Chronic City (12 page)

“Sure, but we have to try.” Between starved attacks on his
bagel, gobbets of pureed fish and mayonnaise dripping from between his fingers, Perkus named Brando as the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era. His lordly vulnerability, his beauty overwritten with bulk, his superbly calibrated refusal to oblige, all made Marlon Brando the name of that principle which nemeses as varied as Mayor Jules Arnheim, the War on Drugs, Jack Nicholson’s museum-defacing scene as the Joker in Tim Burton’s
Batman
, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had conspired to unname.

“You know Brando’s single most crucial moment?” Perkus quizzed me.

“Uh, not
On the Waterfront?”

“Not even close. Too compromised by McCarthyism.”

I hated this game. “
Apocalypse Now?”

“Well, that’s an important one, with the whole
Heart of Darkness
subtext, but what I have in mind is when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Oscar in his place. I mean, it’s the most amazing conflation of the American Imaginary, just think about it! In one gesture Brando ties our rape of the Indians to this figure of our immigrant nightmare, this Sicilian peasant doing the American dream, capitalism I mean, more ruthlessly than the founding fathers could have ever dreaded. We’re as defenseless against what Don Corleone exposes, the murderous underside of Manifest Destiny, as the Indians were against smallpox blankets. And in the vanishing space between the two, what? America itself, whatever that is. Brando, essentially,
declining to appear
. Because the party’s over.” Here Perkus hesitated for breath, like a jazz soloist tipping his horn to one side. His unruly eye tested the bounds of its socket. He also snuck in another bite of whitefish and pumpernickel—at least I was getting some calories into him. “By refusing to show up Brando took on the most magnificent aspect, it’s as if Toto sweeps the curtain aside and
the great and powerful Oz has absconded, leaving you to contemplate the fact that
behind the illusion there’s nothing
. The Oz of American history, for all its monstrousness, is all we’ve got. Brando could have done anything at that moment. Come home to us, instead of remaining in exile. He should have run for mayor of New York.”

“Like Mailer?” I might not pass many tests, but I recalled a recent Tooth History of New York.

“Sure, but Mailer had it all fouled up, he still bought the romance of Marilyn Monroe, all that Andy Warhol crap. Brando was pure because he’d been out there, had Marilyn, knew it didn’t matter. He was our captain. Maybe it’s not too late.”

“Not too late—?” To lure Brando here to run for mayor? I hesitated to complete the thought aloud, fearing I’d lead Perkus to this conclusion if he hadn’t reached it already. I wasn’t sure which was more worrisome, Perkus’s careening logic or that I’d mostly been able to follow it.

“No, Brando’s keeping faith. That’s what I realized, Chase. He’s still out there, sending up flares, if anyone’s paying attention.”

“What flares?”

“His most recent film, that spy movie,
Footholds
—you know how it was supposedly ruined by his battles with the director, Florian Ib, the guy who made
The Gnuppet Movie?
There’s this one anecdote from the set, seems like typical Hollywood gossip, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Yes?”

“So, there’s a scene they’re shooting, Ib’s setup calls for a wide shot, but Brando demands a close-up. They argue over it, but neither backs down, and then Brando goes back to his trailer, and when he comes out for the shot,
he’s wearing only the top half of his costume
. Right there, with the whole crew watching, Brando’s nude from the waist down. He’s basically daring Florian Ib to shoot the wide shot.”

“I’m somehow guessing Marlon got his close-up.”

He tried to contain his impatience with me. “Sure, but if that was the whole point it wouldn’t be more than showbiz vanity. The thing is, by that time Brando’s figured out
Footholds
won’t be much of a vehicle for what he needs to say, so he sends out this message.”

“What message?”

“It took me a while to decipher it, but think, Chase—what’s the Platonic form of a Gnuppet?” My baffled look told Perkus not to wait for my guess this time. “Your quintessential Gnuppet stands behind a
wall
, right? You only ever see them from the waist up. Remove the wall, or the edge of the frame, and you’d see the hands of the operators, making them move. I’ve been studying Brando’s scene in
The Gnuppet Movie
, there’s a reason he’s pointing us back to that work—the key is the relation between the actors and the Gnuppets. We’re players in a Gnuppet realm, reading from the same script.
We’re All Gnuppets
. Brando was saying: abolish this boundary, tear down the wall or the curtain, and let’s have a look at the Gnuppeteers.”

“Or at his genitals.”

“Haven’t you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn’t because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame’s edge, which reminds them of all they’re not seeing. That glimpse is intolerable. When your gaze slips beyond the edge of a book or magazine, you notice the ostensible texture of everyday reality, the table beneath the magazine, say, or the knee of your pants. When your eye slips past the limit of the letterboxed screen, you’re faced with what’s framed and projected in that margin—it ought to be
something
, but instead it’s
nothing
, a terrifying murk, a zone of nullity. But the real reason it’s so terrifying is because it begs the question of whether
they’re
the same thing
. Maybe the tabletop or the knee of your pants bears no more relation to the contents of the magazine than the images on the screen do to the void above and below.”

I rinsed a glass and handed Perkus some cold tap water, wanting to see something going in besides coffee.

“I think I ought to put up a broadside,” he said.

“It’s been a long time.” I spoke cautiously, not wanting to jar him, and anyway uncertain of my facts.

“Yes.”

We both glanced in at the paperscape of his living-room floor, the unreconstructed epiphany. Was it a broadside in progress? That groping collage seemed a kind of wan parody of the maniacal hand-scrawled rants of his heyday. It dawned on me that by lighting on a champion whose triumph was in
declining to appear
, Perkus might elaborately forgive his own years of inactivity, his hide-and-seek muse. That Brando had frittered away much of his prime gave them something in common. (Me, too, if I bothered to think in those terms.) Even better, absence could form a statement, especially if punctuated with a well-timed and phantasmal return, the broadside equivalent of Sacheen Littlefeather. Manhattan might have forgotten Perkus and his broadsides, but never mind. He’d send up a flare.

“Would you help me put it up?” he asked.

“Like Oona Laszlo?” I joked. “You want me for your glue-girl?”

“Seriously.”

This figure before me—with bare-knuckly shoulders, cheek sinews tensed beneath beard bristles, fingernails mooned with newsprint dirt, unmoored eye careening—I’d sooner chaperone to Bellevue’s intake door myself than allow onto the street to be swept up by Mayor Arnheim’s quality-of-life squad. “On one condition,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll let me make an appointment for you with my Chinese practitioner.”

I didn’t kid myself that Perkus felt obligated. Rather, he’d agreed out of a kind of pity for me that I pitied him, and out of embarrassment at my worry. Plus I saw I’d made him curious, with my wild claims for Strabo Blandiana’s visionary and remedial powers. What if Perkus could be freed of the cluster headaches? How much more ellipsis would that leave time for? Any gambit might be worth that chance. Some rare medical gift might come shrouded in the mystical wrapping paper.

So here he was, pocked with needles, a Saint Sebastian of aromatherapy and pan-flute solos, when he could have been home studying Brando’s Gnuppet moment frame by frame, like it was the Zapruder film. Well, it was relaxing, at least. Obediently breathing all the way to the pit of his stomach, he expected to feel sleepy. Instead experienced the opposite effect, grew strangely excited inside his total stillness, whether creditable to needles, the somatic tones dwelling underneath the fake-Asian music, residual traces of coffee and pot, or Strabo’s uncanny pronouncements.
The loss you felt was already real. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You know what you need to do to continue your work
. These phrases continued to sink through Perkus. He couldn’t feel Strabo’s needles at all, but if he closed his eyes his body seemed to float toward the ceiling, a disconcerting sensation he avoided by opening his eyes instead. There at the center of vision was the framed photograph he’d passingly noted before, of the orange ceramic vase glowing, as if lit from within, against the minimal white backdrop. The line of the table on which the vase sat was barely detectable, so near was the tone of the tabletop to the wall behind it. The vase was lit to
throw no shadow against either wall or table. It had a translucence, perhaps
opalescence
would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle. Under the circumstances, the vase seemed to have its own message for Perkus:
Have you neglected Beauty?
Even as he believed he contemplated the photograph with idle curiosity, killing time as he would with a copy of
Sports Illustrated
in a dentist’s waiting room, Perkus felt the tears begin to seep across his cheeks, toward his ears, the salt stinging tiny fresh cuts that edged his sideburns, cuts he’d incurred shaving with shaky hands.

Now Perkus felt himself float without closing his eyes. Not toward the ceiling, but up and, however impossible,
into
the orange vase in the photograph. He dwelled there, was held there, for a long and outrageously pure instant. The vase sheltered Perkus like a kindly cove. And when it couldn’t continue to shelter him the failure wasn’t a rejection, a spitting out, but a sigh. Perkus understood that he and the vase couldn’t abide with each other any longer than that instant, not here in these absurd surroundings, not stuck full of acupuncture needles and separated by the boundaries of a framed photograph. This had been a mere taste. But what a taste. The orange vase spoke to Perkus, simply, of not the possibility but the fact of another world. The world Perkus or anyone would wish to discover, the fine real place where the shadowy, tattered cloak of delusion dissolved. The place Perkus had tried his whole life to prove existed. Only lately he’d lost the thread. Fuck ten-year-old epiphanies made of scraps of yellowing articles from the
London Review of Books
and
Comics Journal
! Perkus had nodded off the night before, seated on the floor, and woken to find his scissors nearly glued to his thumb and forefinger. But even to taste what the orange vase promised was to feel weariness lift away entirely. Just to know it was out there, like a beacon calling.

Strabo Blandiana returned and removed the needles, a process which Perkus now barely noticed, then allowed Perkus a moment to collect himself and dress. The exit interview was brief, Perkus as eager to wrap up as Strabo, who obviously needed the room for his next patient—Chazz Palminteri, or Lewis Lapham, or whomever. (It was this that always surprised and amused me, too, how Strabo whisked you through, as much as any Western doctor.) Perkus didn’t want to stare at the vase too intently, fearing he’d give himself away. He did manage a quick inspection of the photograph’s margin, to make certain there was no signature or other mark he’d need to memorize for his later quest. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything.

“How do you feel?” asked Strabo.

“Great,” said Perkus truthfully.

“You respond well. We’ll eventually want to talk about caffeine and other substances, but there’s no hurry. For now I’d like you to think about your breathing, and this may seem strange to you, but I’d like you to eat more meat.”

“I can do that.”

“And while in the outer office I couldn’t help noticing you came here wearing nothing but your dress jacket. You should have a coat in this weather.”

“You’re right, of course.”

“If you’d like a copy of the CD I played, you can rebalance yourself at home this way. One purchases it from a Web site, it’s quite simple.”

Perkus consented, and Strabo scribbled the Web address on a slip. Then, before stepping out to take a receipt from Strabo’s receptionist (I’d insisted on paying for the visit in advance), he asked about the photograph of the vase. It was silly to lose the chance.

“Ah,” said Strabo. “The chaldron, yes, it’s quite beautiful. A gift from another patient. At first I hesitated to place it so prominently,
but as it happens several patients have mentioned that they find it quite consoling. I’ve forgotten the name of the photographer, alas.”