“I don’t think eagles howl,” I said. I took none of this personally. Oona and I were too ecstatic these days to be damaged by Perkus’s addled paraphrase. It was only interesting to hear him find a way to let me know he knew.
“We’ll see about that,” he said humorously, rising to his shelves. He dug out the tall blue Field Guide to North American Birds of Prey. “There’s something else I want to check anyhow.”
“What’s that?”
“Whether eagles are monogamous.”
Oh, Tooth. I watched him hunt in the book, as if it really held the clue he needed. It didn’t. That clue served as a bookmark in a P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves Omnibus on my bedside table: the wrinkled card on which Lindsay of Jackson Hole had scribbled her phone number. I didn’t dare mention it. That project had too much calamity in it, and I was selfishly willing to let Perkus go unlaid to keep the peace I now enjoyed. So we’d explore the dating profile of apartment eagles instead, or lapse into some other subject even more imaginary and arcane. Why was Perkus so determined to be sexually lonely? I asked this question of myself, not him.
One of these nights I came in and found them back at their nostalgic samizdat, organizing what looked like a finished project, in piles on the living-room floor. Someone had done some photocopying, and Perkus had apparently resolved the conundrum of the polar bear by creating two broadsides: one with only the bear, the other with the bear almost blotted out with a proliferation of other clippings, text excerpts, and illustrations (including, I noticed, at least one scientific diagram explaining Northern Lights’ possible procedure for docking an unmanned scow of medical supplies). Somewhere between these two lay the truth Perkus wished to unveil. The photocopies had none of the grandeur of his famous broadsides, arrayed in painful evidence throughout the apartment, but I was impressed that the edition even existed. Evidence of outside destinations for Perkus, other than Jackson Hole, was always startling, he was such a creature of that apartment. But that was the least of it, for now he and Oona were pulling on their winter coats, preparing for an old-school postering run. I found myself enlisted, after a quick smoke.
“Look out for the graffiti patrol,” said Perkus, once we’d bumped out into the cold streets with our freight of posters and masking tape. “They travel in black vans. Arnheim’s quality-of-life initiatives are no joke, ever since Gladwell and his fucking Tipping Point.” (Here was another of Perkus’s sacred enemies; I recalled one early rant blaming Gladwell for the “commodification of whim.”) Once Perkus declared this, black vans seemed to be everywhere, though if these held quality-of-life police they looked to me to have bigger fish to fry. Oona, unruffled, capriciously taped a poster, one of those in which the bear was jumbled over with other stuff, around a lamppost. Mostly, though, our trouble was we couldn’t find places to put the things. Perkus exhorted us to find construction sites, but the blocks between Second and Third Avenues didn’t have any of these. “This whole town used to be one big claptrap collage,” Perkus complained. “Nobody even removed posters, they were in too much of a hurry, they’d just layer them over with other stuff. Sometimes somebody would rip away a chunk and reveal seven or eight different layers, and I’d see something I put up six months or a year earlier resurface in a new context…”
It was cold for reminiscing, but I didn’t want to let him down too abruptly. “That was a… certain amount of time ago,” I said. “And a little farther downtown.”
Oona went on affixing posters wherever she could, her breath billowing steam as she warmed herself with the effort, her scrappy winding dance with the dispenser making her resemble a kind of bat in her black layers and loose hair. I felt I should take her example, but it seemed to me the bear-only version, which was what I carried, when bound to a lamppost looked far too much like a “lost dog” flyer, only one lacking a phone number and the promise of a reward.
“This way-” Perkus whisked us from block to block, searching, I think, for the door into 1988 or thereabouts. In lieu of this we slapped a desultory photocopy on a bus shelter or two, always lowering heads guiltily at the sight of passersby, ordinary Manhattanites whom I couldn’t keep from suspecting we’d typically meet at book parties or gallery openings-me and Oona, that is. But tonight we were enveloped in Perkus’s cloak of banditry. We should have been smoking cheroots and sporting eye patches. Whatever reputation Perkus might have once conjured for himself by his vigilante dissertations, these present scraps of visual noise couldn’t have been more meaningless on these walls if they’d been gum wrappers. The meaning resided in our gesture, silly as it was. Or there was no meaning. I began stuffing our posters into trash cans when the others weren’t looking. I would have liked to set them afire to warm our hands, but I suspected that might have finally drawn some quality-of-life-enforcement attention.
Circling back to Perkus’s at last, bankrupt of posters due to my illicit disposals, speaking with chattering teeth of the coffee Perkus was about to brew, we found ourselves confronted at his doorstep not by the usual Brandy’s drunks-it really was too chilly tonight-but by a weird sentinel presence planted in our path. He wore a long leather coat with a floppy buckle, a thick-ribbed purple turtleneck rising from inside the coat’s wide collar, and an absurd imperial fur tower of a hat, under which glared the whites of his eyes in a mask of darkness, making him resemble Orson Welles as Othello. But that mask wasn’t blackface. We all had been primed by Perkus to be met by some figure of authority, and Biller’s new costume looked anything but secondhand. He might have been deputized to arrest us, if the mayor’s graffiti squad had been configured on a Blaxploitation theme. Biller was famously boycotted from the building, but it was hard to imagine Perkus’s neighbors challenging him now. Somebody had laid out some money to dress the homeless man this way. Then I remembered that Biller wasn’t homeless anymore. The other day Perkus had been trying to explain Biller’s weird new apartment, where Biller lived, Perkus said, “with forty or fifty dogs.” I chalked the dogs up to exaggeration, and forgot about the apartment until now.
Before I could express my surprise, Perkus and Biller embraced, Perkus vanishing for an instant into the larger man’s clasp. “Come inside, it’s too cold,” said Perkus. “You want some coffee, Biller?”
“That would be nice.” His voice was still gentle, even meekly hesitant, but now you imparted to this gentleness a certain majesty, a noble restraint. The clothes made the man.
“You’re looking fantastic,” said Perkus, sweeping us all inside. If there was a grain of overcompensation in Perkus’s heartiness with Biller, I assumed this had less to do with any guilt toward the silent wandering figure than a relief that the timing of Biller’s appearance would blot out contemplation of the lame broadsiding session. (In fact, we’d never mention it again.) “So, you know Chase and Oona, don’t you?” Perkus asked belatedly. Well, Biller did or didn’t, but he nodded, taking us in together as Perkus’s introduction had suggested, ChaseandOona.
Indoors, we defrosted our paper-cut fingertips around stingingly hot mugs while Perkus prompted Biller to explain his new good fortune, the respectability he’d attained through the strange backdoor of his laptop computer, or explain it as well as he could, anyway, to us Internet primitives. Biller sat, his shiny leather coat and monstrous hat shed, resplendent in his purple sweater, commandingly patient with our stupidity. Had we heard of Yet Another World? No?
It was difficult to explain, and it didn’t help that Perkus tried to help Biller paint the picture while plainly not grasping it himself. Neither a video game nor an online community, exactly, Yet Another World was, in itself, only a set of templates and tools, “a place with stuff,” in Biller’s words. “A place where you can do things.” You might go there to build a virtual house, to furnish it with the virtual objects you liked. Much of it, according to Biller, was pretty much like the world out here-homes, with belongings inside. You also made yourself, there behind the screen, and the self you made was something Biller called an “avatar.” Again, many visitors to Yet Another World settled for realism in this regard, their avatars little more than digitally prettified versions of their usual selves, spines a little straighter, waists narrower, tits bigger, and so on. Many were content to shamble through this potential paradise in cliques of sexy avatars browsing virtual shops and cruising or flirting, as in a mall. “Man is born free,” Perkus offered, “and everywhere is in chain stores.”