Chronic City (34 page)

Your lost one,
Janice

CHAPTER
Seventeen

The first globs
had begun drifting to earth three hours before the mayor’s party, not so much flakes as frost-spun jigsaw chunks rotating themselves into view as if an invisible examiner were hoping to puzzle them together on arrival. None of these were pure six-pointed specimens, those famously symmetrical and fingerprint-unique skic-halet-wallpaper darlings, instead rough amalgams of three or four or six that had clotted together somewhere above the city, assembling into eerie contours, snow-cartoon images of docking spacecraft or German coffeemakers or shattered Greek statuary. This advance wave melted so smoothly it was as though ghosts slid through the wet pavement’s screen to some realm below. Then, abruptly, the stuff quadrupled and began to lodge, the ghosts denied entry to the subterranean world, too many to welcome there, their bodies heaping uselessly against the former portal.

Then suddenly the drifting globs had gone torrential, bidding to replace the windless air itself entirely with white material, undertaking a crazy campaign to outline every contour in Manhattan, each sill and rearview mirror, each knuckle of crossing-signal plumbing,
each midget newspaper dispenser, all the things too dumb to scurry through the cold. Perkus and I, we’d dashed from our taxicab, which had plodded its way down Park Avenue to Sixty-fourth Street, its tires chewing along the echo-deafened streets. The steps of the wide, curved stoop of the mayor’s town house had been scraped and salted; our footing confident, we took them two at a time, eager to get out of the suffocating clots of white that swarmed into our noses and clung to our lashes, and though we’d both have denied it, each buzzing with adrenaline at the occasion of the party. Perkus, the practical one for once, wore a black toque decorated with a knit patch depicting the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, something likely exhumed from deep in his collection, its wool everywhere pilled and knobbed, like a scalp showing beginnings of dreadlocks. I’d had to pray he’d stuff the hat into his coat pocket the moment we were through the door. For myself, I’d been vain about my haircut, left my head bare, and so had meltage trickling through my sideburns and behind my ears for the party’s first half hour.

Now we mingled in the mayor’s vast parlor, a scene of glowing golds and browns against monumental windows showing blizzard, backdrops blue and silent as aquarium views. We’d entered into a scrum of arrival, another type of blizzard, guests busy emptying flutes of Prosecco and vodka shots and trays of tiny sushi and blini shopped among us by the catering staff, all of us tabulating faces we knew and others we recognized, all awed beneath a thirty-foot-high plaster scrollwork ceiling painted and lit to resemble buttercream icing on an inverted wedding cake. Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji stood in one corner pleasantly receiving admiration as though they themselves were the gathering’s hosts, Richard in his renovated elegance, shined shoes where he’d have ordinarily flown Converse high-tops as his freak flag, even his beard trimmed closer than I’d seen it, exposing a disconcerting chinlessness; Georgina
lordly and tall, her dress an unrevealing cone of black, her silver earrings and piled hair imparting aspects of Gothic Christmas tree. I also saw, at a first survey, Strabo Blandiana (no surprise, he knew everyone), Naomi Kandel, Steve Martin, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, David Blaine, and Richard’s co-op-board enemy and my sitcom mom, Sandra Saunders Eppling, accompanied by a graying distinguished man who was not Senator Eppling. Mayor Arnheim had decorated his party with a cultural crowd, for the holidays. I couldn’t find Oona and Laird Noteless, but my search was compromised by trying to keep tabs on my own “date.”

Perkus had treated us to the airing of another secret costume for the occasion, a purple velvet suit, the velvet either intentionally “crushed” or badly stored and in need of pressing—I really didn’t know which—over a crimson shirt and matching tie. I thought it would be simple to follow the purple velvet, but Perkus flitted after someone or something, his thin shoulders vanishing sideways through some brief entranceway through the crowd that shut to me as simply as subway doors. I’d lost him. Assorted pleasantries imposed themselves, a round of reintroductions that wouldn’t make the next round any less necessary, followed hard and fast by those evermore-dire condolences for Janice’s sickness. I gulped Prosecco, too much right off the bat, trying to keep from screaming in their faces that though I appreciated their good wishes
I
didn’t have cancer, personally—that in fact
every possible human tumor
was geographically nearer to us, here where we stood, than Janice’s, and didn’t they find that odd? And incidentally, had they seen a doctor themselves anytime lately?

I remembered my vows, though, to disburse a field of love to enclose all within my range, which certainly should include the walls of this parlor. Oona might be watching, after all. So I gathered their well-wishes and their sadness to me, took their hands in mine,
and thanked them. If you plumb into a person’s eyes at an occasion like this one, you can usually spook them in a moment or two, and be done. The trick was not to try to break the circuit too soon but to wait, until they’d had their tiny fill. Trying to manage the migration of my gaze elsewhere from the persons it should be attending, I felt like Perkus even as I searched for him, an acolyte to his brand of double and wandering vision.

A young man in a tuxedo and obnoxiously slicked-back hair was suddenly before me, putting a finger in my chest.

“Chase!”

“Yes?” Now I recognized but couldn’t place him.

“How do you like the script?”

He was one of that pair of “producers” that had tried, so long ago, to enlist me in their dream project. The role of my lifetime, they’d promised.

“I didn’t get it,” I said.

“I love it, you didn’t
get it
. There’s nothing
to
get, Chase!”

I felt irritated, even beyond my anxiousness that Perkus had slipped free of my caretaking. “I mean it never arrived, I never received it.”

“That’s a good one, you’re a riot, Chase. Just keep on doing what you’re doing—”

Then I heard Perkus’s voice, in full harangue, rising out of the gregarious babble: “…rock critics are like little animals that live in holes… they defend themselves by scraping up fortifications of dirt and shit and regurgitated food …” Someone must have introduced him as a former famous
Rolling Stone
columnist, so Perkus was elaborating his standard defense. I tipped up on my toes to locate him. Perkus stood not far off, his back to me. He addressed his spiel to Mayor Arnheim, who looked to be listening. It was the first time I’d seen the mighty billionaire in person. I tried to believe he was nothing
more than another graying operative in a suit, but like other truly powerful men Arnheim seemed a bit of gravitational sinkhole, a place where other men’s hopes had gone to die. His eyes and teeth gleamed with bonus luminosity, his stance and posture arranged to support an extra density. Arnheim might in truth be many men crushed together, like a diamond.

“Excuse me,” I said to the wolfish producer. “I’ve got to go … over there.”

“Talk later?”

“You bet,” I said to brush him off.

I elbowed in toward the mayor, in time to collide with a shortish thirtyish attractive blonde in tense eyeglasses, who though well dressed seemed unfestive, no guest. I could feel agendas humming around her head, as though she were checking prioritized lists in the very air. Though her glance sliced me into a pie chart, I assumed we were on the same side here, had come to chaperone and disentangle. I’d be happy to get my introduction some other time. I edged Perkus from the mayor just as the blonde, recovering from our little tangle, power-pointed Arnheim in another direction.

“Come with me, my little purple friend,” I said. “Help me find Oona.”

Perkus held an emptied Prosecco flute—a first warning I should heed, since he always refused Richard Abneg’s fine red wines, and I doubted he could hold the stuff—and now waved it overhead as if toasting or blessing the whole crowd. His mood was already electric, though it might have nothing to do with meeting the mayor. “I’ll help you find Oona, sure,” he said. “But after that we have to go talk to Russ Grinspoon. I just saw him come in.”

“Russ Grinspoon the singer? He’s here?” I thought of Grinspoon as the lamer half of a well-forgotten seventies smooth-rock duo, Grinspoon and Hale. I was surprised Perkus much cared.

“He’s Manhattan’s arts commissioner,” said Perkus chidingly. “You of all people should know that. He’s at Arnheim’s elbow at the gala openings of museum wings and restored opera houses and so on.”

“Is that how you see me?” I asked. “A hack among hacks?” A snippet of “The Night Takes Back What You Said,” the act’s early, Dylanesque hit and one tolerable song, ran now through my brain. Grinspoon was the guy doing the high lilting harmonies, not the “genius” one who’d written the lyrics—sort of the girl in the act, I’d always thought. But then by some lights I was probably the girl in Insteadman and Tooth. “I resent your notion of me as a specialist in superficial occasions.” No tone of irony was enough to secure my protest, not here.

Perkus was after bigger game than my pride, anyhow. “Forget what you know of his music,” he said. “In another lifetime Grinspoon hung out with the Semina Culture guys in L.A. He was an extra in that Monte Hellman movie I was telling you about,
Two-Lane Blacktop
. He’s actually one of only two actors to be directed by
both
Morrison Groom and Florian Ib, the director of
The Gnuppet Movie.”

“I know you’re going to tell me who the other one is.”

“Marlon Brando,” he said with maximum satisfaction.

So the game was afoot. Tonight, I gathered, we’d attempt to penetrate one or several vital questions, pertaining to Marlon Brando’s aliveness or lack thereof, his Gnuppet interlude and its sinister importance, as well as Morrison Groom’s suicide: Faked, or Not? I felt involuntary jubilation and horror. Here was what I’d conducted Perkus into this midst for, unknowingly. I was an instrument, and among my duties was to resound with excitement at mad quests I couldn’t comprehend. Semina and Hellman, for instance, were names I hadn’t retained, but they carried with them a scent of summer, of Perkus as I’d first met him, and a time when, I now realized,
my life changed totally. I’d never pass a pop quiz, yet these obsessions felt as rich to me as sexual pursuits, and hence it seemed perfectly appropriate that Perkus had bargained one for the other.

“I’m amazed that Arnheim’s not more wary of letting a Brando mole like Grinspoon this deep into his organization,” I teased. “Seeing as how Brando’s about to topple Arnheim for mayor of New York. But I suppose that’s the typical arrogance of power, to taunt a rival by stealing his people.”

Perkus put his finger to his lips to silence me, his severity seeming to ratify even my looniest implication. Meanwhile, his mugwump eye was busy elsewhere.

“Okay,” I said, before I lost my chance, seeing Perkus eager to reel off along his own foggy trail. “But Oona first.” I wasn’t going to let him off my leash, but I couldn’t bear to think of Oona and Noteless working this room unpatrolled by me. In my mind’s eye they looked as complacently coupled as Abneg and the Hawkman.

Then, as though I’d really needed him for my dowsing rod, Perkus took my elbow and steered me right into them, the party opening like a door. Noteless stood, tall and imposing as in one of his iconic photographs, shoulders square in loose black linen, face crevassed with significant doubts, hair a platinum flume. I had to admit I saw why the man had gone into sculpture. Oona, at his side, was the bird perched on the alligator’s fang. In a room where we all frolicked with bubbly wine, she’d somehow cadged a perfect-looking twist martini.

Perkus dashed the silence. It turned out he had a program here, too. “So, I’ve been wanting to speak with you, Laszlo,” he said.

“Yes?” said Oona. They hadn’t seen each other since the tiger’s destruction of Jackson Hole. I’d barely seen Perkus since, and not once at his place. Eighty-fourth Street was still cordoned while the city engineers measured structural damage beneath the blocks adjacent to
the crater. He and I had met for a couple of feeble, pot-deprived encounters at Gracie Mews, Perkus giving my haunt a desultory audition.

“I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about simulated worlds,” Perkus launched in. “About the simulators shutting us off if we started running our own simulations, because it might use too much juice …” For Perkus every meeting was only tabled, every ruling merely given a continuance (for this reason, if no other, Marlon Brando could never die).

“Right, sure, what of it?” Oona slurped at her martini, awfully blithe about apocalypse. That might be because she shepherded apocalypse in gelled human form through the world at the moment, and for her living presently took His dictation. Noteless, maker of chasms, swayed gently, perhaps tracking Perkus’s eye, his whole looming form like a nudged metronome. The party seemed to have receded around us, or perhaps that was only my sensation of its unimportance, the mayor and all the flies in his web of no relevance now that I had Perkus beside and Oona before me.

“Here’s my second thought,” said Perkus. “The fact that we develop simulations of our own only drains their computing power if the way they simulate is to make everything exist
whether we look at it or not
. If, on the other hand, the simulators only trouble to put stuff where we’re going to look at it, then the amount of effort and energy is exactly the same.”

“I don’t get you,” said Oona.

“It’s like this. Picture a man in a library. The books are all blank, until he picks one out. Then the simulator—or whatever—fills in that book, only for as long as he leafs through it, inscribing the minimum number of words, just in time for his eyes to meet the page. If he drops that book and selects another, the simulator’s efforts go to making
that
book exist. But the preponderance of the library is
a bluff, just a lot of book spines that wouldn’t even have titles if you didn’t look too closely.”