Chronic City (44 page)

Being Perkus Tooth, he blamed the nearest cultural referent he could find: I smoked dope with a man who went from being directed by Groom to being directed by Ib and couldn’t tell the difference! What a fool I am. That joint was probably laced with
essence of mediocrity
, a substance that gave you a solo career as feeble as Grinspoon’s once he’d parted ways with Hale, and made its imbiber hallucinate that sublime chaldrons were only video-game fodder. For now that Perkus had begun to distrust one assumption he had to question them all. Chaldrons were something else. Maybe Claire Carter didn’t even know, though at the same time he was certain she was trying to throw him off the hunt. Linus Carter might have glimpsed their form somewhere and based the crappy decoder ring in the cereal box of Yet Another World on what he’d glimpsed. Nothing was necessarily so simple. Hah, as if it even outwardly claimed to be!

Chase Insteadman was his friend. Chase Insteadman was an actor and the ultimate fake. A cog in the city’s fiction.

The tiger was destroying the city. The tiger was being used by the city to un-home its enemies.

Chaldrons were real and fake, as Marlon Brando was alive and dead.

Mailer, almost destroyed by gravity, walking with two canes, and complacently resigned to Provincetown, vacating the fight.

Richard Abneg worked for the city and the eagles were therefore a wild force from elsewhere. Richard Abneg might be a key to something, if Perkus thought about him coherently enough, impossible in this snow and cluster. Abneg, inside and outside at once,
self-consciously corrupted, a hinge on the door between the old city and the new.

Oona Laszlo, Perkus’s own Frankenstein creation, mocking him always. She carried the tang of betrayal and sellout. One thing to dash off with your left hand memoirs of abused point guards, but Oona carried water for that middlebrow
Times
darling, Noteless. Nothing worse than what Perkus liked to call too-late modernism. Clever Oona had written herself into a bed of lies. Perkus only pitied Chase for being so much under her thumb, and excommunicated her now in his mind.

He thought, too, of friends lost to time, who’d left their traces in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment: the mad bookseller D. B. “Bats” Breithaupt; George, the art restorer from the Met; Roe, Specktor, Amato, Sorrentino, Howe, Hultkrans, other names he’d misplaced, the good faith implicit in convivial uncompromising evenings now stranded in amnesiac mists.
Where are my friends?
If he could see all his friends again, the apartment or chaldrons wouldn’t matter.

Somewhere, far off, a urine-stained bear bellowed (did polar bears bellow?) on a sun-blasted floe, seeming to ask what did
anything
in the city have to do with what was real?

All of this occurred on Eighty-fourth between Second and First, as Perkus made his staggering way across the traffic-barren intersection. He’d begun walking in the center of the streets, in the gully the early plows had made. To cover a block’s distance required a sort of heroic effort, but Perkus wasn’t in a state to savor the exertion of his own will so much as he observed himself from a fascinated distance, like a creature in nature footage, one of those bears spied on from a biplane window, or a crippled caribou strayed from the herd into an unwelcoming landscape. His books and CDs and videotapes were
okay. The building hadn’t fallen, they remained indoors, waiting for him. It was as if the apartment represented the better part of him, the brain in archive, and it didn’t so much matter what happened to the exiled scrawny body that now noticed the wetness of cuffs and sleeves beginning to clumpily freeze in the chill wind. Nonetheless, discomfort gusted his sails to a nearby port: Gracie Mews. A twenty-four-hour place, the coffee shop hadn’t bowed to the storm, its waiters taking turns scraping and chopping at the sidewalk through the night to keep at least a symbolic pathway open, though a customer would have to clamber over a hell of a lot of other unshoveled snow to get to the area they’d cleared. Well, Perkus did the clambering now. He plunged through the door of the Mews and, though he could barely see his hand in front of his face anymore for the breadth of his blind spot, smelled coffee, tureens of it, the good stuff.

Despite his appearance they welcomed him into a booth, recognizing a friend of the actor’s, or anyway one of their few likely customers under present weather conditions. Perkus had about forty dollars in his pocket—good thing he hadn’t been able to hail a cab. He ordered a poached egg, if only to have something to try to center in his vision, a peg to drink coffee around. Drink coffee he did, though it was too late. Cluster had risen like a sea over his head. Perkus was now (at least) triply divided from the world, riven by loss and snow and the imposition over his senses of that state of half-life which would have kept him from even noticing the restoration of those other things.

He told himself he was waiting in Chase Insteadman’s place for Insteadman to come, but after the first hour or so of nodding in and out of a psychedelic caffeinated coma right there in the booth, he admitted to himself that he couldn’t really imagine the former child star budging from his apartment in this stuff for love or money. It wasn’t as if Chase knew he was here. Perkus would have to go from
the Mews eventually, back out into the cold. The obvious thought was to find his way to Chase’s building, if he could manage it by memory, crippled by migraine. Yet the more he lived with Claire Carter’s taunts the less eager he was to face the actor soon. Associations with the Mews gave him cause to meditate on the actor’s part in things, the changes that had crept over the city and Perkus’s life since late last summer, since their meeting in Susan Eldred’s office at Criterion.

Perkus lived as much inside a conundrum as he did a city. At any given moments the conundrum presented itself in some outward form, a vessel or symbol. Chase Insteadman might be the thing that had come along to replace chaldrons, which had themselves probably replaced some other emissary pregnant with undisclosed messages—Gnuppets, say, or Marlon Brando, Perkus couldn’t always say which was the preeminent form conundrum took at a given time.

Unlike Brando or any of the others, however, Chase Insteadman had presented himself at Perkus’s own door, offered himself as a friend.

Perkus had been readying himself to tell the actor what he knew: that his life was a lie, an entertainment. That there was no beautiful heartbreaking astronaut alive overhead, dropping sad notes from space. Perkus had been astonished that Claire Carter had let this secret be confirmed. Yet why fall into such a simple trap? There must be more. There was more. Why explain Yet Another World so laboriously to him? The answer lay in plain sight: Claire Carter wanted Perkus Tooth to consider the extent to which
he lived as much in a construction as Chase Insteadman
.

Perkus held to one ethos above all, a standard drawn from early drug episodes, Ecstasy, mescaline, one memorable day a silver tray heaped full of psilocybin-mushroom tea sandwiches, crusts trimmed by a friend steeped in WASP manners, as with companions he experienced
side-by-side plunging in and out of brief dazzling revelation, while others lurched into bad trips, negative worlds, needing to be retrieved: don’t rupture another’s illusion unless you’re positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you’re wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you’re reaching to shatter? Perkus, operating from a platform of cultural clues arranged into jigsaw sense, had gone years certain his solipsism was a pretty good home. Plastering the city with broadsides, he’d done his best to widen it to let passersby be drawn inside, so sure he was of its grounding in autodidactic scholarship and hard-won ellipsis.

Now, all certainty had fled him at once. If a man found himself consoled inside a virtual chalice, wasn’t he possibly a virtual man? Maybe Perkus’s Manhattan was as fragile a projection as Yet Another World, crafted by an unnamed maker or makers as erratic and helpless as Linus Carter. Did he want to destroy it? The city was a thing of beauty, however compromised at its seams, however overrun with crass moola, however many zones were hocked to Disney or Trump. Claire Carter had done the impossible, inspiring in Perkus a yearning sympathy for anyone who kept this mad anthill running, even developers throwing up vacuous condos in place of brown-stones, or the sorrow-stricken moneymen working beneath the gray fog. They were all pitching in, and who was Perkus to let them down if they liked reading about Janice Trumbull on their folded-over front page as they stood crammed into the IRT? Perkus’s present bit of business, she’d not-so-subtly implied, might be to keep the actor happy, like a spear-carrier on the Met’s stage who was really the lead tenor’s rent boy or coke dealer. Did that mean jolting Chase from his astronaut dream? No, don’t accuse any other person of functioning as a Gnuppet unless you are ready, like Brando, to walk onto the set without pants to prove what you’ve got underneath, to show that no
hand has climbed up your shirt to operate your hands and head and to speak through your mouth. Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone! Here was how extensively Claire Carter had destabilized him: Perkus Tooth now knew he might be a Gnuppet, though operated by whom he couldn’t say.

So he couldn’t face Chase Insteadman, at least not yet. He wouldn’t know what to say to him.

This fugue wasn’t instantaneous. On a more tangible plane, the Mews’ waiters eventually took away the yolk-curdled remains of Perkus’s egg, swabbed with a string mop at the slush as it unclung from his velvet cuffs and from between his shoelaces, and refilled his coffee five or six times. They must love that ritual of refilling, either that or feel their customers got a kind of macho charge from emptying so many cups, they gave you such a shallow coffee mug at these places. A noisy couple of customers, a chortling example of pair-bonding at its most lelf-congratulatory, had come and gone what might be hours ago. At last, from within his zone of self-erasure, his chalk outline, Perkus’s raging bladder signaled the risk of soaking his pants right here in the booth. For an instant he calculated that it might pass as more melted snow, then decided he’d haul himself to the Mews’ bathroom. When he returned he found his place cleared, a check on the table, decorous dinerese for the old heave-ho.

If not to Chase’s, where? Richard Abneg? The eagles had preempted that destination. He had no idea where Georgina Hawkmanaji lived. Oona? Hah! Perkus might as well return and appeal to Claire Carter for shelter, that’s how low his regard for Oona Laszlo had sunk.

No, there was only one inevitable haven, and as in a merciful desert vision the information Biller had jotted on a scrap of receipt on Perkus’s kitchen table appeared before him, oasis in a blind spot: Biller’s new street, the dog apartments, Sixty-fifth near York. Not the
numerical address, but he didn’t need that, from Biller’s descriptions he’d surely be able to stake out the volunteer walkers crisscrossing the lobby with their leashed clientele.

His warming and elliptical passage of hours within the Mews had served another purpose, allowing more streets to become negotiable, though still the city’s official life was charmingly on hold, giving way to the goofy storm-trooperish skiers, and kids in bright plastic saucers. Perkus tried and failed to remember doing such a thing himself. On a snow day he’d have been indoors with a pile of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In Dell Pocket editions—he could still see
Cat’s Cradle
in red,
The Sirens of Titan
in purple,
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
in blue, fox-blond pages softened by his eager thumbs. Cluster couldn’t drag him deep enough into half-life to blot from mind’s eye the beacon of those Dell Vonneguts.

Biller was the one he needed now. As though Perkus had been keeping Biller in the bank, feeding and strengthening a daily soldier accustomed to Life During Wartime. Well, here, trudging sickened in the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately convinced.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t
. Perkus had gotten complacent in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go underground. Biller knew how to live off the grid, even in a place like Manhattan that was nothing but grid. Even better, Biller had an encampment in the enemy terrain of Yet Another World. Biller could tell him what he knew about Linus Carter and chaldrons—now Perkus would be patient enough to listen to what had always seemed a little pointless before. With the virtual realm seeming to have penetrated Perkus’s city at any number of points, Biller was the essential man, with means for survival in both places. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without resources. Perkus laughed at
himself now: Biller was like Old Man McGurkus in Seuss’s
Circus McGurkus
, who’d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants’ shit, and also do the high-wire aerialist act.