The Book of Other People Read online

  Theo was not the only one who noticed. The tinies below seemed endlessly fascinated by her. Groups of young men gathered on the mountain called Toto-Hesker, at the level of her chest, and watched her wash herself in the waterfall; they were willing to watch her do anything. Most important to them was that a 200-foot woman had 35-foot breasts, ten-foot-tall lips, legs eighty feet high.

  Where had she come from? Theo wondered. She was not awake the last time he was conscious. Or perhaps she had been. He knew that his memory was not good. His memory of this land bore little resemblance to what lay around him now. Hadn’t it been colder before? Had there not been a glacier between those peaks? He had no great faith in his memory, and yet he was almost certain that this region had changed. The villagers called it Northland now, and the name seemed apt enough. They were not far from the top of the earth, and during the summer, the days stretched elliptically, morning meeting morning. That much had not changed.

  But certain variations were beyond debate. When he last roamed this land, there had not been the tiny people - built like himself but so very small. They had almost certainly appeared in the intervening epochs. Once they knew that the giants meant them no harm, as he lay down to sleep and his ears were close to earth, they asked Theo about other nearby mountains, foothills. Are they all like you? Will they awaken? Theo tried to reassure them, but he could not lie. He didn’t know who was a mountain and who was not a mountain. So much was unfamiliar to him. There had not been so many deer, so many moose and bears. He remembered being very hungry when he last walked these hills; he had been forced to eat trees, turtles, whales. Now there was plenty of delicious food, easily caught. Soren and Magdelena could eat whole forests of animals at any meal, carelessly tossing the bones on rooftops. Theo could get by on a few deer, maybe a few dozen rabbits, eating everything whole, leaving no mess. Afterward he would enjoy a long drink from the white-cold runoff of the snow-capped peak to the west.

  Magdelena could be mine, Theo thought, foolishly, in the first hours and days. After all, the three of them spoke together, ate together. There was equanimity, he thought. Those first days were good days. Theo and Soren and Magdelena chased herds of buffalo off the cliffs, ate what they needed and stored the rest in nets they hung from the tallest trees. They made fires and slept well in the valley where the bobcats chased the antelope.

  Because it was he who made Magdelena laugh, Theo presumed she would be his. There were so many things that only he and Magdelena shared. Only he knew how to swim and so swam with Magdelena for hours while Soren dug massive holes for no apparent reason. Only he had a sense of rhythm, so when the villagers played their mandolin jigs he danced with Magdelena. She did so while looking at her feet and placing the fallen strands of her hair behind her ears. Theo moved with light feet, trying not to upset the buildings below, but Magdelena had no such control. She jumped, she shuffled, and stood on her hands. And though the church’s roof caved when she did, no one minded. The music continued and the men above and below watched, unbreathing.

  Soren did not mind. He watched Magdelena dance with Theo, and watched her swim with Theo, and never did he appear jealous. Theo almost felt bad for him. When there are two men and one woman, the math was cruel. What was the third to do? Theo did not want to think about the plight of poor Soren.

  It was on the ninth day of consciousness that Theo saw them, Soren and Magdelena, standing shin-deep in a fjord where the villagers lured whales and sea lions. They were standing, talking quietly, facing each other. There was a low rolling fog that day, woolen and colorless, and it eclipsed their bodies below the waist. Still, Theo could see that below the waves of white rolling through them, their hands were touching. Her knee was bent slightly, leaning in to kiss his.

  Theo was not a confrontational man. He simply took this information and walked away. While Soren and Magdelena roared and laughed and sang tuneless songs, Theo sat silently near the chalky cliffs of Toto-Mootn, eating bears, lost in thought. There he spent most of his days, alone, talking to the sea, watching the whales, waiting for the days when the moon was visible across the sky from the sun.

  Soren and Magdelena came to him often, asking if he was alright, if he wanted to swim, if he wanted to dig or run or eat buffalo. He smiled to them politely and declined. I’m trying to remember this land when we were last awake, he told them, and they accepted this explanation. They wanted to know his findings when he found them, they said. They considered him a serious man and respected his privacy.

  Still, there was pleasure in certain parts of a day. The first break of sun through the oval-shaped stand of pines in the flatlands to the east. A swim in the cold ocean in the afternoon. Laying on the bald peak, letting the warm rock dry his front while the sun dried his back. And yet, he did not know why he should live, why he should keep his eyes open. After a few days of near-joy, he had settled into something between life and sleep. He had seen so much. He was tired. He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.

  He decided he would leave. He thought it best to go north, to another place, to see if there were others like him, others like Magdelena. And so he rose early one morning and left, walking as quietly as he could. After all the weeks with the giants, the tinies below had learned to live with the rumbling of the earth caused when any of them moved about. He rose and woke no one, certainly not Soren and Magdelena, who by then slept side by side, unmoveable, their bodies connected in a dozen ruthless ways.

  He walked north, the sun a rising friend at his side, and found that the trees dwindled as he strode. The further north he walked, the more the grass shrank away, the earth paled. Soon there was only ice, and he was cold, and he missed being near Magdelena, taken or not. After some time, each step away from her caused him ache. First a cramp in his abdomen, then a stiffness in his legs, then a headache that radiated with fervor and rhythm.

  So he returned, and for a few weeks he tried to find a balance. Soren and Magdelena were happy to see him, and he enjoyed his time with her, with Soren, together and alone. Magdelena still swam with him, and they laughed as they had before, and they danced, Magdelena smiling at her shuffling feet. Making her laugh gave him something like pleasure, though in the moments of quiet he felt he was on the moon, frozen and dark. Soren, so confident, allowed it all, was sincere in his friendship with Theo, who to him posed no threat.

  So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light.

  He had found a sort of equilibrium, but equilibrium is temporary and fickle. One day he discovered that he was not satisfied. He wanted the full attention of love.

  So again he walked. He knew that to walk too far would cause him more pain than he could bear, so he limned the perimeter within which he could journey each day - far enough to be alone but not so far that he was lonely. He walked over glaciers and through unknown craters, he bathed in cold black lakes, and he caught flocks of birds from the sky and ate them with something like hunger.

  One day, while traveling west, through an ocher-colored canyon, he saw something ahead, something odd. There was a low mountain range rising from a flat tundra. It was a solitary thing, without foothills, without reason. All around was plain flat earth and so he felt himself drawn to it. He jogged through the canyon, his eyes set upon it. He crawled up from the canyon and ran to this exceptional mountain laying in the middle of the level dusty land.

  He walked around the range, examining it from every angle. This was something very strange. He knew enough about his own kind to know that a giant hibernating here in the middle of nowhere was unlikely, but not impossible. He lay next to it, and it was about as long as he was. There was a rise that could be a shoulder, a dip where a waist might be, a bundle at the end that could be ankles crossed. His pulse raced, his bre
ath shortened. He stood up, walking around the outcropping, guessing at legs, toes, a head.

  It could be, he thought.

  He sat with the mountain for a day and a night, examining it closely, to be sure that the form of a giant - a woman - could be waiting below its rough surface of rock and snow.

  Feeling foolish at first, he began to talk to her. When did you go to sleep? he asked. There was no answer. He asked more questions, thinking that she might awaken if the right query struck her as demanding an answer. He asked her name, and began to guess. Marketa? Dora? Siobhan? He settled on Amaranth, and began his sentences with Oh, Amaranth! and he surprised himself by growing comfortable hearing his own voice. He talked to her in verse, in song. He wondered, he speculated, he named clouds for her. He confided in her, telling her the best ways to eat bears, and about Magdelena and Soren, referring to them only as friends, a couple that he knew some other place, some other time.

  After a few weeks or months he wondered if he should return to them, to tell them where he had gone, whom he had met. But when he stood to do so, he found it harder, so much harder than before, when leaving Magdelena’s perimeter. To be more than a few steps away from Amaranth caused him vertigo. His legs were not what they once were, and leaving her seemed a foolish act. There was doubt here, yes, for he could not be certain that Amaranth was a woman and not a mountain. But he would gladly trade this uncertainty - small, he thought, for he was sure she was she - for what he had left with Magdelena and Soren - the certainty of pain.

  He sat again and decided that he would perhaps visit the others another day.

  Sleep came like the lightest rain. He felt it on his skin, something like a mist, numbing his legs, his arms. He could not recall how the last long sleep had begun, but what was happening now to him seemed familiar and right. A sigh escaped him as he lay next to Amaranth, Amaranth so warm, the contour of his side echoing hers, a valley forming between them. His eyes grew heavy and could no longer stay open to the world. When he closed them, though, he still saw her shape. Her constancy kept him strong and allowed him rest.

  Perkus Tooth

  Jonathan Lethem

  I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

  This was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on 52nd Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon. I’d gone there to record a series of voiceovers for one of Criterion’s high-end DVD reissues, a ‘lost’ 1950s film noir called The City is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that film’s director, the late émigré auteur Von Leopold Dresden. I would read a series of statements culled from Dresden’s interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I’d met at a dinner party. In drawing me into the project they’d supplied me with a batch of research materials, which I’d browsed unsystematically, and a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I’d heard of Dresden, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. Anyway, I was curious to see the inside of Criterion’s operation. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go-between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the places where Manhattan’s veneer gave way to what I liked to think of as the practical world.

  I recorded Dresden’s words in a sound chamber in the technical wing of Criterion’s crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room outside the chamber, where the sound man sat giving me cues through a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am Curious (Yellow). Afterwards I was retrieved by the producer who’d enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and another colleague I’d met at the dinner party - unguarded, embracing people with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom I’d felt an instantaneous homely affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more lost films petitioning for Criterion’s rescue. Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an office to share. The glamour of Criterion’s brand wasn’t matched by these scenes of thrift and improvisation I’d gathered from my behind-the-scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner had Susan introduced me to Perkus Tooth and given me an invoice to sign than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

  He was, that first time, in what I would soon learn to call one of his ‘ellipsistic’ moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought or begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth’s turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dress - trim-tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, over moldering tennis shoes - I could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his forties - still ten or fifteen years wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a little while. He was in his thirties, no older than me. I’d mistaken him for old because I’d taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf-lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooth’s whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored the gambit, trained on me.

  ‘You’re the actor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, I’m doing the liner notes. For The City is a Maze, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight . . . Recalcitrant Women . . . The Unholy City . . . Echolalia . . .’

  ‘All film noir?’

  ‘Oh, gosh, no. You’ve never seen Herzog’s Echolalia?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I wrote the liner note, but it isn’t exactly released yet. I’m still trying to convince Eldred - ’

  Perkus Tooth, I’d learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment Susan Eldred returned.

  ‘So,’ he said to her, ‘have you got that tape of Echolalia around here somewhere?’ He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. ‘I want him to see it.’

  Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. ‘I don’t know where it is,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, and we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown façades, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumb-waiter - there was no margin for pretending we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt’s collar was grubby and crumpled; the green-gray sneakers like
mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor’s bucket.

  ‘So,’ he said again. This ‘so’ of Perkus’s - his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk - wasn’t in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. ‘So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Roog’s Nowhere Near. Roog’s movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Roog’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said . . . you know, echolalia . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth’s torrential specifics.

  ‘But it’s also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near. Morrison Roog destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film - ’

  Why ‘ironically’? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. ‘It sounds incredible,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you know Roog’s suicide was probably faked.’

  My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: ‘You first - ’ ‘Oops - ’ ‘After you - ’ ‘Sorry.’ We faced one another, October mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t harassing me.