“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?