Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page B

and then you were going to get back in your car.”
    I tried to understand, and almost did, and then found myself wondering if Abneg was emphasizing the word piss so strongly in order to force Georgina to visualize the existence of his penis. It was forcing me to visualize it, anyway.
    “That… is… not… deep,” said Naomi Kandel conclusively.
    Thatcher, Abneg’s biggest fan, seemed to get it. “Got a place like that in Australia,” he said. “Ayres Rock, only you’re supposed to call it something else. Biggest rock in the world, takes a coupla hours to walk around it. Same thing, though. You go around in a track. Center of the country, nothing around for a thousand miles, no other reason you’d ever stop there. Rock has its own damn airport.”
    Abneg was thrilled, though it seemed to me his point, if he had one, had been hijacked for Thatcher’s imperial scorn. “Fantastic! So, basically, that airport’s just the world’s foremost example of a Stonehenge restroom.”
    Thatcher toasted this, a little uneasily, with a hoist of his snifter.
    “In a thousand years,” continued Richard Abneg, “they’ll probably lead walking tours around the perimeter of the ruined airport.” “Huh,” said Thatcher, less and less sure.
    “It would be a terribly disappointing walking tour,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji, with a sly smile to make us know she was playing along. Abneg, who’d snaked a densely haired forearm around Georgina’s tiny waist at some point, drew her nearer to him now, proud to be understood. His grip accordioned a coo from Georgina.
    “Very few people know this,” I heard myself saying, “but Stanley Kubrick once tried to make a film with the Gnuppets, if you can believe it.” I’d been silently drunk for so long my voice startled me, but for that same reason some participation seemed demanded of me, to prove I’d been listening. Idiotically, I’d fished up this secondhand anecdote too late, after the Kubrick interlude had passed, and everyone looked at me a little daftly.
    “Urgghh, I hate Gnuppets!” said Sharon Spencer. She formed her hands into tortured upright figures, snarling at them so we couldn’t fail to taste her avid revulsion.
    “Sure,” I said, then tossed a life preserver after my drowning remark. “But just picture it … a Kubrick film… with Gnuppets … it might be kind of incredible …”
    “You sound like someone I know,” said Richard Abneg. “I’ve got this one friend who’s always trying to make you imagine films that don’t exist.” He squinted as if seeing me for the first time. I might have returned a similar look. “Actually, he was talking about the Kubrick Gnuppet movie just the other day.”
    Busted. It was Perkus Tooth I was parroting in the first place. Of course Abneg knew him. As the tumblers slid into place, I understoodthat the tone of Abneg’s Stonehenge story had unconsciously reminded me of Perkus, and made me wish to smuggle him into the conversation, to impress, or perhaps test, Richard Abneg.
    Then Abneg shocked me. Looking me in the eye, he lifted thumb and forefinger to his lips as if smooching the damp stub of a joint. It was hardly that marijuana was taboo here. The shock was in how the gesture so carelessly pierced the bubble of harmony that had formed, against the odds, among us. In his contempt for our bonhomie, he also showed me how it was still in some way sacred to me. How I was in the business of protecting, and flattering, the Woodrows’ vanities. It felt as if Abneg had undone his fly and pissed on the Woodrows’ carpet.
    His message to me, if it wasn’t too much to read into the single gesture, seemed to be See you later, at Perkus’s . Away from these fucking rich people . Or maybe I’d invented that last, out of my wish that Abneg could detect my own degree of defiance, of bad faith in this company. Anyway, our instant of collusion was finished. As if at some established cue, Abneg swept in and finished what it