Chronic City (18 page)

He glanced, but didn’t recognize the number. “Abneg,” he said.

“Richard? It’s Chase Insteadman.”

The actor. The dupe. Richard was chagrined at how fond he’d let himself become. It felt unwise. “What’s up?”

“It’s about Perkus.” The actor then launched into an anxious jumbled monologue worthy of Perkus himself, something to do with Chinese medicine and the purchase of rare vases on the Internet, all in the cause, so far as Richard could tell, of saying that Perkus had suffered a bout of the usual headaches and madness, only much worse than usual. The actor was working to enlist Richard in something.

Richard retreated farther from the nearest table, under the overhang of the room’s mezzanine, into a dark corner behind a caterer’s table, near a long display full of penguins bunched on floes of ice.

“You think he’s going off the rails, huh?”

“That’s putting it lightly. I don’t think he’s been within sight of the rails in quite a while. I don’t know if he’s taking care of himself, Richard.”

“Well, I’ve known Perkus a lot longer than you. He’s always going off the rails, that’s his signature. He’ll be fine.”

“I’d personally appreciate it if you’d come by and see if you think this is the same sort of thing.”

“You sound like a man with a plan.”

“Is there a chance you’d meet me at Perkus’s tonight?”

Richard found himself almost interested, the actor’s panic was so tangible—tangible, that was, beneath his archaically dapper reserve. (Who did he think he was, William fucking Holden? He’d starred in a
sitcom
, for crissakes.)

To care for Perkus Tooth, as Richard would have to confess he did, was to worry. But Perkus was also a perpetual motion machine, on an uncorrectable course, and quite ferociously selfish, too. He’d built for himself a protective armature of text and recordings, an exoskeleton that, however maladaptive in a wider sense, got Perkus through his days as well as anything, say, the denizens of the Reification
Society’s gala had come up with. Perkus had his little orbit: burgers, coffee and pot, free DVDs, acolytes like the actor. There wasn’t much Perkus needed in the way of help. That was, unless he lost his rent-stabilized apartment, or the planners of the Second Avenue subway issued an eminent domain seizure of Jackson Hole, and tore the restaurant down. At that, Richard might feel some need to intervene.

But the actor’s panic meant the actor identified with something in Perkus’s plight, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not. That
was
interesting. More so, at least, than the evening at hand.

“Sure, I’ll be there, just as soon as I can get away from this other thing,” Richard said. He liked leaving stuff vague, putting it all on a par,
items on the agenda of Abneg
.

“Great.”

Great, but the call was too short. Richard didn’t want to be returned yet to the gala table. Retreating farther into the shadows by the penguin display, nodding and winking to a member of the catering staff who eyed him suspiciously, Richard pulled up his e-mail on the phone and began scrolling for something that felt like important business. Nothing much. At least forty new Reply Alls on the tiger Listserv—now there was one ad hoc committee he should never have agreed to join! He twitched Delete until his thumb got tired, then quit. Then glanced up, conscious of some other figure beside him in the penguin gloom. The caterer? No. A woman, another shirking gala attendee punching buttons on a BlackBerry. None other than Claire Carter.

Fuck me
. Richard felt a vertiginous return of the disquiet he’d had to shrug off earlier, his scorn at an affair full of those who liked to imagine they ran the city just because they took their tuxes from their own mothballs instead of Eisenstadt’s. Now Richard’s undertow of apprehension tugged the other way: What was
she
doing
here? Was the Reification Society in some way important? Worth the time of the mayor’s
real
fixer?

“Hello, Richard.”

“Claire.”

“I wouldn’t have assumed this was your sort of cause.”

He shrugged. “I’m slumming. What about you?”

“I’m presenting the Dorffl-Huxley Medal.” Lit from beneath by the tiny screen of her phone, Claire Carter’s gaze appeared more than usually unearthly and impassive. She’d always struck him as ageless, but there was no mistaking that she was younger than he was, a member of the generation of automatons, her blond cowl of hair as immaculate and slick as a helmet. He’d never even bothered to wonder if he found her attractive before this moment. His erotic voyage into Georgina Hawkmanaji had sexualized his whole world, that could be the only explanation.

“How cool for you,” he said. “Since you rarely get to do that kind of stuff.” He meant it sarcastically. Claire Carter likely cut a ribbon or handed over a medal twice daily.

She ignored him, focusing on her own scroll of e-mails. Presumably she’d been blind-cc’ed on all the tiger stuff he’d just been looking at.

“I’m, ah, just going to get back to my table,” he said, needing to be acknowledged.

“Excuse me, Richard,” said Claire Carter, as if it were she who’d been rude. She was infuriatingly immune to his attempted slights. “I’m about to go on. Perhaps I’ll see you at the after party.”

“I doubt it.”

As he slipped into his spot at the table Georgina touched his wrist and smiled, conveying an imperial pride and curiosity that he should have been called away. The Hawkman obviously got her rocks
off on Richard’s air of civic stewardship. He decided to push it. “I’ve gotta go,” he whispered.

“Oh, no, what’s the matter?”

Richard had been relying on implication to carry him, but found he couldn’t lie baldly now that it was required. Georgina seemed too ready to be afraid for him. “It’s a friend, actually. Probably nothing.”

“What friend?”

“Perkus Tooth.”

“He’s sick?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll join you.”

He shook his head.

“Is there some secret about Perkus Tooth I’m not permitted to know?” Her voice had begun to rise.

“It’s not that.”

“Then I’d like to meet your friend.”

“Listen, I’ll go and see what’s up, and meet you at your place by the time this thing is over.” He slid his hand up her thigh, teasingly high into her softness, near the frontier of her wild private hairs. “You can meet him anytime, I’m not hiding him, for fuck’s sake.”

“If you leave here without me, Richard, please return to your own apartment, not mine.”

Richard Abneg felt a humid lurch in his gut, as carnal scenarios he’d been nurturing at some barely conscious level flatlined. Too, he hadn’t confronted whatever waited for him at his own bedroom window in many days, and was hardly eager to try for a night’s sleep beside that nest of horrors now.

“Fine, fuck it, come along.”

The Hawkman had the refinement not to gloat. Her knit
brow demonstrated only concern for his friend’s needs. “Should we leave now?”

“After the award,” he said.

Claire Carter apologized on behalf of Mayor Arnheim, who wished he could be with them, a version of a remark Richard had heard her convey half a hundred times, she the human emblem of Mayor Arnheim’s non-presence. Then, platitudes as inaudible to Richard Abneg as his own ringtone. When she turned to an account of the honoree’s accomplishments, Richard felt himself relax: the project was familiar. Richard even had his own hand in it. The winner was Abigail Friendreth, heir to the Friendreth Securities haul. The childless widow had converted a condemned prewar apartment building for the cause of abandoned dogs, espousing a domesticated beast’s need to inhabit human surroundings, even if there were no human to live with it, or to love it; dogs should live in homes, not cages. Hence the Friendreth Canine Apartments, maintained by a staff paid out of some bottomless trust.

Richard’s part? He’d had to fend off advocates for the homeless, who’d claimed Friendreth’s dogs lived better than some of Manhattan’s humans. The truth that it was the widow’s money to spend wasn’t sufficient to blunt negative hype, so Richard had played his usual conciliatory role, diverting some Friendreth tax write-offs to a few key charities while preserving the Canine Apartments’ charming halo. Another truth, that Manhattan had more advocates than it had homeless, wasn’t politic to say. Richard had barely spotted one in months, apart from the oddball working Perkus Tooth’s back window. Speaking of which, Hawkman or no, it was time to blow this popcorn stand.

Such was Richard Abneg’s state of mind in the hour before he glimpsed his first chaldron.

CHAPTER
Nine

I was surprised
, to say the least, when a moment after buzzing Richard Abneg into Perkus’s building I opened the door to find Georgina Hawkmanaji there, a vision in heels and floor-length fur, head topped with a towering sable hat, cupping her lips and nose with her black dinner gloves, puffing steamily into her fingers. Richard stood a little behind, easily a head shorter than his companion, stamping to defrost his feet, the collar of his inadequate coat turned up around his ears—this was the same frigid day, remember, as my jaunt uptown with Oona—and when I met his eyes they bugged. He mimed a comic groan to say he couldn’t help arriving with company. I wasn’t sure I objected. The ostrich-woman presented a certain awesome spectacle to see wading into Perkus’s squalor, a scent of treasure and foreign shores that seemed to warp the rooms around her and might be a tonic for Perkus to contemplate. If old books and songs and cheeseburgers couldn’t turn his head from this obsession, maybe she would. At the very least she bulked our numbers, gave my intervention ballast.

I’d been the one to buzz them up from the street because Perkus
was already glued to his computer’s screen, tracking a couple of auctions culminating later that night. I’d arrived less than half an hour before and hadn’t yet been able to budge him. For the new visitors, though, he sprang up and rushed into the kitchen and began fussing at his version of hospitality. Richard had already chucked their mountain of coats and gloves and scarves onto Perkus’s sofa, making a soft sculpture of black and fur, and uncovering Georgina’s black-clad, pear-bottomed curves as well as his own ill-fitting tuxedo, gut straining like a sausage in its casing of cummerbund. Perkus didn’t blink, as if their costumes were natural, fitting the unnamed occasion. (After all, he wore a suit himself.) He only introduced himself to Georgina, then clicked a new CD into the player, some kind of guitar drone again, and began rolling a joint at his kitchen table, gesturing for us all to sit with him. The brand of dope was always Ice now, the only product Perkus wanted to smoke since his revelation. I’d opened his freezer for cubes to chill a Dr Pepper a few days earlier and found a backup supply instead, the dealer Watt’s Lucite boxes all labeled with the same name. When I’d joked to Perkus about finding Ice in his freezer he didn’t seem to get it, as though verbal puns were among things left behind in the brave new state of ellipsis in which he now permanently resided.

“Chase says you’re getting into trouble,” said Richard Abneg.

Only his mutinous eyeball revealed annoyance with Richard’s question, or with me for the obvious betrayal. The rest of Perkus couldn’t be bothered. “Never been better. I’m glad you’re here, Richard. I’ve been eager to get you in on this.” He was so certain of what he was about to unveil, it was a bit unsettling to consider I’d pitted myself against it. As it happened, nothing in Perkus’s mien evoked the desperation I’d promised Richard Abneg would strike him as worthy of his concern. Possibly intuiting my agenda when I’d asked to visit, Perkus was showered and shaved, had a fresh shirt on
under his navy pinstripe three-piece, and socks covering his knobby toes, black socks that if they weren’t clean didn’t reveal their footprints in filth, the THC dust-bunnies swirling under the little side table where he kept his computer. Hair still damp so it lay combed back to emphasize his widow’s peak, Perkus resembled a tiny agitated banker, no worse. He’d certainly bounced back from the cluster headache. Even seemed to be thriving in his new pursuits. I could tell Georgina Hawkmanaji was already charmed, and it threw me to memory of Susan Eldred’s office, how he’d swept me off my feet.

He sparked the first joint and passed it to Richard, then went on rolling two more, fingertips busy like a mad scientist at a console. “You’ll want to be freshly stoned,” he announced to no one in particular, to all of us. Richard didn’t hesitate, leaning back in his tux, now untucked and unbuttoned and unzipped in several places, bow tie dangling like a tongue, and drew in a lungful, seemingly certain he could conduct a diagnosis of Perkus in a state of intoxicated complicity. Then made as if to pass the joint to me, skipping Georgina Hawkmanaji, who sat erect and curious, pleasantly impassive, between us. Georgina reached out to intercept it, her glance at him only sweet, unreprimanding. She crossed her eyes and pursed her lips kissingly outward, rather than clamping them together, painting the rolling paper with burgundy lipstick before curtly coughing out her portion and waving the joint in my direction. I had to cradle her hand to steady it, then pluck the joint from her trembling fingers with my other hand. If the Hawkman hadn’t smoked, I suppose I might have abstained, too, the gesture of a gentleman. But I’d called this curious company together, and I wasn’t willing to be left behind wherever they were headed. I nearly finished the joint. Perkus used what remained to ignite the next, which we also devoured.

“Hurry!” said Perkus, now sweeping aside the smoking materials and dashing from the kitchen. Enspelled, we crowded around his
small computer screen, Richard pulling up a chair and patting his lap to invite Georgina to settle there. I stood and craned over Perkus’s shoulder. I wondered at Richard Abneg’s uncommon passivity, but then I’d hardly equipped him to grasp what was wrong here. He’d have to gather an impression before leaping in with the caustic force I’d been bargaining for.

Perkus rattled his mouse, trying to wake up the dial-up connection. “I think there’s about twenty minutes to go,” he said. “Chase, would you turn up the music? Thanks.”