Biller was the one he needed now. As though Perkus had been keeping Biller in the bank, feeding and strengthening a daily soldier accustomed to Life During Wartime. Well, here, trudging sickened in the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately convinced. There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t. Perkus had gotten complacent in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go underground. Biller knew how to live off the grid, even in a place like Manhattan that was nothing but grid. Even better, Biller had an encampment in the enemy terrain of Yet Another World. Biller could tell him what he knew about Linus Carter and chaldrons-now Perkus would be patient enough to listen to what had always seemed a little pointless before. With the virtual realm seeming to have penetrated Perkus’s city at any number of points, Biller was the essential man, with means for survival in both places. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without resources. Perkus laughed at himself now: Biller was like Old Man McGurkus in Seuss’s Circus McGurkus, who’d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants’ shit, and also do the high-wire aerialist act.
In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the headache’s dislodging of himself from himself, working with the only body he had, the shivering frost-fingered blind stumbler in sweat-and salt-stained purple velvet.
He trailed a dog and walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain that a volunteer had sought him out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat functioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen modestly lurking in the rooms of certain dogs, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. So Biller gathered Perkus and immediately installed him in what would become Ava’s apartment. It was there, nursed through the first hours by Biller’s methodical and unquestioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nourished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth until it could keep down something more, that Perkus had felt his new life begin. It was a life of bodily immediacy, after Ava’s example. Perkus didn’t look past the next meal, the next walk, the next bowel movement (with Ava these were like a clock’s measure), the next furry sighing caress into mutual sleep.
Biller, attuned to this, minimized, when Perkus brought it up, any talk of Yet Another World. Sure, he knew about chaldrons. They were the crème de la crème of virtual treasure, and people had quit trading them for any accumulation of virtual anything-tracts of land, magnificent architecture, sex slaves, other treasure. They only changed hands for dollars now, and quite a lot of those. But Biller reminded Perkus that if you cared about Yet Another World there was a lot else to care about besides chaldrons. And yeah, he knew the legends of Linus Carter, but so what? Every place had a creator. What made Yet Another World interesting was that it had thousands. You didn’t have to pay any attention to the wishes of the originator of the place if you didn’t care to-a creator who might, after all, be the last person to know what was really going on. Still, Perkus saw Biller’s ears perk up when he told him about the castle hoard of chaldrons Linus had bestowed on his unimpressed sibling. That fact did stir the imagination. Putting the subject aside, Biller promised he would help Perkus set up an avatar, a persona on Yet Another World, if he wanted one. Somehow, at least through January and into February, they failed to get around to it. There was no computer in Ava’s apartment.
Biller wasn’t a hanger-outer. He had his entrepreneurial paces to go through, and his altruistic ones, too, which included checking in with Perkus and, most days, dropping off edible donated items of food and new clothes he thought might fit, most recently a pair of heavy and useful tan work boots. Otherwise, he left Perkus and Ava alone. When Perkus was drawn unexpectedly back a step or two into the human realm, it was Ava’s former walker, Sadie Zapping, who drew him. Sadie had other dogs in the building and still troubled to look in from time to time, always with a treat in her palm for Ava to snort up. This day she also had a steaming to-go coffee and a grilled halved corn muffin in a grease-spotted white bag which she offered to Perkus, who accepted it. This being not a time in life of charity refused or even questioned. She asked him his name again and he said it through a mouthful of coffee-soaked crumbs.
“I thought so,” said Sadie Zapping. She plucked off her knit cap and shook loose her wild gray curls. “It took a little while for me to put it together. Me and my band used to read your posters all the time. I read you in the Voice, too.”
Ah. Existence confirmed, always when you least expected it. “Broadsides,” he corrected. Then he asked the name of her band, understanding it was the polite response to the leading remark.
“Zeroville,” she said. “Like the opposite of Alphaville, get it? You probably saw our graffiti around, even if you never heard us. Our bassist was a guy named Ed Constantine, I mean, he renamed himself that, and he used to scribble our name on every blank square inch in a ten-block radius around CBGB, even though we only ever played there a couple of times. We did open for Chthonic Youth once.” She plopped herself down now, on a chair in Ava’s kitchen Perkus had never pulled out from under the table. He still used the apartment as minimally as possible, as if he were to be judged afterward on how little he’d displaced. Meanwhile Ava gaily smashed her square jowly head across Sadie’s lap, into her cradling hands and scrubbing fingers. “Gawd, we used to pore over those crazy posters of yours, or broadsides if you like. You’re a lot younger-looking than I figured. We thought you were like some punk elder statesman, like the missing link to the era of Lester Bangs or Legs McNeil or what have you. It’s not like we were holding our breath waiting for you to review us or anything, but it sure was nice knowing you were out there, somebody who would have gotten our jokes if he’d had the chance. Crap, that’s another time and place, though. Look at us now.”
Sadie had begun to uncover an endearing blabbermouthedness (and even when not addressing Perkus she’d give forth with a constant stream of “Good girl, there you go girl, aw, do you have an itchy ear? There you go, that’s a girl, yes, yessss, good dog. Ava, whaaata good girl you are!” etc.) but another elegist for Ye Olde Lower East Side was perhaps not precisely what the doctor ordered just now. Perkus, who’d preferred to think he was in the manner of a Pied Piper, influencing a generation following his, didn’t really want to believe that when his audience made itself visible again it would resemble somebody’s lesbian aunt. He sensed himself ready to split hairs-not so much Lester Bangs as Seymour Krim, actually-and thought better of it. He was somewhat at a loss for diversions, however. He couldn’t properly claim he had elsewhere to be. Sadie, sensing resistance, provided her own non sequitur. “You play cribbage?”
“Sorry?”
“The card game? I’m always looking for someone with the patience and intelligence to give me a good game. Cribbage is a real winter sport, and this is a hell of a winter, don’t you think?”
With his consent, the following day Sadie Zapping arrived at the same hour, having completed her walks, and unloaded onto the kitchen table two well-worn decks of cards, a wooden cribbage board with plastic pegs, and two packets of powdered Swiss Miss. Perkus, who hated hot chocolate, said nothing and, when she served it, drained his mug. He’d gone without marijuana now for more than a month, and alcohol (never his favorite anyhow), taking no stimulants besides caffeine and sucrose, both of which the hot chocolate provided in a rather degraded form. The game Sadie taught him was perfectly poised between dull and involving (so any talk could be subsumed to concentration) as well as between skill and luck. The first few days Perkus steadily lost, then got the feel of it. Sadie sharpened, too, her best play not aroused until she felt him pushing back. They kept their talk in the arena of the local and mundane: the state of the building, which had its own minor dramas involving the bureaucratic management imposed by the Manhattan Reification Society versus the pragmatic hands-on knowledge won by the volunteers themselves; the state of the streets, which had borne another two-inch snowfall, a treacherous slush carpet laid over the now seemingly permanent irregularities of black ice wherever the blizzard had been shoved aside; the ever-improving state of Perkus’s cribbage; above all, the state of Ava, who thrived on Sadie’s visits and seemed to revel in being discussed. Perkus could, as a result, tell himself he tolerated the visits on the dog’s account. It was nearly the end of February before Sadie told him the tragedy of Ava’s fourth limb.