Chronic City (13 page)

“I’m sorry, what did you call it?”

“I understand that type of ceramic is called a chaldron.”

“Thank you.”

That evening, Perkus home from the fateful appointment, he called me and I hurried over. Appearing both radiant and exhausted from the adrenaline Strabo’s treatments typically unblocked, Perkus effused as much as I could have hoped, but his exact subject bewildered me. Crumbled marijuana buds from a container labeled ICE were strewn across the tabletop I’d sponged clean for him a few days before, and he waved a half-consumed, temporarily extinguished joint in his fingers as he explained that he’d already looked up “chaldron” on the Internet, and found two for sale on eBay, advertised with photographs much like that he’d seen on Strabo’s wall. They weren’t cheap, but he’d entered bids. He’d get one into his apartment as soon as possible, and then I’d see what he’d seen—that, in so many words, he’d detected proof of another, better world. “Like reverse archaeology, Chase, but just as thrilling as contemplating the lost remains of the past. A chaldron is treasure from the
future
, if we deserve a future that benign.” Meanwhile, did I want to see an image of one? Even in cold pixels, he promised, they conveyed a certain force.

I slowed him as well as I could, as his tale tumbled out, frantic, careless, ridiculous, the whole visit a pretext for his encounter with the chaldron. Had I seen it myself? Yes, I recalled the framed print, vaguely. No, it hadn’t had such an effect on me. Or rather, I hadn’t credited any effects to the photograph. Was Perkus certain he wasn’t transposing the results of Strabo’s treatments—the twin penetration
of his needles and his insights into Perkus—onto the artwork? Perkus corrected me: it wasn’t an artwork, it was an
artifact
. Evidence. A manifestation. Furthermore, he wasn’t so impressed with Strabo as all that. The acupuncture hadn’t been unpleasant, but it also hadn’t been anything at all beyond a self-evident placebo. Perkus found the propagation of ancient ritual into an upscale urban setting innocuous and charming, in its way. The needles imparted a gravitas to Strabo that his customers, who otherwise paid handsomely to lie on a table and be reminded to breathe, must find reassuring.

As for Strabo’s so-called insight, Perkus was sorry I was so credulous. For it had only taken him a second thought to be certain Strabo employed techniques perfected by British mediums during the great Victorian craze for psychic phenomena of all types: safely evocative and flattering generalizations with which anyone would agree, combined with precise secret research into the subject’s background in order to provide a clinching detail or two. I ought to do a little reading on the historical techniques, I’d find it fascinating. “Strabo’s brilliant, I’ll give you that, Chase. Unmistakably, he’d been reading my work carefully in those two days between your call and my appointment. He must have a hot-shit researcher tucked away somewhere. What’s incredible is that he distilled my basic themes so quickly. He was feeding me back to me, neatly mixed up with his own brand of stuff.” Perkus widened his eyes, his expression that of exaggerated admiration for what he regarded as a top-notch stunt. Where could I begin? To attack the first premise, that Strabo Blandiana—who’d added the appointment as a favor, and who was in my experience often sweetly oblivious that clients like Marisa Tomei or Wynton Marsalis were renowned themselves rather than merely friends of others he’d helped—could ever have had the interest or means to discover Perkus’s marginal writings, might seem an assault on Perkus’s
frail sense of his own relevance. I said nothing. Perkus relit the joint and after drawing on it himself handed it to me. “Enough of this,” he said. “Let’s go win an auction!”

Well, we lost a couple. If anything epitomized Perkus’s curious disadvantages, his failure to find traction in the effective world, it was the state of his computing. Perkus was the type to be Web-delving on some sleekly effective Mac, I’d have thought. Instead his lumpy Dell looked ten years old, Cro-Magnon in computer years. He connected by his phone line, which he transferred by hand from his living-room Slimline, and which bumped him offline if anyone rang, but also, it seemed, intermittently and at random. Watching that Dell painstakingly assemble a page view, images smoothed pixel by pixel, was agony. Perkus was enchanted—he’d just discovered eBay, by way of the chaldron hunt. The format and rules fascinated him, and as we watched the hour tick toward the resolution of the two chaldron auctions—one half an hour later than the other—he gleefully refreshed the pages again and again in turn, to see if anyone had trumped his bids. No one had. As things stood he’d be collecting two chaldrons, one for three hundred and fifty dollars, the other for one hundred and eighty-five. I suggested Perkus bow out of the first, but he waved me off.

Then, thirty seconds left, Perkus refreshed the page again. After excruciating delay, a verdict was coolly levied: another bidder had raised on Perkus with fifteen seconds to go. Unanswered, this rival had taken the chaldron. Better luck next time! Indignant, muttering, Perkus hastened back to the other auction. He lurked intently over the screen, as if the scouring of his hot breath might be telling in the effort. Again he looked to be in command with less than a minute to go, until a speedier bidder stole the chaldron away at the last instant. Game over.

I saw Perkus crumble then, drained of spirit, sagging into him-self,
an imploded building in slow motion. Despite all care he’d taken to shave and wash and dress for the morning’s appointment, he looked heartbreakingly worse, his vessel stranded even higher on the shoals than before I’d sent him downtown. In my experience Strabo’s needles uncorked vast energies in the weeks following a treatment, but on the day of their entry into one’s body they took a severe toll. Even so, I had to persuade Perkus not to resume his hunt. If there had been two chaldrons the first time he’d looked there’d be more tomorrow. He’d mentioned Strabo’s advice to him to eat meat, so what about a burger? I joshingly mentioned replacement lipids, appealing to his self-medicator’s vanity. Perkus smiled wanly. He made motions of consent to the expedition downstairs, but couldn’t seem to get out of his chair. I detached the phone line from the computer and replaced it in the telephone, enforcing my little prohibition. Someone might want to call. I might want to call. Perkus didn’t have the gumption to argue. He moved through the French doors to his little bedroom, slid his jacket onto a hanger, then curled onto his bedspread like a dog. The temperature outside was dropping, in Perkus’s kitchen I’d felt a chill draft on my neck from gaps in the window to Biller’s inner courtyard, but the building’s clanking, whistling radiators were at work and the bedroom was practically a sauna. Perkus’s lids sagged to veil the good eye and the irascible one, which still lolled in the direction of the living room, seeking the Dell’s screen, which had reverted to a screen saver featuring comical raccoons huddled in the upper branches of a towering redwood. Then his lids at last tucked over his aggravated orbs, to meet the parchment-yellow skin beneath. For what it was worth, my four-day campaign was victorious: I’d put Perkus to bed. As he drifted off, he honorably swore he’d wait until morning to chase chaldrons.

Oh yes, and one other thing: he still relied on me to locate Brando.

CHAPTER
Six

Oona Laszlo
was bizarrely productive. She seemingly did nothing, when out of my sight, but dash off books. The week previous we’d strolled together though the Barnes & Noble on Lexington and, serene and deadpan, she’d pointed out three she’d written just among the new releases. (Then again, she could have told me she’d written anything in the shop. Her name wasn’t on the books.) Now she’d taken a new assignment, covert as ever: an autobiography of Laird Noteless, who’d received the commission for the
Memorial to Daylight
popular sentiment had demanded in reply to the gray fog downtown.

Noteless, legendary for his unbudging exile stance, his stark antihumanist vision, his clashes with borough presidents and local preservationist groups in attempting to mount his abysmal spectacles, was experiencing the kind of late-blooming legitimacy this town sometimes accorded to avant-gardists who stuck around long enough. It might be the case that in this era of gray fog we’d caught up to Noteless’s stark antihumanist vision, even found some flinty comfort there. Or perhaps it was simply that Noteless’s Ivy League
undergraduate friends were finally, four decades later, running the world, as they were always meant to. (Legitimacy settles on us in various ways.) Anyhow, Noteless was too occupied with the big controversial commission to pen his own memoir, so his publisher had found reliable, versatile Oona. Now she’d persuaded me to travel this morning to 191st Street, to have a look at
Urban Fjord
. Unembarrassed to inform me or the publisher that she paid contemporary art little attention, Oona wanted to gaze on a few of Noteless’s works, to get a feel. She was at least that thorough, though she promised me she’d be concocting the book without much consultation with Noteless or his assistants, and that she preferred it so. She also bragged or confessed that she wrote with the television on, mostly
Top Chef
or
Next Year’s Model
. This was the third morning we’d woken together. I’d still never crossed the threshold of her apartment building.

Despite all global rumors, the city was suffering a ferocious November. In a kind of wardrobe shock, nobody could locate their January gear, and on the street all hobbled like crooked insects, stunned by the knifing winds. Oona and I made it as far as Eighty-sixth and Third before ducking into the nearest shop, a Papaya Czar on the corner there.

“Why don’t we take a cab?” I said.

“The subway goes right to it,” said Oona. “Let’s just warm up for a minute. We haven’t had breakfast anyway.”

“Fabulous suggestion,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere for breakfast.” I gestured at the hot dogs browning on the grill, the dented tureens of sickly tropical beverage, covered with garish signage, that lined the walls, hoping my point was self-evident. I had good visions of a bowl of latte, something crumbly in my fingers, hot dough and caffeine. Then a U-turn route to my bed, which we’d vacated too soon for my taste, driven here by Oona’s workaholic jitters. My own priorities would have kept us indoors, fugitive and warm, out of public view.

I wanted Oona in the morning. I could still conjure her slippery smoothness in my arms (and divergent cuppable breasts in my palms, where they left ghost trails of a peach’s weight), but Oona had kept dunning lights and pulling curtains, and dressing and undressing stealthily, while I was at the sink or refrigerator, or asleep. When I asked, Oona informed me she was too skinny to look at. She might even be invisible, she joked. After I looked clear through her I’d see there was no one there at all. Well, I suspended judgment. Meanwhile, I campaigned to get her nude in a bed flooded with daylight. I really felt no call to visit any
Fjord
in this weather.

“This is a good breakfast right here.”

“You’re kidding.” Oona had a thing for dodging my suggestions of bars or restaurants, I’d noticed. She’d claimed she lived on roast chestnuts and knishes from sidewalk carts, and takeout Chinese. Really, I think I’d seen only white wine, good Scotch, and Häagen-Dazs cross her lips.

“Papaya’s fantastic for the lower intestine,” said Oona. “I think it reverses cancer, too.” She ordered herself a cup of orange stuff from an imperturbable Hispanic man in a white smock and mustache. Lodged beneath the glowing coils of ceiling-mounted heater, he might have been on some faraway beach, vending to bathers. Outside the shop window, a cyclonic wind had roiled a discarded
Times
into a kind of whirligig, one which pedestrians had to dodge, with their hands protecting their faces.

“Have some. It really is an aid to digestion, it says so on this sign.”

“Yes, that’s why they sell it with hot dogs.”

“Poor Chase. Is capitalism too paradoxical for you?”

“I’ll take a black coffee,” I told the counterman. Then I pointed at the hot dogs. “And two, with mustard.”

“You’re the astronaut’s man,” said the counterman suddenly, breaking what I thought had been a fourth wall between us.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Don’t give up,” he said, his tone conveying stoical solidarity. “She needs you, man.”

“Thank you.” I shook his hand awkwardly before accepting the hot dogs and coffee.

Oona and I stepped out to brave the wind again. It was then that, without trying, I spotted him, second from the corner in a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries, pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down Eighty-sixth Street, the way we’d come. Biller. Oona and I had likely passed him once already, obliviously bantering, our elbows not linked but jostling together, on our way into the Papaya Czar. Biller’s little card table was loaded edge to edge with trade paperbacks; literary titles, unusual ones, it seemed to me, even as it dawned that they must be Perkus Tooth’s books. Stopped there, my dumb cardboard tray of coffee and dogs between us, I felt a strange guilt that Biller should catch me and Oona together. Perkus was in the dark about us, so far as I knew. (Confronted with a vagrant, my mind also fled to vagrant guilts: that wind-whipped
Times
surely must contain the latest update on
Northern Lights’
damaged tiles, and the space walk the trapped astronauts had scheduled to tend them.) Whether Oona recognized Biller or not I couldn’t guess.