Free Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

twice been photographed in the company of Janice Trumbull, lady spaceexplorer. My receiving an invitation wasn’t anything personal, however, a fact that was made plain the instant I entered. Some publicist, knowing the cavernous size of the society’s hall, had emptied his Rolodex into the invitation list. In range of my glance I spotted Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Lou Reed. There were surely many others I didn’t recognize. Despite being a low-grade semi-celebrity myself, I’m rotten at picking out any but the cartoon-obvious among us. I felt like an idiot, dressed to the nines, alone and invisible in the dim back rows as the stately figures spoke one after the other on the distant stage. I’d attended out of an absurd pity, imagining an old man who’d been exaggerating his connection to Janice, and therefore to me, not remotely guessing that Emil Junrow’s passing was an authentic cultural moment, and that with the gravity and glamour of those who’d come to pay respects no one would trouble to register my presence. I only stayed out of a mild curiosity, and discretion. No one should duck out of a funeral.
    Oona found me just as the three-hour marathon of tributes concluded and the crowd broke into a buzzing mass, before I could sprint to the exit. Perhaps she’d spotted me earlier. She seemed, anyway, to be alone here.
    “What did you think?” she said.
    “It was all very impressive.”
    “For me, there was only one good line in the whole show,” said Oona, oblivious to the risk of being overheard.
    “What was that?”
    “From when Emil Junrow was born, when he was handed to his mother in the hospital and she said, ‘He looks like he can remember happier days.’”
    The words had been offered up by one of the few family members giving testimony amid the parade of luminaries, a cantankerous elderly cousin, a woman as shriveled and fierce as Junrow. Hearing the quip, it was hard not to picture the newborn already possessing Junrow’s white muttonchops and furrowed brow, his hectoring eyes.
    “Sometimes one good line is enough,” I said.
    “Oh, absolutely, I wasn’t complaining. Junrow’s mom, she goes straight into the annals with that remark.”
    As we drifted out into the lobby a waiter appeared, balancing a tray of wineglasses, half of them filled with white, half with red. Oona and I each grabbed a white.
    “Did you know Junrow?” I said. A stupid choice, since I wouldn’t have wished to be asked the same in return. I was groping. My tongue felt cardboardy in my mouth. Yet other parts of me were unaccountably alive, all at once, despite the soporific effects of three hours in that whiskey-colored auditorium, and the sober and seemly procession of tributes.
    “I wrote his last two books,” she said, fixing me with that same steady, warmly sardonic gaze I’d faced at Perkus’s.
    “Ah. You know a lot about science, then?”
    “Barely anything. I wrote his funny, personable books. Junrow’s Rules for Amateurs and I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”
    “So you must have spent a lot of time together. I’m surprised you weren’t invited up onstage to pay homage.”
    “My existence is meant to be a secret,” she said, again with no concern for secrecy. “I didn’t get where I am today speaking at funerals.”
    “Did you like him?”
    “Picture one of those old New Yorker cartoons with the old man chasing the secretary in circles around the desk. Luckily he was easy to outrun.”
    “I read Across Foul Lines the other night—I mean, part of it.”
    “I’m guessing you mean Perkus Tooth’s copy.”
    “It was pretty good, actually.”
    “Oh God, I can totally picture it, you and Perkus getting stoned and reading pages aloud and roaring with laughter, until the words quit making any literal sense. Am I right?”
    This was closer than I wanted to admit.
    “Did you guys do voices, trying it out as Donald Duck and Greta Garbo and so on? It’s perfectly okay,