Chronic City (21 page)

“Tell Richard about Marlon Brando, how you, you know, realized he was destined to save New York City from itself.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Richard.

Was it my imagination, or did the vigilante eyeball in Perkus’s head rotate laser beams of hatred at me for this betrayal? I somewhat hated myself, but pushed on. “Perkus told me Brando was the key, but I didn’t quite understand it at the time. Brando and Gnuppets.”

“What does that have to do with anything else?” said Richard, suspicious of us both.

“Maybe Brando owns a chaldron,” I said lamely.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Perkus. He leaned back in his seat, legs crossed ankle-over-knee, bare fringe of leg hairs exposed beneath his pants hem, held up a joint of Ice and his lighter, ready to bring them together but not doing it yet, and despite leaping into a verbal assault, kept his physical comportment cool, apart from that eye. “You’re just staggeringly useless, Chase, to understand what’s right in front of you. You’re even
part
of this culture, albeit a foolish part, and yet you can’t see it, or won’t. The breadth of awareness that’s embodied in a figure like Marlon Brando, the aspects of American possibility that he’s tasted on all our behalves, well, that wouldn’t probably interest you. The fact that for you he’s maybe only some kind of laughingstock, that says it
all
, doesn’t it, about what flourishes in this world of commodities and cartoons. And about what’s exiled, made into a safe caricature, or just outright expunged and forgotten. Brando’s a figure of freedom, just as much as that chaldron we just saw, yes, sure, and fuck you totally, Chase.”

“He’s not a laughingstock to me,” I said, unable to keep a little hurt from my voice. Brando and I were members of the same guild, after all. “He’s our greatest living actor, everybody knows that.”

“He’s not an actor,” said Perkus with stubborn ease.

“He’s not
living,”
commented Richard, but we paid him no attention, not yet. We spoke in full voice, giving no consideration to Georgina Hawkmanaji’s nap. She slumbered on in our midst, tucked pet-like atop that mound of coats, sublimely oblivious.

“I agree with all of what you say.” There was a stubborn part of me, too. “I just hoped you’d explain to Richard about how Brando was coming out of exile soon, to overturn all this plastic stuff. You said he might run for mayor. You wanted me to get in touch with him for you.”

“My mistake,” said Perkus stiffly. “I’ll contact him another way.”

“Listen, guys, not that Marlon Brando wouldn’t make a fucking excellent mayor,” said Richard, chortling in his beard. “But nobody’s contacting him anytime soon, because he’s kaput.” Richard reached out, took the joint and the lighter from Perkus’s hands, and ignited it. “Big fat old corpse, loads of sad tributes, few months ago. Anyway, Arnheim would crush him.”

We stared at Richard.

“Dead. He died. Not my fault. Hey, aren’t we missing an auction, fellas?”

“Marlon Brando isn’t dead,” said Perkus, in a voice shredded with fear.

“Sure he is, even Chase knows, he’s just too polite to mention it, aren’t you, Chase?”

I had no idea either way. But this wasn’t what I wanted for Perkus. Our intervention, barely begun, was already too harsh, our reality check too real. “A world without Marlon Brando in it,” I
began, “would be a far poorer place … so I prefer to believe he’s alive. Of
course
he’s alive.”

“Who’s alive and dead isn’t a matter of belief,” said Richard.

“I remember now, he lives on an island …” I went on, desperately, “Trinidad-in-Tobago … or… Mustique…?”

“Everybody lives on some island,” said Richard. “Marlon Brando lately inhabits the Isle of the Dead. You could look it up.”

“What makes you the authority on who’s inhabiting what island?” said Perkus, now summoning fury to cover his trepidation. “You’ve been looking over your shoulder for months, you only act like you know more than the rest of us, but you’re bluffing.”

“Bluffing about what, exactly?” Richard Abneg’s voice tightened, as it had earlier, when he’d reacted with real discomfort to Perkus’s jibe about arrests and interrogations. I couldn’t say what was at stake between the two of them, yet I felt the room almost seesaw.

“What’s happened to this city,” said Perkus. “The tiger, for instance. You can’t even catch a tiger. For fuck’s sake, you’re
eagle-hunted
, Abneg.”

“Those eagles and that tiger have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”

“Why should I believe you even know?”

“The tiger is… not what people think it is. I’d explain it to you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

The feeble joke seemed to belittle Richard Abneg’s usual ominous aura without quite dispelling it, and so restored a measure of equilibrium to our little company. Perkus’s point hadn’t been refuted, only bargained with. Now Perkus turned in scorn to the computer keyboard, began rattling. “Good idea,” I said, in cheerleader mode. “We don’t want to miss our window of opportunity…”

I moved into the kitchen and swapped the Van Morrison for
Sandy Bull, skipping ahead a few tracks, to where I figured we’d left off. Bull was playing his banjo again, this time a bluegrass version of
Carmina Burana
, calling up a vision of Disney dinosaurs transversing a primordial wasteland. Perfect. The music offered a sense of purpose, of destiny claimed. I wished to lure Perkus back to fugue and, for that matter, join him there myself. Returning, I entered a cloud of expelled Ice fumes, Richard bogarting the joint mercilessly. I plucked it from his lips and passed it to Perkus, who accepted it, puffing distractedly as he typed. “Here,” he said at last, his tone petulant. The new screen began to resolve.

It was my first green chaldron. (Like sexual positions or travel to distant locales, I’d begun semiconsciously cataloguing seminal moments, breakthroughs.) With Richard, I leaned over Perkus’s shoulder and let it seep into my wide-open eyes and heart. Music and smoke swirled to form a vertiginous cone or funnel of attention, as though we lay at the bottom of a deep well and the chaldron had peered over the top to gaze down at us. The top bid was already sixteen thousand dollars. Three-quarters of an hour remained.

“Christ, look at the price tag on that one,” said Richard.

“The green ones are rarer,” said Perkus. “Incidentally, Marlon Brando is alive.”

“Move,” said Richard.

“What?”

“Get up,” he said. “Get out of your chair, let me.”

“We can’t bid,” said Perkus. “It’s over my PayPal limit. Let’s just enjoy this one for what it is.”

“Step aside.” Richard shucked his tuxedo jacket onto the floor, fumbled off his cuff links and thrust them into a pocket, then shoved his sleeves up carelessly and plunked himself in Perkus’s chair and commandeered the keyboard, tackling the Internet as if it
were a basin full of sudsy dishes. Perkus passed the joint to me and dithered into the kitchen, his marionette limbs twitching.

“Not only is Marlon Brando dead,” Richard muttered into the screen, “but we’re going to land one of these mofos tonight. Get me the Hawkman’s purse.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s got pearl bead things, it’s right under her ass.”

“Are you
sure?”

“She’d want us to, Chase. Believe me, she can afford it. Go!”

Under Richard’s guidance I dug out Georgina’s neat, pale-calfskin wallet and, skirting the temptation to learn what wonders I’d find browsing there, handed him her American Express card. The Hawkman never stirred. Richard, typing madly, flinging oaths at the recalcitrant dial-up connection, brought up a fresh window, and fit Georgina’s name and digits into online forms. View of the chaldron was blocked, yet I was sure I could still sense its vitality leaching around the screen’s boundary. I snuffled at the soggy last inch of joint, waiting. Perkus still hung in the kitchen. Then Richard switched back, and it awed us again. Perkus, perhaps alert to the intake of my breath, snooped around the doorway’s edge, sullen but tempted. I watched as Richard, under a new name, UpYours1, committed twenty-five thousand of the Hawkman’s dollars to purchase of a vase, that ceramic that was more than a ceramic and yet also so much less: a rumor, a chimera, a throb, a map. We had ten minutes to learn whether it was ours. I had a feeling if it was that it would be living, necessarily, in Georgina’s penthouse apartment.

“Now, look.” Richard conjured up another screen. “We’re online, we don’t have to wonder about these things.” He narrated aloud from Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia entry,
“Final years and death… notoriety, troubled family life, obesity attracted more attention than his
late acting career… earned reputation for being difficult on the set
… Okay, skip all that, here,
On July 1, 2004, Brando died in the hospital … age of eighty… the cause of his death intentionally withheld… lawyer citing privacy concerns… cremated, ashes scattered partly in Tahiti and partly in Death Valley
—” I leaned in over Richard’s shoulder, wanting anything now but to confirm it and strand Perkus in a Brando-less landscape, yet inescapably curious. At that moment Richard hurried back to the auction, to see how Georgina’s thousands were holding up—or rather he tried to, and the computer screen went dark. “Fuck!” he yelped.

We turned to find Perkus leaning out his kitchen’s back window, a chill wind whistling in around him. “What’s wrong?” he asked when he pulled his head in and slammed it shut.

“Your computer crashed or something,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I heard Biller. You had more than two windows open, didn’t you? Well, that’s what crashes it.”

“Did … you hear… what Richard was—”

“What?”

“Never mind.” We stood back while Perkus hurriedly restarted the computer and chased a new connection. Richard, beside himself at the delay, crashed around in the kitchen, igniting another joint’s tip on the burner of Perkus’s stove. Sandy Bull’s banjo urged evolution forward. Richard returned in a new cloud of smoke, waving the smoldering Ice in my direction, and I partook, but maybe we were stoned enough already, or too stoned, yes, unmistakably we were horrendously stoned, our mission curdled, our new Coalition of the Chaldron singed at the edges. Was it worse to tell Perkus that Brando was dead or not? I couldn’t decide. Richard Abneg’s distress was tangible, too, his gloating dynamism sapped by so many sweaty compromises with eagles, tigers, mayors. A dozing Hawkman no longer
prize enough, despite any resemblance. The green chaldron was not only more costly, it was ruining us, exposing our underbellies, whether we were privileged to pay its ransom or not. And now there was no Marlon Brando to redeem us, only chaldrons to salve loss of chaldrons. Perkus brought up the page. The auction bragged a bid of twenty-six thousand. Richard had been topped. Three minutes remained. I felt a green stab in my heart.

Unspeaking now, Richard scrambled to bid. He got it up to thirty-four thousand, a heroic labor of blunt hairy fingers, tooth-grinding jaw visible even through his beard. His white shirt was widely stained under the arms and stank fiercely. The effort took two minutes, more. At forty-eight seconds another veiled bidder drove it to thirty-six thousand, then another, with five seconds to spare, took the jewel at an even forty grand. I think we all three groaned as if gutshot, but it was well covered by Sandy Bull’s thrumming music. Georgina Hawkmanaji then punctuated our stunned silence with a long whining exhalation, gleaning disappointment in her sleep. I examined the page, the image there, for any trace of psychedelic vigor I could draw on for repair, but nothing reached me now. Perkus, likely familiar with the effect, spared us, reaching past Richard’s numbed hands to click on a box and close the window.

The convocation found its end there, human fragments amid the ashtrays and crumpled rolling papers, Mallomar crumbs, shed evening clothes. The three of us left Georgina in the dark with the screen-saver raccoons, and retreated to the place where we used to thrive, a month or so before, around Perkus’s kitchen table. Perkus changed the music, to a band called Souled American, and I didn’t know whether it was my imagination or the band’s special distinction that they sounded as unspooled as we felt, the bass player and guitarist and singer each absently mumbling their contribution seemingly with no regard for the others.

It was after Perkus fished out a dusty, half-filled bottle of single-malt Scotch, twelve-year-old Caol Ila, something Richard had left behind some ancient evening before I’d made their acquaintance, and we began sipping the amber poison from juice glasses, that Richard, uncorking some deeper material from himself as if in reply to the booze, began his disquisition on the tiger. At the start his tone was as diffuse as Souled American’s music, so that I almost might have imagined he was singing along. “It’s pretty goddamn funny that everyone calls it a tiger in the first place,” he said. “Even those of us who know better have fallen into the habit … a testament to what Arnheim likes to call the power of popular delusions and the madness of crowds…” Perhaps this was Richard’s way of consoling us with distraction, as Perkus had before. Yet his words took on the urgency of a confession. “That it’s a problem I’d never deny. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, but it’s become partly my responsibility to deal with it, that’s fine, it’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be good at…” Neither of us had spoken, let alone challenged him, yet it was as if Richard were negotiating, to persuade not only Perkus and myself but whole invisible balconies of skeptics. “When the Transit Authority began researching ways to build the Second Avenue line, you see, they brought in the engineers who’d built the Channel tunnel, in England—I mean between England and France. They’d built these machines that went underground and burrowed through bedrock. They’d had good luck with them, but ours went a little out of control—”