Chronic City (28 page)

Doing so, rushing back to Eighty-fourth Street, I was steering into a storm’s eye. Things in Perkus Tooth’s apartment could never be as they were, because they’d never been any particular way for more than two evenings in a row, really. Nevertheless, I was to briefly reenter a dream I’d idealized. One of life’s oases, those moments that come less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.

That first night I was shocked to arrive and find them on Perkus’s living-room floor together, Perkus cross-legged like a kindergartener, scissors looped on thumb and forefinger as he browsed half-mangled magazines, Oona kneeling on folded knees, squinting at scraps of text, forgoing her glasses, I guessed, in anticipation of my arrival. They had a broadside in progress between
them, one in the late manner, made entirely of collaged elements, devoid of Perkus’s distinctive scribbled hand, Oona resuming her glue duties—perhaps I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten nostalgic around here! Yet they’d only settled, so far, on a single image, smack in the center of a large sheet of drawing paper: the newsprint photo of the polar bear on his raft of ice, which Perkus had latched onto during our last visit. The image, raggedly clipped free of surrounding text, now sat smeared and wrinkling in an excess of rubber cement, worse for wear, bordered by the mute page. Oona’s hair was rubber-banded up into two blunt, irregular ponytails, as if to make an extra joke about my discovering the pair in their childish arrangement on the carpet.

“Hello, Chase Insteadman.” She grinned up at me wryly and lowered her voice to a laconic drawl, as if playing the sheriff in a satiric Western.

“Hello, Oona.”

“Haven’t see you in a while.”

I suppose we weren’t counting that curtailed encounter in her apartment. It now seemed totally unreal. “Too long,” I said keeping it noncommittal.

“We’re making a poster,” she said. “For old times’ sake, while trying not to, you know,
feel
old.”

“Yes, I see.”

“It’s on the theme of isolation,” she said. At this Perkus tilted up one goonish eye, and one severe. “Excuse me,” Oona corrected. “It’s on the theme of bears.”

“Why feel the need to choose?” I said.

“Great point.” She slugged Perkus on the arm. “Bears
and
isolation.”

In my conception Perkus and Oona were enemies or contestants, yet I’d never known what was at stake. Now Perkus was wholly
caught up in Oona’s ironic frolic, or frolicsome irony, whichever it was. He seemed cowed and catalyzed at once. I wondered if Oona was thrilled to reclaim her place as his Tweedledee, if the nostalgic gesture hadn’t opened some door into discarded possibilities, taking her by surprise. She might have set out to please Perkus just to please (and unnerve) me, then found herself pleased, too.

Or perhaps this was my projection. I might be crediting to Oona the thrill of relief I felt to reenter the Eighty-fourth Street sensorium, to hear Perkus’s strange music (if I asked what was playing he’d surely pretend to be shocked I didn’t know it), to step into his arena of exhaled fumes, knowing that soon enough I’d exhale plenty myself (I’d absentmindedly catalogued the presence of a fresh row of joints on the kitchen table, and one, half smoked, tipped into a tray), to see his information hectically distributed across the living-room afghan, a puzzle whose pleasure was its insolvability, to find myself restored to my small shelf in his collection. It had taken just one disinvitation to make me glimpse exile.

Perkus tried to fit a clipping containing a paragraph of small type into the white expanse surrounding the bear photo. Over his shoulder, I read:
Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished
… The way he shifted the clipping from spot to spot, intently evaluating, then rejecting, each position, suggested Perkus was trying to believe in the worthy coexistence of those words with the conundrum of the bear, almost as if hoping that the paragraph could comprise a rescue, make a bridge or raft back to the mainland the bear could hop across to safety. But no, the new element fell short, no matter where he placed
it, and so Perkus swept it into a pile of others that lay to one side and behind him. I scanned the other tatters, until my eyes lit on a recent clipping from
The New Yorker
, a Talk of the Town describing the city’s tormented infatuation with Janice Trumbull’s medical saga. At this I turned away, not wanting to know what else might be auditioned to fit the theme of
bears and isolation
.

“Light up a smoke, if you want,” said Perkus, the eyes in the back of his head telling him I’d shifted back toward the kitchen. “We’ve got more on the way, actually,” he added. “Watt should be coming around any minute now, just so you know.”

“Waiting for Watt,” said Oona, in singsong, not looking up from the old magazine she browsed. She unfurled the centerfold from a crackling thick copy of
Playboy
, circa the early ’70s at the latest, given the model’s coy mascara and bobbed hair, and the Technicolor wrongness of her aureoles. “Who’ll tell us what’s what. And sell us some pot.”

“Oona only comes around here to score,” said Perkus cheerily, at last daring to jab back. “I no longer hold that against her.”

Foster Watt did come and lay out his wares, though not before we’d attempted to use up the last of the present supply. The poor pot dealer was shivering, still locked into his uniform of red vinyl jacket and no head covering, despite the cold, and he must have felt, coming into that kitchen, that he’d stepped onto a vaudeville stage. We were so high we finished each other’s lines like the Marx Brothers, even if the result was mostly a verbal version of a game of exquisite corpse. Perkus offered Watt a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, and Watt took it and struck a pose of claustrophobic cool by the door while the three of us slavered over his open case of goods, running our reddened and hysterical orbs over the rainbow fonts that differentiated the plastic boxes crammed full of fertile buds. Oona kept surprising me. I’d
thought she flinched from direct encounters with the drug trade, but she seemed positively exuberant to see Watt, who enlarged the pool of victims for her global mockery.

“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me …” she said. “What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”

“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question. Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball. It was merely a question of which answer would come up. “Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”

“Ice,” said Perkus. “Where’s the Ice?”

“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”

“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed. “Very, uh,
topical
selection, Foster.”

“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt. “You ought to try it.”

Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table. Oona went on listing brand names. “Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”

Watt didn’t even trouble to shrug, just ignored her. I suspect she’d lost him at “topical.” Oona couldn’t let it go, though. “Somebody needs to get some of their own material,” she said again pointedly, as if she were a professor offering a plagiarizing student a first warning. Watt took it lightly enough. Yet even after he left, bearing away a large stack of our pooled twenties in return for eight of his Lucite containers—Perkus’s five portions of Ice, a couple of the old standby, Chronic, which vanished into Oona’s purse, and one Northern Lights I
purchased as a morbid souvenir—Oona circled back to the topic. “Don’t you think Watt isn’t playing fair, Perkus?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”

“Tailoring his material to his audience like that,” she said. “It sort of breaks the illusion, don’t you think?” She kept calling it “material,” though it seemed to me an odd word for names snatched from the headlines.

“What illusion?” Perkus rolled a joint while he contended with her.

“That, you know, there’s an ancient and mighty
marijuana tree
somewhere in South America called El Chronic, named that by some Mayan priest a thousand centuries ago, for its special properties of transubstantiation—you know. It just doesn’t seem right some skanky Irish kid from Chelsea Clinton or wherever it is Watt lives to rename this ancient essence ‘Balthazar’ or ‘Derek Jeter’ just because he has a laser printer and a captive audience.”

“I don’t think it’s Watt,” said Perkus slyly, seeming to take her concern seriously. “He’s just a middleman. I think it’s someone else giving them names. Maybe actually even a Mayan priest, one who’s just, you know, keeping up with the news.”

“Then it’s him I want a word with,” said Oona. “Can you get the Mayan priest’s beeper number?”

“So,” said Perkus, the key word signaling he’d become interested at last, had found something he could work with, “maybe we’ve got the polarities reversed. It’s crucial we remember to question basic assumptions.”

“Polarities reversed… how?” The hungry mind supplying this query was my own. Perkus’s paradoxes were just what I’d been starved of, no matter that they gave me a dangerous sense of reality slippage. I’d become an addict and needed replenishment, as much as Perkus had needed Watt’s visit.

“What if
The New York Times
is getting its material from Watt’s brand names, rather than the other way around?” said Perkus. At this, his revelatory eye exulted, though we’d no time to linger on the point—Perkus had reminded himself he had a sort of front page of his own to consider, an edition in progress. “Maybe the bear is enough,” he said to Oona, musingly. “Maybe the empty border around the picture says something nothing else could ever say…”

“We might not even need the bear,” said Oona.

That first night of reunion, and the ones that came after, turned out to be episodes hinged in the middle. A brief frigid walk back to my building and Oona and I were at it. Actually, that night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment. Our December fucks made what had come before seem like glimpses, tourist views from some highway pull-off—now we abandoned the car and climbed the guardrail and built a hut in that landscape below, where no one could see, to dwell for a while in a place from which, when we climbed out woolly-eyed and helplessly grinning afterward, we were astonished to find any highway so close, it was so primeval.

This wasn’t the sort of thing I was inclined to examine for causes, a gift horse, a windfall of sex like I’d known just a time or two before. I didn’t want to think my own intensity drew in any measure on what I’d turned from: Janice’s weird crises, off away in space. Oona and I pursued expression of something that had zip to do with anyone else, I tried to believe it desperately. As for what anyone else
might judge, that was obvious, and irrelevant. However this chance had come, we’d taken it. We didn’t discuss it—after leaving Perkus’s place we barely spoke. If I was looking for causes, there might be one. A few hours with Perkus and all Oona’s mordancy was bantered out of her, and my need to play the dopey straight man used up, too. All talk could fall by the wayside.

We weren’t a secret from Perkus, though we kept our hands to ourselves in his company. I didn’t know whether Oona had spoken to him privately, or if our state was obvious after that first night. Perkus granted it, no more. Nothing said in hearing of all three, that might be the rule. He did acknowledge the fact to me alone, one early evening in the middle of the month, he and I under way at Watt’s product while Oona slaved to meet a deadline, her panicking editor having pleaded for some chapters, some evidence of progress on the Noteless book. But Perkus only arrived at the subject indirectly, as a passing remark during an alienated disquisition on what he called “pair bonding.”

“So, it’s not one hundred percent a received notion,” he began, as if a topic heading had been announced, or revealed on a banner only he could see. “I mean, I always used to feel critical of anyone who fell into pair-bonding, like they were failing the test of reimagining all the basic premises.”

“What basic premises?”

“The basic premises of existence,” he said impatiently. “But then, really, if you pay attention to animals, there’s
tons
of pair-bonding. I was thinking about Abneg’s eagles.”