Richard Abneg, when he heard about me and Anne Sprillthmar, was properly infuriated. I’d guess that despite the new life that has enclosed him, Richard’s competitive ire told him Anne was rightfully his, least compensation he could expect for the indignity of his profile being killed by Anne’s editors at The New Yorker, who finally didn’t concur that Richard was so signal a figure in the present life of the city. (I didn’t explain that I’d noticed her first, figuring it would only irritate a sore point.) As for the escaped giant tiger, it hasn’t been captured or killed, nor bent to the purpose of digging subway tunnels, and goes on wrecking only things it seems to me the city can spare. Rumors abound of late-night standoffs with worshipful mobs, but mainstream coverage has fallen off, more enamored lately with the coyotes that have been terrorizing joggers at the Central Park Reservoir. I do find it hard to believe the wrecking-tiger is the same one Richard and I met in the fresh-fallen snow, but I’ve never tested this two-tiger theory on him, and have no plans to. Anne Sprillthmar mentioned that a friend at the Times claimed they were market-testing a Tiger Free edition. I don’t know whether she was joking or not.
I spend a lot of my time on the computer now (I bought myself a new one). Apart from frequent visits to Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia page, where controversy over the truth or rumor of his death remains fresh and interesting, I’m mostly immersed in Yet Another World. There, under Biller’s leadership, my newborn avatar has joined a commando unit, made of dozens of others, volunteers or mercenaries hidden behind their contrived personae, which has been readying itself to storm Claire Carter’s redoubt and seize her cache of chaldrons. I’ve spent not a little of my own money (Reification Society stipends, that is, as well as genuine Martyr & Pesty residuals) compensating the weapon and armor-makers’ guilds for what outfitting our force requires, to ensure success in the coming battle. Our existence is a tightly held secret at the moment, but Biller promises me that if we succeed no one in Yet Another World will fail to hail our name: Les Non-Dupes. What exactly we’ll do with the extravagance of chaldrons once they’ve been liberated remains to be seen. Biller speaks of opening a virtual museum, placing the treasure into a public trust, where all and any may commune with the impossible objects, but I suspect this would only be to inspire marauders more powerful than ourselves. As well, it may be a mistake to assume that our confederation will hold at the seams once the chaldrons are in our hands. There’s no honor among thieves.
Speaking of Biller, I’ve acquired another paperback copy of Ralph Warden Meeker’s Obstinate Dust. Though it’s hardly easy going, I’m doing my best to push through to the finish line, in Perkus’s memory. I read it on the subway, another new imperative in my life-I’ve renounced taxicabs. Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker’s bulky masterpiece in their hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell.
Two days ago I left Ava at home and went to visit Richard and Georgina on Park Avenue, in Georgina’s penthouse, less than a week home from the hospital. If I thought the brown stripe had unraveled Richard Abneg’s cynical poise, that was a mere preview of coming attractions. Richard hovered over his new family with tiny plates of prepared foods, tomatoes heaped on cottage cheese and laced with balsamic vinegar, a small, dubious feat of cooking of which he was unduly proud, explaining to me how many calories Georgina needed to sustain her breast-feeding. In his enthusiasm he tipped the plate and dripped balsamic down the infant’s neck, but Georgina only ever basks in his brutish attentions, and the three seemed bound in some human energy field impossible to deny, as if glimpsed in the core of a flame. The boy looked in my direction but seemed to see right through me, an effect both parents assured me was in every sense typical, in no sense a judgment upon my status as Cheese Unperson. His name is Ayhar, meaning Ruler of the Moon. Ayhar’s brow is blotched with evidence of his birth, a ruddy archipelago the doctors say will fade. He has the Hawkman’s eyes.
I let Ava lead me where she wants to go, finding traces on the snow-scraped pavement where she or some acquaintance (though many are only scent-acquaintances, inhabitants of a virtual world inside Ava’s snout) has made some statement that needs to be footnoted or overwritten. It was only a week or so ago when it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care. She’s flying under the radar, not a bad trick.
Yesterday Ava and I went out walking, and she tugged me to an unfamiliar block, Ninety-fourth Street, beyond First Avenue, almost to York. There we discovered a street corner where a flock of gray-jacketed, white-bellied birds were scattered like jimmies over a mound of snow, a mound some custodian must have heaped up in the process of clearing the gated courtyard where it lay-a church courtyard, when I looked up to see. The birds pecked at seed strewn over the icy heap, until Ava, uncharacteristically, and despite the heavy black iron that divided them, made a leash-snapping charge and scattered the birds to the sky. It was as if she wanted them in the air. Only after they found the altitude they liked, that which made them feel safe or free or whatever it was birds found in their places in the sky, and began wheeling, passing between buildings and repeatedly in and out of view, did I judge the shape of the church’s spire and knew that these were my birds, that we stood at the foot of my tower.
We watched a while and then headed home, and when we had ridden up in the elevator and gone inside and I’d freed Ava from the leash I went to my window for the first time in two months to see if they were still aloft, to catch a bit of the aerial pandemonium ballet it now seemed to me I’d been heedlessly neglecting. The birds were there, still satisfyingly continuous in their asymmetries and divergences, as if I’d been abiding with them through all these weeks and days. But I noticed something else as well. The Dorffl Tower had shifted a little to the right, shaving another margin from my window’s view. I don’t know how this can be possible, but then again there are so many things that escape me. It’s still a view I can live with. I only hope it doesn’t get any smaller.
Note
With gratitude I return the tiger to Charles Finney, The Unholy City; “In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved,” to Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift; “The Beatles family goes back to Jack Kerouac, etc.,” to George W. S. Trow, My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies 1950–1998; “But in truth, moderns live in a world-order in which the primitive, etc.,” to Kenneth Smith, The Crypto-Revolution of Our Age XX. Power Versus Reality (Comics Journal no. 185); “Perhaps such secrets… in which the person perished,” to James Baldwin, Another Country; The New York Times as “the commissar of the real,” to Seymour Krim, What’s This Cat’s Story?; “I want it on record, right here and now… Captain’s birthday cake,” to Jane Poynter, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2; everything else to everywhere else forever and ever amen.