’s friend,” I said. “Chase.”

“Okay,” said Biller.

“Those are some of his books you’re selling, I see.”

“He gave them to me.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

“I read them first.”

“I’m sure.”

This was small talk, but even as I made it, one title caught my eye, raised above the others by the book’s thickness. Obstinate Dust, by Ralph Warden Meeker, the tome Perkus had had on his kitchen table or at his bedside the last few times I’d visited. Now, as though an involuntary detective action had been triggered in me by Biller’s defensiveness, I also noticed the bookmark, a smoothed Ricola cough-drop wrapper, hanging like a tongue just a quarter or fifth of the way through the volume’s heft. Perkus’s bookmark, I knew it. Perkus sucked the Ricola drops to coat his fume-seared gullet, another of his self-medications-like papaya beverages to smooth the passage of frankfurters, it occurred to me now.

Oona tugged at my arm and scowled. I handed her the hot coffee, as though she’d requested it. Then continued with Biller, a little helpless to quit what had become an interrogation. I put my finger on Obstinate Dust. The book must have been a thousand pages long.

“You finish that one? Perkus didn’t.”

If I’d caught Biller in a lie, he wasn’t chagrined. His attitude was still sympathetic, as though I’d come to him somehow penitently, to right a small wrong. Or perhaps the air of sympathy was directed at the absent Perkus.

“Mr. Tooth gives me books he can’t finish,” he said. “He’s not reading a lot these days, I don’t think.”

“Chase,” said Oona, butting her forehead against my shoulder, then closing to me for warmth. The sidewalk entrepreneurs to the right and left of us each jogged in place, fists deep in pockets. They eyed the transaction between myself and Biller, plainly envious to think the bookseller, of all people, had a customer in the impossible weather.

“Okay, I’ll take that one.” I had the wild thought I’d read it, and surprise Perkus. Maybe I could recapture his interest from chaldrons. I hadn’t seen Perkus for three days, but we’d spoken on the phone. He’d reported that the going price of chaldrons was skyrocketing, not that he’d had a chance to pay it-he’d bid in seven auctions and lost them all. Before I could remind him of the joke about the restaurant-goer who complained that the food was bad and the portions small, he’d hustled me off the phone so he could resume scouring eBay for sellers. There were obsessions I could adore in Perkus, others which in their thinness broke my heart. I didn’t want him to give up his books.

Biller quoted a price. “Ten dollars.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Half price.”

I handed Biller a twenty. He told me I was his first buyer of the day, and that he had no change. I waved it off, and shoehorned the brick of pages into my coat pocket. As if aping me, Biller crammed the last third of the hot dog into his mouth, then raised his half-gloved hand in salute, bare fingertips gripping the air, while Oona and I slanted off toward the subway entrance.

Oona’s plan, which she claimed was impeccable, involved shooting downtown in order to go uptown. We took the Lexington line to Forty-second Street, then boarded the shuttle, in order to get on the 1 train up into Harlem and beyond, to the parklands alongside the Harlem River, where Noteless had constructed his Fjord. I couldn’t imagine why we’d needed to cross to the West Side if our destination had been in the east all along, and after our second train began pleading with Oona to be reasonable and exit the system, but she ignored me, continued dragging me through passages like a ferret with a captured hare in its jaws. The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier. This is why I always take taxicabs. Nevertheless, we eventually boarded the uptown Broadway local, which poked its way unsteadily into unknown parts of Manhattan.

“closing in dream the somnolent city-”

“Wait, wait, that’s the first sentence?”

I began again. “closing in dream the somnolent city-”

“No, stop, that’s enough.”

I’d unwedged Obstinate Dust from my coat’s pocket and begun narrating its opening to Oona once we’d found seats on the local. Now she grabbed the book from me. Our subway car held a scattering of faces, none, after 125th Street, white as our own, and none interested for more than a glance-worth in Oona’s and my own agitation. I am always nervous, I’ll admit, in Manhattan’s triple digits. (In my defense, I’m nervous in the single digits, too.) Fidgeting with the big paperback, we were out of place and to be ignored, painted over with everyday disdain. The train was clammily warm and malodorous. Riders sat with coats loosened, nodding in rhythm to earbuds or just the robot’s applause of wheels locating seams in ancient track.

“No, no, no,” chanted Oona, flitting through a few pages. “Not lowercase italics, they can’t be serious, it’s like poetry! Next thing you know the characters’ names will be X, Y, and Z. I can’t even find any character names.”

“Maybe that’s just a kind of overture,” I suggested. “It can’t really stay like that all the way through.” I felt a kind of wilting despair, as though my plan to read the book was a real one, on which any hopes for Perkus’s stability was contingent.

“Impossible. I don’t want to know about it. I didn’t get where I am today reading thousand-page prose poems. Please, sorry, but no.”

This was one of Oona’s recurring jokes: I didn’t get where I am today. She never said, of course, where it was she claimed she’d gotten-the ghost, the invisible girl. I suppose that was the joke. That she’d gotten who knows where, but still had some standards. What I noticed now was how near she held the book to her face. I’d never before seen her reading.

“Do you need glasses?”

Oona replied idly, as if musing to herself. “Sometimes I wear glasses, but never in front of you. My god, it’s all like this.” She thrust the book in my lap, and I resumed the survey she’d abandoned. True enough, the look of the pages was consistent…he struggled to interest them in the concretization of listenality… Why italicize an entire book? Was the whole of Obstinate Dust meant to be taken as a kind of parenthetical fugue, or as an aside to something else? And if so, what? Ralph Warden Meeker’s other novels? Literature per se? The reader’s mundane existence?

Doubt swallowed my fantasy. Even if I somehow managed to get through Obstinate Dust, and then to resuscitate Perkus’s interest in it, was reading Meeker’s opus in any way preferable to surfing eBay for chaldrons? Nonetheless, I felt I’d incurred a responsibility, was somehow doomed to the book. Biller had tricked me into taking a hot potato off his hands, just as Susan Eldred had booby-trapped her office by introducing me to Perkus in the first place.

“Is ‘listenality’ a word?” I asked Oona.

“So do you have, like, this whole network of spies on street corners giving you regular updates on Perkus Tooth’s mental health?”

“I realize this sounds weird, but Biller lives in the air space behind Perkus’s kitchen… part of the time, at least…” I attempted to explain the whole unlikely fact that Perkus had a dependent in this world. Meanwhile our train rattled out of the 145th Street station. The unfamiliar tunnels grew stained and decrepit, the tile more and more resembling Roman or Greek mosaic, those fragments entombed at the Met in dim vacant rooms one hurries through en route to the latest exhibition of Bacons or Arbuses.

Oona didn’t mask her impatience. “I’ve seen him lowering leftovers out his window. But what’s your role? Did you agree to keep buying back the junk Perkus gives Biller? A little triangular economy of pity?”

“I thought I’d return the book,” I said, feeling pathetic. “I thought Perkus might have given it to him… by mistake.”

“Tried to put Humpty together again,” she possibly muttered, her voice engulfed in the train’s clangor.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

“Why would pity be triangular?” I heard myself ask. “Perkus shouldn’t pity me. Or Biller.”

“Nobody pities you, Chase.”

“Why are you angry all of a sudden?”

“I’m not angry. It’s just I thought you and I were sneaking around behind her back.” Oona jabbed a finger upward. Though we sped through an underground tunnel in a dingy earth rocket, anyone would understand she meant Janice Trumbull, the sky’s noble captive. It was in the nature of orbit that Janice’s presence blanketed the planet, overhead of any given location. She was like a blind god, one helpless at our lies, deceived effortlessly.

“We are,” I told Oona, though I really barely did more than mouth the words, feeling dangerous stating it aloud. My guilt was as large as the sky, and I couldn’t escape it underground.

“Really? Because it mostly feels to me like we’re cheating on Perkus. Whenever you mention him, which is constantly, I feel like you’re talking about your wife and kids and dog, waiting in a suburban home where you’ll inevitably return.”

“I’m concerned about Perkus,” I blurted.

“Why aren’t you concerned about your girlfriend? She’s stranded in orbit with four horny cosmonauts, plus one American horticulturalist who’s begun barking like a dog and won’t come out of the storage attic. The plants are dying, the air’s full of carbon dioxide, and now she’s got these unspecified medical symptoms-”

My betrayal of Janice was compounded by Oona’s details. “What medical symptoms?”

“You really should read the letters more carefully.”

What had I missed? My shame took its place in a vast backdrop of shames-oxygen-starved astronauts, war-exiled orphans, dwindling and displaced species-against which I puttered through daily life, attending parties and combating hangovers, recording voiceovers and granting interviews to obscure fan sites, drinking coffee and smoking joints with Perkus, and making contact with real feeling unpredictably and at random, at funeral receptions, under rain-sheeted doorways.

Yet through shame and guilt I felt a sudden joy. Oona was jealous. To be jealous was to be in love. Oona would deny this on the spot, but the two were continuous territories on any emotional map I’d ever known. The realization unleashed delight in me, but Oona didn’t seem delighted. She was gnarled in herself, peevish. Maybe she was sorry she’d mentioned Janice. I wanted to embrace and protect her, but she’d angled from me on the seat. How odd, really, that Oona felt pitted against Perkus. With their small bodies and large heads, their persnickety outfits and smoke-tinged tenors, I’d first taken them for siblings or lovers. Even now, in their vibrant wit and impatience, and for their revitalizing effect on my own life, I associated the two, no matter that each spoke dismissively of the other. I’d certainly fallen into this skulking romance partly because it sprang from the magical site of the Eighty-fourth Street kitchen. But it was obvious that poor Oona had displaced her jealousy: to directly compete with the stranded astronaut was too abysmal, so she projected the feelings onto Perkus instead. Yet under the circumstances, it didn’t seem strategic to say so.

I had barely a chance to dwell on the dismaying cityscape as the train soared aboveground, the slate-brown monolithic prewar tenements, the rusted Coca-Cola-sponsored bodega signs, the glass-strewn lots full of twisted ailanthus shrubs, before we’d abandoned the elevated views and descended to that unfriendly map ourselves. I felt a little overwhelmed, being one who flinches from any wider world but prefers to feel at home in Manhattan, to glimpse the island’s own provinces and badlands, its margins. The bitter wind had died, and the pavements were full of drifting souls, men in porkpie hats leaning on parked cars or arrayed in beach chairs, packets of schoolchildren not in school. Oona knew just where she was headed, putting the commercial avenues behind us, and then the tenements, too, as we crossed Fort George Avenue, into the parklands at the island’s edge. I had to pee, but wasn’t too tempted by the prospect of any restroom I’d find if we backtracked. Anyway, Oona was impossible to slow. Consulting some inner compass, she drew us to the cyclone-fenced perimeter of a wild steep slope, the ground tangled with underbrush, nothing like the tended river’s edge I knew. A cleared ball field, its home plate caged to manage fouls, was partly visible below us, but I saw no evidence of a trail that would get us to it.

“We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?”

“We just have to find the entrance. Come on, Chase. Your shoes will be fine.”

“I wasn’t worrying about my shoes.”

“Then stop looking at them.”

That was when they appeared, on the trail through the brush the way we’d come: two black kids, boys rather than teenagers, not threatening in any way, though one carried a stick, picking along as if with a shepherd’s crook. One wore a puffy fake-down coat, gold scuffed with black, and the other a New York Jets warm-up jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. They fell in with us easily, local guides to the forsaken zone, masking their curiosity with shrugging familiarity.

“Hey.”

“Hey to you,” said Oona.

“You lookin’ for the Ford?”

“Fjord-yes.”

“Fee-ord,” repeated Puffy Coat, lightly mocking. “You goin’ the wrong way.”

“So take us the right way.”

They steered us back uphill. The beaten trail at the base of the fence forced us into single-file, Oona ahead of me, the boys bracketing us protectively. It was Puffy Coat who led, foraging ahead with his broomstick crook. The one at my back, New York Jets, tapped my elbow.

“Where you from?”

It seemed odd to say Upper East Side. For one thing, his part of things was so much farther upper. “Downtown,”

I told him.

“You and her married?”

“No.”

“You Zoom, right?”

“Sorry?”

“From that show, Mister Pesty.”

There may be no way to say this sensitively: from my vantage, I’ve come to believe black people watch a lot of reruns. Or at least they tend to know me for my first fame, rather than my second, that social half-life at Janice Trumbull’s side or in cocktail photographs in New York magazine.

“That’s me.”

“You look old.”

“I am old. That was a long time ago.” It occurred to me that he was probably near the age I was when cast for Martyr & Pesty’s first season.

“Why you never punch that dude in the face?”

“It’s not me, it’s a character. If it were me I would have punched him.”

“Naaah.” My interlocutor seemed to think I lied.

“Well, Zoom needed to keep his job, you know.”

This answer satisfied him better, and he fell silent behind me for the time being. Oona was quiet, too, behind our leader, and we made a kind of reverent company as we picked our way up and down the scrubby rises led by these sprites, these ushers, who’d emerged from the wasteland. The ball field was in view for a moment, then it wasn’t. Puffy Coat halted at a section of the cyclone fence where it was split and curled away from the ground as if by a raiding animal. He set his stick on the ground, then gripped the fence and widened the breach, nodding to indicate that we should duck through, his breath frosting in the air before him.

“This can’t be what Noteless had in mind as an approach to his great work,” I said.

Oona had wriggled past the barrier, and now beckoned me to follow. “I don’t think he necessarily intends to make it easy to see. I’ve heard some people rent helicopters and fly over.”

“What if we just took his word for it?”

A dust-trampled path led downhill from the damaged fence, into deeper brush. Bladder swelling, hands chapping in cold, I was just ready to despair totally when Noteless’s Fjord erupted into view at our feet. The chasm seemed to have been hewn out of the earth by unnatural force, the ground’s lip curling suddenly downward, bringing with it shrubs and small trees now turned horizontal to sprout from the Fjord’s walls. The artificial crevasse yawned at least fifty yards across, perhaps a hundred. On the vertiginous cliffs dangled dozens of pairs of sneakers tied together at the laces, lodged on all sides in the branches and scrub. Then I made out other stuff, on the ridge at our feet, junk which unlike the sneakers had perhaps been intended to finish a journey into the earth’s craw but had fallen short: children’s toys, kitchenware, electronics, knotted plastic bags of unspecified treasure. I made out a tricycle and a large nude doll, a smashed stereo turntable, a power drill. I wondered whether the refuse was Noteless’s flourish, or the local community’s spontaneous outpouring. In any event, the cascade of garbage was the only thing “urban” about his Fjord, since the city was entirely out of view. We could have been a hundred miles into forest, for all the skyline of treetops informed us. I wondered, too, whether I knew exactly what a fjord was, after all. Or maybe it was Noteless who didn’t know what a fjord was. Shouldn’t it be full of water? Perhaps it was, at the bottom.

We stepped nearer, the four of us. Beneath the lip of trees and grass and the crap that had lodged there, the earth gave way to an underbelly of roots and stones, and below that, darker stuff, veins of sunless soil, and shadow tapering to total blackness. It was as though a titanic ax had descended from heaven to sink its blade in the parklands, then be lifted away. Oona and I stepped as though hypnotized nearer to the lip-there was no definite limit to approach, only whichever foothold on that curled ridge of landscape you’d last judge safe to take. Trampled grass showed others were braver than ourselves. The boys hung back. Having marshaled us here, they seemed to want to let us steep in the site’s insane grandeur undisturbed a while. The wind had died entirely by now, and the long tilt of clouds overhead seemed ready to close over us like the lid of a box. I took an involuntary step backward, and heard something glassy crackle underfoot. But I didn’t take my eyes off the dark center before me. The longer I stared into the Fjord, the more likely it seemed that I’d pitch headfirst into that light-destroying well, so the sky could slam shut and entomb my tiny form inside.

“Okay, it’s kind of incredible. Let’s go home now.”

“Wait, I want to take it in,” Oona said. “It’s a total vision of death.”

“One hundred percent agreed. I’m cold and I have to pee.”

“So go pee.”

I stepped backward again, unwilling to trust the Fjord at my back. Again I felt a gritty crackling under my shoes. I turned one heel up, as if to check for dog shit, and found dusty shards of thin glass embedded in my sole’s leather. Crack vials. That detail, I figured, was beyond even Noteless’s vision. He’d had collaborators at this site.

“Can you believe they’d put the man who built this in charge of the Memorial to Daylight?” said Oona. “I wonder if those people have ever even seen this thing.”

“Well, he’ll obviously have to… compromise… on the memorial…” I’d found a discarded Starbucks cup and was using it to scour the glass from my shoe.

“Did you know he originally proposed Urban Fjord for Columbus Circle? Needless to say, they refused him.”

“Pretty petulant of him to have put it here instead.”

“You’re projecting, Chase. Whatever you think of Noteless, there isn’t a less petulant man alive.”

“I’ve never heard you speak so reverently about one of your assignments. You’re trying to make me jealous.”

The boys stepped up beside us-like museum guards, it occurred to me now.

“What you gonna give?” asked Puffy Coat. Leaning on his broomstick crook, framed in wilderness, he could have made some mock Pre-Raphaelite tableau. But I needed to get a grip on myself. Not everything was in quote marks, or wearing some mystical halo of interpretation. I suffered Perkus’s disease by proxy. I should focus on the real. Two badly parented boys had led us to see the freakish hole in the ground on this chilly bluff at the edge of their ghetto. They were playing hooky. Their older brothers would have mugged us.

“What do you mean?” said Oona.

“Everybody put in something,” said Puffy Coat. “What you got?”

“An offering, you mean.”

Puffy Coat only shrugged. That word was near enough to what he had in mind.

Oona looked at me, and pointed at the coat pocket where Obstinate Dust bulged. “He brought something,” she told the boys.

“I want to return this to Perkus,” I protested.

“Perkus gave the book away, Chase,” said Oona. “Besides, what else have we got? I’m not tossing in my Treo.”

“Do it, Cheese,” said New York Jets.

I had to tell myself it wasn’t Perkus Tooth I’d be symbolically interring in that pit, but Ralph Warden Meeker. From the sample I’d taken on the 1 train, he and Noteless deserved each other. Obstinate Dust, meet Obstinate Hole. Anyway, it would be a relief to walk the return path without the asymmetrical sink-weight in my pocket. I gave the book a spirited heave, wrenching my shoulder in the process. The tubby paperback fluttered softly as it dwindled to a birdlike speck, proving the real breadth of Noteless’s monstrosity. Then it was gone.

“Ow.” I cradled my shoulder, amazed at what a single effort could inflict. I hadn’t been to the gym in months. At least I’d gotten the book past the crud-strewn whale’s lip, into depths where its impact returned no sound.

The ceremony freed us from the Fjord’s spell. The boys turned and piloted us back through the tear in the fence, and up the last rise, until Fort George Avenue was evident ahead of us, and beyond it, hints of the wider city, even the reassuring far-off Chrysler and Empire spire-tops. There our guides soberly shook each of our hands, and turned back. Their graceful final silence would forever enshrine them for me as mythological chaperones. I peed behind a tree, then Oona and I found our way back into the streets. Oona was on the silent side herself.

Something was wrong at the 191st Street station. Reflective tape barricaded one stairwell entrance, and an orange-vested MTA worker, wearing a black woolen hat with earlaps and puffing out great gusts of breath steam, stood at the center of a teeming mob of disappointed passengers. Pushing into this congregation of the confused, we made our way near enough to overhear the worker, who in the most blasé tone possible announced that the subway was out of commission going downtown, and directed us to a nearby bus stop for a shuttle to 125th Street, where we could reboard the train. He parried all questions with a shrug, and rewound his spiel for the next party.

A bit stunned, Oona and I trudged with the others in the direction of the bus stop, two blocks down Nagle Avenue, on Broadway. The chaos there was more appalling than at the stairwell. One shuttle bus was loaded and just embarking, full with seated and standing passengers to such a point that I could hear its carriage sigh unhappily, promising breakdown in a mile or so. Another hundred passengers waited, in a streaming, hive-like circulation around a pole on which was taped a hasty, Magic Markered sign promising shuttle service at fifteen-minute intervals. A scene to crush your heart.

“What happened?” Oona addressed this as a kind of local petition to the five or six aggrieved passengers milling nearest. As in a street incident involving wreckage or fire trucks a volunteer explainer emerged, a middle-aged Hasid with curved shoulders draped in a long, soiled scarf, and bearing twin shopping bags like a milkmaid’s yoke. He seemed drawn to Oona as another dressed in black.

“Somebody said the tiger again,” he told her.

“They still haven’t caught it?”

He made a sour face under his beard, as though tasting the civic ineptitude. “If it stays so far uptown, what do they care? Five, six times I’ve been forced to get off and switch to the bus.”

“Really?”

He nodded, widening his eyes: really. “They claim it’s tearing up the track. But then an hour later the train goes right through. A convenient excuse, that’s all. So let it devour a small-businessman’s livelihood now and again. People like distraction. They live on it, gobble it up.”

I had to interrupt. “You’re saying they… encourage the tiger?”

He shrugged. “Tolerate maybe. Encourage maybe. It’s not mine to say. What they don’t do is catch.”

“Thank you,” said Oona. She nudged us away before I could ask more.

“I don’t completely get that man’s theory,” I said. “If there’s really a tiger, then why would he call it an excuse?”

“Well, the MTA could be opportunistically lying about the tiger’s whereabouts, I think that was what he meant.”

“Where do you suppose he’s getting his information?”

“Same as me, Chase. He’s just repeating what he’s heard.”

“Please don’t be so short with me. I think I dislocated my shoulder.”

“Don’t whine.”

“Now I’m completely sure you brought me out today as some kind of esoteric punishment,” I said. “I only don’t understand what I did wrong.”

Oona gave me a knifelike look. “You’re a little confused, Chase. I brought you with me for protection. I was scared to come up here alone.”

How quickly we’d become invisible to each other. I saw Oona Laszlo now, as if in a visionary flash, almost as if she were a blazing chaldron set before me. Pale, not so much dressed in black as feathered in it like a wounded bird, tinier in the white canvas tennis shoes she’d selected for the hike to Noteless’s Fjord than I’d ever seen her before, blinking her mascaraed eyes at me with a self-loathing which, if I let myself truly take notice, never subsided. A sort of elegant fragment or postulate of a person, but not whole, not entirely viable, certainly not credible waiting to board a shuttle among all these stolid brown-faced citizens whose depressive rage hovered smoggily overhead, a communal rain cloud formed of a loathing so much readier, so much less curdled in irony. Of course Oona again made me think of Perkus, and of course again I wouldn’t say so. I roused then what was best in me, what made me worthy of her or Perkus or anyone else who’d ever called to me for protection, and stuck out my expert arm and hailed an empty taxicab pointed downtown. It was hardly a miracle-this was Broadway, after all, never mind the high triple digits-but it felt like a miracle, one I’d summoned personally, in the manner of a quarterback’s Hail Mary pass.

We plopped exhausted and relieved into the cab’s backseat. The heater got my nose running and I snuffled happily. Even before Oona gave the driver her address we sped off, putting the grotesque scene of the bus stop behind us. We wouldn’t be missed-more shamblers redirected from the subway were arriving there, in waves.

“Well, you got your cab ride after all.”

“You want to make me feel guilty, but I can tell you’re as happy as I am.”

It was true, Oona was exhilarated, we both were, at the escape. If some standard of austerity, indicated by Noteless’s unforgiving aesthetic, had seemed to require a pilgrimage to his artwork by public transportation, then it was as if with the taxicab I’d wooed Oona back from that grim brink.

I couldn’t keep from gloating. “It’s amazing how passive people get in the face of an authority figure like that bully in the orange vest. He told them to go and wait for the shuttle, and they were all doing it, like sheep.”

“No doubt about it, Chase, those people would totally all hail cabs if they only had your iconoclastic courage.”

“I’m just saying we were locked into some kind of collective trance.”

“And then you recalled that you had a hundred dollars in your wallet, et voilà.”

Oona’s assault was fond, a sting with no venom. In one gesture I’d reclaimed her affection, and been forgiven my obsession with Perkus, too. I suppose I’d bargained for that forgiveness by surrendering Dust to Fjord. Our surrogates had canceled each other. In the delicious seedy security of the taxicab I felt I’d passed tests, survived fjords, ghettos, tigers. Even my shoulder felt better. My lust flooded back, too, the pang I’d felt earlier, of unfinished bed-business between us. Now I crowded Oona, in a pleasant way, and put my nose in her hair. The city seemed to be parting for us, the lights green in easy sequence, our cab already rounding Central Park’s northeastern shoulder.

“What are you doing later? And by later, I mean pretty much anytime starting immediately.”

She squirmed, also in a pleasant way, but farther from me. “I have to work. I want to get some impressions of Urban Fjord on paper while they’re fresh.”

“You sound like you’re working on a serious book for a change.” My jealousy wasn’t too real, but I didn’t mind striking the note.

“Oh, I didn’t get where I am today working on serious books. If I ever write a serious book you’ll be the first to know, Chase, I promise.”

“So why not risk an impression that’s… less than fresh?”

She used both hands to push me away. “I have to work, really.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Honestly, I have a lot on my plate.”

“I’m glad you’re being honest.”

“Fuck off.”

We’d pulled up to her building, at Ninety-fourth and Lex. The place had taken on a certain aura for my being excluded from it, and I turned my back to the entranceway and faced the street instead, not wanting to stare like a tourist at the pyramids.

“Don’t sulk,” said Oona. “Maybe I’ll call you later on. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, I heard there was this fabulous crater on Thirty-fourth Street, I thought I’d wander over and have a look.”

“Nice.”

“I mean, I’d sing under your window, but I don’t know which one is yours.”

“I might not even have a window.”

“I might not have much of a singing voice.”

“Okay, well then, that sounds like a plan.”

“Perfect.”

In truth, I wasn’t completely shattered at the prospect of our parting ways for now. I had an assignment, one I’d awarded myself at some point in the morning’s episode, though I couldn’t say exactly when. It would be a secret from Oona for now. I was going to visit Perkus again, but not alone. As Oona had dragged me to the rim of Noteless’s bleak pit, I’d drag some sane witness into the present void of Perkus’s obsessions, his unhealthy onanistic chaldron-hunt. This was overdue. Call it an intervention. So while I went on playing the role I’d been cast in, that of the fluffy vacant boyfriend, he who’d be doing nothing, only pining, while Janice or Oona carried on her important work, just beneath I was full of intent. (This might be seen as the mediocre actor’s basic minimum threshold: to play two moods simultaneously, one on the top surface, the other below, and invest adequately in both.)

With whom to people this intervention, though? Well, my first impulse had been Oona herself. Her vibrant skepticism could be just the tonic Perkus required. I liked to find occasions for us to be around one another, these days. Yet that notion disqualified itself. The triangle between the three of us was a little fierce at the moment, even if Perkus had no knowledge of it. Oona might speak too scornfully, and so drive Perkus deeper into defiance. Anyway, I was already under suspicion with her now, of trying to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. I’d also considered inviting Susan Eldred, who after all had introduced us. Susan was the sanest person I was sure Perkus knew. Yet I had no reason to believe Perkus had ever welcomed Susan into his Eighty-fourth Street sanctum. I wouldn’t want him to feel invaded or overrun. My sole option was that which had been inevitable all along: Richard Abneg.

I hadn’t seen Richard in more than a week, but two days before I’d been summoned to lunch at Daniel with Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer, almost a sort of intervention of its own. Maud had refused to name the occasion on the telephone, but made my attendance mandatory. The two women wanted me to give expert testimony on Richard Abneg, though this agenda wasn’t unveiled before I’d been plied with several rounds of the gratis appetizers Daniel made its specialty. It was a little early in the day for me, and I had to remind myself to quit draining half my wineglass for appearance’s sake, since the staff hovered, ready to top it off after I’d had even a sip. Too late. I was a little sick from the rich food before we’d eaten a single item we’d actually ordered, and dizzy before the interrogation began.

“He’s practically living at Georgina’s,” said Maud. “We keep seeing him crawling through the lobby at weird hours. He leers at people, Chase. He made friends with the night doorman, they were seen drinking together at four AM.”

I understood the situation instantly: Richard’s invasion of Georgina Hawkmanaji wasn’t in Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s plans. To those Lords of the Building, he’d been amusing enough, turning up at their party as an outcropping of Mayor Arnheim’s power, which seemed feeble contrasted with the deeper sway of the Woodrows’ ancient dough. But Richard had overstepped his bounds by going after Georgina, though even that was diverting enough at first, and could have been a perfect scandal-in-a-martini-glass, if it had caused merely a little harmless wreckage as they’d wagered after the party. Georgina slightly broken by a taste of sex, Richard totally humbled by a taste of wealth: either or both of those outcomes would have been suitable. Instead Richard, by succeeding with Georgina, threatened to make her not so conveniently absurd, less a container for their patronage and pity. Or anyway, that was what was at stake at this lunch. The women had no actual evidence of what had gone on, except that he was suddenly in the building. They only knew what Georgina had told them and, more important, what they’d invented by themselves. In truth, by threatening to be a Visigoth Richard had gratified their unacknowledged yearning for chaos, for the torching of their complacency.

“I first met Richard at your dinner,” I pointed out. “It’s not like we’ve got some huge history.”

“But you’re in that secret after-hours club with him,” said Sharon Spencer. “He must confide in you, you must know what he’s up to.”

I raised my eyebrows. By what game of Telephone had my connection to Richard Abneg become an “after-hours club”? Georgina’s arcane English might be partly to blame.

“By all reports Abneg’s apparently a bit of an animal,” said Sharon, her nostrils flaring while her mouth cinched in disdain. “If you can imagine Georgina Hawkmanaji waking up handcuffed.”

“My problem is I can imagine almost anyone waking up handcuffed,” I said irresponsibly.

“To her toilet.”

“Perhaps Georgina’s bed doesn’t have an easily accessible frame?”

“He’s taking advantage of her, Chase, anyone can see that,” said Maud. “He’s setting up some kind of beachhead in her apartment. What I can’t imagine is why.”

I didn’t understand her implication. I really ought to push aside my wineglass. “There’s a problem at his building,” I said, stalling. “A problem… with… eagles.”

“We’ve heard about the eagles, Chase,” said Sharon. “That’s a pretty lame justification, if you ask me.”

“Thatcher was saying he thinks the eagles might have come specifically for Richard,” said Maud. “He says they may follow him here now. Somebody told Thatcher they follow him everywhere, that when he leaves his building they fly overhead.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “We’ve been out together and I’ve never seen any eagles following him. They’re nesting, Maud. They just happened to pick his window ledge.”

“You and I both know these things don’t ‘just happen.’”

“I Googled him,” said Sharon. “He has a history in this particular regard.”

“What particular regard? Eagles?”

“Abneg began as a squatter,” said Sharon. “He has a track record of colonizing apartments that don’t belong to him. That’s how he got his start.”

“That’s not the same at all.”

“I admit it’s not the same, I’m just saying there’s a certain tendency in both.”

“She’s got a point,” said Maud.

“No, she doesn’t.” I was eating something now that had looked like an oyster but when eaten tasted like foie gras, an item I distantly recalled picking from the menu. For some reason the courses seemed to be clumping around me at the table, while the women went on sipping at balloon-sized glasses of white wine and thimblefuls of chilled soup.

“You’re protecting him.”

“From what?”

“We don’t know,” said Maud, with great exasperation. She’d come to me with a problem, and I was refusing to help. “That’s what’s killing us, Chase. Georgina is so nuts, she just talks about him like he’s her boyfriend now, she won’t take a look at what’s going on.” The secret garden of sexual satisfaction was the only truly unimaginable thing. That two people might locate such joy on Maud and Sharon’s watch would be worse for them, by far, than if Richard had been some indiscriminate seducer, bent on pillaging through their beds in turn. The problem might not be that Richard Abneg was an ogre but that he wasn’t ogre enough.

“Now we’ve told you everything we’ve got,” said Sharon Spencer, squinting fiercely. “You owe us the same in return.”

I doubted I could reciprocate such a stew of nonsense, even if I’d wanted to. “I don’t know Georgina, really,” I said. “Maybe they’re good together.”

“Forget Georgina for a minute,” said Maud, totally irritated by my answer. “Tell us about Perkus Tooth.”

“Georgina told us he’s the leader of your little club,” said Sharon.

“Has she met him?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thatcher’s been asking why you’ve never brought him around. We’re all wondering, Chase. Do you and Richard think we wouldn’t like him? Or wouldn’t he like us?”

I tried to fit Perkus for Maud and Thatcher’s compilation album, Great Shrunken Heads of Manhattan. It wasn’t easy. Maybe ten years before, when Perkus had been just arriving at his brief moment of currency, with his bylines in Artforum and Interview. Even then it would have been an ill-fated encounter. Now, I couldn’t even picture them in the same room.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m alone in knowing such opposite, such irreconcilable people: Maud at her regular table at Daniel, vibrantly awake to an invisible yet omnipotent web of social power, and Perkus, in his Eighty-fourth Street burrow, testing his daily reality on a grid of cultural marginalia, simultaneous views of mutually impossible worlds. Or do I flatter myself? Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence. Something in me defaults to an easeful plasticity, a modularity. I’d claim it as the curse of my profession, except I’ve forsaken that profession for so long now it defines me only in the eyes of others, not in my own.

And still I flatter myself: my empathy here was sharply circumscribed. I wasn’t finding the vacuum of me too well fed by Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer. Actually, the domain of these hedonist inquisitors seemed, at this moment, the most undernourished I knew. For all the butter-poached and truffle-oiled fare, I felt drunk and annoyed and ready to behave a little badly.

“Do you know what a chaldron is?” I asked Maud and Sharon. I’d asked flippantly, but then felt keen to hear the answer.

“A what?”

“A chaldron. It’s a certain kind of… very rare and desirable… ceramic.”

“Er, no,” said Maud. “Why?”

“That’s Perkus’s current interest,” I said. “He collects chaldrons.”

“Well, that’s… terribly interesting.”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t what I was expecting.”

“No.”

“But what’s Perkus himself like?” said Maud.

“He’s, I don’t know, fairly ellipsistic,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she bluffed.

“I imagine that’s how he’d strike you, yes.”

“I’d love to meet him.”

“Let me see what I can do.” There wasn’t a chance I’d do anything to bring this about. I’d sooner ask my agent (who wasn’t exactly pining for a call from me) to see if he could put me in touch with Marlon Brando’s people.

At that moment I felt Sharon Spencer’s stockinged toes flex against the inner curve of my thigh, then slither beyond, toward my crotch. I didn’t move either to discourage or encourage this maneuver, took it rather as a neutral element in an environment already suffocatingly sensual. Given a pillow at my setting I could have begun napping at the table, with the warmth of Sharon’s instep now cradling my penis. Her foot’s adventure might not mean so much more, to either of us, than the redundant hors d’oeuvres that had slipped down our throats without our even pausing to hear their descriptions. Likely it represented less the divulging of some occult agenda for our lunch date than a local tactical response to what she’d found to be a dull stretch in the table talk.

Anyway, this lunch encounter had made me certain in my present plans. For it was evident Richard Abneg hadn’t forgotten about Perkus Tooth, despite Richard’s recent absence from the scene at Eighty-fourth Street, and no matter his involvements with eagles or Georgina Hawkmanaji’s toilet. Like me, Abneg bore the matter of Tooth around with him wherever he went, and talked about him, too. He might not be up-to-date with chaldrons and other catastrophes, but he could be brought up-to-date. He’d rise to the occasion of my planned intervention. I’d only need to find and rally him.