‘You’re the actor.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, I’m doing the liner notes. For The City is a Maze, I mean.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight… Recalcitrant Women… The Unholy City… Echolalia…’
‘All film noir?’
‘Oh, gosh, no. You’ve never seen Herzog’s Echolalia?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I wrote the liner note, but it isn’t exactly released yet. I’m still trying to convince Eldred – ’
Perkus Tooth, I’d learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment Susan Eldred returned.
‘So,’ he said to her, ‘have you got that tape of Echolalia around here somewhere?’ He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. ‘I want him to see it.’
Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. ‘I don’t know where it is,’ she said.
‘Never mind.’
‘Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?’
‘What do you mean?’
Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, and we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown façades, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumb-waiter – there was no margin for pretending we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt’s collar was grubby and crumpled; the green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor’s bucket.
‘So,’ he said again. This ‘so’ of Perkus’s – his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk – wasn’t in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. ‘So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Roog’s Nowhere Near. Roog’s movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Roog’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said… you know, echolalia…’
‘Yes,’ I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth’s torrential specifics.
‘But it’s also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near. Morrison Roog destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film – ’
Why ‘ironically’? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. ‘It sounds incredible,’ I said.
‘Of course you know Roog’s suicide was probably faked.’
My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: ‘You first – ’ ‘Oops – ’ ‘After you – ’ ‘Sorry.’ We faced one another, October mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t harassing me.
‘So, I’m off.’
‘Very good to see you.’ I’d quit using the word ‘meet’ long ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the thousandth time someone explained to me that we’d actually met before.
‘So – ’ He ground to a halt, expectant.
‘Yes?’
‘If you want to come by for the tape…’
I might have been failing some test, I wasn’t sure. Perkus Tooth dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret callipers. I’d never know when I’d crossed an invisible frontier, visible to Perkus in the air between us.
‘Do you want to give me a card?’
He scowled. ‘Eldred knows where to find me.’ His pride intervened, and he was gone.
For a call so life-altering as mine to Susan Eldred’s, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was, dialing Criterion’s receptionist later that afternoon, asking first for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan’s volunteer, that’s me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about Echolalia, or Morrison Roog’s faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth’s curious intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye’s gaze? All of it and none of it, that’s the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I’d come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred’s office or that elevator.
‘Your office mate,’ I said. ‘They didn’t recognize his name at the front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong – ’
‘Perkus?’ Susan laughed. ‘He doesn’t work here.’
‘He said he wrote your liner notes.’
‘He’s written a couple, sure. But he doesn’t work here. He just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I’m sort of Perkus’s babysitter. I don’t even always notice him anymore – you saw how he can be. I hope he wasn’t bothering you.’
‘No… no. I was hoping to get in touch with him, actually.’
Susan Eldred gave me Perkus Tooth’s number, then paused. ‘I guess you must have recognized his name…’
‘No.’
‘Well, in fact he’s really quite an amazing critic. When I was at NYU my friends and I all used to idolize him. When I first got the chance to hire him to do a liner note I was quite in awe. It was shocking how young he was, it seemed like I’d grown up seeing his posters and stuff.’
‘Posters?’
‘He used to do this thing where he’d write these rants on posters and put them up all around Manhattan, these sort of brilliant critiques of things, current events, media rumours, public art. They were a kind of public art, I guess. Everyone thought it was very mysterious and important. Then he got hired by Rolling Stone. They gave him this big column, he was sort of, I don’t know, Hunter Thompson meets Pauline Kael, for about five minutes. If that makes any sense.’
‘Sure.’
‘Anyway, the point is, he sort of used up a lot of people’s patience with a certain kind of… paranoid stuff. I didn’t really get it until I started working with him. I mean, I like Perkus a lot. I just don’t want you to feel I wasted your time, or got you enmeshed in any… schemes.’
People could be absurdly protective, as if a retired actor’s hours were so precious. This was, of course, a second-hand affect, a leakage from Janice’s other-worldly agendas. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks. If an astronaut made room for me on her schedule, my own prerogatives must be as crucial as an astronaut’s. The opposite was true.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll be sure not to get enmeshed.’