Read Online Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online Page A

beginning again with the nest, and everybody’s so thrilled. I’m totally stuck. There’s this bored old television star on the eighth floor, she’s made the eagles her whole raison d’être.”
    “What television star?” I had an odd feeling I knew.
    “You know, what’s her goddamn name?” Richard slurped air around the joint’s tip, waved his hand.
    “Sandra Saunders Eppling,” supplied Perkus. “She was married to Senator Eppling for a while. She was the one who spoke at the press conference.”
    “Sandra Saunders played my mom on Martyr & Pesty,” I said.I felt, as I often do at those rare times I actually choose to speak of my child stardom, as if I was boring my listeners with information too familiar to mention, and yet also evoking a distant pocket realm no living human could imagine. In either case, the result felt as though I were being humored. Possibly I did live on a cloud.
    “She was in an Elvis movie,” said Perkus, frowning at me for not citing the more salient fact. I’d noticed—this may have been when I first noticed it—how Perkus didn’t browbeat Richard Abneg for his cultural illiteracy. He had me for that.
    “Right, that’s the one,” said Richard, uninterested in anything but his nest. He seized the newspaper section from me now. “These days she’s a kind of fundamentalist vegetarian eagle-advocate. It’s horrendous luck for me she doesn’t have a real career to keep her busy. My whole building’s brimming with mediocrities and has-beens.”
    “The whole island’s brimming with them,” said Perkus agreeably.
    “Yes, but your bedroom isn’t full of the smell of moldering underbrush and the death screams of squirrels and pigeons and sewer rats,” said Richard. “Look at this.” He handed the fuming joint to me and raised the newspaper for us to consider, folded to the photograph of the eagles and their startlingly large construction. “It’s obscene. It’s practically… pubic.”
    “Yes,” said Perkus. “Your building is definitely wearing a merkin.”
    “That’s a polite word for it.” Richard stroked his beard, perhaps unconsciously making an association.
    “I don’t think merkin is the polite word for something,” I said. “It’s more specific than that—”
    “Read it to me,” interrupted Richard. Perkus had taken up the book, the Field Guide . I now saw it lay flapped open to the entry oneagles, Perkus having already delved into study on Richard’s behalf. “I’ve got to find some way to eradicate them that can’t be traced back to me …”
    “I guess if you got a dog it would bark at them.” This was my pallid contribution, while Perkus studied the pages, tilting the book to favor his orderly eye.
    “No, it can’t be inside my apartment, it has to be something that will crawl up the front of the building. Besides, I hate dogs.” We were deep into crime melodrama, a caper, Richard and Perkus collaborating on the perfect interspecies murder. “I’m going to need an alibi, too. I can’t be anywhere in the vicinity when those eagles go. That building is ready to come after me with torches and pitchforks.”
    “So, here’s the thing.” Perkus held up a finger proclaiming Eureka! He was forever ferreting out the key, always distilling essences. “Majestic in his privilege,” he narrated from the Field Guide, “the bald eagle knows no natural enemy apart from Man.”
    “What a freight of shit,” said Richard.
    “Why?”
    “There’s something totally insane about saying a frigging psychotic serial killer has no natural enemy! What they mean is the eagle’s enemies don’t stand a chance. All those mice and squirrels and pigeons, believe me, they’d gladly define themselves as enemies in that instant before the talons tore through their hearts.”
    “In nature I think a thing doesn’t qualify as your enemy if it can’t fight back,” I said. “It’s just a victim.”
    “Maybe we could corral a whole bunch of mice and