Chronic City (11 page)

Strabo Blandiana’s examination room was neither encouragingly medical nor New Agey enough to justify Perkus’s balking. Just a couple of Danish Modern chairs, in which the two now sat as equals, a brushed-steel cabinet on wheels, and beyond it a long, flat daybed covered with a neatly folded sheet. One silver-framed photograph, of an enigmatic orange-glowing ceramic vase against a blank white backdrop. From the moment Strabo opened his mouth no question of negotiation remained. He spoke decisively, each word
acute. The tone suggested they’d agreed beforehand never to waste an instant of the other’s time. Perkus’s clipboard results were in evidence nowhere, and the word
headache
was never spoken.

Strabo explained quickly that Perkus was—surprise!—“out of balance.” He could see that Perkus worked with his mind, and that he did so with the urgency of one who knew that if he faltered in his chosen task no one could possibly carry on in his stead. This sense of special purpose motivated Perkus to accomplish extraordinary things but also made him lonely, and defiantly angry. Strabo surprised Perkus by finding nothing shameful in this: Perkus evidently made use of productive fear and rage. Each insight Strabo offered as if describing the workings of a car, some fine-tuned Porsche or Jaguar, to its interested owner. There was no air of metaphysics. Strabo went on to explain that Perkus’s constitution was strong. If it wasn’t he wouldn’t have made it even this far, nor accomplished what he had. The suggestion being that this Porsche’s owner had brought his car limping into the garage just barely in time. Strabo’s intuition of Perkus’s special accomplishments and challenges allowed Perkus to feel them himself as though for the first time. What burdens he carried! That Perkus couldn’t go on as he had been was simply manifest and true.

Strabo Blandiana paused now, as if catching himself too much showing off what one glance had collected from the subject before him. He might be about to turn to the question of treatment, whatever that consisted of. Perkus was at this point only dazzled. Then Strabo again turned that gaze of total discernment in Perkus’s direction. “You understand,” Strabo said, as if incidentally, “that beneath your anger is really mourning. But you feel you can’t afford to mourn.”

“Mourn who?” said Perkus, feeling a breath disappear, so he had to gulp to replace it. The description seemed to tip him headfirst
into self-understanding, as if from a high diving board. But he hadn’t hit the water yet.

Strabo shook his head, refusing the obvious. “Before your parents were taken from you, the loss you felt was already real.” Yes, Perkus’s parents had both died, but how did Strabo know this? Or was this one of those specious bold guesses with which a charlatan secured your confidence? Perkus’s suspicions were aroused, but they were overrun by his hunger to understand what Strabo was on about.
What loss?

“You mourn a loss suffered by the world. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You see it as your sole responsibility to commemorate this loss.”

With this astonishing pronouncement, Strabo shifted efficiently and permanently to the practical effort of the Porsche’s maintenance. Was Perkus aware that he breathed only into his upper chest, never into his stomach? This distinction anyone would be likely to have noted a hundred times, but Strabo, with a guiding touch, made Perkus feel the difference. Perkus then tried to reopen the conversation, but Strabo, with a shrug, conveyed the sense that their talk had been conclusive. He deferred to Perkus’s expertise. “You know what you need to do to continue your work, I can’t teach you anything about that. Let’s just get you balanced, and then we’ll discuss strategies for leaving aside the useless pain. When you were younger you could carry more, but it isn’t efficient or necessary now. Please undress and lie under the sheet, I’ll return momentarily.”

To reject anything now was out of the question. Perkus made himself ready, folding his suit neatly on a chair back. Strabo returned and got to business. Acupuncture needles didn’t look as Perkus had imagined them, but then he’d never bothered to imagine anything other than a sewing needle. Thin as threads, each with a tiny flag at their end, they entered his body at various points, neck
and wrists and shoulders, painlessly. Only a hint of tightness, a feeling he shouldn’t move suddenly, confirmed Strabo had used them at all. Then Strabo lowered the lights and switched on some music, long atmospheric tones that might have been vaguely Eastern. “To someone like you this CD may sound a bit corny,” he said, surprising Perkus. “But it’s specially formulated, there are tones underneath the music that are engaging directly with your limbic system. It works even if you don’t like the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”

“Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.

“I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”

“What if I fall asleep?”

“It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pinned like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it come to this? How could I have been allowed to persuade him? Puttylike Chase Insteadman, so eagerly enlisted in absurd causes—
Chase
had talked
Perkus
into this?

Well, he’d frightened me. For a week Perkus hadn’t answered his phone, nor his apartment buzzer when I resorted to dropping by unannounced. Then, my own phone had rung, at six thirty AM, an hour at which, even had I been driving deep through evenings in Perkus’s company, I’d reliably have been dozing. I fumbled the receiver up to my ear, expecting I don’t know what, but always guiltily
terrified of dire updates from the space station, some further revolution in Janice’s fate.

His voice was dim, smoke-tight, wreathed in hours. No question of his having slept anytime recently.

“So, I need your help with something.”

“Yes?” I croaked.

“I have to talk to Brando. Can you get his number?”

“Brando?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, miming groggy disbelief for an invisible audience. “You mean
Marlon
Brando?” I thought Brando was recently dead, but this was exactly the sort of thing I get mixed up about. Maybe Paul Newman had died, or Farley Granger.

“Yes, Chase, Marlon Brando. Can you call, I don’t know, someone at your talent agency?” However depleted, however absurd the hour, Perkus seemed in a rage of impatience.

“Doesn’t he live on some island?”

“So you’re saying you can’t?”

“I—I don’t know. I guess I can try.”

“Only Brando can save us.”
He croaked out the line as if he’d been saving it for the crucial moment, a bombshell revelation.

“Perkus, what’s going on? What time is it? Are you okay?”

Silence.

“I tried to call, five or six times.”

“I had cluster,” he said after a moment, the grandiosity leaked from his voice. “I turned the ringer off.”

“I rang your doorbell.”

“I know. It sounded like an atom bomb, whistling toward the Nagasaki of my brain.” Perkus tittered at his own joke, his voice seeming to fall away from the receiver. Having failed the Brando test, I was losing him.

“Have you been in all week? When did you last eat something?”

“I don’t know …”

“Can I come over?” I asked, astounding myself. He didn’t answer. “I’ll stop at H&H and grab some bagels and stuff.” Now I bargained, pathetically.

“Go to East Side Bagel, they’ve got better whitefish spread.”

“Okay.”

“And Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Get some extra for Biller. I haven’t had anything for him for a couple of days.”

It might have taken me an hour to rally myself, get bagels, and arrive to ring Perkus’s bell. This was a day or two before Halloween, the morning fiercely cold, a first taste of winter. I worried for a long chilly moment on his doorstep that Perkus had changed his mind, but no, without troubling with the intercom he buzzed me through. His door was unlocked when I tried the handle, and a sour smell escaped to the corridor. Inside, Perkus’s tightly managed chaos had tipped into squalor, his sink’s basin like a geological site, heaped with unrinsed cups and a rain of grounds emptied out of his gold filter, ashtrays too, their contents muddily mixed with the coffee, his living-room floor a mad tatter of clippings, books with spines pressed open by whatever lay to hand—more coffee cups, a stapler, a brown banana, a pot of rubber cement—and with their pages mutilated, paragraphs excised and stickily transferred to gigantic cardboard backings, collaged into wild conjunctions, like vast scholarly punkrock liner notes. I’d never seen Perkus destroy a book. Rather they were holy objects, whose safety he compulsively patrolled when he placed them in your hands, forehead veins bulging in panic if you turned one down on its open face, though he reserved the right to do
this himself. But no more. Now his precious collection was only fodder on some quest. Perkus sat on the floor amid this disaster, his hair dripping wet, his chin and throat peppered with a week’s beard, his expression smashed and dark. He wore a green sharkskin three-piece suit’s pants and vest, nothing else—I suppose he’d made a lastminute effort to neaten up for me and could locate no clean shirts. His chest was, somehow, scrawnier than I’d allowed myself to imagine. The television screen was frozen on a stop-motion frame of Marlon Brando, smiling ominously as he scratched a large blue felt-and-fur tree-sloth Gnuppet behind its ears. I turned from him to the kitchen, pushed aside heaps of ancient magazines,
Rolling Stone, Playboy
, and
Esquire
, to clear a spot on his table for the bag of bagels and spreads, then went back in and confronted him.

“Perkus, tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m trying to reconstruct an epiphany.”

“An epiphany? I thought you had a
headache.”

“I don’t know if the cluster’s passed, but I had a great ellipsis a few days ago, between episodes, really revelatory. I couldn’t do anything about it then, I was so fucked up. I could barely walk for two days at the peak, Chase! The blot on my vision was like an elephant in my apartment this time, crowding to the edges of the room, I felt like I could stroke its pebbly hide.” He spoke in a feverish rasp, all the while concentrating on piloting scissors to free a few sentences from their surrounding page. “Then the epiphany came, I could see everything, the whole landscape at once, like it was lit by the moon. This enormous undescribed thing in every detail, I have to get hold of it while I can, I don’t know how long I’ll be allowed this time.”

“Get hold of the epiphany, you mean?” The Venn diagram of
ellipsis, epiphany
, and
episode of cluster
was already too much for my mind’s eye. I feared what I would never again dare suggest: that it was All One Thing. The pebbly hide of the elephant and the moonlit
landscape, the first so close it was oppressive and useless, the other so distant he’d never reach it even if he grew wings, One and the Same.

“Yes.”

“So that’s what all this is?” I indicated the project arrayed on the floor. “An… epiphany… from last week?” I craned my neck to read the filleted sentences draped in Perkus’s hand—
The Beatles family goes back to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. They want to get to American freedom; they don’t understand that American freedom is itself horribly complicated and conflicted
… Another slip continued,
There’s also a kind of Less Than Zero thing about being the Beatles; they’re not quite the Beats. There’s a kind of Bret Easton Ellis about the whole Beatle phenomenon, and that has to do with the tragedy of John Lennon. Being a kind of Beetle, being a kind of insect in a way
… And then a third excerpt, in a different font:
But in truth, moderns live in a world-order in which the primitive “physics” or “chemistry” of things (“reality,” the measurable and controllable thingliness of things strictly taken) is overwhelmingly eclipsed, reduced nearly to negligibility by the
power-relations
or
actualities
that have strategized and shaped the thing-complexes among which moderns live
…

“Not last week,” said Perkus, patiently straightening me out. “Last week, I told you, I was in a death glaze, mostly. I’m reconstructing an epiphany from five years ago, at least. Probably ten.”

I wanted many things, but for starters I wanted us to quit saying the word
epiphany
. “What do you want on your bagel?”

“Let’s make coffee.”

When I’d performed what triage I could on his kitchen and we sat with coffee in fresh cups and pumpernickel halves frosted with whitefish, Perkus said, “So, what about Brando?”

What about sleep?
I wanted to reply. “I honestly think it’ll be difficult to get hold of him.”