Chronic City (58 page)

“Richard mentioned it,” she said.

“My friend told me … a lot of things. He believed Manhattan had become a fake. A simulation of itself. For some purpose … he couldn’t guess, but he died trying.”

“What on earth makes you think it could possibly be only one purpose?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Pay attention, Mr. Insteadman. I’m astounded at your naïveté. How could a place like Manhattan exist for just one purpose, instead of a million?”

I had no answer.

“Do you
personally
believe Manhattan is fake?” asked Claire Carter.

How could I reply? Perkus’s theories proved themselves ludicrous while demolishing any castles of consolation to which I might hope to retreat. They unmade those as they unmade themselves. Our
sphere of the real (call it Manhattan) was riddled with simulations, yet was the world at hand. Or the simulation was riddled through with the real. The neat pink seam of Ava’s surgery scar, which I’d traced with my finger this very morning while giving in to her cuddling demands in my bed; the brown stripe—the “milk map”—across Georgina’s pregnant belly which, though I hadn’t witnessed it myself, had plainly reordered Richard Abneg’s helpless mind; the exact flavor of Oona’s kisses (or Ava’s, for that matter), the sugar dust on a Savoir Faire almond croissant (I have my weaknesses); these details could no more have been designed and arranged than Laird Noteless could have thought to include discarded baby carriages and crushed crack vials in his sketches for
Urban Fjord
. The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort
fake
from
real
was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions, the West Side Highway of the self, to shattering encounters with the wider real: bears on floes, the indifference and silence of the climate or of outer space. So retreat. Live in a Manhattan of your devising, a bricolage of the right bagel and the right whitefish, even if from rival shops. Walk the dog, dance with her to
Some Girls
. Why did Perkus have to be killed for his glance outside the frame? But maybe he hadn’t been killed, had only died. And again, maybe absconded. I was sick with ignorance, and my own complicity.

I’d been like Steve Martin in
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
, playing scenes opposite phantasms, figures unreal and deceased. Yet Perkus had made me peculiarly brave. The Polish starlet was also the detective who couldn’t kill or be killed by guns, but might brandish love. It struck me that Oona had done me a favor, too, enmeshing me in such a lame script. How many ever know they’re in one? “Being
until recently one of the local fakes,” I told Claire Carter, “I take the matter seriously. Forgive me if it strikes you as tendentious.”

“Let me make a suggestion,” she said.
“Follow the money.”

“Sorry?” The glib cliché shattered my reverie, returned me to the tangible fact of the mayor’s operative, her dress-for-success pugnacity, her horrific
completeness
, how she made in her whole earthly self Perkus Tooth’s true opposite, and how vile she was to me, real or fake. She might begin clubbing me, as a pelt prospector clubs a baby seal, with further phrases such as
do what you love, the money will follow
and
show me the money
, and I might die here yelping on the mayor’s superb Oriental. I couldn’t brandish love in this encounter, had to choose my battles, flee.

“Take a look at who signs your checks. If it isn’t a city agency, and it isn’t, then you’ve brought your complaints to the wrong door.”

I wondered, for the first time, if my residuals weren’t all residuals. “I get… direct deposit.”

“We’re in the coping business around here,” said Claire Carter, ignoring me. “Like any administration, we
inherited
the problems we’re trying to solve.” Her tone was almost sulky. Perhaps my accusations had reached her, in whatever slight place she could be reached. Or maybe the phrases were a secret signal, for now the mayor arrived. He wore a brocade robe over silk pajamas, and inspected me like a disgruntled father in a black-and-white comedy, or Sherlock Holmes resigning himself to lecturing Watson on the obvious. He should have been carrying a candelabra. But these weren’t Hugh Hefner or Rossmoor Danzig pajamas, tailored to jollify ugliness, these were no laughing matter, the pajamas of power wakened from its deserved repose. I had to make myself worthy of interrupting these pajamas. I felt I might have wandered into another joke besides the riddle about the Polish starlet now, that like a penitent who’d ascended a snowy Tibetan mountain to speak with the hermit
guru, I’d be permitted a single question before being returned to my exile.
Why is it snowing? Is Marlon Brando alive or dead? On what support does the weight of the world rest?
I couldn’t choose, and so exhibited my traditional mask of placid stupidity. Yet before the swarming pressure of the unreal rose up and swallowed us three where we stood, Arnheim’s impassive features deflated in an approximation of human sorrow, and he beckoned with his short arms to encircle me, and like a giant infant I was for a moment comforted against his shoulder, which was surprisingly knobby under my cheek, as though it had knuckles.

“I’m deeply sorry for your loss,” he said. “Our city mourns with you.”

“Thank you, sir.” I tried to conceive that Perkus would be granted this tribute after all, and whether I should accept it for him. On the other hand, it might be an attempt to persuade me not to look into the circumstances of his “death.”

“She won’t be forgotten.”

“She?”

“The Chinese will pay some price for this, don’t doubt it.”

Arnheim meant Janice Trumbull. The ghost-astronaut had been declared dead at last, I gathered, though I’d have to buy the
Times
the following day to learn that rather than linger any more in fetid cancer and agriculture, the space captives had serenely directed their station into the path of the mines, to be cleansed in vacuum fire. Did the mayor believe I still believed that stupid tale? Did he? Perhaps Claire Carter was simply being truthful when she told me I’d come to the wrong door.

I had nothing at all to say to him, or anyone, about Janice Trumbull. But in the comedy we now played, in which the billionaire Arnheim, veins so notoriously icy, now steadied me by the elbows and gazed into my eyes with avuncular wartime bonhomie as if
I were some far-posted confidential agent coming in briefly to receive encouragement from the home office, I could let “her” stand for Perkus Tooth. This suited me. Perkus could be everywhere and nowhere, as I’d often felt him to be. I hungered to dismay Arnheim, to let him wonder if the operative in his embrace had gone over to the other side, even if I had no idea whether another side existed. “I learned certain secrets from
her
, before she died,” I told him. “Secrets about the city. The tiger, for instance.”

Arnheim stepped back from me, placing his hands in his robe’s deep pockets as if he were suddenly ashamed of them. He didn’t have to bend his elbows to do so. “I’m glad you mention it.”

“I didn’t want there to be any confusion.”

“There’s a Sufi aphorism that’s apropos to this situation—have I ever mentioned it to you?”

I stared in confusion. Arnheim spoke as though we enjoyed some long association.

“
The secret protects itself.”

“That’s the Sufi aphorism?”

“Go with it, my friend. You can do no wrong. The secret protects itself.”

I found this notion, that
I could do no wrong
, demoralizing in the extreme. If I believed it I might have to hurl myself into one of Noteless’s chasms, perhaps the
Memorial to Daylight
, during the opening ceremonies. Though I suppose my most flamboyant suicide could be incorporated readily enough into a tale of the astronaut-fiancé’s bereavement. Better to drift into the gray fog and be forgotten. I noticed I’d now officially
contemplated suicide
, an act no one warns you is involuntary, unfolding as it does in contemplation. All it had taken was the crushing force of this parlor’s decor, and a mayor who might himself be a memorial to daylight, as though he’d drunk it all for himself and left nothing on the table. Who required even
hiccups to destroy me? In my despair I tried one more code word on Jules Arnheim, a gesture in commemoration of the now-dissolved Fellowship of the Chaldron.
“Les Non-Dupes refuse!”
I said, producing the slogan with all the useless courage of Nathan Hale on the gallows.

The mayor had a ready response, one which seemed to gratify him, not at the layer of his bogus joviality but in the deeper stirrings of his killer’s soul, on view at last. “Les
Non-Dupes errant,”
he said, gazing unblinking and unavuncular into my eyes. My own high-school French, flickering in memory, supplied the interpretation. Like knights-errant, we non-dupes were not only lost but mistaken. We wandered in error. To be unduped was not to live. There was no way out, only a million ways back in.

“What do I do now?” I asked him, helpless not to turn to the authority before me, the father we dream of in joy and fear.

“Go back to a city that needs you.”

“You mean, Manhattan?”

“No one disputes your place here. You own your apartment outright, don’t you? I understand it has a fine view.”

If I stayed a moment longer Arnheim might describe those birds and that tower, my heart’s last sacred quadrant of sky. I fled into the night and snow before I could hear it.

CHAPTER
Twenty-eight

This is the story
of Bloomington that I told Richard Abneg, the night of Perkus’s death and the night of our arrest, while we sat with our heads leaned close against the bars of our cells, in the quiet that descended in the dark there. Richard had finished speaking of his teenage life, and Perkus’s. He’d asked how I’d come to the city, how a person becomes a star in a television show filmed live on a soundstage on West Forty-seventh Street while still the age of a high-school junior, leaving parents and friends and a world behind in distant unimaginable Indiana. I tried and faltered over making him a portrait of my parents, my old and helpless and perfectly kind parents so confused by their youngest son, and the story of my legal emancipation from them by the talent agent who discovered me, in order that I could travel and be tutored and work for the benefit of myself (and the agent) before I’d attained a legal working age. It was all a bit much and likely too boring to tell.

So I instead drew a loose portrait of myself, how strange and also strangely happy I was, waiting for something to happen, knowing it would. How I grew into my big rangy handsome body that attracted
so much notice from my school’s coaches, and how it attracted so much notice from girls and women after it had finished disappointing the coaches. I wasn’t interested in or gifted at sports at all, which to others might have seemed the only thing to do with the problem of me. I probably should have been homosexual but wasn’t—then I could have been a mascot of the girls, or a dodgy runaway, of whom everyone could say they’d seen it coming. Instead I was good and big and straight and something of a chameleon. I wanted and tried to be funny, and sometimes was, but my curious formality, diction borrowed from P. G. Wodehouse and Cary Grant instead of from my peers, was funnier without trying. I was like a thing born for something else. Tolerated and teased in school, but dreamily destined, and unafraid. Destined to be adored. Destined for sex. I waited for someone to put me to right use, and when I was fourteen the talent agent did that, an old story, like someone discovering Kim Novak in a cornfield. So I set it up by painting this picture of myself and then I told Richard a particular story of a moment from just before my emancipation and my first journey to Manhattan.

Bloomington kids, the good and bad ones, the professors’ children and the ten-generations-in-the-same-house kids, the athletes and the losers and those who would get away and even those who we all knew were secretly homosexual, we all of us did the same thing in the summer months, together and apart, in groups that overlapped and broke apart as much as our cliques in junior high during the school months: that was to swim in the abandoned granite quarries scattered in the fields and forests outside of the town. The kids who wanted to be ruffians would swim in the most dangerous and most forbidden, those farthest into the woods and with the deepest cuts, where the water was black with legends of drownings. The losers puttered in a wretched shallow quarry where a kitten couldn’t drown.
And the popular kids swam in a clean high-walled pit known as Turtles. I was, after all, a part of the popular crowd—I was the not-gay unathletic daft handsome mystery among them. Turtles, named for creatures often sighted there, lay hidden in overgrown fields whose owner trimmed thistles from the worn path and made us welcome as long as we carried out our Strohs empties, was also outfitted with a raft, a bobbing wooden platform anchored by some method to the center of the water, and ladderless, so one had to clutch with both arms as it tilted and then haul a leg over one side, or be helped by someone standing above. One tumbled crevice led to easy entrance to the water, and this was where we gathered to swim, though sometimes a show-off, a diver on our high-school team, would plunge in from elsewhere on the rim—the water was clear and deep enough to make it safe. All who swam eventually congregated out on the raft, which might have been ten or fifteen yards from the crevice’s entry point. All but me.

It began as a matter of fear, then a prideful obstinacy. I began as a poor swimmer, though I got better. (Slipping my body through water seemed to me more like sex than athletics; I had an instinct for it, but like masturbation it felt private, and I hid my improvements.) The more I was ruthlessly mocked for not joining the laughing throng that teetered atop that raft (and frequently cleared itself in a paroxysm of shoving), the more I distinguished myself in the calm of my own mind for not caring to join it. The raft was where everything eventful was transacted, all the famous gropes and shames and confidences, somehow hidden in plain sight, secreted within the mob, or just at that moment when everyone else was in the water to miss them. So I’d exiled myself from society, shunning that artificial island. It made me who I was, the act of not going there. I attached a certain feeling of irreversibility to the choice, as if those who’d gone that mere distance of strokes to clamber aboard had in a sense never
returned, or not completely. Perhaps after I overcame my swimmer’s fear I was still afraid of the disappointment that awaited me if I joined them there. Somehow I was patient enough to have another island in mind for me.