Chronic City (41 page)

Even those voicings were faint, the stolid prewar building’s heavy lathe and plaster making fine insulation, and Perkus could feel confident of remaining undetected if he wished to be. When clunking footsteps and scrabbling paws led to his threshold, his apartment’s unlocked door widened to allow the dog inside to take occupancy, Perkus hid like a killer in the tub behind the shower curtain, slumping down to sit against the porcelain’s cool shape. He heard Ava’s name spoken then, by a woman who, before leaving her behind, set out a bowl of kibble and another of water on the kitchen floor, then cooed a few more of the sweet doggish nothings a canine lover coos when fingering behind an ear or under a whiskery chin. Perkus had never lived with a dog. But much had changed just lately, and he was open to new things. He couldn’t think of a breed to wish for but had an approximate size in mind, some scruffy mutt the size and shape of a lunch pail, say. The door shut, the volunteer’s footsteps quickly receding in the corridor. Perkus had not done more than rustle at the plastic curtain, preparing to hoist himself from the tub, when the divider was nudged aside by a white grinning face—slavering rubbery pink lips and dinosaur teeth hinged to a squarish
ridged skull nearly the size of his own, this craned forward by a neck and shoulders of pulsing and twitching muscle. One sharp white pink-nailed paw braced on the tub’s edge as a tongue slapped forth and began brutalizing Perkus’s helpless lips and nostrils. Ava the pit bull greeted her roommate with grunts and slobber, her expression demonic, her green-brown eyes rimmed in pink showing piggish intellect and gusto, yet almost helpless to command her smacking, cavernous jaws: from the first instant, before even grasping his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth.

The next moment, falling back against the porcelain under her demonstrative assault, watching her struggle and slip as she tried and failed to hurtle deeper into the tub after him, he saw that the one front paw with which she scrabbled with was all she had for scrabbling, as she braced and arched on her two back feet: Ava was a three-legged dog. This fact would regularly, as it did now, give Perkus a crucial opening, his only physical edge on her, really. Ava slid awkwardly and fell on her side with a thump against the tile. Perkus managed to stand. By the time he got himself out of the tub she was on her three legs again, and flung herself upward once more, insisting that boxy skull, with its smooth loose-bunching carpet of flesh, into his hands to be adored. Ava was primally terrifying, but she persuaded Perkus pretty soon that she didn’t mean to turn him into kibble. If Ava killed him it would be accidental, in seeking to staunch her emotional hungers.

Those first days were all sensual intimacy, a feast of familiarization, an orgy of, yes, pair-bonding, as Perkus learned how Ava negotiated the world, or at least the apartment, and how he was to negotiate the boisterous, insatiable dog, who became a kind of new world to him. Ava’s surgery scar was clean and pink, an eight-or ten-inch seam from shoulder blade to a point just short of where he
could most easily detect her heartbeat, at a crest of fur beneath her breast. Some veterinary surgeon had done a superlative job of sealing her joint so she appeared a creature naturally like a muscular furry torpedo there, missing nothing. Perkus couldn’t guess how fresh it was or whether Ava’s occasional stumbling indicated she was still learning to walk on three legs—mostly she made it look natural, and never once did she wince or cringe or otherwise indicate pain, but seemed cheerfully to accept tripod status as her fate. When she exhausted herself trailing him in this manner from room to room she’d sometimes charmingly sag against a wall or chair. More often she leaned against Perkus, or plopped her muzzle across his thigh if he sat. Her mouth closed then, as it rarely did otherwise, and Perkus could admire the pale brown of her liverish lips, the pinker brown of her nose, and the raw pale pink beneath her scant, stiff whiskers—the same color as her eyelids and the interior of her ears and her scar, and the flesh beneath the transparent pistachio shells of her nails. The rest, albino white, with a single, saucer-sized chocolate oval just above her tail to prove, with her hazel eyes, she was no albino. More usually, that mouth was transfixingly open—even after he’d persuaded himself she’d never intentionally damage him with the massive hinged trap full of erratic, sharklike teeth, Perkus found it impossible not to gaze inside and marvel at the map of pink and white and brown on her upper palate, the wild permanent grin of her throat. And when he let her win the prize she sought, to clean his ears or neck with her tongue, he’d have a close-up view, more than he could really endure. Easier to stand was her ticklish tongue baths of his toes, anytime he shed the ugly Nikes, though she sometimes nipped between them with a fang in her eagerness to root out the sour traces.

Ava was a listener, not a barker. As they sat together on the sofa, Ava pawing at Perkus occasionally to keep his hands moving on her,
scratching her jowls or the bases of her ears or the cocoa spot above her tail, she’d also cock her head and meet his eyes and show that she, too, was monitoring the Friendreth Canine Apartments’ other dwellers and the volunteers that moved through the halls. (As Perkus studied the building’s patterns he understood that the most certain proof of human visitors, or other squatters, was the occasional flushing of a toilet.) She listened to the fits of barking that would possess the building periodically yet felt no need to reply. Perkus believed this likely extended from the authority inherent in the fantastic power of her own shape, even reduced by the missing limb. He guessed she’d never met another body she couldn’t dominate, so why bark? She also liked to gaze through the window, when he moved a chair to a place where she could make a sentry’s perch. Her vigilance was absolutely placid, yet she seemed to find some purpose in it, and could spend an hour watching the street below without nodding. This was her favorite sport, apart from love.

Ava let him know they were to sleep in the bed together, that first night, joining him there and, then, when he tried to cede it to her, clambering atop him on the narrow sofa to which he’d retreated, spilling her sixty or seventy writhing pounds across his body and flipping her head up under his jaw in a crass seduction. That wasn’t going to be very restful for either of them, so it was back to the twin-size mattress, where she could instead fit herself against his length and curl her snout around his hip bone. He grew accustomed by the end of the second night. If he didn’t shift his position too much in his sleep she’d still be there when dawn trickled in around the heavy curtains to rouse him awake. Often then he’d keep from stirring, ignoring growing pressure in his bladder, balancing the comfort in Ava’s warm weight against the exhausting prospect of her grunting excitement at his waking—she was at her keenest first thing, and he suspected that like him, she pretended to be asleep until he showed
some sign. So they’d lie together, both pretending. If he lasted long enough, the volunteer would come and open the door and Ava would jounce up for a walk at the call of her name (and he’d lie still until the echoes of “Okay, Ava, down girl, down, down,
down
, that’s good, no, down,
down
, yes, I love you too, down, down,
down
…” had trickled away through the corridor).

Though the gas was disabled, the Friendreth’s electricity flowed, thankfully, just as its plumbing worked. Biller provided Perkus with a hot plate on which he could boil coffee, and he’d have a cup in his hand by the time Ava returned from her walk. He imagined the volunteer could smell it brewing when she opened the door. Coffee was the last constant between Perkus’s old daily routine and his new, a kind of lens through which he contemplated his own transformations. For there was no mistaking that the command had come, as in Rilke’s line: you must change your life. The physical absolutes of coexistence with the three-legged pit bull stood as the outward emblem of a new doctrine: recover bodily absolutes, journey into the real. Perkus’s reckoning with Arnheim’s chaldron had catapulted him into this phase, the night of the blizzard and the loss of his apartment and the books and papers inside all manifestations of the same watershed encounter. He held off interpretation for now. Until the stupendous cluster headache vanished into last traces, until he learned what Ava needed from him and how to give it, until he became self-sufficient within the Friendreth and stopped requiring Biller’s care packages of sandwiches and pints of Tropicana, interpretation could wait.

The final step between them came when Perkus assumed responsibility for Ava’s twice-daily walks (he’d already several times scooped more kibble into her bowl, when she emptied it, having discovered the supply in the cabinet under the sink). On the fifth day Perkus woke refreshed and amazed, alert before coffee, with his cluster
migraine completely vanished. He’d clambered out of bed and dressed in a kind of exultation to match the dog’s own, for once. He felt sure Ava hoped he’d walk her. And was tired of hiding. So he introduced himself to the volunteer at the door, and said simply that if she’d leave him the leash he’d walk her now and in the future. The woman, perhaps fifty, in a lumpy cloth coat, her frizzy hair bunched under a woolen cap, now fishing in a Ziploc of dog treats for one to offer to Ava, and who’d certainly earlier discerned his presence by any number of clues, showed less surprise than fascination that he’d spoken to her directly. Then she stopped.

“Something wrong with your eye?”

He’d gone unseen by all but Biller for so long, her scrutiny disarmed him. Likely his unhinged eyeball signified differently now that he was out of his suits, instead in this homeless-man garb, and featuring a two-week beard. To this kindly dog custodian it revealed that Ava’s spectral cohabitant was not only poor but dissolute or deranged. A firm gaze, like a firm handshake, might be a minimum.

“From birth,” Perkus said, referring to something he’d never mention in any other setting, but pridelessly needing to establish his competency here. He smiled at her as he said it.

“It’s cold out.”

“I’ve got a coat and boots.” Biller had loaded both into the apartment’s closet, for when he’d need it. “You can control her?”

Perkus restricted himself from any fancy remarks. “Yes.”

On the street, fighting for balance on icy sidewalks, Perkus discovered what Ava’s massiveness and strength could do besides bound upward to pulse in his arms. Even on three legs, she rode and patrolled the universe within scope of her senses, chastening poodles, pugs, Jack Russells, even causing noble rescued racetrack greyhounds to bolt, as well as cats and squirrels foolish enough to scurry through
the zone. Ava only had to grin and grunt, to strain her leash one front-paw hop in their direction, and every creature bristled in fear or bogus hostility, sensing her imperial lethal force, which required no trumping up, no Kabuki enactments of coiling to pounce, no theatrical snarls. On the street she was another dog, with little regard for Perkus now except as the rudder on her sailing, their affair suspended until they’d returned indoors. That first morning out the glare of daylight stunned Perkus, but also fed an appetite he’d had no idea he’d been starving. The walks became a regular highlight, twice a day, then three times, because why not? It was only a minority of female dogs, he learned, who bothered with marking behaviors, those scent-leavings typical of all males. Ava was in the exceptional category, hoarded her urine to squirt parsimoniously in ten, sometimes twenty different spots. Biller brought Perkus some gloves to shelter his exposed knuckles but also cover the chafing of Ava’s heavy-woven leash, that ship’s rigging, in his landlubber palms. Perkus learned to invert a plastic baggie on his splayed fingers and deftly inside-out a curl of her waste, to deposit an instant later in the nearest garbage can. Then inside, to the ceremonial hail of barking from the Friendreth’s other inhabitants, who seemed to grasp Ava’s preferential arrangement through their doors and ceilings.

Ava’s volunteer—her name revealed as Sadie Zapping—poked her head in a couple of times to inquire, and once pointedly intersected with Perkus and Ava during one of their walks, startling Perkus from reverie, and making him feel, briefly, spied upon. But she seemed to take confidence enough from what she witnessed, and Perkus felt he’d been granted full stewardship. Now the two gradually enlarged their walking orbit, steering the compass of Ava’s sniffing curiosity, around the Rockefeller campus and the Weill Cornell Medical Center, on a bridge over the FDR Drive, to gaze across at the permanent non sequitur of Roosevelt Island, defined for Perkus by
its abandoned TB asylum to which no one ever referred, certainly not the population living there serviced by its goofy tram, like commuting by ski lift. “No dogs allowed,” he reminded Ava every time she seemed to be contemplating that false haven. Or down First Avenue, into the lower Sixties along Second, a nefariously vague zone whose residents seemed to Perkus like zombies, beyond help.

Yet far more important than any human map, Perkus learned to which patches of snow-scraped earth Ava craved return, a neighborhood circuit of invisible importances not so different, he decided, from his old paces uptown, the magazine stand where he preferred to snag the
Times
, or East Side Bagel, or the crater formerly known as Jackson Hole. Perkus never veered in the direction of Eighty-fourth Street, though, and Ava never happened to drag him there. His old life might have rearranged itself around his absence, his building reopened, his places waiting for him to reinhabit them—but he doubted it. Equally plausible to him, if also unlikely, the tiger might have razed everything he’d ever known. The creature, which Richard Abneg had claimed was a machine operated by the city, might have been on a Perkus-eradication course to begin with. Perkus accepted this possibility with equanimity. The breadth of the city’s mysteries that had begun to reveal themselves to him were beyond taking personally, even if they occasionally sought out a personal victim like himself or the Jackson Hole waitress, Lindsay. Occasionally he missed a particular book, felt himself almost reaching in Friendreth toward some blank wall as though he could pull down an oft-browsed volume and find consolation in some familiar lines. Or glance at an old broadside to recall some epiphany he’d gained, publicized to the street corners, and then forgotten. Nothing worse than this, he didn’t miss the old life in and of itself. The notion he should cling to a mere apartment, he found both pathetic and specious. Apartments came and went, that was their nature, and he’d
kept that one too long, so long he had trouble recalling himself before it. Good riddance. There was mold in the grout of the tiles around the tub he’d never have gotten clean in a million years.