Chronic City (17 page)

“No.”

“But what’s Perkus himself like?” said Maud.

“He’s, I don’t know, fairly
ellipsistic,”
I said.

“Oh, really?” she bluffed.

“I imagine that’s how he’d strike you, yes.”

“I’d love to meet him.”

“Let me see what I can do.” There wasn’t a chance I’d do anything to bring this about. I’d sooner ask my agent (who wasn’t exactly pining for a call from me) to see if he could put me in touch with Marlon Brando’s people.

At that moment I felt Sharon Spencer’s stockinged toes flex
against the inner curve of my thigh, then slither beyond, toward my crotch. I didn’t move either to discourage or encourage this maneuver, took it rather as a neutral element in an environment already suffocatingly sensual. Given a pillow at my setting I could have begun napping at the table, with the warmth of Sharon’s instep now cradling my penis. Her foot’s adventure might not mean so much more, to either of us, than the redundant hors d’oeuvres that had slipped down our throats without our even pausing to hear their descriptions. Likely it represented less the divulging of some occult agenda for our lunch date than a local tactical response to what she’d found to be a dull stretch in the table talk.

Anyway, this lunch encounter had made me certain in my present plans. For it was evident Richard Abneg hadn’t forgotten about Perkus Tooth, despite Richard’s recent absence from the scene at Eighty-fourth Street, and no matter his involvements with eagles or Georgina Hawkmanaji’s toilet. Like me, Abneg bore the matter of Tooth around with him wherever he went, and talked about him, too. He might not be up-to-date with chaldrons and other catastrophes, but he could be brought up-to-date. He’d rise to the occasion of my planned intervention. I’d only need to find and rally him.

CHAPTER
Seven

I find I want to
get this description right, or at least a little righter. With the possible exception of my own face in the bathroom mirror, the church spire outside my window is the sole thing I look at deliberately, consciously, every single day. Yet I glance in its direction as if in doubt, as though the spire’s memory is only a rumor between me and myself, and one of the two of us doesn’t completely trust the other. When my eyes do confirm the church’s actuality
(buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena)
, the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page. If I’m elsewhere, I have an easy name for the thing: a church spire, a few blocks away, and, sporadically, a flock of wheeling birds. When I look, however, language dies.

Against a white sky the stones of the church are gray-brown. They’re smutched, like scraped toast. Against blue, the stones reveal an earthiness. Sienna? Umber? In sunset, the church nearly looks blue. Darker stones are bricked at right angles, lines of mortar visible
between them, while lighter stones form the tight-jointed and apparently seamless triangular spires which cluster, one atop the other, each crowned with a small stone cross, nesting toward the single highest cross at the peak. The long A-frame roof is dusky black, not shingled but smooth, and lined with a ridged ornamental top and gutter, both a shade of copper-gone-green like that of the Statue of Liberty. Windows framed in lighter stone take the shape of a snub, rounded cross. (A Celtic cross, possibly? Or do I just mean it reminds me of a shamrock?) Other windows, in the smaller spires, are formed in clusters of three upright lengths, with arched tops. I’ve never seen anyone in any of those windows. I doubt they open. You’d think they ought to be colored glass, and perhaps they are, but they appear black.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description:
Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress
, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.

One day recently I glanced out in the spire’s direction and was shocked to see a bird passing, just at that moment, quite near the glass of my window. Not one of my birds (or perhaps I should say “the church’s birds”), but a migrating duck, its Concorde-like shape unmistakable even if I hadn’t seen a hundred drab paintings of winging ducks on the walls of cheap restaurants. The duck flapped in one direction only, intently passing through, so quick it was apparitional. Then, followed by others, twenty or perhaps thirty ducks,
none so close to my window as the first, yet all flapping doggedly through the margin between my building and the Dorffl Tower. The ducks seemed a kind of eruption, a happening, yet they were too fixedly themselves, too plainly on a natural mission, to be a harbinger of anything but ducks. I yearned for the group to waver, to turn and linger, to sweep through my sky space a second time at least, but in a moment they were gone, another ordinary mystery, one discrete plane of existence momentarily intersecting with another, under my obtuse witness.

Today the tower’s flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot’s lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he’d woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: “Paranoia is a flower in the brain.” Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes—the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus
dreamed sentences
to begin with). Yet I hadn’t understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain’s flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.

CHAPTER
Eight

It struck Richard Abneg
that the appropriation of certain buildings—great museums and libraries, music halls, public atriums—for the throwing of benefit galas, those gatherings of social and monetary forces, dressed in their human costumes of ball gown and black tie, to dine at circular tables of ten or twelve, had the effect of seeming to reveal the provenance and rightful ownership of such spaces. Ten trillion schoolchildren might have tramped through these corridors, peered into spooky vitrines and dioramas to contemplate exotic tableaux frozen within: Serengeti lions, emperor penguins, a polar seal writhing in an orca’s jaws. Richard had been one of those children himself, ogling this museum where bland informational placards barely veiled the revelation of morbid oddities, of Barnum voyeurism. But the mystery of a building as grand as this one was as deep as anything locked in the tormented gazes of the taxidermied dead.

To whom does New York City belong? Not to schoolchildren. Not to the citizen shuffling cowed and amazed across marble floors in the Frick or Cooper-Hewitt, or paging bug-like through some
tome under the green lampshades of the Forty-second Street reading rooms. Money communes after hours in these places, after the turnstiles have been stilled. Money shows itself only when it cares to. Mostly it lurks instead in the high prosceniums and fitted-rosewood ceilings, the broad granite staircases, the fitted-veneer mosaic archways, and as well in the fitted tuxedos and fur coats slumbering in walk-in closets, the strings of pearls and antique diamond cuff links biding time in their felt-lined drawers. Then comes one morning in the mail the engraved invitation, the stamped reply card, with boxes to check, indicating numbers of seats at two thousand a pop, or the whole table at ten grand.

Richard Abneg loathed the fucking galas. He persistently rented his tuxedos, from Eisenstadt & Sons on Fifty-fourth, a musty theatrical institution, with framed autographed glossies of celebrity customers dating back to Ray Milland. By now for the accumulated sum paid to Eisenstadt he surely could have bought ten tuxes on the installment plan. Yet there was a certain liberty in renting. One of the city’s truths he’d let slip through his fingers, right about the time he scrabbled together a down payment on the Seventy-eighth Street three-bedroom, now beset with eagles. Liberty in renting, greater liberty in squatting. He’d prefer to regard himself as squatting in the tuxedo, if squatting expensively.

Georgina Hawkmanaji had sprung for these seats at the Manhattan Reification Society’s annual fund-raiser, in the room any kid in the city would know as the one with the blue whale strung overhead. This evening being at least in part a tentative experiment in appearing in public together. Indeed, the society’s guest list proved an intersection of their worlds, though by definition a gala was more the Hawkman’s vibe than Richard’s. His tux itched at the crotch. Better update his measurements in Eisenstadt & Sons’ primitive card-file system. Or maybe Georgina had given him crabs—hah! At
Hunter College he’d battled them for a shameful semester, his hairy body their dream refuge. Shaved his pubes and the fiends packed off to his navel and the tuft above his ass, a little allegory of urban renewal and displacement. Well, he’d pay that price happily, that was the humble truth. He hadn’t fucked like this since his Hunter days, either, since Marta Tristman, with whom in a sweaty, fly-infested Barnard dorm one famous July he’d once managed intercourse five times in a twenty-four-hour period. The whole month had been a marathon, he and Marta aching and giggling in their pot haze and falling asleep for ten hours on her perfectly filthy futon.

Not since then for Richard Abneg, nothing like that, not if he was honest. The insatiable Hawkman debased herself elegantly to him night after night, in positions and attitudes the involuntary recollection of which he found overriding his senses throughout the days between. For instance, now, here, at the gala. At two that same morning he’d had Georgina swinging in a rope chair she’d had installed at his whimsical suggestion, hung from a bolted hook on her ceiling, her legs spilling over the sides of the mesh seat in which her splendid bottom lay helpless to his savage ministrations. The situation was wildly odd and erotic, Georgina’s hands bound behind her as she rotated in the squeaking device, head turned courteously to one side, ever and absolutely the aristocrat no matter how fiercely he worked to defile her. He’d heard her murmuring as she climaxed, “The best, the best, the best …”

The best!

Remembering it, Richard’s crotch throbbed, grew hotter, the itching more intense. He reached down once to work the tux’s fabric loose around his testicles, then tried to refocus on the dais, the society’s oxygenless sequence of self-congratulatory speeches, the elaborate buildup to this year’s winner of the Dorffl-Huxley Medal, whatever. Only worse thing would be to be ensnared in their table’s
mummified conversation, wives with hair precariously piled, exposing necks burdened with bling, husbands all in identical tuxes, with nostrils nicely groomed, gray sideburns and temples expertly carved. Richard Abneg’s hair lapped his ears—that might qualify as his last stand. If I’m ever trimmed so precisely around the curve of my ear let me die in my sleep. Let the eagles pluck out my eyes.

With his fork Richard nudged the remains of the two-thousand-dollar pork medallion and scalloped potatoes facing him like a cameo on his navy-blue plate, sickened at what the price tag could have bought instead. He didn’t so much have in mind hundreds of cleft-palate surgeries to brighten the prospects of African orphans, no. Richard had begged off such mathematics long ago. Worlds couldn’t be seen to balance as on a seesaw; their relation was tangential, irreducible, oblique. Dollars resided intrinsically here in Manhattan. Their transfer elsewhere was only a mystical wish, as unlikely as the wish to see the gala’s overdressed constituency suddenly swap existences with the long-dead dolphins and ocelots and forest gorillas trapped within the museum’s glass cases.

Two days before, the steward at Arc d’X had accompanied their young, coltish waitress back to Richard and Georgina’s table, to explain in the place of the frightened, voiceless girl that the credit card company had not only refused Richard’s card for payment, it had commanded her to immediately scissor the thing into pieces, a command she’d followed. Doing so was contrary to the restaurant’s policy, but certainly Mr. Abneg could understand how in the girl’s deference to authority she’d obeyed the voice on the telephone. The quartered plastic card had been returned to him with this apology, in a Ziploc bag. Georgina had laid down her own card to pay for the meal, and treated the episode as an endearing joke, tipping the waitress unusually well for her trouble. But Richard was still without a replacement from the company that had canceled the card, his last. Georgina’s
four-thousand-dollar subsidy of this glum evening could have repaired his credit rating. Richard’s embarrassment at thinking this, the one thing he’d never say, only amplified his rage at Georgina’s sacred obliviousness.

At that moment she touched his arm. Their neighbors at either side stared at him with polite, puzzled expressions.

“Darling,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I think it is your cell phone.”

Well, duh. Logically nobody else here would have a snippet of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” seeping from their tuxedo pocket. Richard knew the ringtone typified his strategy, a strategy also tipped by his beard and the hair overlapping his ears, to festoon himself with harmless signifiers of his past selves. The problem was that through endless repetition the song had become inaudible to him, providing only a mild affront in certain mixed companies, like this one. He should have set it to vibrate, but was grateful he hadn’t. Fuck it, he was
important
, the mayor’s fixer, not merely here as the Hawkman’s hirsute man-candy. Let their tablemates feel the urgency of his business, an urgency they’d never know in their own coddled existences, that was unless the sky truly fell on all of them. Still, Richard imagined, the Manhattan Reification Society and its constituency here would manage to shore up their bubble of bemusement, of obliviousness. Not-knowing being the supreme luxury. As for Richard, he bore the heavy duty of partly-knowing. So he flipped open the phone and stepped away from the table, raising up a faux-apologetic hand and scowling his seriousness to Georgina as he left.