I lifted the package from the floor. A four-tape set, Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Platinum Collection. By process of elimination I determined the tape Perkus had inserted was Season Three. “More salvage from the storage-space people?”

“No. I spotted it in Eldred’s office, but she’d taken it home. I’ve been drooling after this item for years, it’s surprisingly scarce. CBS had to delete it, because they hadn’t gotten permission to include “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

I tried not to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, feeling more generally disgruntled that he’d presume to blow my mind with something as commonplace as The Twilight Zone. “I used to watch these things on late-night TV,” I said, though I couldn’t recall a thing beyond the opening narration, Serling seeming to mock his own stiletto delivery, which I mocked now. “There is a fifth dimension-”

“The easiest way to pass as a spy is to tell everyone you’re a spy,” Perkus pronounced gnomically. He loosed Ava, who twisted to her feet and began nosing at the box in my hands. “Once they think you’re a fool, you get away with anything.”

“Are we going to watch ‘The… Incident… at… Al’s Creek Bridge’?” I knew I’d gotten it wrong.

“No, we’re going to watch ‘The Midnight Sun.’”

“Is it about Japan?”

“No. Be patient.” Perkus held his forefinger to the VCR’s Fast-forward, which apparently needed to be continuously pressed, and not only moved with the speed of a man crawling across the desert but mimicked his groans as he died of thirst. I intertwined my fingers beneath Ava’s throat, keeping her corralled with me.

“Wait, I just guessed: it was directed by Morrison Groom, before he was famous.” I tried not to allow too sardonic a pronunciation to this last word.

“It wasn’t directed by anyone important.” Perkus had his selection cued, and now put on a kettle for more coffee.

I grew more peevish by the minute. At three in the afternoon the light outside wasn’t impressive, but it was daylight, sun fracturing off the fine new powder, however firmly Perkus kept Ava’s curtains drawn. This wasn’t one AM, we weren’t in the mental theater of Eighty-fourth Street, we’d smoked no Chronic nor Blueberry Kush, let alone Ice, and I wasn’t positive Perkus could enthrall me with creaky tapes of old television episodes this time around. The surround was just too tragically shabby and irrelevant to me all of a sudden. If Perkus couldn’t see he’d tumbled, I could. He’d misplaced the old heartbeat of his dissidence, wasn’t cutting across the grain of anything except himself (or so I thought at that moment). I wasn’t totally unaware that my judgments mingled with an irrational sense of betrayal that he’d summoned Susan Eldred, that the Friendreth apartments were turning into as much of a revolving door of acquaintances and contacts as his old apartment had been. I might have been smarting over his remark about the predictability of my visits, but for the first time I felt disappointed in him. Perkus’s ascetic phase had no more rules than had his libertinism-he made calls on mobile phones, watched old TV shows, and who knows, probably sneaked a joint now and again, only wouldn’t share it with me. I felt we were headed for our second fight (after “The Incident Concerning the Jackson Hole Waitress”) and I didn’t mind. I was glad now it was Susan Eldred and not me that had said aloud that she’d do anything for him. Right now I wanted to do nothing.

So what did I do? The day’s light graying behind those curtains, I joined Perkus on Ava’s couch, each with our fresh cups of coffee, and dutifully watched “The Midnight Sun,” from The Twilight Zone’s third season, on glitchy, burping videotape. Ava wedged herself between us to sit bolt upright regarding the television screen as if it were a window, her head darting at the blocking of the characters, growling once when a man holding a pistol pushed his way through a door (you couldn’t quibble with her prejudices), otherwise hiccuping at regular intervals.

The episode was set entirely in a New York apartment building. (I felt Perkus glance at me with satisfaction at this hint of relevance, but I ignored him, wedded to the grudging line I’d drawn in the sand: I’d watch it, but refuse to marvel over whatever he wanted me to marvel over.) The city is nearly abandoned, due to an end-of-the-world heat wave, Earth’s orbit declining toward the sun, which never exits the sky-hence the title. The few who cling to existence in the melting city, namely a young female painter (a Village bohemian in a 1950s sense) and an older woman in her building, are dependent on failing air-conditioning and a failing Frigidaire, which houses what may be the last pitcher of water in Manhattan. The man with the gun, at whom Ava snarled, is a thirst-maddened desperado who breaks in and swigs down this treasure, a scene played by the sweating women as if it were an allegory of rape. Then, thirst quenched, the intruder apologizes and departs in shame. The heat, reaching a peak, murders the older woman and causes a painting to melt off a canvas. Only after the young painter also collapses does the tale reveal its characteristic twist: she awakens from what is revealed to be a nightmare to find with relief that the sky is dark, the air cool, and outside, snow is falling, but relief gives way to the next horror-the Earth is moving away from the sun, not nearer to it, and Manhattan is locked in a fatal deepening freeze.

That I followed this narrative is a blooming miracle, however, as throughout our viewing Perkus was unable to keep from voicing a filibuster of interpretations. The twenty-odd minutes of black-and-white fable gave him innumerable opportunities to persuade me that Rod Serling was the zero point for the pure themes: Cold War fear! Conformity! Alienation! Collective and consensual delusion, the leakage of the dream life into the waking! The Twilight Zone, Perkus explained, was news that stayed news (I took this as rebuke of my gift of the Sunday Times), in this case speaking volumes about the true nature of the unnatural winter the city had been enduring. Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist.

“Remind you of anything?” he insisted afterward, scurrying to halt the tape’s progress to the next immortal episode.

Remember, I’d done television, too much of it. I mostly had just pitied the actors, forced to work on such an impoverished set and to be sprayed with glycerin between takes. Then again, these were pretty feeble actors.

“Lots of things,” I said. “What things did you have in mind?”

“The state of… everything. Your life, mine, the state of the weather.”

I played dumb. It couldn’t be a crime merely to exaggerate the role Perkus cast me in always. “Sure, it’s been a little cold. You think despite how it feels, it’s actually hot out?”

“Many things helplessly produce their own opposites.” Sensing my resistance, he half swallowed this manifesto line. I saw him squint, too, to keep his dodgy eye from embarrassing him. “I think I’m losing you.”

“It all feels a little plotty to me,” I said, dead set on disappointing him. “I was never one for plots.”

“Too bad, since you’re in one.”

“The newspaper is the news, too, at least on the day it’s published. Did you read about the crane collapse on Ninety-first? They think Abneg’s tiger might be to blame.”

“Fuck Abneg’s tiger, and fuck the newspaper.” Perkus began swearing, invoking Richard’s style. “The Times isn’t the commissar of the real, not anymore, not as far as I’m concerned. It’s the cover story.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Perkus. You don’t have to rely on it, like I do, for updates on your personal life!”

“Why are you yelling?”

I had gotten a little ventilated, without noticing. I felt tide-swamped with provocations: the serial bulging of Ava’s ribs as she hiccuped under my hand; the moldering smell and tawdriness of the Friendreth generally; the fine grounds the gold filter hadn’t kept from ending in the bottom of my cup and on the carpet of my tongue; the unrelenting March weather, which seemed to prove some arcane fact my loopy friend Perkus held over me like a threat, as though he could be right and I could be wrong about everything; that neither Perkus nor Oona ever called me on the phone-I was somehow a principle taken for granted, as much an item of decor in Perkus’s circle as I had been the chunk of handsome furniture at wealth’s table; that Mission Control hadn’t received a communication from Janice or Northern Lights generally for almost three weeks. Once upon a time Janice had peppered the newspapers with affectionate updates I guiltily speed-read; now I guiltily scoured the papers daily for hints of her existence which refused to appear. All of this seemed irreconcilable data, yet the ultimate provocation was the way Perkus arched his eyebrows at me as though I was supposed to grasp it as a whole.