Though the gas was disabled, the Friendreth’s electricity flowed, thankfully, just as its plumbing worked. Biller provided Perkus with a hot plate on which he could boil coffee, and he’d have a cup in his hand by the time Ava returned from her walk. He imagined the volunteer could smell it brewing when she opened the door. Coffee was the last constant between Perkus’s old daily routine and his new, a kind of lens through which he contemplated his own transformations. For there was no mistaking that the command had come, as in Rilke’s line: you must change your life. The physical absolutes of coexistence with the three-legged pit bull stood as the outward emblem of a new doctrine: recover bodily absolutes, journey into the real. Perkus’s reckoning with Arnheim’s chaldron had catapulted him into this phase, the night of the blizzard and the loss of his apartment and the books and papers inside all manifestations of the same watershed encounter. He held off interpretation for now. Until the stupendous cluster headache vanished into last traces, until he learned what Ava needed from him and how to give it, until he became self-sufficient within the Friendreth and stopped requiring Biller’s care packages of sandwiches and pints of Tropicana, interpretation could wait.
The final step between them came when Perkus assumed responsibility for Ava’s twice-daily walks (he’d already several times scooped more kibble into her bowl, when she emptied it, having discovered the supply in the cabinet under the sink). On the fifth day Perkus woke refreshed and amazed, alert before coffee, with his cluster migraine completely vanished. He’d clambered out of bed and dressed in a kind of exultation to match the dog’s own, for once. He felt sure Ava hoped he’d walk her. And was tired of hiding. So he introduced himself to the volunteer at the door, and said simply that if she’d leave him the leash he’d walk her now and in the future. The woman, perhaps fifty, in a lumpy cloth coat, her frizzy hair bunched under a woolen cap, now fishing in a Ziploc of dog treats for one to offer to Ava, and who’d certainly earlier discerned his presence by any number of clues, showed less surprise than fascination that he’d spoken to her directly. Then she stopped.
“Something wrong with your eye?”
He’d gone unseen by all but Biller for so long, her scrutiny disarmed him. Likely his unhinged eyeball signified differently now that he was out of his suits, instead in this homeless-man garb, and featuring a two-week beard. To this kindly dog custodian it revealed that Ava’s spectral cohabitant was not only poor but dissolute or deranged. A firm gaze, like a firm handshake, might be a minimum.
“From birth,” Perkus said, referring to something he’d never mention in any other setting, but pridelessly needing to establish his competency here. He smiled at her as he said it.
“It’s cold out.”
“I’ve got a coat and boots.” Biller had loaded both into the apartment’s closet, for when he’d need it. “You can control her?”
Perkus restricted himself from any fancy remarks. “Yes.”
On the street, fighting for balance on icy sidewalks, Perkus discovered what Ava’s massiveness and strength could do besides bound upward to pulse in his arms. Even on three legs, she rode and patrolled the universe within scope of her senses, chastening poodles, pugs, Jack Russells, even causing noble rescued racetrack greyhounds to bolt, as well as cats and squirrels foolish enough to scurry through the zone. Ava only had to grin and grunt, to strain her leash one front-paw hop in their direction, and every creature bristled in fear or bogus hostility, sensing her imperial lethal force, which required no trumping up, no Kabuki enactments of coiling to pounce, no theatrical snarls. On the street she was another dog, with little regard for Perkus now except as the rudder on her sailing, their affair suspended until they’d returned indoors. That first morning out the glare of daylight stunned Perkus, but also fed an appetite he’d had no idea he’d been starving. The walks became a regular highlight, twice a day, then three times, because why not? It was only a minority of female dogs, he learned, who bothered with marking behaviors, those scent-leavings typical of all males. Ava was in the exceptional category, hoarded her urine to squirt parsimoniously in ten, sometimes twenty different spots. Biller brought Perkus some gloves to shelter his exposed knuckles but also cover the chafing of Ava’s heavy-woven leash, that ship’s rigging, in his landlubber palms. Perkus learned to invert a plastic baggie on his splayed fingers and deftly inside-out a curl of her waste, to deposit an instant later in the nearest garbage can. Then inside, to the ceremonial hail of barking from the Friendreth’s other inhabitants, who seemed to grasp Ava’s preferential arrangement through their doors and ceilings.
Ava’s volunteer-her name revealed as Sadie Zapping-poked her head in a couple of times to inquire, and once pointedly intersected with Perkus and Ava during one of their walks, startling Perkus from reverie, and making him feel, briefly, spied upon. But she seemed to take confidence enough from what she witnessed, and Perkus felt he’d been granted full stewardship. Now the two gradually enlarged their walking orbit, steering the compass of Ava’s sniffing curiosity, around the Rockefeller campus and the Weill Cornell Medical Center, on a bridge over the FDR Drive, to gaze across at the permanent non sequitur of Roosevelt Island, defined for Perkus by its abandoned TB asylum to which no one ever referred, certainly not the population living there serviced by its goofy tram, like commuting by ski lift. “No dogs allowed,” he reminded Ava every time she seemed to be contemplating that false haven. Or down First Avenue, into the lower Sixties along Second, a nefariously vague zone whose residents seemed to Perkus like zombies, beyond help.
Yet far more important than any human map, Perkus learned to which patches of snow-scraped earth Ava craved return, a neighborhood circuit of invisible importances not so different, he decided, from his old paces uptown, the magazine stand where he preferred to snag the Times, or East Side Bagel, or the crater formerly known as Jackson Hole. Perkus never veered in the direction of Eighty-fourth Street, though, and Ava never happened to drag him there. His old life might have rearranged itself around his absence, his building reopened, his places waiting for him to reinhabit them-but he doubted it. Equally plausible to him, if also unlikely, the tiger might have razed everything he’d ever known. The creature, which Richard Abneg had claimed was a machine operated by the city, might have been on a Perkus-eradication course to begin with. Perkus accepted this possibility with equanimity. The breadth of the city’s mysteries that had begun to reveal themselves to him were beyond taking personally, even if they occasionally sought out a personal victim like himself or the Jackson Hole waitress, Lindsay. Occasionally he missed a particular book, felt himself almost reaching in Friendreth toward some blank wall as though he could pull down an oft-browsed volume and find consolation in some familiar lines. Or glance at an old broadside to recall some epiphany he’d gained, publicized to the street corners, and then forgotten. Nothing worse than this, he didn’t miss the old life in and of itself. The notion he should cling to a mere apartment, he found both pathetic and specious. Apartments came and went, that was their nature, and he’d kept that one too long, so long he had trouble recalling himself before it. Good riddance. There was mold in the grout of the tiles around the tub he’d never have gotten clean in a million years.
Perkus had let go of things more dear than apartments. His encounter with the mayor’s chaldron spared him such simplicities: an apartment was only a container for bodies, after all, while a chaldron was a container for what under duress he’d call souls. And Perkus had only ever possessed a chaldron by wanting one, and then lost the only chaldron he’d even seen by seeking to possess it. Meanwhile all along their true source had been near at hand to begin with, sometimes no farther than his kitchen’s rear window. Perkus, who’d lived for as long as he could remember snared in such perplexities, the existential equivalent of an impossible object, stuck forever in parallax view, its different aspects irreconcilable, could only afford mild surprise at how the events of this winter had overturned him. It was on these long walks with Ava, dog flaneur, when he began to allow himself to muse on the implications, but never resentfully. Gratefully. He felt grateful to still live anywhere in Manhattan. If Ava could thrive with one forelimb gone, the seam of its removal nearly erased in her elastic hide, he could negotiate minus one apartment, as well as with the phantom limbs of conspiracy and epiphany and ellipsis that had always pulled him so many directions at once.