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

squirrels and pigeons together,” suggested Perkus. “If they somehow were all run up the side of the building at once, when the eagles were sleeping…” He flipped eagerly through the Guide’s back pages, perhaps scanning the index for some precedent.
    “No.” Richard leaned forward, grabbing for the joint I still held. He took it and drew in a puff and shook his shaggy head. “No, it won’t do.” His grave tone suggested real deliberation. “Prey is prey, I’m sorry to have to disenchant you two dreamers. You total Communists. If you’d heard them whimper and die, the way I have, you’d understand. A million mice couldn’t do it.”
    “Didn’t mice kill the dinosaurs?” asked Perkus.
    Richard shook his head. “The dinosaurs were stupid, they were on their last legs. Anyhow, the mice had help, they needed comets and glaciers, all kinds of stuff. I’m pretty certain the mice just jumped in at the end and administered the coup de grâce, then took all the credit.”
    “We need a predator,” said Perkus.
    “Exactly.”
    “We should go up there, the three of us,” said Perkus. “Not now, but later, when it’s dark, when they’re sleeping.” We were always, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg and I, on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. Oh, how Manhattan yearned for our expert intervention! We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.
    “The thing about animals,” Perkus said, “I remember this clearly, is that when you bring in, you know, kangaroos to chase away monkeys , then you have a kangaroo problem. Then you bring in zebras to chase off the kangaroos, and you’re overrun with zebras, and so on.”
    “You learned that in a Dr. Seuss book, didn’t you?” said Richard.
    “What about the tiger?” I said. “What if somehow the tiger could be brought into play?”
    Perkus gave Richard a look of horrified helplessness, seeming to say at once, Don’t blame me, I didn’t suggest it , and Well, why not?
    Richard tittered. “The tiger?”
    “Sure.”
    “Sure, that’s just what my apartment needs, Chase. That tiger destroyed one of the city’s primary water mains last week. I mean, totally shattered layers of concrete and brick that had held since the nineteenth century, it’s going to take months to repair it.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Well, maybe the tiger could be … blamed somehow.”
    Richard snorted smoke through his nostrils. “Blamed when I off the eagles , you mean?”
    “Sure.”
    “Brilliant.” At this Richard Abneg dissolved in giggles, sweeping Perkus Tooth along with him. And soon enough myself, too. “Blame the tiger!”
    Let this stand for a typical night in our company there. I don’t remember them all in such detail.

    I met Oona next at a funeral, the funeral of a man I didn’t know, a purportedly great man. I had to cross the park to be there—the services were held at the Society for Ethical Culture, on Central Park West—and when I saw how populous the congregation was, I felt foolish for troubling. Emil Junrow was a famous science-fiction writer of the 1940s, a lowly career he took upmarket by being also an accredited (if undistinguished) scientist, and a famous humanist who’d uttered fine early doubts about the Cold War, a sort of Einsteinwithout any theory. He’d then gone on to become a relentless prose-lytizer for the peaceful exploration of space, appearing many times before Congress and in public forums, a dwarfish wizened presence in bolo ties and flyaway hair (I learned all this in tributes presented during the long memorial presentation, including video clips that made me realize I’d seen Junrow on television without registering his name).
    It was in this last role that Emil Junrow had once or