Chronic City (19 page)

“What is that crap?” said Richard distractedly. A veteran of Perkus’s enthusiasms, he’d obviously begun readying himself for some esoteric disclosure on the computer screen. The music was, I hoped, the first clue that we’d migrated out of the usual range.

“It’s Sandy Bull,” said Perkus, not turning from the screen. He’d called up eBay, and now tapped Refresh, so the page blinked and began redrawing itself. “So, Chase’s acupuncturist was onto something, actually, there
is
some kind of tonality that resonates with the limbic system, and Sandy Bull’s guitar has got it in spades. You’ll see, it opens you right up to the chaldron. Chase explained to you about chaldrons, didn’t he?”

“Oh, sure,” said Richard, unflappably mocking. “All about chaldrons and acupuncture and limbic tonality in spades. You know me, Perkus, that’s some of my favorite stuff.”

“Be polite,” said Georgina softly.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Perkus breathlessly. “You’ll see. You have to be listening to the Sandy Bull and high on Ice when you see the chaldron, at least for maximum effect.”

“I’m in your hands.”

Well, we were certainly high. The four of us seemed to throb there where we’d gathered in Perkus’s dim lair, Georgina gracefully
flung across Richard’s lap, long legs and elbows askew, hands gathered beneath her chin, Richard grunting slightly as he shifted her weight around trying to get vantage past her shoulder, the building’s radiators cackling and whining as they beat back the chill seeping through window seams, the four of us like the chambers of a collective beating heart, pulsing with expectancy despite Richard’s congenital cynicism or my heretical doubt. Perkus, the fugitive ecstatic, had infected us with zeal again, the critic’s illness. Who knew, there might be something limbic in the music as well, only I wasn’t sure I knew what the word meant. Just at the instant this occurred to me Perkus got the finished image of a chaldron, all the pixels now smoothed around the edges, centered on-screen.

There were words bordering that screen, I suppose—text with a seller’s description, the latest bids on the item in question, also eBay emblems and advertisements, sidebars and rulers, and a margin of Perkus’s computer-desktop bordering those. None of it pertained, no more than the dun-colored plastic casing of Perkus’s monitor, or the dusty volumes on the shelves behind the table where the computer perched. The glowing peach-colored chaldron smashed all available frames or contexts, gently burning itself through our retinas to hover in our collective mind’s eye, a beholding that transcended optics. Ordinary proportions and ratios were upturned, the chaldron an opera pouring from a flea’s mouth, an altarpiece bigger than the museum that contained it. The only comparison in any of our hearts being, of course,
love
.

Georgina Hawkmanaji leaned a little into the glow. Perkus scooted aside to invite her nearer, a gesture of munificence now that we saw what it was worth to have his privileged seat. How could we have come so late to this knowledge? Sandy Bull’s guitar, which a moment before had been a nagging schoolyard taunt, some universal
nyah-nyah
whine, now catalyzed and enlivened our desire for the chaldron, become less music than a kind of genial electricity, a subliminal correlative to our longing.

It was Georgina who placed the first words into this higher silence, her voice the first out of our joint trance. I think Perkus and Richard would have agreed she properly spoke for us all, her femininity and reserve the only appropriate thing, her trace of accent, formerly laughable, now a nod to the powerful essence of
elsewhere
radiating from the artifact. Our voices would have been too gruff and shattering to offer up.

“It is beautiful,” she almost whispered.

What were we going to do, contradict her? There was nothing to add. We were silent.

“A door,” Georgina added, even more completely under her breath.

I misunderstood and, not wishing her to be embarrassed, said gently, “I adore it, too.”

She shook her head, never taking her eyes off the screen. “I feel it is a kind of
door
, this chaldron. One goes
through
it, to another place. I think I shall never completely return.”

I myself wasn’t positive I’d glimpsed the other place the chaldron evoked, yet Georgina Hawkmanaji’s term stuck. I couldn’t doubt the chaldron as a
door
, even if I hung somewhat at that door’s threshold. But any such minor reservation found no voice, for if I was certain of anything it was that though the chaldron must have somehow been
made
—whether by the hands of some individual human genius, a Mozart of the potter’s wheel, or by a machine or assembly line, was therefore some sacred accident of commerce—its effect was to make constructed things, theories and arguments, cities and hairstyles, attitudes, sentences, all seem tawdry, impoverished, lame.
Door
was good enough. I didn’t need to form a better idea, a
better name. The chaldron had pardoned me of that burden. It possessed
thingliness
, yet was wholly outside the complex of
thing-relations
(these peculiar terms appeared spontaneously in my thoughts, I couldn’t have said how).

“I… want to …
fuck
it,” said Richard.

“Richard!” said Georgina.

He pretzeled his arms around her waist, fingertips tickling high at her ribs, beneath her neat breasts, and ground upward against her from his seat. “I mean it makes me want to make love to you, my sweet!” Georgina squirmed happily even as she reddened with shame, her eyes wide. The atmosphere was helplessly giddy, we all streamed in the chaldron’s light, like hippies in some LSD mud puddle. “I mean it makes me want to dance with you, my darling Hawkman…” Richard lifted them both from the chair, still pinning her around her waist. They shimmied together to one side of us, swaying to Sandy Bull’s droning chords like the last couple on a prom floor, Richard clinging to Georgina, growling endearments with his beard crushed into her long, bared neck. The room flooded with their animal presence, and when Perkus turned from the chaldron I anticipated his disapproval at this outbreak of the corporeal in his dusty mental kingdom. Instead he grinned at them, another blessing that seemed to emanate from the chaldron. I grinned, too. Seeing them dance, I thought of myself and Perkus cavorting, months earlier, and Perkus’s mad declaration that I was his body and he was my brain. Now, immersion in the chaldron’s light refreshed this notion of a gestalt identity alive among us. The chaldron’s door might open to a place where selves dissolved and merged. Anything was possible.

Perkus ushered us ever so delicately back onto earthly ground. This was an
eBay
page, after all. “So, I put in a reserve bid of eighteen hundred dollars. As you can see, that was surpassed ten minutes
ago. It’s already up to twenty-six, and there’s still more than fifteen minutes left.”

“Two thousand … six hundred … dollars?” I blithered.

“Yeah, they’ve gotten a lot more expensive,” said Perkus, not without satisfaction. Why shouldn’t the value of such a thing slide upward—why not a hundred thousand, or a million?

Richard quit dancing. “What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t have the winning bid?” He and Georgina crowded back into their one seat, as if the music had stopped in a game of musical chairs.

“Nope,” said Perkus.

“Can you afford to stay in?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Perkus with a sweet sadness. “I couldn’t afford the eighteen hundred, but it doesn’t matter. I won’t win.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Richard Abneg furiously. Spittle from his lips arced onto the computer screen. “Make a bid, Perkus. I’ll pay you back when you nail it.”

“Sure, sure,” said Perkus. His own fever was expended, now that he’d guided us into the chaldron’s embrace. He was the mellow proprietor of tantalizing glimpses, we the sideshow customers, looking for a slot for our nickels, frantic to widen the peepshow’s aperture. “There’s no hurry, the action’s all in the last minute or so, you’ll see.”

“Bid, bid,”
grunted Richard, almost jostling Georgina off his lap.

“Sure, pick a number, how much do you want to see them pay?” said Perkus. “There’s a certain pleasure in driving the bids up.”

“I want us to
win,”
said Richard.

“Of course you do,” said Perkus delicately. “I used to feel the same way.” We’d all leaned in, seeking reconnection with what now seemed such a dire commodity, feeling breathless at what could be taken away from us, a thing we hadn’t even known to want a few minutes before. Chaldrons circulated in a zero-sum system, and those
not winners were certainly losers. How could we have been so naïve? It was as if for a sweet instant we’d forgotten death existed, and Perkus had had to break the news.

“What do you mean, ‘used to’?”

“I’ve come to see that it’s enough to put on the music, smoke some Ice, and, you know, bid on them. Just that feeling is enough. It gets me through, knowing that it’s out there. Increasingly, I think that’s what they’re
for
. It’s like an indirect thing, who knows if it would even work if you had it right in front of you.”

“Screw that,” said Richard. “I want one in my
house.”

“You don’t have a house anymore,” I pointed out.

“Perhaps Richard means
my
house,” said Georgina, teasingly.

“Okay, let’s give it a shot,” said Perkus equably, his fingers on the keys. Now he was our arbiter of the reasonable. “How much do we want to go in for? I’m warning you, coming in this early we’re probably just forcing the price up for the eventual winner—even if it’s somehow us. But you’ll chip in if we nail it, right?” He appeared to find our eagerness somehow funny. His temper recalled, of all things, Strabo Blandiana’s bedside manner with his needles.

“Go in hard, stick it to them, make them think twice,” said Richard. “Five grand. We’ll pay.”

“Go ahead, Perkus,” I heard myself say. “Do it, please.” Meanwhile the chaldron just went on shining its strange light on our absurd lusts, egging us on and shaming us all at once.

“It’s a good investment,” said Richard, in his crude way reading my mind exactly. “That thing’s obviously worth ten times that much. If it’s trading like this on eBay, for fuck’s sake, imagine what it would bring if it were handled
right
. It should be for sale at Sotheby’s.”

Georgina Hawkmanaji gripped Richard’s arm. “You wouldn’t dare speak of reselling it.”

“No, no, I’m just saying we should blow these small-time operators out of the fucking soup. Bid already, Perkus.”

“I am.” He entered the five thousand as a reserve bid, to be allocated in hundred-dollar jumps, so when he checked the bid list his on-screen name—Brando12—now appeared at the top, bearing the current leading offer of thirty-one hundred. Someone else lurking as we were must have already offered a reserve to the tune of three thousand. We all four breathed at a different rate, breathed at all for the first time really, since learning the ghostly ceramic was destined for some other hands than ours.

Only Richard wasn’t satisfied.
“Why doesn’t it say five grand?”

“We don’t want to pay more than we have to,” I said, thinking it needed explaining.

“To hell with that. I want them to feel who they’re up against!” As if to confirm that our rivals were simultaneously more pathetic and more expert than ourselves, the bidders we’d topped were named Chaldronlover6 and Crazy4Chaldrons. That they seemed to have no other life confirmed that we deserved the chaldron more, yet this was no consolation, for not to have a chaldron was to have no life at all.

“Spoken like a representative of the Arnheim administration,” said Perkus. “Maybe you should have the other bidders all arrested. Then you can seize the chaldron as evidence.”

“No,” said Richard, with a husky note of urgency, even terror, in his voice, as if Perkus’s taunts outlined some real prospect, one within Richard’s scope. “This isn’t for… them. This is for
us.”

“Yes, for us,” said Georgina, almost singing the words. Her tone, balm to Richard’s fury, was at the same time beseeching, a prayer or invocation over the battle we’d entered.

“We’ll keep the chaldron at my place,” I said, thinking ahead.
“Seeing as how I live sort of at the midpoint of our various apartments. We can build some kind of special display case—”

“Perhaps this marvelous pottery ought to spend time in each of our homes,” said Georgina.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to treat it like a child in a divorce,” said Perkus.

“We need
four,”
said Richard.

“We don’t even have
one
yet,” said Perkus.

We spoke wildly, one eye on the clock ticking down on-screen, feeling invisible enemies crawling nearer to our prize with each silent digital heartbeat. Maybe the music and Ice were wearing off, maybe we weren’t entirely worthy, maybe we weren’t remotely worthy, anyway somehow the chaldron seemed to recede before us, no less potent but more distant, as if preparing us for goodbyes. The chaldron wasn’t to blame, we’d hardly hold it against that pale magnanimous container, but it seemed to wish to ease us toward an inevitable farewell, toward heartbreak. We were going to have to try to pretend we were content to be just friends. Perkus refreshed the page. The current bid was at five thousand and fifty. Perkus checked the history—the bidder was Crazy4Chaldrons. The auction closed in four minutes.

“Who are these fucking fucks?” said Richard.

“Tax-paying citizens like yourself,” said Perkus impartially.

“You don’t know for a fact that I pay taxes,” said Richard. “Raise on them, hurry up.”

“Five thousand, one hundred?” I suggested.

“Fifty-dollar increments is Tinkertoy stuff,” said Richard. “That’s how I know we’re going to kick the ass of these clowns. Make it fifty-five hundred.”

“Neither of these two is going to win it,” Perkus predicted,
even as he entered the new bid. “One of the really big players will be coming in any second now.”