So what did I do? The day’s light graying behind those curtains, I joined Perkus on Ava’s couch, each with our fresh cups of coffee, and dutifully watched “The Midnight Sun,” from The Twilight Zone’s third season, on glitchy, burping videotape. Ava wedged herself between us to sit bolt upright regarding the television screen as if it were a window, her head darting at the blocking of the characters, growling once when a man holding a pistol pushed his way through a door (you couldn’t quibble with her prejudices), otherwise hiccuping at regular intervals.
The episode was set entirely in a New York apartment building. (I felt Perkus glance at me with satisfaction at this hint of relevance, but I ignored him, wedded to the grudging line I’d drawn in the sand: I’d watch it, but refuse to marvel over whatever he wanted me to marvel over.) The city is nearly abandoned, due to an end-of-the-world heat wave, Earth’s orbit declining toward the sun, which never exits the sky-hence the title. The few who cling to existence in the melting city, namely a young female painter (a Village bohemian in a 1950s sense) and an older woman in her building, are dependent on failing air-conditioning and a failing Frigidaire, which houses what may be the last pitcher of water in Manhattan. The man with the gun, at whom Ava snarled, is a thirst-maddened desperado who breaks in and swigs down this treasure, a scene played by the sweating women as if it were an allegory of rape. Then, thirst quenched, the intruder apologizes and departs in shame. The heat, reaching a peak, murders the older woman and causes a painting to melt off a canvas. Only after the young painter also collapses does the tale reveal its characteristic twist: she awakens from what is revealed to be a nightmare to find with relief that the sky is dark, the air cool, and outside, snow is falling, but relief gives way to the next horror-the Earth is moving away from the sun, not nearer to it, and Manhattan is locked in a fatal deepening freeze.
That I followed this narrative is a blooming miracle, however, as throughout our viewing Perkus was unable to keep from voicing a filibuster of interpretations. The twenty-odd minutes of black-and-white fable gave him innumerable opportunities to persuade me that Rod Serling was the zero point for the pure themes: Cold War fear! Conformity! Alienation! Collective and consensual delusion, the leakage of the dream life into the waking! The Twilight Zone, Perkus explained, was news that stayed news (I took this as rebuke of my gift of the Sunday Times), in this case speaking volumes about the true nature of the unnatural winter the city had been enduring. Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist.
“Remind you of anything?” he insisted afterward, scurrying to halt the tape’s progress to the next immortal episode.
Remember, I’d done television, too much of it. I mostly had just pitied the actors, forced to work on such an impoverished set and to be sprayed with glycerin between takes. Then again, these were pretty feeble actors.
“Lots of things,” I said. “What things did you have in mind?”
“The state of… everything. Your life, mine, the state of the weather.”
I played dumb. It couldn’t be a crime merely to exaggerate the role Perkus cast me in always. “Sure, it’s been a little cold. You think despite how it feels, it’s actually hot out?”
“Many things helplessly produce their own opposites.” Sensing my resistance, he half swallowed this manifesto line. I saw him squint, too, to keep his dodgy eye from embarrassing him. “I think I’m losing you.”
“It all feels a little plotty to me,” I said, dead set on disappointing him. “I was never one for plots.”
“Too bad, since you’re in one.”
“The newspaper is the news, too, at least on the day it’s published. Did you read about the crane collapse on Ninety-first? They think Abneg’s tiger might be to blame.”
“Fuck Abneg’s tiger, and fuck the newspaper.” Perkus began swearing, invoking Richard’s style. “The Times isn’t the commissar of the real, not anymore, not as far as I’m concerned. It’s the cover story.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Perkus. You don’t have to rely on it, like I do, for updates on your personal life!”
“Why are you yelling?”
I had gotten a little ventilated, without noticing. I felt tide-swamped with provocations: the serial bulging of Ava’s ribs as she hiccuped under my hand; the moldering smell and tawdriness of the Friendreth generally; the fine grounds the gold filter hadn’t kept from ending in the bottom of my cup and on the carpet of my tongue; the unrelenting March weather, which seemed to prove some arcane fact my loopy friend Perkus held over me like a threat, as though he could be right and I could be wrong about everything; that neither Perkus nor Oona ever called me on the phone-I was somehow a principle taken for granted, as much an item of decor in Perkus’s circle as I had been the chunk of handsome furniture at wealth’s table; that Mission Control hadn’t received a communication from Janice or Northern Lights generally for almost three weeks. Once upon a time Janice had peppered the newspapers with affectionate updates I guiltily speed-read; now I guiltily scoured the papers daily for hints of her existence which refused to appear. All of this seemed irreconcilable data, yet the ultimate provocation was the way Perkus arched his eyebrows at me as though I was supposed to grasp it as a whole.
“Janice might be dead,” I blurted, seeking his sympathy. “And I’m in love with Oona.”
“Have you ever found yourself exhausted by a friend whose problems simply never change? Here, Ava.” Perkus rattled her leash and she sprang from the couch to the door-her transitions, from placidity to avidity, were like jump cuts. Then he began bundling himself into outer layers I’d mostly purchased for him. Despite the uncanny truth The Twilight Zone episode had revealed, he’d protect himself from the cold outside. Perkus’s selfish certainties took my breath away. Yet I had to grant the distinction: he was, if nothing else, a person whose problems were never exactly the same twice. There is a war, I thought, between the ones who stagger from chaldron drunkenness to cohabitation with a three-legged pit bull, and those who try to keep up with them. I was losing the war. Chaldrons, for instance: Would they ever be mentioned again, or had they slipped from his scheme? Was it my duty, as I’d earlier assumed, to suppress uncomfortable facts, or was I somehow the stooge who couldn’t keep all the essentials in his head? I didn’t mind jigsaw puzzles, but this one seemed to have no edge pieces. Marlon Brando is dead! I wanted to shout after him as he departed, leaving me there alone in Ava’s digs.
I think!
I said nothing, as footfalls of man and dog waned to silence in the corridor. So much for the fight I’d planned. I was no match. Perkus’s transitions were as rapid as Ava’s, and if he was applying tough love it was fairly tough. On the other hand, his mysterioso style left my pride some wiggle room. Sure, I replied to Perkus’s absence, I have been exhausted by those people whose problems never change. Good thing there’s none of those around here! My own bedevilments seemed dynamic enough to me. If I stuck around and changed the subject I could pretend we’d never tangled. Only I might have to praise Rod Serling to get back in Perkus’s graces. That’s when I located my pride-I fled.