Then he’d reverse himself, plunge into the newer vein, aping Ava’s doggish absolutes, renounce proliferating interpretation and context, all the cultural clues. Too much news or manufactured opinion was distraction from the deeper soundings to be conducted at a level of pure experience: Ava’s sniffing walkabouts, the corroded jape of Keith Richards’s guitar, the juicy platonic ideal of a pastrami sandwich he’d isolated at a coffee shop on York Avenue. And the weather, he was devoted to the snow and cold, the uncanny force of it, as he was to the legend of the tiger, his own personal destroyer. He preferred what defied or needed no explanation. “Alan Watts said you mustn’t concern yourself with information from outside your immediate village. People, like dogs, make demimondes for the purposes of sensory sanity. Nobody-that’s no body-really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe. Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe.” These harangues I’d begun to think of as the Friendreth Purities, though really they’d begun earlier, with the floe-borne polar bear, whose profundity had shamed a broadside into silence. Now he published a daily War Free edition of the mind. What a dog couldn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
Whatever the pursuit, I was his student again, reenlisted. It was as though we’d wasted time enough on misunderstandings of a personal nature. Perkus seemed in a hurry, too eager for our connection to resume his sporadic cruel needling. Apparently I gave him something Ava or Sadie Zapping couldn’t. He had their ears, but mine were more attuned to Perkus’s vocabulary, his field of reference, even if he claimed he wished to vacate that field. Biller was invisible, so far as I could tell, and Sadie treated me as an incidental presence, when we overlapped. Oona didn’t turn up in the Friendreth again. The Oonaphone was silent, or used secretly.
First, though, it had to be admitted that he had a chronic case. When I saw him the first time, two days after Oona and I had made our dawn escape, Perkus was covering his mouth, belching once or twice, or pausing in his speech, turning his head-covering, in other words, any way he could, rather than confessing the situation. At last a sonically undeniable hiccup, the world’s most onomatopoetic utterance, brazened its way from his lips while Perkus faced me directly, nowhere to hide.
“Runs in the family,” I suggested.
He glared a little warning to me not to get too cute. “Not Ava anymore.”
“Have you had them continuously?” I didn’t add, since that night.
“On and off.” He breezed a hand to dismiss the topic, but even as he did I saw him clench and swallow, stifling another.
“Trouble sleeping?”
“No,” he lied.
Her hiccups shed, Ava thrived, though it couldn’t be just my projection that she seemed more orderly, less bounding, as though the dog were every much as concerned as I was, fearing she’d somehow sap Perkus’s energies now that he’d taken her malady upon himself. Their relationship had entered another phase (I don’t know why I should find this remarkable, knowing Perkus). Ava seemed to pride herself on deferentially coiling at his feet, energies banked until Perkus made a grab for her leash or beckoned her to the dance. She’d never climb his back now, never hurl herself between his knees to trip his steps to the door. She stole less food from the table, perhaps only because she’d observed how rarely Perkus finished a meal anymore, losing interest in trying to fit in bites of egg-and-cheese or pastrami sandwiches between his grunting contractions, and how certain it was he’d push a substantial remainder her way at the end. It was as if Perkus had been training her, but when I asked he denied it, said he’d never wanted to compel her into any such Nietzschean slave-master bond. “She and I talk, Chase”-here he hiccuped, leaving a gap, which we ignored except for his wheeling eye, which seemed to search the room’s walls for the missing words-“just talk, nothing more.”
Ava also seemed a key to one of Perkus’s new motifs, a disquisition in progress on the constructed nature of all consciousness. He worked repeatedly to perfect the thought aloud, seeming to believe he and I had both been persuaded we lived in a virtual reality, and needed to feel better about it. We might as well live in a concocted environment, according to his new epiphany, since our awareness was a sort of virtual construction to begin with. No baseline reality existed to worry over. “All memories are replacements, Chase, I read about this, it’s the latest neurological breakthrough.” Why the hermetic skeptic should credit fresh scientific dispatches I didn’t know, but never mind. I obliged by asking him to explain. “Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored ‘original.’ We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. We have no sugar mountain to journey backward toward, Chase! Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, and imagine you feel its weight at your back. All we’ve got is our working draft, no more final than the last, just as ready to be discarded. Memory is rehearsal for a show that never goes on!”
Fair enough, but what did this have to do with the dog? “Each day Ava traces the scent map of the real, beyond which nothing matters to her. She’s aware that the world requires reassembly each time through it. And think of what Manhattan is to a dog, Chase! If she can endure living in our daydream, we should be able to tolerate living in someone else’s!” Now that Perkus hiccuped openly before me, with evident relief he allowed the gasping intervals to open in his speeches, ellipsis made audible. The asynchronous music of his potholed speech united the Friendreth Purities with their opposite, those floodgates of paranoiac explanation that periodically opened. “Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really! Meant to halt time’s encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. So these disjunctions appear, and we have to explain them away, as tigers or epic sculpture. If Noteless didn’t exist the city would have had to invent him, Chase!” The more Perkus fleshed this theory the more the holes in his speech began to seem a kind of necessary reply to the temporal lacunae he felt the city had fallen into, as well as to Laird Noteless’s bottomless pits and absent structures.
Perkus seemed to need Manhattan to be both a falsehood and in ruins (“This town is wearing tatters”) to make good on his intuitions. But Manhattan wasn’t shattered in the sense that Mick Jagger had indicated in 1978, the way Perkus needed it to be. By recent measures the city was orderly, flush with money, a little boring, even. That was, if you trusted the complacent testimony of the millions who checked TigerWatch in the morning before donning their April snowshoes and subwaying to work as usual, then in the evenings filled the bars and restaurants, or stayed home to watch The Sopranos or the Yankees, speed-dialing to stir Chinese-delivery bicyclists to flight. There was Perkus’s point, proved: the slumbering millions who never pierced or even nudged the veil of dream. I was one of them, a born sucker, but at least I was here listening to his dire facts. Was he a conspiracy theorist? He spat like I’d said rock critic. The only conspiracy was a conspiracy of distraction. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law of complicity I should go back to the beginning and start again. When he said this, I thought of Susan Eldred’s office, my first sight of his antithetical eye.