Chronic City (42 page)

Perkus had let go of things more dear than apartments. His encounter with the mayor’s chaldron spared him such simplicities: an apartment was only a container for bodies, after all, while a chaldron was a container for what under duress he’d call
souls
. And Perkus had only ever possessed a chaldron by wanting one, and then lost the only chaldron he’d even seen by seeking to possess it. Meanwhile all along their true source had been near at hand to begin with, sometimes no farther than his kitchen’s rear window. Perkus, who’d lived for as long as he could remember snared in such perplexities, the existential equivalent of an impossible object, stuck forever in parallax view, its different aspects irreconcilable, could only afford mild surprise at how the events of this winter had overturned him. It was on these long walks with Ava, dog flaneur, when he began to allow himself to muse on the implications, but never resentfully. Gratefully. He felt grateful to still live anywhere in Manhattan. If Ava could thrive with one forelimb gone, the seam of its removal nearly erased in her elastic hide, he could negotiate minus one apartment, as well as with the phantom limbs of conspiracy and epiphany and ellipsis that had always pulled him so many directions at once.

CHAPTER
Twenty

He’d spent that whole night
right there, huddled at what came to seem the bottom of a well of dark, as though rather than climb to this point he’d fallen, and the snow-covered skylight and the glowing chaldron in its nook were two portals above, representing his only hope of escape. The mayor’s carpeted stair was thick enough to make a comfortable perch, and he chose the stair that split the difference between his need to be as near as possible to the chaldron and to find an angle of view from which the least of its form was obstructed by the underside of the shelf on which it sat, then settled there, fully expecting to be interrupted, rescued, arrested, or assassinated.

But no. Mayor Arnheim never arrived with a flock of policemen or some dark-suited private force, the modern equivalent of Pinkertons. Nor did Richard Abneg or Chase Insteadman or even Georgina Hawkmanaji come. Nor his dangerous new acquaintance Russ Grinspoon, who’d said such disturbing things about Morrison Groom. Nor his cunning old protégée Oona Laszlo, no surprise in that. The mayor’s astounding chaldron had no appreciator besides himself, and Perkus
Tooth began to wonder if it had only conjured him into being to provide itself with an imaginary friend, he felt so invisible and unknown there through the passing hours. The party sounds were long gone from the foyer below. The irreverent clangor of a catering staff sealing up and loading its materials soon followed. Abandoning him in silence there. He centered the chaldron in his vision, a matter, paradoxically, of turning his head to disfavor the rebellious eye. Then steeled himself to ignore the portion he couldn’t see, the imperfection of its outline. What was ever perfect? The form pulsed in his vision, beaming concurrence with his most reconciled thoughts, absolving all failure. To abide was not to compromise. At this Perkus fell deeply asleep.

He woke in early-morning light flooding the stairwell, his neck sore where it had rested crookedly against the curved wall. A woman stood on the stair above him. The mayor’s aide, Chase had pointed her out at Arnheim’s table.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” he replied.

“I wondered when you’d wake up,” she said. “My name is Claire Carter, by the way.” How long had she stood there? Was he caught? If so, at what?

“So, I’m Perkus Tooth,” he said.

“We know.”

“You do?”

“You came with the actor,” she said.

“Yes.” He glanced up at the chaldron. In the bright light its unearthly radiance was a little blanched. He wondered whether it would have caught his eye in this light. A ridiculous thought. A chaldron was a chaldron, immeasurable and bright. Yet here Claire Carter stood, just beneath one, and either totally oblivious or uninterested. This weird fact imparted some of the chaldron’s force to the
woman herself, whose corn-husky-golden Dorothy Hamill was back-lit to a halo like a solar flare, while her rectangular glasses pitched back to Perkus letterboxed, fish-eye-lens impressions of his own sorry form. Beneath those reflections her own features were precisely serene and nonjudgmental. The mayor’s woman had brought with her no cops or Pinkertons, apparently not fearing him, and she presented nothing for Perkus to fear—not, anyway, apparently. He felt his presence had been lightly tolerated in the stairwell overnight, nothing worse. That “they” knew his name suggested he wasn’t just some phantasm the chaldron had dreamed up to keep itself amused or adored.

“How—”

“There was a single checked overcoat left behind,” she said. “In its pocket was a woolen hat with a distinctive patch featuring bright red lips and tongue. Security found you on the tape, walking in.”

“Ah.” So this was the sense in which he was known, by cultural iconography Claire Carter was apparently too young to identify. Perkus could imagine spadefuls of earth dropping onto a casket where everything that had ever been relevant to him was being quietly buried.

“Your coat is waiting downstairs.”

“You don’t care that I broke in?”

“You didn’t break in,” she pointed out. “You stayed.”

“You don’t want to know what I’m doing here?” He began to feel taken lightly. He didn’t know how he wanted to be taken instead. His heart beat wildly.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’d like to speak with Mayor Arnheim, please.” He stood, gathered himself, joined Claire Carter on the landing so that she no longer loomed above him, smoothed real and imaginary lint from the front of his velvet, hoping she knew it was intended to be wrinkled.
Perkus decided he wanted her to understand that he was fundamentally a
dandy
, a word he’d never precisely applied to himself before but which he felt might pardon his spending the night on the fourth stair from the top. She should consider herself lucky he didn’t have a pet lobster on a string, though that reference was likely beyond the compass of someone who couldn’t identify the Rolling Stones’ logo.

“He’s not here.”

“Isn’t this his home?” Now he detected himself growing uselessly huffy, as though he had some higher ground attainable in this situation. He couldn’t quit trying to make an impression, however, since Claire Carter, with her implacable, nearly mechanized mood of bright efficiency, made him feel invisible.

“The mayor entertains here, but he’s got an apartment he prefers.”

“Did you spend the night here?” Perkus asked. He found himself suddenly stirred by the notion of the two of them alone in the town house together through the long hours of the night, the chaldron really a sort of sexual beacon.

“The mayor’s been very generous in letting me occupy the in-law apartment downstairs.”

“Are you lovers?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.” She appeared unoffended, but regarded him with fresh curiosity, ticking the golden bowl cut of her head sideways like the second hand of an alert clock. Impressively, in meeting Perkus’s gaze she never once took the bait of tracking the wrong eye.

“I’ve got a question for him about … that vase up there.”

“The chaldron, you mean? Jules couldn’t tell you much about that.”

“You know what it is?”

“Sure. I gave it to him. I don’t think he’s glanced at it twice.”

She gratified each question with a little surplus of revelatory value for which he couldn’t have thought to ask. Yet the ease of this exchange felt slippery and corrupt, as though she were toying with him. He preferred to find the question that would make Claire Carter balk. “Where did
you
get it? Did you buy it on eBay?”

“My brother gave it to me. Do you want to have a look? I think you’ll be surprised.”

At last Perkus could quit trying to make an impression, or to calibrate the nature of this encounter, for he was surely still asleep on the stair, and dreaming. Or perhaps the dream had begun long before. “Who’s your brother?”

“Linus Carter, you may have heard of him. He’s the designer.”

“Designer of what—chaldrons?”

“That and all the rest of it, yes.”

“The rest of what?”

“Yet Another World.”

“I would very much like to see it, yes.”

He followed her through the door at the landing, to find himself surprised, if surprise were still possible, by a curved stair leading up inside what he’d taken for a thin outer wall. Deep-set windows in the turret allowed just slivers of blue above gouts of snow, evidence of the storm Perkus had nearly forgotten. They climbed the steep curled stair in single file, the ascent of her tiny, pear-shaped buttocks before him a transfixing vision, as though one by one a chaldron’s effects were transferring to Arnheim’s Girl Friday.

The room at the top was large enough for the two of them and a chair and small desk, nothing more, making with its single window a kind of lookout or observation room. Perkus thought it would be a spectacular place to get some clear thinking done, to write a broadside or two, but he’d no sooner entertained the thought than Claire Carter unbolted a midget-size door at the level of her waist, swinging
it inward, to disclose how it backed to the high nook below which he’d thirsted and pined through the dark hours, before passing out. She reached in and slid the box containing the chaldron onto the floor between them, revealing, among other things, a small power cord, trailing off to a transformer plugged in a socket at the rear of the nook. The thing inside looked watery and nebulous, its glamour and force completely spent in the bright sunlight that suffused the little attic study. Perkus saw immediately that what stood at his feet wasn’t anything as definite as a ceramic, let alone one of some perfect and unearthly density, was less, in truth, than the photograph he’d admired in Strabo Blandiana’s office or the pixel-dense lures he’d ogled on eBay. This chaldron was a hologram, and when Claire Carter switched off the tiny laser at the bottom of the vitrine it blinked out completely. The vessel had appeared so ineffectual that this seemed nearly an act of mercy: last one out, please turn off the chaldron.

“Looks more impressive at night, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, yes, it does. Is there any chance I could get a cup of coffee?” Until the last possible instant Perkus had felt in the grip of an exalted confusion. Even as she debunked chaldrons, Perkus’s encounter with Claire Carter had taken on some of a chaldron’s strange ambiance. With the hologram’s switching off, though, deflation set in. Perkus had begun to recognize the first glimmerings of a cluster prodrome, the inevitable aura preceding a really major headache. Caffeine was his first line of defense, at least the first available—he couldn’t really ask whether any of Grinspoon’s roaches had happened to be still lying in the mayor’s marble ashtrays. The snow’s sideways glare that attacked him through the windows everywhere he turned was possibly implicated, bright-angled light being one of several typical migraine triggers, along with dark chocolate and Richard Abneg’s infernal red wines. Perkus kept his shades drawn
low for a reason. There was nothing to do about it now but cope. He dreaded going out into that sunshine.

Linus Carter, though famously camera shy, was real, not, as rumored, just the name behind which some consortium of geniuses had hidden themselves. She should know, since she grew up with his brilliance overshadowing hers, Linus being three years older, though he was also so physically and emotionally immature that they were mistaken, and in some sense mistook themselves, for twins. Certainly they trusted each other more than anyone else, their parents, or the Dalton kids who treated them both a bit like freaks for their closeness, and for their lack of interest in the gossip and status games that defined the place. College divided them only a little, her Harvard, him MIT, and both places ones where they could shake themselves free of the unspoken expectations of the Manhattan castes they’d instinctively set themselves apart from. It was a matter of money, always money, and so when she came back to the city it was in the employ of media conglomerateer Arnheim, then several years from his run for the mayoralty, and if you’d mentioned that possibility it would have seemed a joke. Her first job, for which she found herself scouted before summa cum laude graduation, and working for Arnheim meant that money was never again going to divide Claire Carter from anything. It wasn’t even that he paid her so well, as that she’d put herself right up against money’s large and impassive flank, under its vast scaly wing. As a matter of fact, when some of the really hugely trust-funded kids who’d shit on her and Linus at Dalton resurfaced these days, spaced-out on boards of corporations they didn’t even know whether they owned, she was usually running rings around them, telling them what to do. And when Linus came back to the city with his big idea and needed capital investiture to
get it started up, she could take care of him, too, introduce him to the right people.

She explained all this in the town house’s big kitchen, where they sat on stools at a marble counter, over coffee—cappuccinos from a machine that took a little cartridge of coffee under a lever and spat them out perfectly, brimming with foam on top. The device’s brief guttering productions shattered the dawn’s eerie silence. Perkus would have preferred for purposes of headache prevention a bottomless mug of traditional black, but was too polite to say anything. He sipped the hot foam and ignored the background of approaching migraine and listened to what Claire Carter appeared compelled to explain to him as his reward for camping out beneath the hologram. It seemed that her shy and kooky older brother had written all the design protocols for Yet Another World in secret, while working for a Menlo Park company whose contract claimed any idea he originated as their own, and so he’d quit and moved to their parents’ apartment, sleeping in his old room like the unsocialized loser he perhaps felt himself to be, and let five months tick by watching TV Land reruns of
Square Pegs
and
Martyr & Pesty
, only afterward whispering to Claire that he was sitting on a gold mine but couldn’t afford the tools to dig with. She set him up with investors, not Arnheim himself but a rich-beyond-rich pajama-wearing Hugh Hefner wannabe, no disrespect, named Rossmoor Danzig.