He’d have walked the twenty blocks home in any event, since the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable, but there wasn’t any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their walks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed to mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb into drifts that had barely been traversed, fitting his poor shoes into boot prints that had punched deep as his knees. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before even getting to Second Avenue. Under other circumstances he’d have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested by the quality-of-life police for public drunkenness, but on streets the blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him apart from a cross-country skier who stared pitilessly from behind solar goggles, then a few dads here and there dragging a kid or two on a sled. If they saw him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. Nobody would have any other reason to be making their way along impassible streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, their entrances buried in drifts.
When he met the barricade at the corner of Eighty-fourth, he at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood-of course they were letting through the residents of the buildings on the block, even if other pedestrians had to make their way the long way around. But no. His building was one of three the tiger had undermined, and the snowstorm had finished the job. He talked with neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years of dwelling on the same floor, though gripped in the vise of his cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn’t have made too good an impression. You need to find someplace to sleep tonight, that was a fragment that got through to him. They might let you in for your stuff later, but not now. You can call this number… but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away: Get yourself indoors, young man. And: Pity about that one.
Now, as he made his way through the snow to he knew not where, what engulfed Perkus Tooth, as completely as the headache engulfed his brain and the snow the city, was the sense of cumulative and devastating losses in the last twelve hours, since he’d allowed himself to be lured to the mayor’s party, by Chase Insteadman, and upstairs, to see the hologram, by Russ Grinspoon. All of it felt terribly coherent and scripted, down to the last sequence, when Claire Carter, if that was even her real name, had spun out her story just long enough to allow the cluster migraine to eclipse him totally, only then booting him out into the streets to find his apartment barred. For she’d surely known. The tiger was a city operative, hadn’t Abneg confirmed it? Perkus couldn’t think straight, but you didn’t need to think straight to put such simple facts together. Claire Carter and the forces for which she was a mere spokesperson, a bland front, had evidently meant to smash him, and she’d chosen to flaunt the fact by how she toyed with him for the last hour or so. She was, he saw now, a member of the we-nerds-will-destroy-you-so-thoroughly-it-will-leave-you-gasping school. Under the power pantsuits, she was part of that inexplicable generation subsequent to his, the Trench Coat Mafia. Arnheim probably surrounded himself with them, autistic revengers, like Howard Hughes insulating himself with Mormons. Seeing him in the teeth of his ruination, Claire Carter had even told him the whole plot, like Goldfinger with Bond strapped to the death ray.
Being Perkus Tooth, he blamed the nearest cultural referent he could find: I smoked dope with a man who went from being directed by Groom to being directed by Ib and couldn’t tell the difference! What a fool I am. That joint was probably laced with essence of mediocrity, a substance that gave you a solo career as feeble as Grinspoon’s once he’d parted ways with Hale, and made its imbiber hallucinate that sublime chaldrons were only video-game fodder. For now that Perkus had begun to distrust one assumption he had to question them all. Chaldrons were something else. Maybe Claire Carter didn’t even know, though at the same time he was certain she was trying to throw him off the hunt. Linus Carter might have glimpsed their form somewhere and based the crappy decoder ring in the cereal box of Yet Another World on what he’d glimpsed. Nothing was necessarily so simple. Hah, as if it even outwardly claimed to be!
Chase Insteadman was his friend. Chase Insteadman was an actor and the ultimate fake. A cog in the city’s fiction.
The tiger was destroying the city. The tiger was being used by the city to un-home its enemies.
Chaldrons were real and fake, as Marlon Brando was alive and dead.
Mailer, almost destroyed by gravity, walking with two canes, and complacently resigned to Provincetown, vacating the fight.
Richard Abneg worked for the city and the eagles were therefore a wild force from elsewhere. Richard Abneg might be a key to something, if Perkus thought about him coherently enough, impossible in this snow and cluster. Abneg, inside and outside at once, self-consciously corrupted, a hinge on the door between the old city and the new.
Oona Laszlo, Perkus’s own Frankenstein creation, mocking him always. She carried the tang of betrayal and sellout. One thing to dash off with your left hand memoirs of abused point guards, but Oona carried water for that middlebrow Times darling, Noteless. Nothing worse than what Perkus liked to call too-late modernism. Clever Oona had written herself into a bed of lies. Perkus only pitied Chase for being so much under her thumb, and excommunicated her now in his mind.
He thought, too, of friends lost to time, who’d left their traces in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment: the mad bookseller D. B. “Bats” Breithaupt; George, the art restorer from the Met; Roe, Specktor, Amato, Sorrentino, Howe, Hultkrans, other names he’d misplaced, the good faith implicit in convivial uncompromising evenings now stranded in amnesiac mists. Where are my friends? If he could see all his friends again, the apartment or chaldrons wouldn’t matter.
Somewhere, far off, a urine-stained bear bellowed (did polar bears bellow?) on a sun-blasted floe, seeming to ask what did anything in the city have to do with what was real?
All of this occurred on Eighty-fourth between Second and First, as Perkus made his staggering way across the traffic-barren intersection. He’d begun walking in the center of the streets, in the gully the early plows had made. To cover a block’s distance required a sort of heroic effort, but Perkus wasn’t in a state to savor the exertion of his own will so much as he observed himself from a fascinated distance, like a creature in nature footage, one of those bears spied on from a biplane window, or a crippled caribou strayed from the herd into an unwelcoming landscape. His books and CDs and videotapes were okay. The building hadn’t fallen, they remained indoors, waiting for him. It was as if the apartment represented the better part of him, the brain in archive, and it didn’t so much matter what happened to the exiled scrawny body that now noticed the wetness of cuffs and sleeves beginning to clumpily freeze in the chill wind. Nonetheless, discomfort gusted his sails to a nearby port: Gracie Mews. A twenty-four-hour place, the coffee shop hadn’t bowed to the storm, its waiters taking turns scraping and chopping at the sidewalk through the night to keep at least a symbolic pathway open, though a customer would have to clamber over a hell of a lot of other unshoveled snow to get to the area they’d cleared. Well, Perkus did the clambering now. He plunged through the door of the Mews and, though he could barely see his hand in front of his face anymore for the breadth of his blind spot, smelled coffee, tureens of it, the good stuff.