“Where’d you get that thing?”
“From a Labrador. Dogs don’t need VCRs, Chase!”
“I doubt anyone needs them lately.”
“You do if you’re going to play VHS tapes,” he said, speaking as if to a child. “Can you stay for a bit? I’ve got something I want to show you, it’s less than half an hour long. Ouch, Ava! Ava, down now, get down, that’s a good girl, Ava, Ava down!” Ava, hell-bent on Perkus’s neck and ears as he crouched, nibbled and tongue-scrubbed him with increasing ferocity. Perkus, often surprisingly forceful with the dog, now gripped her one forepaw and twisted her onto her back, rear limbs cocked and twitching in submission while she writhed the mighty worm of her torso and neck under Perkus’s wrestler hold. I prayed for the dog never to exercise her full powers on him in return, having no doubt who’d prevail. Perkus seemed to whisper something directly into Ava’s mouth, then, still pinning her, returned to blandly pitching his discovery to me. “You might already have seen this, these shows are a part of the collective unconscious. But that’s the nature of this kind of material, Chase, it falls into the category of what D. W. Winnicott calls ‘the unthought known.’ You absorb a thing like this before you’ve assembled the context necessary to grasp it.” Ava hiccuped violently.
I lifted the package from the floor. A four-tape set, Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Platinum Collection. By process of elimination I determined the tape Perkus had inserted was Season Three. “More salvage from the storage-space people?”
“No. I spotted it in Eldred’s office, but she’d taken it home. I’ve been drooling after this item for years, it’s surprisingly scarce. CBS had to delete it, because they hadn’t gotten permission to include “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
I tried not to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, feeling more generally disgruntled that he’d presume to blow my mind with something as commonplace as The Twilight Zone. “I used to watch these things on late-night TV,” I said, though I couldn’t recall a thing beyond the opening narration, Serling seeming to mock his own stiletto delivery, which I mocked now. “There is a fifth dimension-”
“The easiest way to pass as a spy is to tell everyone you’re a spy,” Perkus pronounced gnomically. He loosed Ava, who twisted to her feet and began nosing at the box in my hands. “Once they think you’re a fool, you get away with anything.”
“Are we going to watch ‘The… Incident… at… Al’s Creek Bridge’?” I knew I’d gotten it wrong.
“No, we’re going to watch ‘The Midnight Sun.’”
“Is it about Japan?”
“No. Be patient.” Perkus held his forefinger to the VCR’s Fast-forward, which apparently needed to be continuously pressed, and not only moved with the speed of a man crawling across the desert but mimicked his groans as he died of thirst. I intertwined my fingers beneath Ava’s throat, keeping her corralled with me.
“Wait, I just guessed: it was directed by Morrison Groom, before he was famous.” I tried not to allow too sardonic a pronunciation to this last word.
“It wasn’t directed by anyone important.” Perkus had his selection cued, and now put on a kettle for more coffee.
I grew more peevish by the minute. At three in the afternoon the light outside wasn’t impressive, but it was daylight, sun fracturing off the fine new powder, however firmly Perkus kept Ava’s curtains drawn. This wasn’t one AM, we weren’t in the mental theater of Eighty-fourth Street, we’d smoked no Chronic nor Blueberry Kush, let alone Ice, and I wasn’t positive Perkus could enthrall me with creaky tapes of old television episodes this time around. The surround was just too tragically shabby and irrelevant to me all of a sudden. If Perkus couldn’t see he’d tumbled, I could. He’d misplaced the old heartbeat of his dissidence, wasn’t cutting across the grain of anything except himself (or so I thought at that moment). I wasn’t totally unaware that my judgments mingled with an irrational sense of betrayal that he’d summoned Susan Eldred, that the Friendreth apartments were turning into as much of a revolving door of acquaintances and contacts as his old apartment had been. I might have been smarting over his remark about the predictability of my visits, but for the first time I felt disappointed in him. Perkus’s ascetic phase had no more rules than had his libertinism-he made calls on mobile phones, watched old TV shows, and who knows, probably sneaked a joint now and again, only wouldn’t share it with me. I felt we were headed for our second fight (after “The Incident Concerning the Jackson Hole Waitress”) and I didn’t mind. I was glad now it was Susan Eldred and not me that had said aloud that she’d do anything for him. Right now I wanted to do nothing.
So what did I do? The day’s light graying behind those curtains, I joined Perkus on Ava’s couch, each with our fresh cups of coffee, and dutifully watched “The Midnight Sun,” from The Twilight Zone’s third season, on glitchy, burping videotape. Ava wedged herself between us to sit bolt upright regarding the television screen as if it were a window, her head darting at the blocking of the characters, growling once when a man holding a pistol pushed his way through a door (you couldn’t quibble with her prejudices), otherwise hiccuping at regular intervals.
The episode was set entirely in a New York apartment building. (I felt Perkus glance at me with satisfaction at this hint of relevance, but I ignored him, wedded to the grudging line I’d drawn in the sand: I’d watch it, but refuse to marvel over whatever he wanted me to marvel over.) The city is nearly abandoned, due to an end-of-the-world heat wave, Earth’s orbit declining toward the sun, which never exits the sky-hence the title. The few who cling to existence in the melting city, namely a young female painter (a Village bohemian in a 1950s sense) and an older woman in her building, are dependent on failing air-conditioning and a failing Frigidaire, which houses what may be the last pitcher of water in Manhattan. The man with the gun, at whom Ava snarled, is a thirst-maddened desperado who breaks in and swigs down this treasure, a scene played by the sweating women as if it were an allegory of rape. Then, thirst quenched, the intruder apologizes and departs in shame. The heat, reaching a peak, murders the older woman and causes a painting to melt off a canvas. Only after the young painter also collapses does the tale reveal its characteristic twist: she awakens from what is revealed to be a nightmare to find with relief that the sky is dark, the air cool, and outside, snow is falling, but relief gives way to the next horror-the Earth is moving away from the sun, not nearer to it, and Manhattan is locked in a fatal deepening freeze.
That I followed this narrative is a blooming miracle, however, as throughout our viewing Perkus was unable to keep from voicing a filibuster of interpretations. The twenty-odd minutes of black-and-white fable gave him innumerable opportunities to persuade me that Rod Serling was the zero point for the pure themes: Cold War fear! Conformity! Alienation! Collective and consensual delusion, the leakage of the dream life into the waking! The Twilight Zone, Perkus explained, was news that stayed news (I took this as rebuke of my gift of the Sunday Times), in this case speaking volumes about the true nature of the unnatural winter the city had been enduring. Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist.
“Remind you of anything?” he insisted afterward, scurrying to halt the tape’s progress to the next immortal episode.
Remember, I’d done television, too much of it. I mostly had just pitied the actors, forced to work on such an impoverished set and to be sprayed with glycerin between takes. Then again, these were pretty feeble actors.
“Lots of things,” I said. “What things did you have in mind?”
“The state of… everything. Your life, mine, the state of the weather.”
I played dumb. It couldn’t be a crime merely to exaggerate the role Perkus cast me in always. “Sure, it’s been a little cold. You think despite how it feels, it’s actually hot out?”
“Many things helplessly produce their own opposites.” Sensing my resistance, he half swallowed this manifesto line. I saw him squint, too, to keep his dodgy eye from embarrassing him. “I think I’m losing you.”