Ordinarily, I’m exempted from my turn helping Sledge shift his banks of grow lights from one position to the next, but one day recently I was feeling vital and bored shitless enough to give it a go. In zero-G the task doesn’t involve any lifting, obviously, and even a one-footed lady can be useful nudging the arrays around corners and helping Sledge reorient them in a new zone. Sometimes in all this dark it’s pleasant to cling to those few yellowish lights, too. This day Sledge confessed to me the basis of his mastery of indoor agriculture: he once single-handedly ran the most profitable indoor marijuana farm on the whole island of Manhattan. The operation was tucked inside a four-room apartment on the Upper East Side, unknown not only to the authorities (kept off the scent by elaborately rerouted utility accounts, the massive electrical bills thrown to other addresses like a ventriloquist’s voice into a dummy’s body) but to even the closest neighbors, who regarded Sledge as an innocent, forgettable fellow tenant in the large and anonymous building. Sledge described it generously, the rooms teeming to the ceilings with bud-heavy green stalks, the floor cabled with water sprinklers, the walls lined with foil reflectors to maximize the ripening effects of the solar-spectrum lamps, the stereo chattering NPR-talk radio to cover the drone of the daytime light banks, and classical music to give the plants a cultural heritage through the cool damp night. In one large closet he kept what he called the “mother plant,” a grotesquely thickened and practically pulsing rope of marijuana from which he cloned seedlings, a fine-tuned specimen of THC. The result he spliced from her was the highest high-end “one-toke dope,” or so he bragged. He’d made himself and several confederates wealthy from the operation before a paranoid inkling triggered a violent two-day fit in which he completely disassembled the farm and eradicated its traces. It was those skills that now turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung. I suppose I am Sledge’s mother plant, the improbable thing he keeps alive in an unnatural cramped space.
I don’t know why I’m wasting so much of my keyboard time paraphrasing Sledge’s tale, except that it was as if I’d visited the place myself. We’re prone to transporting visualizations now, in our darkened station, not to mention vivid olfactory hallucinations like the apple cider presently rising to my nostrils. The Russians talk about their childhoods incessantly, when they talk at all. Mstislav, drifting in the dark like a dreamer in a sensory-deprivation tank, has spontaneously offered several wistful accounts of cutting his bare foot on a sickle while pursuing a goat, and while we’ve many creatures roaming the station now that the Greenhouse doors have been thrown open, I’m fairly certain there’s no goat on our roster. For me, it isn’t juvenile pastoral to which I revert, but moments between us, Chase, daydream flashes I prefer not to believe I’ve cobbled out of wishful thinking and damp air. (Did you know we can’t even properly gaze at the stars, now? Our breath fogs any window we turn to. We’re moisture, Chase, we’re returning to dew.) I know I’ve got a lot of gall questioning your existence when it’s my own that’s so transparently dubious, or dubiously transparent, or something. But you never write, you never call, ha ha ha. So each time I roam the corridors of the Met in my imaginings, seeking that Chinese garden where our cool thrilling birdlike kisses were exchanged, finding that oasis of stone and fern and skylight, bowing my head to see our twinned reflections in the rippling pool there, the museum and the Chinese garden and the mirror of water grow clearer and clearer while you begin to pale, I see only myself and a shimmer beside me, you’re nothing now but an urgent elusive talisman, an object glimpsed but unseen, a fish’s lure in the deep, a reason to go on living. And I do that, Chase. At someone’s command, and I prefer to believe it is yours, my friend, I go on living.
Love,
J.
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
Hiccup-afflicted, Perkus began to oscillate like his own eye, as though some internal compass was being again and again jostled out of its usual operation. Or perhaps it was more as if a needle was bumping on a scuffed LP, like his salvaged copy of Some Girls, and skipping from track to track. Not that Perkus had ever seemed particularly compassed-it took the onset of hiccups to make me see the relative continuity of his earlier passages. Now he reeled. He’d revive his old mode of whirlwind intertextual eurekas, citing Mailer’s The White Negro, Seymour Krim calling Lenny Bruce “the Jazz Circuit Hegel,” the expulsion of Richard Hell from Television, The Man Who Was Thursday, the aphorisms of Franz Marplot, Colin Wilson on Gurdjieff, Dennett’s theory of mind-as-computer, Borges’s “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” a Cassavetes appearance on The Gnuppet Show, all in a flurry, relying on shorthand-a glimpse of turrets in mist where once he would have drawn a whole castle in the air before me. Or he’d launch a manic exposé-something to do with Claire Carter, the mayor’s right hand and Richard Abneg’s bête noire, having a nerd-king brother who’d invented chaldrons-but run aground, mutter into his fist, begin discoursing on the progress of Ava’s bowel movements mid-sentence, or otherwise, before gaining any momentum, lose his way. If his arguments were once brakeless vehicles he could ride a mile or two before veering into a ditch-a listener climbing aboard if they dared-now they seemed compacted on arrival in one of those junkyard car-crushing machines, recognizable for their former purpose but undrivable.
Then he’d reverse himself, plunge into the newer vein, aping Ava’s doggish absolutes, renounce proliferating interpretation and context, all the cultural clues. Too much news or manufactured opinion was distraction from the deeper soundings to be conducted at a level of pure experience: Ava’s sniffing walkabouts, the corroded jape of Keith Richards’s guitar, the juicy platonic ideal of a pastrami sandwich he’d isolated at a coffee shop on York Avenue. And the weather, he was devoted to the snow and cold, the uncanny force of it, as he was to the legend of the tiger, his own personal destroyer. He preferred what defied or needed no explanation. “Alan Watts said you mustn’t concern yourself with information from outside your immediate village. People, like dogs, make demimondes for the purposes of sensory sanity. Nobody-that’s no body-really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe. Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe.” These harangues I’d begun to think of as the Friendreth Purities, though really they’d begun earlier, with the floe-borne polar bear, whose profundity had shamed a broadside into silence. Now he published a daily War Free edition of the mind. What a dog couldn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
Whatever the pursuit, I was his student again, reenlisted. It was as though we’d wasted time enough on misunderstandings of a personal nature. Perkus seemed in a hurry, too eager for our connection to resume his sporadic cruel needling. Apparently I gave him something Ava or Sadie Zapping couldn’t. He had their ears, but mine were more attuned to Perkus’s vocabulary, his field of reference, even if he claimed he wished to vacate that field. Biller was invisible, so far as I could tell, and Sadie treated me as an incidental presence, when we overlapped. Oona didn’t turn up in the Friendreth again. The Oonaphone was silent, or used secretly.
First, though, it had to be admitted that he had a chronic case. When I saw him the first time, two days after Oona and I had made our dawn escape, Perkus was covering his mouth, belching once or twice, or pausing in his speech, turning his head-covering, in other words, any way he could, rather than confessing the situation. At last a sonically undeniable hiccup, the world’s most onomatopoetic utterance, brazened its way from his lips while Perkus faced me directly, nowhere to hide.