Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Page B

the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”
    “Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.
    “I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”
    “What if I fall asleep?”
    “It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pinned like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it come to this? How could I have been allowed to persuade him? Puttylike Chase Insteadman, so eagerly enlisted in absurd causes— Chase had talked Perkus into this?

    Well, he’d frightened me. For a week Perkus hadn’t answered his phone, nor his apartment buzzer when I resorted to dropping by unannounced. Then, my own phone had rung, at six thirty AM, an hour at which, even had I been driving deep through evenings in Perkus’s company, I’d reliably have been dozing. I fumbled the receiver up to my ear, expecting I don’t know what, but always guiltilyterrified of dire updates from the space station, some further revolution in Janice’s fate.
    His voice was dim, smoke-tight, wreathed in hours. No question of his having slept anytime recently.
    “So, I need your help with something.”
    “Yes?” I croaked.
    “I have to talk to Brando. Can you get his number?”
    “Brando?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, miming groggy disbelief for an invisible audience. “You mean Marlon Brando?” I thought Brando was recently dead, but this was exactly the sort of thing I get mixed up about. Maybe Paul Newman had died, or Farley Granger.
    “Yes, Chase, Marlon Brando. Can you call, I don’t know, someone at your talent agency?” However depleted, however absurd the hour, Perkus seemed in a rage of impatience.
    “Doesn’t he live on some island?”
    “So you’re saying you can’t?”
    “I—I don’t know. I guess I can try.”
    “Only Brando can save us.” He croaked out the line as if he’d been saving it for the crucial moment, a bombshell revelation.
    “Perkus, what’s going on? What time is it? Are you okay?”
    Silence.
    “I tried to call, five or six times.”
    “I had cluster,” he said after a moment, the grandiosity leaked from his voice. “I turned the ringer off.”
    “I rang your doorbell.”
    “I know. It sounded like an atom bomb, whistling toward the Nagasaki of my brain.” Perkus tittered at his own joke, his voice seeming to fall away from the receiver. Having failed the Brando test, I was losing him.
    “Have you been in all week? When did you last eat something?”
    “I don’t know …”
    “Can I come over?” I asked, astounding myself. He didn’t answer. “I’ll stop at H&H and grab some bagels and stuff.” Now I bargained, pathetically.
    “Go to East Side Bagel, they’ve got better whitefish spread.”
    “Okay.”
    “And Chase?”
    “Yes?”
    “Get some extra for Biller. I haven’t had anything for him for a couple of days.”
    It might have taken me an hour to rally myself, get bagels, and arrive to ring Perkus’s bell. This was a day or two before Halloween, the morning fiercely cold, a first taste of winter. I worried for a long chilly moment on his doorstep that Perkus had changed his mind, but no, without troubling with the intercom he buzzed me through. His door was unlocked when I tried the handle, and a sour smell escaped to the corridor. Inside, Perkus’s tightly managed chaos had tipped into squalor, his sink’s basin like a geological site, heaped with unrinsed cups and a rain of grounds emptied out of his gold filter, ashtrays too, their contents muddily mixed with the coffee, his living-room floor a mad tatter of