There was another dire fact Perkus wanted me to know without telling me. Something too big to be told. The sky would come crashing down if he told it, so I had to absorb it by implication. In this mysterious matter I was intended to understand Perkus had spared me the worst (I thought he’d spread pretty bad tidings already), and that this secret had to do with women generally, or with Oona Laszlo specifically, or both. Yet he wanted to dance on the precipice of telling it. One day he passingly referred to Oona as “your chaldron,” by which he meant nothing good. I found him scratching this itch again the very last day I visited him by myself. That is to say, the day before the day Richard Abneg and I finally dragged him out of the Friendreth Canine Apartments, too late.
These days Ava would come rushing to the door as I came in, plainly eager for more company but also appearing to be concerned for Perkus, wishing to scoot me in to where he sat or sometimes lay on the carpet, twitching in glee over some storage-space flotsam like the Warren Zevon LP Excitable Boy (he loved a song called “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) or, in this case, the latest find, a commercial videotape he’d rescued from a pug’s quarters, a Steve Martin comedy called Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
“Watch-” A hiccup destroyed this word, so he began again. “Watch this with me, Chase, it’s brilliant.”
“Have you eaten?” He looked disastrous: sallow, skeletal, un-shaved, exultant. “I brought sandwiches.” I stuck to his preferences, not daring to have some variation rejected, just wanting to see nutrition go in. So pastrami, Diet Coke, pickle spears. There was no coffee brewed. He’d suddenly abandoned coffee, too.
“It’s not sitting well.”
“What’s not?”
“Food.” Unspoken, but heard, was You idiot!
The black-and-white Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a satirical film noir, and a curious amalgam of twelfth-grade tit jokes and an elaborate intertextual trick: Steve Martin’s character, a stooge of a private eye, is allowed by the magic of editing to interact with a number of dead performers from ancient movies, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and so on. The element, practically an avant-garde gesture, was fascinating and stillborn, destroying any possible mood or rhythm. But incredibly to me, Perkus had located in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid another sacred item. I guess Perkus identified with Martin’s detective, for the way he breezed in and out of the archival footage, reanimating his own pantheon of heroes. This was analogous to how Perkus saw himself moving amid Brando, Groom, Krim, Cassavetes, Mailer, Marplot, Serling, and all the others.
Or so I was thinking, as I sat trying to grasp Perkus’s intensity yet again. It was then we came to what it turned out he regarded as the key scene. Steve Martin, whose relations with the femme fatale are absurdly abusive and overwrought, opens the cabinet behind his bathroom mirror and finds a note he’s taped there, intended to remind him on a daily basis of something he needs to know: “Guns Don’t Kill Detectives, Love Does.” Perkus spoke these words aloud as they appeared on the screen, forcing himself past the urge to hiccup at the cost of a wrenching shudder. “Guns! Don’t! Kill! Detectives! Love! Does! You see that, Chase?”
“Funny.”
“What’s funny about it?” Perkus’s voice was sharp. He was suddenly spoiling for trouble, an interpretive high noon. Ava got up on all threes and pointed her nose to the door, to meet whatever invader his tone signaled.
I tried, as ever, to meet his standard. “Well, I guess it distills Raymond Chandler’s lifework to a bumper sticker…” I’d personally always thought the hard-boiled mode wearisome to begin with, so its sending-up felt pretty fish-in-a-barrel.
“Sure, it does that, you’re right. But that’s not what kills me about this scene.”
What kills you? I wanted to scream. What kills me is how you smell as if you haven’t showered any more recently than your pit bull friend, how your former impeccable suits have degenerated into the same New York Cosmos sweatshirt worn for weeks on end, how your haircut and speech and self-awareness have all gone as crooked as your eye, how your long intellectual voyaging has culminated in a Steve Martin flick. I wasn’t going to be swayed into this latest and least of epiphanies, I swore. The closer I looked the more I felt I’d been overlooking the obvious, my eye trained too incrementally on Perkus’s details to survey the whole grim trend. He was falling apart, falling down. I couldn’t believe I’d let him fall so far. Or that other eyewitnesses, guilty bystanders, hadn’t stepped in-I blamed them for what I hadn’t seen myself.
“Have you showed this film to Sadie Zapping?” I asked, craftily, I thought.
“Sadie quit coming around,” he said. His hand flipped up to flag contempt. “She kept wanting me to try these stupid cures. I swallowed so much water I bloated like a tick. What I love about this scene, Chase, isn’t simply that Martin’s epigraph cuts so deep into the heart of the matter, but that having arrived at such an essential admonition, he actually forgets it and needs to be reminded each day at his shaving mirror!”
I was glad I hadn’t suggested any of my own stupid cures. “What about Biller?”
“So, the point is how we forget the most basic fact of ourselves on a daily basis, even while we go around playing our parts, believing ourselves perfectly continuous. Yet a thing can be blotted from the very center of our vision and we won’t notice! Even the very thing we should most remember! It’s like when I tried to write a book, Chase. Practically every day I had to remind myself what it was even about, why I’d even started it! What do you mean, what about Biller?” Perkus’s gaps just kept on getting more frequent, and longer.
“I just wondered if he still comes around.”
“Biller’s busy making treasure.”
“Oh, sure, I forgot.” I’d also forgotten, if he’d actually mentioned it, that Perkus had ever tried to write a book. But no, he hadn’t mentioned it. That I would have remembered. It seemed such a simple and humble confession, and I was embarrassed for him for an instant, for burying the lede, slipping the fact into an aside. Then I returned to more root, more animal, worries. No Biller, no Zapping, Laszlo not since the misbegotten night, Abneg never seen in this vicinity, occupied entirely now with his pregnant girlfriend-I, Insteadman, was alone in charge of the faltering organism before me.
“Guns don’t kill detectives. Love does!” The film had progressed beyond that moment, but Perkus hadn’t. He barked the line, seemingly at Ava, as if this were his new song, one he thought as compelling as a Rolling Stones riff, and they should jump up and dance. They didn’t jump up and dance. Perkus remained where he sat cross-legged on the floor, too close to the television, I thought, poised with his hand on the remote, his knobby spine showing where his sweatshirt rode to part from his threadbare corduroys. Ava, in a posture of readiness, had split the difference between us and the door, not wanting to miss a beat when the situation clarified. She cocked her head at Perkus with what seemed tender sympathy, but might only have been a yen for him to break into the ignored sandwiches.
“What does it mean to you, Perkus?” I asked gently. “I never thought of love as your big nemesis.”
“No, true enough, I’ve largely skirted that stuff. Skirted-ha! No, Steve Martin more reminds me of you, Chase. Oh, shit.”
“Did Ava-?” I started this question and stopped, for I’d craned to see that the dog remained poised where she’d been a moment before, the kitchen tile surrounding her clean on all sides, the scent deriving elsewhere.