Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Page B

her?”
    “Oona’s great, when you’re in the mood. She used to be a kind of intern of mine, I guess that’s what you’d call it. She answered an ad I placed at the New School, she used to help me pasting up broadsides…” His voice trailed, even as his desublimated eyeball zipped to walls of the living room, rolling wildly to indicate the framed and unframed manifestos of his youth.
    “Oona was your glue-girl!” I said.
    “Something like that. My apprentice.”
    “Every mad scientist needs an apprentice.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “She didn’t want to change the world, I suppose? Or what did she call it—deconstruct the universe.”
    “There was this editor from Viking Penguin, uh, Paul somebody. He proposed to do a compilation of the broadsides, and took us out for drinks. I didn’t care to do the book, but Oona ended up with a job in publishing. She was looking for a writing career, and I guess she felt it was her way in.”
    “Why didn’t you do the book?”
    “We differed on… context.”
    “He saw you as a rock critic?”
    Perkus nodded.
    “So she’s in publishing?”
    “Oona?” he asked, as if we’d dropped the subject hours earlier. He stood and put his back to me, fussing at his coffeepot. “Nope, she’s a freelancer. A self-admitted hack.”
    “I’m interested in hacks, Perkus, being one myself. What does she write?”
    “Nothing under her own name. She ghostwrites. Autobiographies of people who can’t write their own. She brought one around once—here.” He’d poured us fresh coffees. Now he clapped these, with a pair of spoons, on the table before me, then moved into the living room, to burrow into a stack of unsorted books at the foot of a shelf.
    The hardcover Perkus delivered into my hands was unexpectedly garish and grim: Across Foul Lines , by Rose Arbogast, the memoir of a seven-foot-tall WNBA center who as a high-school star had been abducted and serially tortured by a teenage gang, then rescued by a federal agent she’d married a decade later. “This is shit,” I blurted.
    “Read the inscription.”
    “What?”
    “On the title page.”
    Someone, Oona Laszlo, had printed in a stenographically precise hand To Perkus Tooth, who taught me to lay up, not lie down, warmly, R.O./O.L . “She’s become a specialist in traumatized athletes, frostbitten Everest climbers who have to wear plastic noses, etcetera, a narrow field she dominates. She fully knows it’s shit. How she gets through her days is another question.”
    “The same way you do,” I suggested. “White Rhino.” I nodded at the remaining container.
    Perkus ignored me. I learned nothing further about Oona Laszlo that day, nor did Perkus and I get around to viewing the early-assembly dub of Pontecorvo’s Burn , though the videotape sat talismanically before us through the afternoon and into the evening. For lately, with the addition of Richard Abneg, my Perkus afternoons had distended into Perkus-and-Richard nights. I’d begun to letother priorities shrivel in favor of these bouts of epic squalor. It was easy to drop out of my drifting existence. The Eighty-fourth Street apartment was a container bigger on the inside than the outside, and days there might seem to hold thirty or forty hours, yet more and more I reeled home in dawn light, along a Second Avenue mostly vacated, the downtown stream of empty wishful taxicabs all veering to toot their horns at me until I waved them off, pavement deliveries of Italian loaves and kaiser rolls and bundles of tabloids under way—the clocks outside hadn’t stopped, after all. Richard Abneg was the one among us with an office, a morning agenda shackled to those unstopped clocks, yet he drove us maniacally through the night, toward daybreak, as much as Perkus (or his coffeepot, or dope supply) or myself, more perhaps.
    Was the afternoon when Oona first appeared the third or fourth Richard and Perkus and I spent together? Or the hundredth? I can’t say. In the swamp of