Chronic City (52 page)

“This had better be good.”

I wasn’t sure whether I should be furious at Richard for his abdication of Toothland, only that he was so patently aggrieved at my summoning him here that I couldn’t bother trying to reverse the charges. Let Richard be the furious one, whether it was to cover feelings of guilt or not. I needed him today.

“We’re taking Perkus in for a checkup, only he doesn’t know it,” I said.

“Your timing is bad,” Richard muttered. I didn’t know whether he meant the snowstorm, the particular curses of his agenda, the hovering presence of his profiler, or something else, more basic to my being. I didn’t doubt he was right in any case. Anne Sprillthmar introduced herself more fully (my name seeming to mean nothing particular to her, a relief), then fell in with us on our way upstairs. Her presence was unassuming, despite her glamour—I figured it was part of her journalist’s talents for putting people at ease when they shouldn’t be. It wasn’t as though she were recording us with anything more than her warmly puzzled, unjudgmental eyes. At Perkus’s door I tried to warn them both, incompetently, mentioning squalor, disjunction, hiccups, a well-intentioned but boundless three-legged dog. Richard pushed past me in annoyance. I held the door for Anne Sprillthmar. By the time I followed her inside the journalist was squatting on the kitchen’s filthy tile, restraining Ava from tunneling too far down her throat with those patented fang-bared tongue-kisses. “Sweet baby, sweet
baby
, doesn’t anybody ever give you love, you
poor
thing?” The accent made Anne Sprillthmar’s endearments super-lascivious. “Oh, yes, you’re a big baby,
aren’t
you, darling?” It was on seeing that Anne Sprillthmar was a “dog person”
that I recovered an image of her, riding Oona Laszlo’s elevator at my side.

Further inside, the encounter I’d willed was taking place, Perkus startled into semi-accountability as only Richard Abneg’s implicit reproach could startle him. He’d been huddled on the couch, with Sterling Wilson Hobo’s
Immaculate Rust
in scissored remnants all around him, shattered like everything else that met Perkus’s interested eye, digested in his own personal mashup. At first I thought to protest—hadn’t Perkus said Hobo wasn’t his sort of poet?—and then I saw the pages and verses had been reduced past even Hobo’s minimalist intentions, the words and even letters dismembered from one another. Perkus had the single syllable
fal
stuck to his cheek. Here was the final destination of all of Perkus’s languages: the ransom note. Perkus, kidnapped by his own theories, had then suffered Stockholm syndrome, in which one preferred a jailer to oneself.

Or maybe I was unfair. Maybe hiccups wrecked him. Anyhow, he’d wrecked, chin shadow become an unkempt whitish beard, scruff become inane wisps spilling over his ear tops, disarray become dereliction. Perkus wasn’t the only startled person on the scene. Richard Abneg was silenced, too. I saw Perkus through his eyes, miles deep in self-dungeoning since their farewell on Eighty-fourth Street. I recalled they’d been boys together, that unimaginable land of brilliant New York childhood I’d been made to feel ashamed I lacked. I’d given Richard no chance even to understand what the Friendreth Apartments were about—he probably credited the malodorous decor entirely to Perkus. Close enough. Everything stood for itself. Perkus hiccuped violently to rupture the silence and an exclamation mark of drool decorated his chin.

Richard didn’t speak to him at first, but turned back to me, the rage and hurry leached from his voice. “You have a doctor waiting?” he asked. I nodded, and he said, “Take Anne back into the kitchen.”
Anne Sprillthmar, with Ava nuzzling up into her kneading hand, had come in behind me, and now stood shocked. Perkus gawked back at her. “I’ll talk to him for a minute,” said Richard, as if neither Perkus nor the journalist could hear him. “We should have kept a cab waiting. There won’t be many in this goddamn cul-de-sac.”

“We’ll go downstairs and find a cab and be waiting for you.” I was grateful for Richard’s command, eager to expand on my usefulness in return for his taking responsibility for what happened next, perhaps even what had happened to begin with.

“Get two and send her back to the Condé Nast building.”

The snows were wilder than even ten minutes earlier, though these were still the sort of brittle pinprick flakes I had trouble imagining accumulating much, not because they’d melt—it was too cold for that—but because they’d whirl and drift and be whisked into piles, never adhering to anything, not even one another. If cab-hailing could be called street smarts, Richard’s were unerring: Anne Sprillthmar and I had to walk to the corner of First for a taxi. We rode it back while I explained to her that Richard wanted her gone.

“What
is
that place?”

“Only dogs are supposed to live there. If you Google under Friendreth you’ll find out all about it.”

“I’m guessing this has nothing to do with the tiger.”

“No, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Nothing to do with Richard’s official responsibilities.”

“Who is that dismal person?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Would I know the name?”

“I doubt it.” I could excuse
dismal
, which was easily justified. Yet I felt an obligation to be as flinty as Richard, on his and Perkus’s behalves, rather than to act as sentimentally undone as I felt, under the twin sway of the disastrous watershed occasion—I was as
amazed at myself for waiting so long to put Perkus Tooth into a framework of emergency as I was that I had finally done so, and that it had, seemingly, worked—and my irrelevant and inappropriate responsiveness to Anne Sprillthmar’s voice, height, and scent.

She made one last bid for conversation. “Amazing about this weather, don’t you think?”

“I guess—yes.” I didn’t want to think about the snow, though in our cab we were surrounded at all sides by a theater of white chaos. The snow seemed to be thinking about us. That would do for now. Anne Sprillthmar got out and found herself another cab, smiling placidly through a wiped porthole in my window to let me know I’d done no damage to her undamageable serene curiosity about me and other things.

Richard Abneg stuffed Perkus into the cab just a moment later. He’d got him into several layers of charity sports-gear junk to insulate his skeleton from the cold, and a fleabag hat I thought I’d never seen, until I recognized it as the fur tower Biller had once sported, now crushed and matted, as if Ava had been regularly humping it. Ocelot, I remembered. Perkus seemed to be waking from a spell, slowly. “Who was that woman, Chase?”

“You better ask Richard.”

Richard pushed in at Perkus’s door, securing Perkus on the hump seat, hands cradling his knobby corduroy knees. A few bits of language, words and letters jaggedly snipped from their contexts, still clung to his pants amid the melting snowflakes. The cabby’s lush incense didn’t blot a certain doggy, pukey, unshowered smell. I told him where to take us.

“Is that your new girlfriend, Richard? What happened to the Hawkman?”

Richard might have known better than to try to wait him out.

“You make a beautiful pair. Beautiful
coats.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a journalist doing a profile.” Before Perkus could pry it from him, Richard added, “For
The New Yorker.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Is Avedon going to take your picture?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Perkus was disturbingly gleeful through his debris and hiccups. His eyes were thrilled, one with Richard, the other with the surrounding scene. “So you’ve
done
it, Abneg! How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“How does it feel
to finally ride the hegemonic bulldozer?”

Richard let this line die in silence. Our cab got lucky shooting downtown, then made slow sticky progress crossing west on Thirty-fourth Street. Perkus, unanswered, ground into his silent management of the jarring hiccups, sometimes seeming to murmur between them to himself, not daring to speak. “I need to walk Ava,” he said suddenly.

“Chase will go back and walk Ava,” said Richard, smoothly delegating.

“Maybe you should call Sadie Zapping,” Perkus mused. He spoke as if conjuring a figure in mist, some fallen Valkyrie or minor archangel.

“I’ll do that,” I said. I had no idea if this was possible, but I’d be willing to try. I didn’t plan on abandoning Perkus anytime too soon. The Friendreth’s volunteers, Sadie or another, would certainly look in on the dog before long.

“Perkus is probably wondering what kind of doctor he’ll be seeing,” said Richard, his voice weary, as he craned his head at the snow-clotted traffic. He’d fallen into a queer oblique habit of addressing
us each through the other, perhaps a measure of how badly he’d been rattled by Anne Sprillthmar’s questions.

“Strabo Blandiana,” I said. “They’ve met before. He’ll be familiar with Perkus’s history.”

“The Romanian quack,” said Richard darkly. “I know who he is.”

“He’s a Chinese practitioner,” I said.

“Chase must think I’m out of
balance,”
said Perkus humorously.

“Ironic,” said Richard.

“No, it
is
ironic,” said Perkus, his voice an ember reigniting in a damp bonfire, cheek muscle frogging beneath his Unabomber beard. “Given all that’s off balance around here!” He was revving up another of his hiccologues. “Seriously, I’ve got to talk with you, Richard. A lot of this, uh, stuff I’ve been working on is completely lost on Chase.”

“Thanks.”

“No offense, Chase, but it’s like trying to describe Gnuppets
to a Gnuppet.”
Perkus’s glee in this superb comparison was tempered by the ferocity of the seizure that marked it, an emphysematous gasp for breath adequate to complete the phrase.

“We’ll talk after you’ve seen the doctor.” Richard’s unrestrained sarcastic inflection of this last word served not only to reinforce what a poor selection he thought I’d made in Strabo Blandiana but to assuage Perkus that the two of them still spoke above my head, and so his promise of future listening was sincere. Perkus, no matter his state, caught this implication and was reassured. His response was to defend Strabo, halfway.

“Blandiana’s an interesting character, Richard. Did you know that before we met he actually troubled to read quite a bit of my work?”

“Really.” Richard kept it neutral.

“Strabo’s a kind of catalyst person, I think. His offices might function as a message center or way station for higher intelligences…” From his vague tone I couldn’t tell whether Perkus meant the offices had already been used that way or only had that potential. I wasn’t sure he knew. (Perhaps it was an allusion to the framed chaldron poster. Or to the chance of Fran Lebowitz running into Frank Langella in the waiting room.) It was maddening that I even wanted to follow his drift into chaotic abstractions. My friend Perkus Tooth had collapsed, then accepted my help. That truth ought reasonably to end my attempt to collate and refold his many crumpled maps of the universe. Yet he was never so very far from where I’d first met him, a door into my life in the city as I knew it now. And I loved him—if that made me his unteachable Gnuppet, so be it.

“Hark!
” said Perkus. When he spoke the hiccups emerged as silences, but when he was silent they took the form of these Shakespearean exhortations.

Arrived in Chelsea, we got him out of the cab, through the darkening street, under a snow-choked sky, and up to Strabo Blandiana’s rooms. In arranging this appointment Strabo and I had spoken on the phone once the afternoon before, once this morning. Strabo had made any number of confidence-inspiring remarks about chronic hiccups, which I needed him to do, for hiccups, I kept telling myself, were the problem here. The healer spoke of my wisdom in coming to him first, explaining that too many of those enduring chronic hiccups found their way to acupuncture only as a last resort. He’d place needles at E-37, E-1, and E-33, and then we’d be able to consider how Perkus had got to this point, characteristically implying
he’d make symptoms disappear
in order
to proceed to deeper matters, the world sickness that by its nature infected every soul. I did my best to preview Perkus’s low state, the tatterdemalion soon to appear in his suite. Strabo assured me he’d have any other clients tucked away in their own rooms when we came through—any idea that he’d be affronted himself was beneath mention. Strabo’s commitment, once he’d taken a client, was absolute. He had no idea how Perkus regarded him. It wasn’t clear to me, actually. Perkus might have absorbed more sincere value from his first visit than he’d ever admit.

Strabo even seemed capable of soothing Richard Abneg’s suspicions as he eased Perkus off behind a closed door, leaving us to face that dippy receptionist in a waiting room that had been otherwise cleared as promised. Richard and I didn’t make any small talk, too conscious of that possible listener, but I believe I wasn’t wrong to sense relief in him. I’d produced a kind of obsequious triumph, having moved the hot potato of Perkus from one bracket of authority to another, leaping the gulf of distrust between the two—the best a Gnuppet might hope to do. I don’t know how long I was allowed to reside in that bubble of false satisfaction before Strabo reappeared, minus Perkus.