“Runs in the family,” I suggested.
He glared a little warning to me not to get too cute. “Not Ava anymore.”
“Have you had them continuously?” I didn’t add, since that night.
“On and off.” He breezed a hand to dismiss the topic, but even as he did I saw him clench and swallow, stifling another.
“Trouble sleeping?”
“No,” he lied.
Her hiccups shed, Ava thrived, though it couldn’t be just my projection that she seemed more orderly, less bounding, as though the dog were every much as concerned as I was, fearing she’d somehow sap Perkus’s energies now that he’d taken her malady upon himself. Their relationship had entered another phase (I don’t know why I should find this remarkable, knowing Perkus). Ava seemed to pride herself on deferentially coiling at his feet, energies banked until Perkus made a grab for her leash or beckoned her to the dance. She’d never climb his back now, never hurl herself between his knees to trip his steps to the door. She stole less food from the table, perhaps only because she’d observed how rarely Perkus finished a meal anymore, losing interest in trying to fit in bites of egg-and-cheese or pastrami sandwiches between his grunting contractions, and how certain it was he’d push a substantial remainder her way at the end. It was as if Perkus had been training her, but when I asked he denied it, said he’d never wanted to compel her into any such Nietzschean slave-master bond. “She and I talk, Chase”-here he hiccuped, leaving a gap, which we ignored except for his wheeling eye, which seemed to search the room’s walls for the missing words-“just talk, nothing more.”
Ava also seemed a key to one of Perkus’s new motifs, a disquisition in progress on the constructed nature of all consciousness. He worked repeatedly to perfect the thought aloud, seeming to believe he and I had both been persuaded we lived in a virtual reality, and needed to feel better about it. We might as well live in a concocted environment, according to his new epiphany, since our awareness was a sort of virtual construction to begin with. No baseline reality existed to worry over. “All memories are replacements, Chase, I read about this, it’s the latest neurological breakthrough.” Why the hermetic skeptic should credit fresh scientific dispatches I didn’t know, but never mind. I obliged by asking him to explain. “Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored ‘original.’ We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. We have no sugar mountain to journey backward toward, Chase! Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, and imagine you feel its weight at your back. All we’ve got is our working draft, no more final than the last, just as ready to be discarded. Memory is rehearsal for a show that never goes on!”
Fair enough, but what did this have to do with the dog? “Each day Ava traces the scent map of the real, beyond which nothing matters to her. She’s aware that the world requires reassembly each time through it. And think of what Manhattan is to a dog, Chase! If she can endure living in our daydream, we should be able to tolerate living in someone else’s!” Now that Perkus hiccuped openly before me, with evident relief he allowed the gasping intervals to open in his speeches, ellipsis made audible. The asynchronous music of his potholed speech united the Friendreth Purities with their opposite, those floodgates of paranoiac explanation that periodically opened. “Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really! Meant to halt time’s encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. So these disjunctions appear, and we have to explain them away, as tigers or epic sculpture. If Noteless didn’t exist the city would have had to invent him, Chase!” The more Perkus fleshed this theory the more the holes in his speech began to seem a kind of necessary reply to the temporal lacunae he felt the city had fallen into, as well as to Laird Noteless’s bottomless pits and absent structures.
Perkus seemed to need Manhattan to be both a falsehood and in ruins (“This town is wearing tatters”) to make good on his intuitions. But Manhattan wasn’t shattered in the sense that Mick Jagger had indicated in 1978, the way Perkus needed it to be. By recent measures the city was orderly, flush with money, a little boring, even. That was, if you trusted the complacent testimony of the millions who checked TigerWatch in the morning before donning their April snowshoes and subwaying to work as usual, then in the evenings filled the bars and restaurants, or stayed home to watch The Sopranos or the Yankees, speed-dialing to stir Chinese-delivery bicyclists to flight. There was Perkus’s point, proved: the slumbering millions who never pierced or even nudged the veil of dream. I was one of them, a born sucker, but at least I was here listening to his dire facts. Was he a conspiracy theorist? He spat like I’d said rock critic. The only conspiracy was a conspiracy of distraction. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law of complicity I should go back to the beginning and start again. When he said this, I thought of Susan Eldred’s office, my first sight of his antithetical eye.
There was another dire fact Perkus wanted me to know without telling me. Something too big to be told. The sky would come crashing down if he told it, so I had to absorb it by implication. In this mysterious matter I was intended to understand Perkus had spared me the worst (I thought he’d spread pretty bad tidings already), and that this secret had to do with women generally, or with Oona Laszlo specifically, or both. Yet he wanted to dance on the precipice of telling it. One day he passingly referred to Oona as “your chaldron,” by which he meant nothing good. I found him scratching this itch again the very last day I visited him by myself. That is to say, the day before the day Richard Abneg and I finally dragged him out of the Friendreth Canine Apartments, too late.
These days Ava would come rushing to the door as I came in, plainly eager for more company but also appearing to be concerned for Perkus, wishing to scoot me in to where he sat or sometimes lay on the carpet, twitching in glee over some storage-space flotsam like the Warren Zevon LP Excitable Boy (he loved a song called “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) or, in this case, the latest find, a commercial videotape he’d rescued from a pug’s quarters, a Steve Martin comedy called Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
“Watch-” A hiccup destroyed this word, so he began again. “Watch this with me, Chase, it’s brilliant.”
“Have you eaten?” He looked disastrous: sallow, skeletal, un-shaved, exultant. “I brought sandwiches.” I stuck to his preferences, not daring to have some variation rejected, just wanting to see nutrition go in. So pastrami, Diet Coke, pickle spears. There was no coffee brewed. He’d suddenly abandoned coffee, too.
“It’s not sitting well.”
“What’s not?”
“Food.” Unspoken, but heard, was You idiot!
The black-and-white Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a satirical film noir, and a curious amalgam of twelfth-grade tit jokes and an elaborate intertextual trick: Steve Martin’s character, a stooge of a private eye, is allowed by the magic of editing to interact with a number of dead performers from ancient movies, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and so on. The element, practically an avant-garde gesture, was fascinating and stillborn, destroying any possible mood or rhythm. But incredibly to me, Perkus had located in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid another sacred item. I guess Perkus identified with Martin’s detective, for the way he breezed in and out of the archival footage, reanimating his own pantheon of heroes. This was analogous to how Perkus saw himself moving amid Brando, Groom, Krim, Cassavetes, Mailer, Marplot, Serling, and all the others.