At the corner of Eighty-fourth we came upon the giant escaped tiger, moving silently along the side street to cross Lexington there, heading east, away from Central Park. We froze when its long streetlamp-foreshadow darkened the intersection, so stood rooted like statuary in our deep footprints as the creature padded to the center of Lexington’s lanes, under the dangling yellow traffic lights which shaded the great burgeoning white-and-yellow fur of its ears and ruff now green, now red, the procession of timed stoplights running for miles beyond through the calming storm. The tiger was tall, a second-story tiger, though not as enormous as its legend. Still, it could have craned its neck and nibbled the heavy-swinging traffic light which hummed in the whispering silence that surrounded us. I found myself thinking the tiger should be measured in hands, like a horse, perhaps because I found myself wishing I could rush to it and grip its striped, smooth-ridged fur with both hands and also bury my face there, then climb into its fur and be borne away elsewhere, out of Perkus’s city, out of my own. This was a death urge, and I did nothing. The tiger had no remotely mechanical aspect to it, nor appeared in any sense to have emerged from underground or be about to return to fugitive excavations, seemed instead to be wholly of flesh and fur, leather-black nostrils steaming above a grizzly muzzle baring just the slightest fang tips and fringed with beaded ice, its own refrozen breath or drool. There seemed no reason to rub Richard’s nose in this fact, which he’d certainly be capable of observing himself. The tiger’s passage across the empty avenue was languorous, hypnotic, serene.
We weren’t hidden, and when the tiger leveraged that mighty head from one side to another, looking both ways before crossing, we were caught in the psychedelically deep-flat headlamps of its pale gaze for an instant and then released. The tiger either didn’t see us or didn’t care. We were beneath or beyond its concerns, wherever it was going, whatever it might be pursuing or, less likely, eluding. Fearless and splendid, the tiger seemed quite outside the scope of Tiger-Watch or of the tracking throngs that massed to rubberneck at its destroyings. Possibly there were two tigers, the famous and chaotic one that lit the tabloid frenzy, and this more dignified one, who showed itself to us alone. It was after all moving along Eighty-fourth Street, toward the block where Brandy’s Piano Bar and Perkus’s old apartment lay condemned. Perhaps this was the tiger that put things back together instead of destroying them. Its touch seemed light enough, unlike mine or Richard’s tonight. In that spirit it regarded us or didn’t, shone its light on us and then shut it off again, and was gone, leaving only claw prints and, with its tail, an inadvertent serpentine signature lashed into a parked Mayflower van’s snowy windshield.
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
I pushed the buzzer for O. LASZLO, just my second time in her building and I’d found the courage to actually buzz. While I waited I ran my eyes over the other names, and found a couple that meant something to me, A. SPRILLTHMAR and T. SLEDGE. Sledge lived on Oona’s floor, not a major surprise. Despite Perkus’s admonition to me, I’d never played a detective, hadn’t struck anyone, I suppose, in the brief duration of my post-childhood career, as deep or sad or crafty enough to be persuasive in that sort of role. I wondered if that would be different now. I buzzed Oona a second time and when I’d satisfied myself that no reply was coming I buzzed T. SLEDGE. The sandy little man hadn’t seemed the type to be wandering out the morning after a major snowstorm, and I was again unsurprised to hear his query to me on the intercom. I said my name and he let me inside the building. (A. SPRILLTHMAR I kept in my back pocket for the time being.)
Out of the elevator I looked to Oona’s door, wondering if she was somehow huddled silently inside, pretending not to be home for my benefit, but the door told me nothing-it wasn’t as if there were milk bottles set outside it. Then I examined myself in the mirror in the corridor there, as I suppose no detective would have. The muscles of my calves pinged from my night of trudging through unshoveled snow. I’d steered the grateful and untiring Ava north again, from the Friendreth, to my apartment, and introduced her to my own bed before collapsing there for a few dream-fuddled hours of sleep in morning glare. Ava had draped herself across my legs, and if she’d wondered about Perkus or this change in her circumstances she did nothing to show it. When she woke she pogoed on her forelimb to give my rooms close-sniffing inspection, then circled into my softest chair. I’d left her there, with only a bowl of water and a few slices of Muenster cheese, to go by myself on this new expedition. But first, prisoner of vanity, I’d showered, shaved, slicked my hair. Now, too vain not to use this mirror to judge the result, I couldn’t locate the disenchanted and fearsome character I wanted to believe the night had made me.
It was my curse to look unruined in my ruins. If the bereaved had no language for speaking to the unbereaved, my own bereavement had no language for making itself known on the outside of me. You’d cast this face as the astronaut’s ineffectual fiancé to the end. My solipsistic fugue might or might not be justified by the discoveries presently dawning on me (or perhaps force-fed, by Perkus, and finally, reluctantly, swallowed by myself). Anyway, I was interrupted by T. Sledge (Thomas? Theodore?), formerly known to me as Blurred Person, the pale sidekick presence lolling around Oona’s apartment waiting for delivery sandwiches the only time I’d been here before. He’d opened his door just a crack at the sound of the elevator’s ding, and now stood watching me with one eye. Now I understood he was more than Oona’s best friend. He was the model for “Sledge,” the gardener, the other American trapped aboard the space station with Janice Trumbull.
Sledge’s door was triply locked from the inside, including an iron bar extending to a slotted plate on the floor, to form a reinforcing buttress a battering ram couldn’t have overcome. Inside, I saw he had every reason to want to be sure a visitor was alone, not flanked by some team of DEA agents. The light inside was all artificial and warm, the smell sweetly fungal, like a rain-forest floor. Bulbs hummed and seeping watering systems chortled, bringing throbbing life to the hundreds of sprouting marijuana plants visible in long open tanks covering every spot of floor in the maze of rooms. The humid false summer here was as oblivious to the snowstorm outside the building’s walls as it would have been to a dry desert heat or the void of space. When I stepped inside I felt I was as near to entering an orbital station (one orbital station in particular) as I’d ever be. There didn’t look to be a bed or even a couch for sleeping. I suppose Sledge spent his nights in some small extra room in Oona’s spacious apartment. Possibly they’d nicknamed it the Attic.
Sledge and I stood in the only bare zone, around his kitchen table, a sort of processing station that included a digital scale for weighing buds and two Tupperware bins full of Lucite boxes, one loaded with empties, the other with those already bulging with zesty-looking wreaths and braids of dope. Between our feet rolled several empty Starbucks to-go cups and crumpled white delicatessen bags. I wouldn’t have been shocked to have a leaf-cutter bee alight on my knuckle, but none did.
“I’m sorry about your friend Perkus.” As before, Sledge seemed to be half asleep, a nodding dormouse. His words squeaked, as if they slipped past unguarded sentries on tiptoe. I wondered if it was possible to die of yawning, as one died of hiccups.
“How did you know?”
“Apparently somebody notified the Times. Their fact-checker called Oona this morning about some details in the obituary.”