Cyberpunk

film—the type who lurks at the side of the primary Asian villain, and is dispatched by the hero penultimately and with great effort, as a kind of respectful nod to the Western viewer. I wondered if he might be the same person I’d negotiated with on the telephone, so protractedly, in seeking my interview with his employer. If so, he said nothing to confirm my suspicion, and spoke only deferentially now that I’d been granted access to the house. The foyer and entrance hallway of the crab’s home were two stories high, with round-topped cathedral windows that flooded midday illumination on the mute, carpeted surfaces of floor and stairway, on the beige walls and tastefully framed black-and-white photographs, many of which, I noted at a glance, contained images of the crab with grinning visitors to the set of his old television program, Crab House Days. The housekeeper closed the door behind me and we stood together dwarfed in pillars of high light and suffocated, it seemed to me, by the Floridian summer heat and the faint odor of proteinous seashore rot that permeated the unconditioned air of the apparently immaculate house.
    “He’ll see you by the pool, Mr. Lethem.”
    I wasn’t a fan of Crab House Days during its original run. The sitcom’s five-season heyday as ABC’s leading Wednesday night comedy program began during my second year of college, the years when I was least likely to care or even know what was on television or on the covers of supermarket magazines—a condition which actually persisted well into my thirties, when I got cable for the first time, largely in order to keep my eye on my favorite baseball team, the Mets. Crab House Days was by then well into its life as a late-night rerun, nobody’s idea of hot news. And the crab’s brief, unsavory resurgence in the form of the late-night cable reality show Crab Sex Dorm was still a few years off then, in the mid-nineties, when I increasingly began to linger, in my channel surfing, over episodes of the now-classic show. I watched Crab House Days idly at first, but soon I found myself entranced by the melancholic longueurs which would from time to time open up within the antic behaviors of the giant, housebound crab and his bawdy, ingenuous human family, the Foorcums.
    So many evenings Crab House Days, ostensibly a laugh-riot, seemed to end on a wistful note. Pansy Foorcum, the abrasive sexpot daughter who was nonetheless the crab’s only reliable confidante, would make herself ready for a date, talking to the crab through the shared wall of their bedrooms as she dressed and applied makeup for a night out, and then go, leaving the crab time and time again to scuttle and fiddle alone in his room. Pansy in many ways played the role of the crustacean’s advocate and mediator among the other Foorcums: Sternwood, the crab’s loutish father; Grania, the crab’s befuddled and mawkish mother; and, of course, the crab’s and Pansy’s younger sibling, the scene-stealing punk-Libertarian brat Feary Foorcum. Squabbling would cease as all four of the others contemplated Pansy’s departure from the house. The other family members seemed saddened, their energies dampened, as though the pleasure in baiting and insulting the giant crab were diminished past any value once Pansy was no longer present to stick up for him. For the crab’s part, his passive-aggressive ripostes and mordant asides were seemingly lost on their actual targets, Sternwood and Grania and Feary; rather, they were meant for Pansy’s ears, and with her departure the crab typically fell to an irate and wounded silence.
    Now I allowed myself to be led through the foyer, past a vast, apparently unused dining room, its chairs and table covered with sheets, and through to the back patio. The housekeeper and I stepped through the frame of a sliding glass door. Lawn and gardens extended to high walls of vine-covered brick, fronted with a row of palm trees, and scattered between the house and the limits of the yard were well-tended circular plantings of midget palms and ferns, around an unusually large rectangular pool lipped with a wide margin of peach-colored tile. On the pool’s tile, between three slatted wooden deck chairs and a low matching table, squatted the crab, wide and round as a golf cart, yet no higher than my knee.
    His armor’s sheen wasn’t what it had seemed fifteen years before, on television, or even in the low-resolution video of Crab Sex Dorm , a scant three years