Chronic City (38 page)

“You should leave this to me,” Richard began.

“Not on your life.” Perkus had spotted the thing tonight, as he had to begin with, and was in every sense our spearhead into chaldrondom.

“I’ve got an in here.”

“We don’t need an in, we need an extension ladder.”

“How the fuck do you imagine you’re going to—?” Richard left the implication open.

“I’ll go upstairs,” said Perkus. “None of the other guests knows me.”

“Forget guests,” said Richard. “Don’t you think Arnheim has security staff in this joint?” Involuntarily I turned my head to examine the room, bringing a sneer from Richard for my lapsed discretion. The catering staff, moments ago my prole army, now struck me as Secret Service operators, prepared to drop their cloth napkins and pull out Glocks.

“Calm down, Chase. I’ll figure out something.”

“I am calm!”

Already the guests spilled disastrously out through the front hall, to filter back toward the grand parlor. Some lined up for their coats, others settled in with an after-dinner drink for more talk. A
few had even camped on the bottom steps, blocking the way upstairs. We’d never recover the privacy we’d enjoyed in our little solo raids. Our mission needed, probably, Spider-Man.

“You’re in this cabal, Richard?” asked Oona. “I’m impressed. I was thinking these two were just high on something.” We tried to ignore her, and failed. “What exactly are you subversives bent on? You’ve got me curious, though I’m sure the answer will be woefully disappointing.”

Richard scowled at Oona, but addressed Perkus. “When did you decide
the more the merrier
, Tooth? Because, no offense, but we’ve got no time to waste persuading Madam Skeptic here.”

“Ask Chase,” shrugged Perkus.

Richard gave me the stinky eyeball. “Why don’t you and Oona shove off, Chase. Make a drunken distraction in the far room.”

“I’m not drunk!” I was stunned Richard could favor Perkus in a pinch.

“Not only drunk, but somewhat famous,” said Richard. “You’re no help.”

How clownish had I become in their eyes? Was I blackballed from the Chaldron Club for Men? At that moment another element overtook us: Georgina Hawkmanaji appeared, with Sandra Saunders Eppling in tow. Both looked drunk on some plot of their own, an eagle armistice, perhaps.

“Darling, Sandra would like to say something to you.”

“Richard, Richard … this has all gotten out of hand. When I saw you here, with dear Chase … I thought, I’m just going to march over there and—” Sandra used her body, bombing into Richard’s unwilling embrace. “Come back to the building, sweetheart!”

Richard’s eyes took on a trapped-animal cast. I remembered his injunction against drawing Georgina into chaldron-hunting, and kept my tongue. Maybe I could sweep Oona upstairs, somehow.
Make some coupleish reason that we needed to visit some private room together. And there, rifle closets to find a ladder, or some suction cups. Only Oona and I weren’t meant to be a couple. At that instant I turned to find Laird Noteless helping her into the sleeves of her coat. The whole party, now that I noticed, was being helped into its coats. A member of the staff, an attractive girl in a tuxedo and ponytail, with an apologetic-lustful gaze, held my own coat and scarf, waiting for her chance to dress me in them. Just then the idiot
producer-with-no-script
hailed me with a grin and a beckoning wave. I waved back, miming helplessness to cross the room. It wasn’t so hard to mime.

“They say the streets are becoming impassible in the storm,” said Oona. I must have been staring at her with the dumb helplessness I felt. Forget Secret Service: my coat and scarf were as fatal to our plans as a Glock. “The limousine drivers want to go immediately. Apparently the taxicabs have given up already. The limousine drivers want to go home to their families.”

“We didn’t come in a limousine,” I said stupidly.

“Ask Richard and Georgina to give you a ride in theirs.”

Noteless guided Oona by the shoulders away from our group which was no longer a group, Richard leaning in to Georgina as he extricated himself from Sandra Eppling, whispering something I couldn’t hear, others with names I couldn’t recall jostling in to make farewells, clotting around us as they fitted into their dressy coats and oohing and ahhing at the gusts of cold as outer doors were pried open against the battering snow. I saw Grinspoon now, shaking hands like a politician, bearing away whatever forbidden knowledge of Brando and chaldrons he possessed. I watched Oona and Noteless go. Noteless was taller than me. We were the two tallest men in the vicinity. It didn’t mean I knew his secrets. Or that he had any. I felt sick. The girl gentled me into my coat. I turned to find Perkus, but
he was gone. My eyes knew where to search before I was conscious of the thought. I sighted him, just barely, sprinting alone upstairs into dark. With Richard and Georgina and a tide of guests I streamed out to the frigid blue transformed city, wet static hazing every personal screen, all objects and persons nearer than they appeared, all of us impossibly vague to one another as we laughed and sneezed into the backseats of limousines, leaving him behind.

January 8

C.,

Severed-foot disposal in a pocket biosphere is really a daft problem, one I hope you never need face, love. We considered air-lock ejection, a sailor’s funeral, but to send my pedal appendage spinning down to Earth, or worse yet, to trigger a mine, seemed florid, flamboyant, a bit of a flambé, and not in the least flame-retardant, even if we wrapped it in a foil boot. (If we had a thousand feet among us, a millipede’s supply to lop off and defenestrate, maybe we’d kick our way out of this crate!) So we opted for a somber burial in the Greenhouse, under the shade of the tallest of the mangroves, though in truth it meant a slightly watery grave after all, stuff seeping up through the muck to swallow the foot, bubbles of mud detaching and floating among us during our tiny, foot-size ritual observances. Sledge, having scooped up the dead bees from the shelf in the Nursery, embedded these in the gunk to form a ring of bee emissaries, the better to passport the foot into whatever afterlife it deserves. Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstislav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.

Afterward, back to work or to moping in our various private nests. I’m not so much an occasion, anymore, for renewed bonhomie.
My ailment is another ambient backdrop now, another machine falling apart with no parts to replace the scrapped ones, another grim dispatch from the various quadrants of the deadly dull but not yet quite deadly enough condition our condition is in. My cancer is a mood. We all of us up here have our moods.

Now a part of me will never touch Earth again, Chase.

Happy New Year!

Footloose,
J
.

CHAPTER
Eighteen

Perkus was gone
. By the time February rolled around, the blizzard’s traces down to those last blackened rinds in gutters, each marking a spot where some ambitious driver had made mountains uselessly digging out around their wheels, I’d long since quit my ritual visits to Eighty-fourth Street to search for him. The condemned buildings on his block had nothing more to show me. The neighbors of Brandy’s Piano Bar might be able to rest at last, the place shuttered, its noisy smokers flitted elsewhere, except Brandy’s had no neighbors anymore. The inhabitants of Perkus’s building, as well as two others on the block, had all been dislodged at once, to who knows where, the apartments of families and friends, I suppose, to await the city’s settlement for the tiger’s ravages, the machine’s or beast’s assertion of eminent domain over what had been their homes. The block wasn’t even fascinating or appalling by then, the darkness in those windows not ominous or intense. Around the corner, Jackson Hole still made a rather dramatic crater, but these were merely uninhabitable buildings, destined to come down and be replaced with something newer, and soon they’d be hard to remember. The city
had moved on. Nothing there matched my own ominous intensity, certainly, as I pushed to the edges of the police barricades to cruise them for trace meanings, and soon enough my feeling faded. Perkus was gone, and I couldn’t mourn it the way I had before, at least not by creeping around his street.

Perkus was gone. By the last part of January, Oona and I had settled into yet another version of our stilted routine, and not mentioning Perkus or the circumstances of his going was a part of it. It was as if Oona and I had met through some other common friend, or picked each other up at a bar. If our career as secret lovers had always had weird denominators, Perkus now became part of that murky undertow, the stuff Oona and I left unspoken. She was deep in the finishing throes of Noteless’s book, on a crash publication schedule, in order to be in stores concurrently with a ceremony at the hole downtown, at the end of the spring. Without Perkus’s apartment as a rendezvous point, and forbidden from calling lest I interrupt, I mostly ended up waiting at home until she’d exhausted herself writing and felt she needed some reward. I knew just how she liked her martinis now, and had a perfect one waiting for her when she came sighing through the door bragging of how many pages she’d batted out. But she wasn’t looking for conversation, and I managed not to press her on sore points, mostly. My encounter with Noteless at the mayor’s party seemed distant history, part of the Perkus era, last year. I’d satisfied myself well enough that they weren’t lovers, but Oona had established something too. By squiring the artist through the party and leaving in his car she’d cemented me in my subsidiary place, forging our present odd equilibrium. I loved her in my bed, but I kept my mouth shut about it.

One day I whined that I couldn’t leave my apartment for fear of missing her. “You should carry a cell phone like everyone else,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t worry.”

“Perkus doesn’t carry a cell phone.”

“Like regular people. If he did carry one you’d be able to call him, wouldn’t you?”

“But you never call me.”

“I might if you had a number.”

“I don’t like the whole rigmarole, everyone going around … talking… everywhere.”

“You don’t have to talk anywhere you don’t want to.”

“I guess I’m old-fashioned.”

“Sort of like the word
rigmarole.”

The next morning, before sharing breakfast at the Mews—a rarity, these days, that she’d linger for breakfast—we ducked in at a newsstand and Oona bought me a disposable mobile phone, with a hundred minutes built in before the thing expired. She entered its digits into her Treo, then handed the little plastic implement to me. It barely weighed anything. “There you go,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything else, just carry it around. If it rings, it’s me. The Oonaphone.”

Nice, but the Oonaphone never rang once. I waited at home with the martini makings—I had nowhere else I wanted to go.

Something else happened then. With Perkus gone, and Oona systematically depriving my heart’s hopes, I pined deeply for Janice, even if I couldn’t know who I was pining for. Maybe I pined for pining, for the notion of love itself. I read and reread the letters, the wealth of them from before her sickness, the few that had come since. Guiltily, I found I loved most not the Janice I was supposed to love, my onetime fiancée on earth, then heroically launched on her mission, nor even the brave professional of the first months after the Chinese mines had trapped her and the Russians in space. No, I loved the deranged astronaut of midwinter, resigned to the space station’s
degeneration and perhaps to dying. The less of Janice I got, the more I cherished her. Any past was like the church tower, gray and mute, bedrocked in mystery. Her scant words now were like the birds, who when they circled into view took my breath away. The flock had never quit, returning to soar at kooky angles even in the tailing last flurries the morning after the blizzard and Arnheim’s party.

Perkus was gone. Midway through the month of January, before I’d completely quit pacing the periphery of that quarantined block of Eighty-fourth Street, I had an idea I was investigating his disappearance, though I could hardly report what outward form, if any, my investigation took. I made a pretty lame detective. One of my forays was to call Strabo Blandiana and get an appointment. I couldn’t imagine a way to interrogate Mayor Arnheim or Russ Grinspoon, but Strabo Blandiana was within reach. The Chinese medicinalist was implicated in the first moments of Perkus’s errancy, if that was what it was, the first encounter which eventually led up the mayor’s staircase. I wanted to see the evidence of the framed photograph in his treatment room and weigh for myself Strabo’s awareness of any plot. Likely I sensed that Strabo would treat any question kindly, and also as symptomatic. When I say I made a feeble detective, I mean that I was as willing to be cured of my case as to solve it.