I began again. “closing in dream the somnolent city-”
“No, stop, that’s enough.”
I’d unwedged Obstinate Dust from my coat’s pocket and begun narrating its opening to Oona once we’d found seats on the local. Now she grabbed the book from me. Our subway car held a scattering of faces, none, after 125th Street, white as our own, and none interested for more than a glance-worth in Oona’s and my own agitation. I am always nervous, I’ll admit, in Manhattan’s triple digits. (In my defense, I’m nervous in the single digits, too.) Fidgeting with the big paperback, we were out of place and to be ignored, painted over with everyday disdain. The train was clammily warm and malodorous. Riders sat with coats loosened, nodding in rhythm to earbuds or just the robot’s applause of wheels locating seams in ancient track.
“No, no, no,” chanted Oona, flitting through a few pages. “Not lowercase italics, they can’t be serious, it’s like poetry! Next thing you know the characters’ names will be X, Y, and Z. I can’t even find any character names.”
“Maybe that’s just a kind of overture,” I suggested. “It can’t really stay like that all the way through.” I felt a kind of wilting despair, as though my plan to read the book was a real one, on which any hopes for Perkus’s stability was contingent.
“Impossible. I don’t want to know about it. I didn’t get where I am today reading thousand-page prose poems. Please, sorry, but no.”
This was one of Oona’s recurring jokes: I didn’t get where I am today. She never said, of course, where it was she claimed she’d gotten-the ghost, the invisible girl. I suppose that was the joke. That she’d gotten who knows where, but still had some standards. What I noticed now was how near she held the book to her face. I’d never before seen her reading.
“Do you need glasses?”
Oona replied idly, as if musing to herself. “Sometimes I wear glasses, but never in front of you. My god, it’s all like this.” She thrust the book in my lap, and I resumed the survey she’d abandoned. True enough, the look of the pages was consistent…he struggled to interest them in the concretization of listenality… Why italicize an entire book? Was the whole of Obstinate Dust meant to be taken as a kind of parenthetical fugue, or as an aside to something else? And if so, what? Ralph Warden Meeker’s other novels? Literature per se? The reader’s mundane existence?
Doubt swallowed my fantasy. Even if I somehow managed to get through Obstinate Dust, and then to resuscitate Perkus’s interest in it, was reading Meeker’s opus in any way preferable to surfing eBay for chaldrons? Nonetheless, I felt I’d incurred a responsibility, was somehow doomed to the book. Biller had tricked me into taking a hot potato off his hands, just as Susan Eldred had booby-trapped her office by introducing me to Perkus in the first place.
“Is ‘listenality’ a word?” I asked Oona.
“So do you have, like, this whole network of spies on street corners giving you regular updates on Perkus Tooth’s mental health?”
“I realize this sounds weird, but Biller lives in the air space behind Perkus’s kitchen… part of the time, at least…” I attempted to explain the whole unlikely fact that Perkus had a dependent in this world. Meanwhile our train rattled out of the 145th Street station. The unfamiliar tunnels grew stained and decrepit, the tile more and more resembling Roman or Greek mosaic, those fragments entombed at the Met in dim vacant rooms one hurries through en route to the latest exhibition of Bacons or Arbuses.
Oona didn’t mask her impatience. “I’ve seen him lowering leftovers out his window. But what’s your role? Did you agree to keep buying back the junk Perkus gives Biller? A little triangular economy of pity?”
“I thought I’d return the book,” I said, feeling pathetic. “I thought Perkus might have given it to him… by mistake.”
“Tried to put Humpty together again,” she possibly muttered, her voice engulfed in the train’s clangor.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.”
“Why would pity be triangular?” I heard myself ask. “Perkus shouldn’t pity me. Or Biller.”
“Nobody pities you, Chase.”
“Why are you angry all of a sudden?”
“I’m not angry. It’s just I thought you and I were sneaking around behind her back.” Oona jabbed a finger upward. Though we sped through an underground tunnel in a dingy earth rocket, anyone would understand she meant Janice Trumbull, the sky’s noble captive. It was in the nature of orbit that Janice’s presence blanketed the planet, overhead of any given location. She was like a blind god, one helpless at our lies, deceived effortlessly.
“We are,” I told Oona, though I really barely did more than mouth the words, feeling dangerous stating it aloud. My guilt was as large as the sky, and I couldn’t escape it underground.
“Really? Because it mostly feels to me like we’re cheating on Perkus. Whenever you mention him, which is constantly, I feel like you’re talking about your wife and kids and dog, waiting in a suburban home where you’ll inevitably return.”
“I’m concerned about Perkus,” I blurted.
“Why aren’t you concerned about your girlfriend? She’s stranded in orbit with four horny cosmonauts, plus one American horticulturalist who’s begun barking like a dog and won’t come out of the storage attic. The plants are dying, the air’s full of carbon dioxide, and now she’s got these unspecified medical symptoms-”
My betrayal of Janice was compounded by Oona’s details. “What medical symptoms?”
“You really should read the letters more carefully.”
What had I missed? My shame took its place in a vast backdrop of shames-oxygen-starved astronauts, war-exiled orphans, dwindling and displaced species-against which I puttered through daily life, attending parties and combating hangovers, recording voiceovers and granting interviews to obscure fan sites, drinking coffee and smoking joints with Perkus, and making contact with real feeling unpredictably and at random, at funeral receptions, under rain-sheeted doorways.
Yet through shame and guilt I felt a sudden joy. Oona was jealous. To be jealous was to be in love. Oona would deny this on the spot, but the two were continuous territories on any emotional map I’d ever known. The realization unleashed delight in me, but Oona didn’t seem delighted. She was gnarled in herself, peevish. Maybe she was sorry she’d mentioned Janice. I wanted to embrace and protect her, but she’d angled from me on the seat. How odd, really, that Oona felt pitted against Perkus. With their small bodies and large heads, their persnickety outfits and smoke-tinged tenors, I’d first taken them for siblings or lovers. Even now, in their vibrant wit and impatience, and for their revitalizing effect on my own life, I associated the two, no matter that each spoke dismissively of the other. I’d certainly fallen into this skulking romance partly because it sprang from the magical site of the Eighty-fourth Street kitchen. But it was obvious that poor Oona had displaced her jealousy: to directly compete with the stranded astronaut was too abysmal, so she projected the feelings onto Perkus instead. Yet under the circumstances, it didn’t seem strategic to say so.
I had barely a chance to dwell on the dismaying cityscape as the train soared aboveground, the slate-brown monolithic prewar tenements, the rusted Coca-Cola-sponsored bodega signs, the glass-strewn lots full of twisted ailanthus shrubs, before we’d abandoned the elevated views and descended to that unfriendly map ourselves. I felt a little overwhelmed, being one who flinches from any wider world but prefers to feel at home in Manhattan, to glimpse the island’s own provinces and badlands, its margins. The bitter wind had died, and the pavements were full of drifting souls, men in porkpie hats leaning on parked cars or arrayed in beach chairs, packets of schoolchildren not in school. Oona knew just where she was headed, putting the commercial avenues behind us, and then the tenements, too, as we crossed Fort George Avenue, into the parklands at the island’s edge. I had to pee, but wasn’t too tempted by the prospect of any restroom I’d find if we backtracked. Anyway, Oona was impossible to slow. Consulting some inner compass, she drew us to the cyclone-fenced perimeter of a wild steep slope, the ground tangled with underbrush, nothing like the tended river’s edge I knew. A cleared ball field, its home plate caged to manage fouls, was partly visible below us, but I saw no evidence of a trail that would get us to it.