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.We were so high we finished each other’s lines like the Marx Brothers, even if the result was mostly a verbal version of a game of exquisite corpse.Perkus offered Watt a fresh-brewed cup of coffee, and Watt took it and struck a pose of claustrophobic cool by the door while the three of us slavered over his open case of goods, running our reddened and hysterical orbs over the rainbow fonts that differentiated the plastic boxes crammed full of fertile buds.Oona kept surprising me.I’d thought she flinched from direct encounters with the drug trade, but she seemed positively exuberant to see Watt, who enlarged the pool of victims for her global mockery.“Hindu Kush… ooh, that’s too exotic for me …” she said.“What’s this, Giant Tiger? Are you trying to frighten your customers, Foster?”“Yeah,” said Watt absently, though it was hardly meant as affirmative to her question.Conversationally, Watt was a Magic 8 Ball.It was merely a question of which answer would come up.“Yeah, I got a few new things, good stuff.”“Ice,” said Perkus.“Where’s the Ice?”“Have I ever let you down, Perkus? I’ve got plenty of your favorite.”“Giant Tiger, Gray Fog, Two Eagles,” Oona listed.“Very, uh, topical selection, Foster.”“People are digging Two Eagles,” said Watt.“You ought to try it.”Perkus hoarded all the Ice he could find in the sample case, built a little architectural stack of five Lucite boxes at one corner of his table.Oona went on listing brand names.“Northern Lights, Chinese Mine… what’s next? Lonely Astronaut? Do you make these up yourself, Foster? Because no offense, but somebody’s really cribbing a lot of this material.”Watt didn’t even trouble to shrug, just ignored her.I suspect she’d lost him at “topical.” Oona couldn’t let it go, though.“Somebody needs to get some of their own material,” she said again pointedly, as if she were a professor offering a plagiarizing student a first warning.Watt took it lightly enough.Yet even after he left, bearing away a large stack of our pooled twenties in return for eight of his Lucite containers—Perkus’s five portions of Ice, a couple of the old standby, Chronic, which vanished into Oona’s purse, and one Northern Lights I purchased as a morbid souvenir—Oona circled back to the topic.“Don’t you think Watt isn’t playing fair, Perkus?”“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”“Tailoring his material to his audience like that,” she said.“It sort of breaks the illusion, don’t you think?” She kept calling it “material,” though it seemed to me an odd word for names snatched from the headlines.“What illusion?” Perkus rolled a joint while he contended with her.“That, you know, there’s an ancient and mighty marijuana tree somewhere in South America called El Chronic, named that by some Mayan priest a thousand centuries ago, for its special properties of transubstantiation—you know.It just doesn’t seem right some skanky Irish kid from Chelsea Clinton or wherever it is Watt lives to rename this ancient essence ‘Balthazar’ or ‘Derek Jeter’ just because he has a laser printer and a captive audience.”“I don’t think it’s Watt,” said Perkus slyly, seeming to take her concern seriously.“He’s just a middleman.I think it’s someone else giving them names.Maybe actually even a Mayan priest, one who’s just, you know, keeping up with the news.”“Then it’s him I want a word with,” said Oona.“Can you get the Mayan priest’s beeper number?”“So,” said Perkus, the key word signaling he’d become interested at last, had found something he could work with, “maybe we’ve got the polarities reversed.It’s crucial we remember to question basic assumptions.”“Polarities reversed… how?” The hungry mind supplying this query was my own.Perkus’s paradoxes were just what I’d been starved of, no matter that they gave me a dangerous sense of reality slippage.I’d become an addict and needed replenishment, as much as Perkus had needed Watt’s visit.“What if The New York Times is getting its material from Watt’s brand names, rather than the other way around?” said Perkus.At this, his revelatory eye exulted, though we’d no time to linger on the point—Perkus had reminded himself he had a sort of front page of his own to consider, an edition in progress.“Maybe the bear is enough,” he said to Oona, musingly.“Maybe the empty border around the picture says something nothing else could ever say…”“We might not even need the bear,” said Oona.That first night of reunion, and the ones that came after, turned out to be episodes hinged in the middle.A brief frigid walk back to my building and Oona and I were at it.Actually, that night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.Our December fucks made what had come before seem like glimpses, tourist views from some highway pull-off—now we abandoned the car and climbed the guardrail and built a hut in that landscape below, where no one could see, to dwell for a while in a place from which, when we climbed out woolly-eyed and helplessly grinning afterward, we were astonished to find any highway so close, it was so primeval.This wasn’t the sort of thing I was inclined to examine for causes, a gift horse, a windfall of sex like I’d known just a time or two before.I didn’t want to think my own intensity drew in any measure on what I’d turned from: Janice’s weird crises, off away in space.Oona and I pursued expression of something that had zip to do with anyone else, I tried to believe it desperately.As for what anyone else might judge, that was obvious, and irrelevant.However this chance had come, we’d taken it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]