Chronic City (37 page)

Well, this group did what Dutch burghers would have done: pretend he was invisible, and reformat the table to push me to the outside, forcing me to cope with him, like an antibody. My cigar was no help, I was back in Perkusland, while Oona went on dwelling in the exalted domain of Arnheim.

“You have to see it.” Perkus plumped down beside me in a loose chair.

“See what?”

“Grinspoon’s dope must have been Ice.” He spoke in a hoarse stage whisper, only no one listened besides me. “The mayor’s got a chaldron upstairs, a real one, and zowie, that thing just
pops!”
Curled fingers springing outward, Perkus mimicked eyes bugging from head, not a far reach for him. Under the pressure of his excitement his vocabulary defaulted to Maynard G. Krebs.

“You’re sure it’s not just some Ming vase with a nice glaze on it?” I offered my soothingest tone, but behind it I’d caught his thrill like a fever. After all, if chaldrons were attainable wouldn’t the mayor have one? Maybe it was my brain that had a nice glaze on it, Prosecco and Grinspoon’s pot, but I wanted to see for myself.

“Oh, I’m sure. Come and have a gander yourself.”

“I don’t want to cause a stir,” I said, as evenly as I could. “We can’t both go running upstairs again.”

“You go. The thing’s burned into my retinas anyway. Did I miss the coffee?” Perkus spoke from the corner of his mouth, we both did, like spies, whether our words were secrets or not.

“I’m sure they’ll pour you some.”

“Look up,” he said. “When you’re at the top, look up.”

I didn’t think of what havoc Perkus might invent downstairs in my absence. There was only the havoc of possibility he’d seeded in my head as I edged from the partyers and then skipped up the wide silent staircase. Past the landing and the entrance to the study where Grinspoon had parked us, up the next flight and into the dark. I ran out of steps, ended holding my breath at the floor of a conical turret streaked with shadow and reflection, facing numbers of doors and corridors at the topmost landing. Then recalled Perkus’s instructions and tilted my head. Two beacons loomed high overhead: another
skylight, this one a mere hatch to the sky, possibly no bigger than a manhole, its pitched sections of glass flurried with snow. And, in a recessed nook in the turret’s curved wall, well beyond reach, tucked within a neat glass vitrine and radioactively shimmering with oil-slick rainbows, the chaldron.

I backed against the wall, craning upward, stretching to get the whole of it into view, though the angle was impossible. It sure did “pop.” The real thing retroactively obliterated the recollection of our eBay encounters. More than diminished, these were overwritten, turned into rehearsals, premonitions of a future encounter: this. What the chaldron revealed now, that no image could ever reproduce, was its sublime and superb
thingliness
(again this word came unbidden). Perkus had been merciful, I now saw, leaving me to ascend here in solitude, to permit me first contact unmediated. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to share. Like Georgina, I fought an urge to shed my clothes.

Time, among other things, was destroyed. I don’t know how long I sagged there, feeling the cool plaster through the shoulders of my suit, a Saint Sebastian in continuous ecstatic surrender to the one ubiquitous and unceasing arrow of the chaldron streaming toward me from above. My vision was irritated by the portion of the form I couldn’t see from that angle, a minor failing, but it was perhaps this which kept me grounded in the everyday fact of the party downstairs, and my duties there. I’d say I pulled out of my trance for Oona, except that this healing and encompassing chaldron seemed to catch up and resolve within it the fact of Oona, too. That she was so nearby didn’t hurt. I could bring her to see it. Maybe we’d fuck on this landing, in this light. In the chaldron’s holistic force I also saw that Perkus’s apparently schizophrenic inquiries all led to the same
place, whether I could follow them or not. They sprang from the certainty that a thing as splendid as the chaldron could be hidden, hogged, privatized by the mayor and other overlords. This theft in turn described the basic condition of Manhattan and the universe. Whatever Perkus mourned or beckoned from the brink of vanishing—Morrison Groom and his fabulous ruined films, Brando, the polar bear and Norman Mailer, ellipsis, every thwarted gasp of freedom—all were here, sealed for safekeeping, and at the same time so healthy their promise grinned from the container.

I’d never been drawn to conspiracy theories, not being smart (or high-functioning autistic) enough to nourish the mental maps they demanded. This, however, was uncomplicated: the chaldron belonged not to Arnheim but to everyone (which was to say, probably, especially, exactly, to myself and my friends). On this thought, I broke away to rush downstairs, an inevitable step in my assignment, the unwrecking of the world. I didn’t miss the chaldron now that I’d seen it. Like Perkus it was burned into my retinas, but also into my brain, giving instruction.

How perfect, that the whole consortium was in attendance tonight. As I breached into the party again Perkus attached himself to me, and I simply nodded, to let him know I knew what he knew. Then I pointed us to the table where Richard Abneg and Georgina sat. Richard would manage the intricacies here, know how we should cope with the reality of a chaldron coming to light in the nest of power, where he’d negotiated his own career. If Richard’s radical origins made him a kind of long-term mole, a one-man sleeper cell in the Arnheim administration, then this was the moment he’d been waiting for. His lifetime’s slide into compromise could be redeemed in an instant.

Their table’s population hadn’t dissolved so much into wider circulation in this dessert-and-cigar phase. They sat formed into one
convivial group, including Strabo Blandiana, Naomi Kandel, and David Blaine, with Richard dominating the conversation. “… these floor-length urinals, all arranged in somber rows, and everybody pissing in silence, the Stonehenge restroom was a more holy scene than Stonehenge by far, I’m telling you …”

His audience was rapt, including Georgina. The two seemed to have receded into some glow even deeper than sexual satiation, though I couldn’t give it a name. Was Richard some bore who told this story everywhere? Perhaps
Stonehenge restroom
was a trigger phrase, a code Richard Abneg had to let drop each time he mingled in the world of wealth and privilege, until the time he heard the reply come back to him, the shrouded reply that would foment revolution. I had Perkus, here at my side, to blame for the plague of overinterpretation that left me feeling that Richard was trying to communicate something to me personally: much of my whole life had been a kind of Stonehenge restroom, a cartoon of depth, in the shadows of some large truth before which I’d balked.

Well, I had a code word to lay on Richard in return. I had to get him away from the table, though. Strabo Blandiana was obviously party to chaldron manipulations, but he was too much a pet of power to be trusted. Naomi Kandel, too, though I liked her. She was a sieve of gossip. I thought of how in my earlier innocence I’d mentioned chaldrons directly to Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer, and shuddered. I trusted no one with whom I hadn’t smoked Ice. I leaned in and asked Richard if I could have a word with him. He saw Perkus at my shoulder and scowled, but excused himself. The table’s others looked us over and shrugged, returning to other talk.

“I would have come over, but I saw you two consorting with that eagle hugger, Epping.”

“Sandra,” I said, hoping to humanize her. “My mom. She doesn’t mean any harm.”

“I had to hire a licensed ornithologist to get a few keepsakes out of that eagle hatchery that was once my apartment. He went in dressed in a suit of leather armor.”

Perkus leaned in, impatient with our small talk. “So, there’s a chaldron upstairs, Abneg.”

I saw Richard make the same conjugation I’d done, so recently. Automatic skepticism couldn’t hide what went deeper than curiosity, straight to appetite. He first had to put up a front, though. “Funny you should say that, Tooth. Because looking at you, I was thinking you’d come
dressed
as a chaldron, and I was going to have to explain how it wasn’t Halloween.”

Perkus never seemed more valiant than when faced with Richard’s or Oona’s glibbest mockery. “It never snows on Halloween, even I know that.”

“So you were just rummaging around in the mayor’s belongings and you happened to come across this… chaldron?” In the hitch in his speech I saw how, like me, Richard had tried to control thoughts of chaldrons by censoring the word. Uselessly.

“He’s got it mounted on a high shelf, out of reach,” said Perkus. “It’s a tricky spot, on a curved wall. We’re going to need an extension ladder.” His leaps to the next implausible thought would have seemed more outrageous if they didn’t anticipate my own.

“What are you guys, the Marx Brothers?” said Richard. “Stay cool, for fuck’s sake, and let me have a look at this so-called chaldron before you start burgling.”

“Should we include Georgina?” I suggested, excited to restore the whole team. This was strategic as well as generous: I wanted to gather up Oona, too, and I remembered how the two women had bonded at Gracie Mews.

Richard Abneg darted a look back at the table, where Georgina remained caught up in glamorous attentions. She seemed to feel his
eyes, and glanced back. He smiled at her, but shook his head at us. “No, no shenanigans for the Hawkman tonight,” he warned. “I’ll go. You two keep a handle on yourselves.”

I wanted to remind Richard he was the first to bring Bolshevik rage into this pursuit—to propose seizing the chaldrons of the rich. I suppose then he hadn’t had Arnheim in mind. But my tongue was clotted with smoke and drink. Anyway, Perkus, looking not in the least hurt about
Marx Brothers
or
shenanigans
, with full faith in the persuasiveness of what awaited, gave chaldron-spotting instructions. Then, putting finger to lips, extra admonishment to good behavior in his absence, gait revealing the eagerness I’d likely also displayed, Richard slipped upstairs.

The decadence that mobbed around us now seemed worse than random, the scrollwork ceiling itself, the wide shadowy stair, the four walls, all a pen for conspirators, villainous overbidders. How many of them hoarded chaldrons at home? I’d never look at Strabo Blandiana or Steve Martin the same way. (Grinspoon I couldn’t quantify—either he’d betrayed the trust of the chaldron controllers, or was a conspirator so secure he felt free to taunt us.) I wanted to round up the catering staff for protection, make them a proletarian corps, radicalizing them instantly with a glimpse of chaldron. The selfishness I’d felt upstairs turned itself inside out, for an instant. Then reversed again. My little gang was fine. I didn’t want to share so promiscuously. I only had to tell Oona, immediately. Again I dragged Perkus, against the grain of the party, which seemed arranged to deny us movement in the mayor’s direction. Some music had been started, and it floated overhead, chunks of oppressive jazz. I lowered my head, ignoring shouted greetings, shunning the call of my own decorousness for once.

I found myself at a juncture where I could neither advance nor retreat, but did catch Oona’s eye. I motioned for her to join us where
we stood, aware my gesticulations had become wild, yet willing to play Perkus’s card, and let my clownishness protect me from any suspicion.

“You found your friend,” she said when she reached us. “Was he rolled up in a rug somewhere? Because you both look a little wrinkled and flustered, if you don’t mind my saying so. Also your eyeballs are pink. Hello, Perkus.” She waved at him as if swabbing a dirty pane between them. Without Noteless nearby Oona had gone into her chipper routine.

“Listen, Oona, have we ever discussed chaldrons?” I honestly wasn’t sure.

“I never figured I’d be very good with chaldrons,” she said. “Though I’ve never been asked in the pluperfect before, I’ll admit that. When you put it so charmingly, I might have to reconsider.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry—little boytrons and girltrons, cleaning their poop trails and teaching them alphabeticals, isn’t that what we were discussing?”

“Seriously, Oona. We found one.”

“I think you can get a medal for that, if you redeem them at a police station.”

Perkus interrupted. “Forget it, Oona, it isn’t your kind of thing.” The old petulance between them was always near the surface. “I could have told you not to bother, Chase.”

“Ah, more boy games, I should have known.” Now she feigned hurt. I saw we couldn’t win with Oona, not in our present condition, doubly or triply intoxicated. She’d only take pleasure in running rings around us. Since Richard had excluded Georgina, I couldn’t precisely argue Oona’s point. Mind’s-eyeing Abneg alone with the prize, my suspicion now forked: What if, holy smokes, it was
Richard
we shouldn’t trust? He’d co-opted to the mayor everything placed in
his care—what kind of fools were we, after all? That we had Georgina in our clutches might be our only insurance. So we needed to take the Hawkman hostage—that’s how far I’d gone down this slippery slope, before Richard rejoined us, and a hungry, Rasputin glint in his eyes told me all I needed to know about his allegiances. The party erupted in laughter and applause, and for an instant I thought we were being mocked for our transparent plotting. But no, some unseen voice had dragged the room back to toasting. Under cover of huzzahs we resumed skulduggery. Oona was meanwhile our bewildered witness.