I wanted Oona in the morning. I could still conjure her slippery smoothness in my arms (and divergent cuppable breasts in my palms, where they left ghost trails of a peach’s weight), but Oona had kept dunning lights and pulling curtains, and dressing and undressing stealthily, while I was at the sink or refrigerator, or asleep. When I asked, Oona informed me she was too skinny to look at. She might even be invisible, she joked. After I looked clear through her I’d see there was no one there at all. Well, I suspended judgment. Meanwhile, I campaigned to get her nude in a bed flooded with daylight. I really felt no call to visit any Fjord in this weather.
“This is a good breakfast right here.”
“You’re kidding.” Oona had a thing for dodging my suggestions of bars or restaurants, I’d noticed. She’d claimed she lived on roast chestnuts and knishes from sidewalk carts, and takeout Chinese. Really, I think I’d seen only white wine, good Scotch, and Häagen-Dazs cross her lips.
“Papaya’s fantastic for the lower intestine,” said Oona. “I think it reverses cancer, too.” She ordered herself a cup of orange stuff from an imperturbable Hispanic man in a white smock and mustache. Lodged beneath the glowing coils of ceiling-mounted heater, he might have been on some faraway beach, vending to bathers. Outside the shop window, a cyclonic wind had roiled a discarded Times into a kind of whirligig, one which pedestrians had to dodge, with their hands protecting their faces.
“Have some. It really is an aid to digestion, it says so on this sign.”
“Yes, that’s why they sell it with hot dogs.”
“Poor Chase. Is capitalism too paradoxical for you?”
“I’ll take a black coffee,” I told the counterman. Then I pointed at the hot dogs. “And two, with mustard.”
“You’re the astronaut’s man,” said the counterman suddenly, breaking what I thought had been a fourth wall between us.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Don’t give up,” he said, his tone conveying stoical solidarity. “She needs you, man.”
“Thank you.” I shook his hand awkwardly before accepting the hot dogs and coffee.
Oona and I stepped out to brave the wind again. It was then that, without trying, I spotted him, second from the corner in a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries, pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down Eighty-sixth Street, the way we’d come. Biller. Oona and I had likely passed him once already, obliviously bantering, our elbows not linked but jostling together, on our way into the Papaya Czar. Biller’s little card table was loaded edge to edge with trade paperbacks; literary titles, unusual ones, it seemed to me, even as it dawned that they must be Perkus Tooth’s books. Stopped there, my dumb cardboard tray of coffee and dogs between us, I felt a strange guilt that Biller should catch me and Oona together. Perkus was in the dark about us, so far as I knew. (Confronted with a vagrant, my mind also fled to vagrant guilts: that wind-whipped Times surely must contain the latest update on Northern Lights’ damaged tiles, and the space walk the trapped astronauts had scheduled to tend them.) Whether Oona recognized Biller or not I couldn’t guess.
“Here.” I shoved one of the two mustardy dogs, in its crenellated paper sleeve, at Biller. He received the steaming gift in fingers bared by a woolen glove with cutoff tips, and only nodded. His eyes were as gentle as I recalled. So much so I couldn’t discern whether they were also puzzled. He seemed to be forgiving me for the hot dog, even as he lifted it for a first bite.
“I’m Perkus’s friend,” I said. “Chase.”
“Okay,” said Biller.
“Those are some of his books you’re selling, I see.”
“He gave them to me.”
“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”
“I read them first.”
“I’m sure.”
This was small talk, but even as I made it, one title caught my eye, raised above the others by the book’s thickness. Obstinate Dust, by Ralph Warden Meeker, the tome Perkus had had on his kitchen table or at his bedside the last few times I’d visited. Now, as though an involuntary detective action had been triggered in me by Biller’s defensiveness, I also noticed the bookmark, a smoothed Ricola cough-drop wrapper, hanging like a tongue just a quarter or fifth of the way through the volume’s heft. Perkus’s bookmark, I knew it. Perkus sucked the Ricola drops to coat his fume-seared gullet, another of his self-medications-like papaya beverages to smooth the passage of frankfurters, it occurred to me now.
Oona tugged at my arm and scowled. I handed her the hot coffee, as though she’d requested it. Then continued with Biller, a little helpless to quit what had become an interrogation. I put my finger on Obstinate Dust. The book must have been a thousand pages long.
“You finish that one? Perkus didn’t.”
If I’d caught Biller in a lie, he wasn’t chagrined. His attitude was still sympathetic, as though I’d come to him somehow penitently, to right a small wrong. Or perhaps the air of sympathy was directed at the absent Perkus.
“Mr. Tooth gives me books he can’t finish,” he said. “He’s not reading a lot these days, I don’t think.”
“Chase,” said Oona, butting her forehead against my shoulder, then closing to me for warmth. The sidewalk entrepreneurs to the right and left of us each jogged in place, fists deep in pockets. They eyed the transaction between myself and Biller, plainly envious to think the bookseller, of all people, had a customer in the impossible weather.
“Okay, I’ll take that one.” I had the wild thought I’d read it, and surprise Perkus. Maybe I could recapture his interest from chaldrons. I hadn’t seen Perkus for three days, but we’d spoken on the phone. He’d reported that the going price of chaldrons was skyrocketing, not that he’d had a chance to pay it-he’d bid in seven auctions and lost them all. Before I could remind him of the joke about the restaurant-goer who complained that the food was bad and the portions small, he’d hustled me off the phone so he could resume scouring eBay for sellers. There were obsessions I could adore in Perkus, others which in their thinness broke my heart. I didn’t want him to give up his books.
Biller quoted a price. “Ten dollars.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Half price.”
I handed Biller a twenty. He told me I was his first buyer of the day, and that he had no change. I waved it off, and shoehorned the brick of pages into my coat pocket. As if aping me, Biller crammed the last third of the hot dog into his mouth, then raised his half-gloved hand in salute, bare fingertips gripping the air, while Oona and I slanted off toward the subway entrance.
Oona’s plan, which she claimed was impeccable, involved shooting downtown in order to go uptown. We took the Lexington line to Forty-second Street, then boarded the shuttle, in order to get on the 1 train up into Harlem and beyond, to the parklands alongside the Harlem River, where Noteless had constructed his Fjord. I couldn’t imagine why we’d needed to cross to the West Side if our destination had been in the east all along, and after our second train began pleading with Oona to be reasonable and exit the system, but she ignored me, continued dragging me through passages like a ferret with a captured hare in its jaws. The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier. This is why I always take taxicabs. Nevertheless, we eventually boarded the uptown Broadway local, which poked its way unsteadily into unknown parts of Manhattan.
“closing in dream the somnolent city-”
“Wait, wait, that’s the first sentence?”