“I never realized Kafka was such a Communist,” I joked.
He blinked away contempt for my wit. “I used to find it tragic that we turned these pack animals into paranoid hermits,” he said. “Now, living here, I see that dogs like having their own apartments.” Perkus was explaining himself, I thought but didn’t say. “What’s astonishing about Kafka is that reading this you’re suspecting he’s never even met a dog and at the same time it’s the greatest handbook to living with one I could ever imagine!”
This might be Perkus in a perfect nutshell, taking Kafka as a resource guide to pet ownership. “Does he say anything about how to cure her hiccups?” Ava’s hiccing seemed to be getting worse-or perhaps I should say more persistent, since it didn’t appear to bother the indomitable animal.
“She’s fine,” he said. “At night they go away so she can sleep. I hug her around the chest and sort of squeeze them away.”
“Is that prescribed in Kafka? Maybe we should take her to see Strabo Blandiana.” I teased, but again, it was Perkus I wanted to have Strabo take a stab at. Maybe the medicinalist knew the right points for a needle to enter the human body and trigger self-awareness, pride in one’s appearance, as well as species pride, the desire to rejoin the human race. Then I felt ashamed for preferring Perkus’s Beau Brummell phase to his present guise as a Staten Island garbageman-it wasn’t as if the first had been geared to impress others or me personally, or signaled any high regard for the opinions of the human race. What had drawn me to Perkus was his absence of any calculation, except in figuring how to persuade me of his next urgent theory or ephemeral fact.
Still, I worried about his health. I’d already snuck aspirin and floss into his bathroom. He boasted he was cluster-free since the hallucinatory and epochal headache that, with tiger and blizzard, had ushered him to this new life. He didn’t smoke pot-it was now as if he’d never smoked pot. I didn’t ask if ellipsis had departed him, too. Who was I to judge that he looked hungry, hunted, harrowed? Maybe being out of his apartment had only revealed an underlying truth, and I, fatally callow, had romanticized his former appearance. One thing I was sure of, Perkus’s temples looked flattened, dented, without the disguise of floppy hair. Once he’d had only the wrecked and reckless eye. Now his whole cranium looked imbalanced to me, though possibly this was birth trauma, a forceps impression. Perkus had, after all, gotten from there to here like the rest of us. But where was he going?
It was after the next snowstorm that I uncovered the fact that Biller and I weren’t Perkus’s only lifeline at the Friendreth anymore. The temperature locked in again, the skies white so that we could feel it coming for a day or two. Korean markets and bodegas and building superintendents everywhere had given up trying to pry up the baked black crusts on either side of narrow-carved walkways, and now laid down a desultory path of salts hoping to preserve just that width they’d struggled for. Only a couple of inches fell overnight, nothing more. By morning it was done and in the bright daylight you might feel you’d been largely spared, after that warning sky. Except now it was March and you felt something was wrong, or anyway different. Winter had stayed. Everyone joked about the weather, and the joke they joked was “Everyone does something about the weather, but nobody ever talks about it,” and it wasn’t funny.
The snowfall, though negligible, slowed the city into depression, a ceremonial plummet like a flag at half-mast. You could travel where you liked but people called in sick and battened themselves at home. I really only knew this by osmosis since the people I knew mostly had nowhere to go, by privilege or otherwise. But I ran into Susan Eldred, from Criterion’s noble offices, in her snow boots outside the Friendreth’s door, just leaving. I was arriving with East Side bagels, miraculously still a little hot in their paper sack. This was two in the afternoon-still, thanks not to Perkus but to Oona, my idea of first thing in the morning. (Perkus rose with Ava and the dawn for the first walk and first coffee of the day.) Susan and I looked at each other rather stupidly at first, as though we’d been caught and now had something to justify or confess.
“We must be calling on the same dog,” I joked, trying to dispel the air of needless guilt.
“Perkus has been bugging me to round up some stuff for him,” Susan explained, as if she had to. “Nobody’s going into the offices because of the snow, so I figured this would be a good day to drop by.”
“Bugging you how? Does he call?”
“He’s called a couple of times but honestly what lit a fire under me was when he showed up in the offices last week with Ava.”
“Well, I’m relieved he’s making the effort,” I admitted.
“I’d do anything for him, actually,” said Susan Eldred, with helpless sincerity. I filed it away as her promise if I needed it. It was too cold to shift to small talk, and so, in some embarrassment, I think, Susan moved past me on the sidewalk. I went inside.
“Were you hiding the fact that you’re in touch with Susan Eldred from me?” I asked after we three had devoured the bagels.
“Why would I do that?” Perkus said distractedly. Ava mounted his back and tongue-bathed his nape as he reached to the floor to display to me a new prize, which appeared to be a shabby boxed set of VHS tapes, decorated with constellations of stars and a giant disembodied eyeball in black and white.
“Did you call her on the cell phone?” A quick scan had revealed the Oonaphone’s charger, trailing from a socket on the kitchen counter.
“Sure.”
“I didn’t know you ever used it.”
“That’s what it’s for, right?”
“Why don’t you ever call me?”
“I don’t have to call, you just appear.” If he’d meant it as anything but a flat observation this might have seemed fairly hostile, but clearly the subject simply didn’t engage him. Once he’d welcomed me into the Friendreth my visits became predictable phenomena, regular as cribbage matches and Ava’s bowel movements. Perkus was engaged with deeper inquiries, into less obvious subjects. His tone left open the possibility that Perkus felt he was the one doing the caretaking in this friendship, but also that if I wanted to think it went the other way, he wouldn’t object. Far more important was this ancient black VHS cassette he now slipped into the ’80s-vintage Panasonic television with built-in player that had been integrated into Ava’s living-room ensemble.