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The day after meeting with Claire Carter I’d done as she suggested, and traced the origin of the surplus flooding my checking account. The signatory was the treasurer of the Manhattan Reification Society, that shadowy philanthropic trust appointed to enact the city’s little Gnuppet shows. I suppose the callow producers who’d long ago enlisted me to play the part of myself as astronaut-fiancé were on their payroll, too, and Oona Laszlo, the writer. When it had been decided to give the remote and perished astronaut a lease on life-to take the cruel and stunted tale of the space station’s collision with the Chinese mines and distend it into an enthralling melodrama of foot cancer and orbital decay-they elected also to humanize Janice Trumbull by awarding her a mopey earthbound boyfriend. (It took a lot of melodrama to keep the War Free edition from seeming a tad thin, I guess.)
So how did they come to pick me? I suppose the footnote of our crossed paths as teenagers, mentioned here and there in magazine profiles, must have bobbed to the surface in Oona’s research, once she took the job. The ghostwriter had surely found it irresistible-as though a pair of Gnuppets had conspired in the distant depths of their Midwestern past to make their Gnuppeteer’s fiction that much more lively and persuasive. (It wasn’t that I’d ever mentioned that Janice Trumbull and I were teenage lovers, but Oona had guessed this, or decided to make it up.) If I was faithful to the dead astronaut it made a fine sentimental motif; if I betrayed her, fine too, sentimental in the other direction. I could do no wrong.
CHAPTER
Twenty-nine
Perkus Tooth’s sister was a twin sister, that was the major surprise. It was Sadie Zapping who’d put together the memorial gathering at the Friendreth, in Ava’s former apartment. I suppose in some way I thought of Sadie Zapping as Perkus’s twin, his female half, now that Oona Laszlo had been disqualified, turning out to be something so much more baited and treacherous than the sibling she first resembled. But no, Perkus had a real twin sister, June Tooth, named for the month of their birth and the month of the gathering at which we met.
June Tooth lived in West Haven, Co
I wondered, but didn’t ask, whether they made anything resembling a chaldron. In truth, I found June Tooth too painful, too much his spitting image, to do more than be introduced and express the passingest of condolences, so the majority of her story I gathered eavesdropping as she explained herself to others in rattling Toothian monologues, making herself known and visible to the astonished others for whom Perkus had always rendered her unknown and invisible, u
Sadie was garrulous and fu
After the others left, I stayed with Sadie Zapping and Biller, gathering the paper plates and plastic cups in a garbage bag, scraping Mallomar crumbs to the floor for Ava to snuffle. It was then that Biller told me what he’d learned from Perkus about Claire Carter’s brother. Linus, the hoard of chaldrons Linus had bestowed on Claire, and the far castle where they lay under supposedly impregnable defenses. Though Biller had never been, as Oona once accused, a “virtual thief,” he had lately spent some time in avatar form casing the joint, and believed he’d located an imperfection in the redoubt’s security. We could take them, he told me simply.
That was two months ago. We’ve only had two snows in August so far. The newspapers are calling it summer, and mostly I find people are content to do the same. There’s only so much you can listen to yourself complain about snow. Ava is mine now, in the sense that she lives with me, eats on my floor, and sleeps in my bed, and that I walk her three times a day (you might as well say that I’m hers). Sometimes I think I hear her hiccup once or twice, and it sends my heart racing. In those moments I always think of the advice to keep your enemies close. Yet I don’t think it is right to be paranoid about dogs. Perkus was murdered as he’d always expected to be, not by Ava or hiccups but by complicity, by having one of his theories, his worst suspicions, come wandering in and befriend him. So the real enemy is one I could never do other than keep close.