“What television star?” I had an odd feeling I knew.
“You know, what’s her goddamn name?” Richard slurped air around the joint’s tip, waved his hand.
“Sandra Saunders Eppling,” supplied Perkus. “She was married to Senator Eppling for a while. She was the one who spoke at the press conference.”
“Sandra Saunders played my mom on Martyr & Pesty,” I said. I felt, as I often do at those rare times I actually choose to speak of my child stardom, as if I was boring my listeners with information too familiar to mention, and yet also evoking a distant pocket realm no living human could imagine. In either case, the result felt as though I were being humored. Possibly I did live on a cloud.
“She was in an Elvis movie,” said Perkus, frowning at me for not citing the more salient fact. I’d noticed-this may have been when I first noticed it-how Perkus didn’t browbeat Richard Abneg for his cultural illiteracy. He had me for that.
“Right, that’s the one,” said Richard, uninterested in anything but his nest. He seized the newspaper section from me now. “These days she’s a kind of fundamentalist vegetarian eagle-advocate. It’s horrendous luck for me she doesn’t have a real career to keep her busy. My whole building’s brimming with mediocrities and has-beens.”
“The whole island’s brimming with them,” said Perkus agreeably.
“Yes, but your bedroom isn’t full of the smell of moldering underbrush and the death screams of squirrels and pigeons and sewer rats,” said Richard. “Look at this.” He handed the fuming joint to me and raised the newspaper for us to consider, folded to the photograph of the eagles and their startlingly large construction. “It’s obscene. It’s practically… pubic.”
“Yes,” said Perkus. “Your building is definitely wearing a merkin.”
“That’s a polite word for it.” Richard stroked his beard, perhaps unconsciously making an association.
“I don’t think merkin is the polite word for something,” I said. “It’s more specific than that-”
“Read it to me,” interrupted Richard. Perkus had taken up the book, the Field Guide. I now saw it lay flapped open to the entry on eagles, Perkus having already delved into study on Richard’s behalf. “I’ve got to find some way to eradicate them that can’t be traced back to me…”
“I guess if you got a dog it would bark at them.” This was my pallid contribution, while Perkus studied the pages, tilting the book to favor his orderly eye.
“No, it can’t be inside my apartment, it has to be something that will crawl up the front of the building. Besides, I hate dogs.” We were deep into crime melodrama, a caper, Richard and Perkus collaborating on the perfect interspecies murder. “I’m going to need an alibi, too. I can’t be anywhere in the vicinity when those eagles go. That building is ready to come after me with torches and pitchforks.”
“So, here’s the thing.” Perkus held up a finger proclaiming Eureka! He was forever ferreting out the key, always distilling essences. “Majestic in his privilege,” he narrated from the Field Guide, “the bald eagle knows no natural enemy apart from Man.”
“What a freight of shit,” said Richard.
“Why?”
“There’s something totally insane about saying a frigging psychotic serial killer has no natural enemy! What they mean is the eagle’s enemies don’t stand a chance. All those mice and squirrels and pigeons, believe me, they’d gladly define themselves as enemies in that instant before the talons tore through their hearts.”
“In nature I think a thing doesn’t qualify as your enemy if it can’t fight back,” I said. “It’s just a victim.”
“Maybe we could corral a whole bunch of mice and squirrels and pigeons together,” suggested Perkus. “If they somehow were all run up the side of the building at once, when the eagles were sleeping…” He flipped eagerly through the Guide’s back pages, perhaps scanning the index for some precedent.
“No.” Richard leaned forward, grabbing for the joint I still held. He took it and drew in a puff and shook his shaggy head. “No, it won’t do.” His grave tone suggested real deliberation. “Prey is prey, I’m sorry to have to disenchant you two dreamers. You total Communists. If you’d heard them whimper and die, the way I have, you’d understand. A million mice couldn’t do it.”
“Didn’t mice kill the dinosaurs?” asked Perkus.
Richard shook his head. “The dinosaurs were stupid, they were on their last legs. Anyhow, the mice had help, they needed comets and glaciers, all kinds of stuff. I’m pretty certain the mice just jumped in at the end and administered the coup de grâce, then took all the credit.”
“We need a predator,” said Perkus.
“Exactly.”
“We should go up there, the three of us,” said Perkus. “Not now, but later, when it’s dark, when they’re sleeping.” We were always, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg and I, on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. Oh, how Manhattan yearned for our expert intervention! We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.
“The thing about animals,” Perkus said, “I remember this clearly, is that when you bring in, you know, kangaroos to chase away monkeys, then you have a kangaroo problem. Then you bring in zebras to chase off the kangaroos, and you’re overrun with zebras, and so on.”
“You learned that in a Dr. Seuss book, didn’t you?” said Richard.
“What about the tiger?” I said. “What if somehow the tiger could be brought into play?”
Perkus gave Richard a look of horrified helplessness, seeming to say at once, Don’t blame me, I didn’t suggest it, and Well, why not?
Richard tittered. “The tiger?”
“Sure.”
“Sure, that’s just what my apartment needs, Chase. That tiger destroyed one of the city’s primary water mains last week. I mean, totally shattered layers of concrete and brick that had held since the nineteenth century, it’s going to take months to repair it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe the tiger could be… blamed somehow.”
Richard snorted smoke through his nostrils. “Blamed when I off the eagles, you mean?”
“Sure.”
“Brilliant.” At this Richard Abneg dissolved in giggles, sweeping Perkus Tooth along with him. And soon enough myself, too. “Blame the tiger!”
Let this stand for a typical night in our company there. I don’t remember them all in such detail.
I met Oona next at a funeral, the funeral of a man I didn’t know, a purportedly great man. I had to cross the park to be there-the services were held at the Society for Ethical Culture, on Central Park West-and when I saw how populous the congregation was, I felt foolish for troubling. Emil Junrow was a famous science-fiction writer of the 1940s, a lowly career he took upmarket by being also an accredited (if undistinguished) scientist, and a famous humanist who’d uttered fine early doubts about the Cold War, a sort of Einstein without any theory. He’d then gone on to become a relentless prose-lytizer for the peaceful exploration of space, appearing many times before Congress and in public forums, a dwarfish wizened presence in bolo ties and flyaway hair (I learned all this in tributes presented during the long memorial presentation, including video clips that made me realize I’d seen Junrow on television without registering his name).
It was in this last role that Emil Junrow had once or twice been photographed in the company of Janice Trumbull, lady spaceexplorer. My receiving an invitation wasn’t anything personal, however, a fact that was made plain the instant I entered. Some publicist, knowing the cavernous size of the society’s hall, had emptied his Rolodex into the invitation list. In range of my glance I spotted Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Lou Reed. There were surely many others I didn’t recognize. Despite being a low-grade semi-celebrity myself, I’m rotten at picking out any but the cartoon-obvious among us. I felt like an idiot, dressed to the nines, alone and invisible in the dim back rows as the stately figures spoke one after the other on the distant stage. I’d attended out of an absurd pity, imagining an old man who’d been exaggerating his connection to Janice, and therefore to me, not remotely guessing that Emil Junrow’s passing was an authentic cultural moment, and that with the gravity and glamour of those who’d come to pay respects no one would trouble to register my presence. I only stayed out of a mild curiosity, and discretion. No one should duck out of a funeral.