Chronic City

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.”

“What is that crap?” said Richard distractedly. A veteran of Perkus’s enthusiasms, he’d obviously begun readying himself for some esoteric disclosure on the computer screen. The music was, I hoped, the first clue that we’d migrated out of the usual range.

“It’s Sandy Bull,” said Perkus, not turning from the screen. He’d called up eBay, and now tapped Refresh, so the page blinked and began redrawing itself. “So, Chase’s acupuncturist was onto something, actually, there is some kind of tonality that resonates with the limbic system, and Sandy Bull’s guitar has got it in spades. You’ll see, it opens you right up to the chaldron. Chase explained to you about chaldrons, didn’t he?”

“Oh, sure,” said Richard, unflappably mocking. “All about chaldrons and acupuncture and limbic tonality in spades. You know me, Perkus, that’s some of my favorite stuff.”

“Be polite,” said Georgina softly.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Perkus breathlessly. “You’ll see. You have to be listening to the Sandy Bull and high on Ice when you see the chaldron, at least for maximum effect.”

“I’m in your hands.”

Well, we were certainly high. The four of us seemed to throb there where we’d gathered in Perkus’s dim lair, Georgina gracefully flung across Richard’s lap, long legs and elbows askew, hands gathered beneath her chin, Richard grunting slightly as he shifted her weight around trying to get vantage past her shoulder, the building’s radiators cackling and whining as they beat back the chill seeping through window seams, the four of us like the chambers of a collective beating heart, pulsing with expectancy despite Richard’s congenital cynicism or my heretical doubt. Perkus, the fugitive ecstatic, had infected us with zeal again, the critic’s illness. Who knew, there might be something limbic in the music as well, only I wasn’t sure I knew what the word meant. Just at the instant this occurred to me Perkus got the finished image of a chaldron, all the pixels now smoothed around the edges, centered on-screen.

There were words bordering that screen, I suppose-text with a seller’s description, the latest bids on the item in question, also eBay emblems and advertisements, sidebars and rulers, and a margin of Perkus’s computer-desktop bordering those. None of it pertained, no more than the dun-colored plastic casing of Perkus’s monitor, or the dusty volumes on the shelves behind the table where the computer perched. The glowing peach-colored chaldron smashed all available frames or contexts, gently burning itself through our retinas to hover in our collective mind’s eye, a beholding that transcended optics. Ordinary proportions and ratios were upturned, the chaldron an opera pouring from a flea’s mouth, an altarpiece bigger than the museum that contained it. The only comparison in any of our hearts being, of course, love.

Georgina Hawkmanaji leaned a little into the glow. Perkus scooted aside to invite her nearer, a gesture of munificence now that we saw what it was worth to have his privileged seat. How could we have come so late to this knowledge? Sandy Bull’s guitar, which a moment before had been a nagging schoolyard taunt, some universal nyah-nyah whine, now catalyzed and enlivened our desire for the chaldron, become less music than a kind of genial electricity, a subliminal correlative to our longing.

It was Georgina who placed the first words into this higher silence, her voice the first out of our joint trance. I think Perkus and Richard would have agreed she properly spoke for us all, her femininity and reserve the only appropriate thing, her trace of accent, formerly laughable, now a nod to the powerful essence of elsewhere radiating from the artifact. Our voices would have been too gruff and shattering to offer up.

“It is beautiful,” she almost whispered.

What were we going to do, contradict her? There was nothing to add. We were silent.

“A door,” Georgina added, even more completely under her breath.

I misunderstood and, not wishing her to be embarrassed, said gently, “I adore it, too.”

She shook her head, never taking her eyes off the screen. “I feel it is a kind of door, this chaldron. One goes through it, to another place. I think I shall never completely return.”

I myself wasn’t positive I’d glimpsed the other place the chaldron evoked, yet Georgina Hawkmanaji’s term stuck. I couldn’t doubt the chaldron as a door, even if I hung somewhat at that door’s threshold. But any such minor reservation found no voice, for if I was certain of anything it was that though the chaldron must have somehow been made-whether by the hands of some individual human genius, a Mozart of the potter’s wheel, or by a machine or assembly line, was therefore some sacred accident of commerce-its effect was to make constructed things, theories and arguments, cities and hairstyles, attitudes, sentences, all seem tawdry, impoverished, lame. Door was good enough. I didn’t need to form a better idea, a better name. The chaldron had pardoned me of that burden. It possessed thingliness, yet was wholly outside the complex of thing-relations (these peculiar terms appeared spontaneously in my thoughts, I couldn’t have said how).

“I… want to… fuck it,” said Richard.

“Richard!” said Georgina.

He pretzeled his arms around her waist, fingertips tickling high at her ribs, beneath her neat breasts, and ground upward against her from his seat. “I mean it makes me want to make love to you, my sweet!” Georgina squirmed happily even as she reddened with shame, her eyes wide. The atmosphere was helplessly giddy, we all streamed in the chaldron’s light, like hippies in some LSD mud puddle. “I mean it makes me want to dance with you, my darling Hawkman…” Richard lifted them both from the chair, still pinning her around her waist. They shimmied together to one side of us, swaying to Sandy Bull’s droning chords like the last couple on a prom floor, Richard clinging to Georgina, growling endearments with his beard crushed into her long, bared neck. The room flooded with their animal presence, and when Perkus turned from the chaldron I anticipated his disapproval at this outbreak of the corporeal in his dusty mental kingdom. Instead he grinned at them, another blessing that seemed to emanate from the chaldron. I grinned, too. Seeing them dance, I thought of myself and Perkus cavorting, months earlier, and Perkus’s mad declaration that I was his body and he was my brain. Now, immersion in the chaldron’s light refreshed this notion of a gestalt identity alive among us. The chaldron’s door might open to a place where selves dissolved and merged. Anything was possible.

Perkus ushered us ever so delicately back onto earthly ground. This was an eBay page, after all. “So, I put in a reserve bid of eighteen hundred dollars. As you can see, that was surpassed ten minutes ago. It’s already up to twenty-six, and there’s still more than fifteen minutes left.”

“Two thousand… six hundred… dollars?” I blithered.

“Yeah, they’ve gotten a lot more expensive,” said Perkus, not without satisfaction. Why shouldn’t the value of such a thing slide upward-why not a hundred thousand, or a million?

Richard quit dancing. “What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t have the winning bid?” He and Georgina crowded back into their one seat, as if the music had stopped in a game of musical chairs.

“Nope,” said Perkus.

“Can you afford to stay in?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Perkus with a sweet sadness. “I couldn’t afford the eighteen hundred, but it doesn’t matter. I won’t win.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Richard Abneg furiously. Spittle from his lips arced onto the computer screen. “Make a bid, Perkus. I’ll pay you back when you nail it.”

“Sure, sure,” said Perkus. His own fever was expended, now that he’d guided us into the chaldron’s embrace. He was the mellow proprietor of tantalizing glimpses, we the sideshow customers, looking for a slot for our nickels, frantic to widen the peepshow’s aperture. “There’s no hurry, the action’s all in the last minute or so, you’ll see.”

“Bid, bid,” grunted Richard, almost jostling Georgina off his lap.

“Sure, pick a number, how much do you want to see them pay?” said Perkus. “There’s a certain pleasure in driving the bids up.”

“I want us to win,” said Richard.

“Of course you do,” said Perkus delicately. “I used to feel the same way.” We’d all leaned in, seeking reconnection with what now seemed such a dire commodity, feeling breathless at what could be taken away from us, a thing we hadn’t even known to want a few minutes before. Chaldrons circulated in a zero-sum system, and those not winners were certainly losers. How could we have been so naïve? It was as if for a sweet instant we’d forgotten death existed, and Perkus had had to break the news.

“What do you mean, ‘used to’?”

“I’ve come to see that it’s enough to put on the music, smoke some Ice, and, you know, bid on them. Just that feeling is enough. It gets me through, knowing that it’s out there. Increasingly, I think that’s what they’re for. It’s like an indirect thing, who knows if it would even work if you had it right in front of you.”

“Screw that,” said Richard. “I want one in my house.”

“You don’t have a house anymore,” I pointed out.

“Perhaps Richard means my house,” said Georgina, teasingly.

“Okay, let’s give it a shot,” said Perkus equably, his fingers on the keys. Now he was our arbiter of the reasonable. “How much do we want to go in for? I’m warning you, coming in this early we’re probably just forcing the price up for the eventual winner-even if it’s somehow us. But you’ll chip in if we nail it, right?” He appeared to find our eagerness somehow funny. His temper recalled, of all things, Strabo Blandiana’s bedside manner with his needles.

“Go in hard, stick it to them, make them think twice,” said Richard. “Five grand. We’ll pay.”

“Go ahead, Perkus,” I heard myself say. “Do it, please.” Meanwhile the chaldron just went on shining its strange light on our absurd lusts, egging us on and shaming us all at once.

“It’s a good investment,” said Richard, in his crude way reading my mind exactly. “That thing’s obviously worth ten times that much. If it’s trading like this on eBay, for fuck’s sake, imagine what it would bring if it were handled right. It should be for sale at Sotheby’s.”

Georgina Hawkmanaji gripped Richard’s arm. “You wouldn’t dare speak of reselling it.”

“No, no, I’m just saying we should blow these small-time operators out of the fucking soup. Bid already, Perkus.”

“I am.” He entered the five thousand as a reserve bid, to be allocated in hundred-dollar jumps, so when he checked the bid list his on-screen name-Brando12-now appeared at the top, bearing the current leading offer of thirty-one hundred. Someone else lurking as we were must have already offered a reserve to the tune of three thousand. We all four breathed at a different rate, breathed at all for the first time really, since learning the ghostly ceramic was destined for some other hands than ours.

Only Richard wasn’t satisfied. “Why doesn’t it say five grand?”

“We don’t want to pay more than we have to,” I said, thinking it needed explaining.

“To hell with that. I want them to feel who they’re up against!” As if to confirm that our rivals were simultaneously more pathetic and more expert than ourselves, the bidders we’d topped were named Chaldronlover6 and Crazy4Chaldrons. That they seemed to have no other life confirmed that we deserved the chaldron more, yet this was no consolation, for not to have a chaldron was to have no life at all.

“Spoken like a representative of the Arnheim administration,” said Perkus. “Maybe you should have the other bidders all arrested. Then you can seize the chaldron as evidence.”

“No,” said Richard, with a husky note of urgency, even terror, in his voice, as if Perkus’s taunts outlined some real prospect, one within Richard’s scope. “This isn’t for… them. This is for us.”

“Yes, for us,” said Georgina, almost singing the words. Her tone, balm to Richard’s fury, was at the same time beseeching, a prayer or invocation over the battle we’d entered.

“We’ll keep the chaldron at my place,” I said, thinking ahead. “Seeing as how I live sort of at the midpoint of our various apartments. We can build some kind of special display case-”

“Perhaps this marvelous pottery ought to spend time in each of our homes,” said Georgina.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to treat it like a child in a divorce,” said Perkus.

“We need four,” said Richard.

“We don’t even have one yet,” said Perkus.

We spoke wildly, one eye on the clock ticking down on-screen, feeling invisible enemies crawling nearer to our prize with each silent digital heartbeat. Maybe the music and Ice were wearing off, maybe we weren’t entirely worthy, maybe we weren’t remotely worthy, anyway somehow the chaldron seemed to recede before us, no less potent but more distant, as if preparing us for goodbyes. The chaldron wasn’t to blame, we’d hardly hold it against that pale magnanimous container, but it seemed to wish to ease us toward an inevitable farewell, toward heartbreak. We were going to have to try to pretend we were content to be just friends. Perkus refreshed the page. The current bid was at five thousand and fifty. Perkus checked the history-the bidder was Crazy4Chaldrons. The auction closed in four minutes.

“Who are these fucking fucks?” said Richard.

“Tax-paying citizens like yourself,” said Perkus impartially.

“You don’t know for a fact that I pay taxes,” said Richard. “Raise on them, hurry up.”

“Five thousand, one hundred?” I suggested.

“Fifty-dollar increments is Tinkertoy stuff,” said Richard. “That’s how I know we’re going to kick the ass of these clowns. Make it fifty-five hundred.”

“Neither of these two is going to win it,” Perkus predicted, even as he entered the new bid. “One of the really big players will be coming in any second now.”

Perkus entered the bid, and we stared as his computer reconstructed the page with agonizing slowness. By the time it resolved an image our offer was irrelevant, had already been surpassed. The present sum was six thousand. Then, six thousand and fifty, Crazy4Chaldrons pitting against Chaldronlover6, ourselves an afterthought, fans in the upper deck bellowing inaudibly at the on-field action.

“Nooooo,” wailed Richard.

“Excuse me,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “I fear I am going to be ill.” She lurched out of Richard’s lap. “Where… I’m sorry…”

“Off the kitchen,” said Perkus, bearing down on his keyboard.

Georgina teetered on her heels. Richard didn’t glance away from the screen. I took the Hawkman by the elbow and steered her through the kitchen, aimed her at Perkus’s small bathroom. She raised her hand in hasty thanks, then shut the door behind her before finding the pull string for the bare bulb overhead. It was too late to point it out. I returned to Richard and Perkus and the calamitous auction. They’d bid seven grand, now waited for the screen to confirm it. With less than two minutes to the auction’s close, the top number came in at seven thousand and fifty.

“More, more!”

Perkus tried, heartlessly, I could see. The number swelled to eight, then nine thousand, our own bids never even reaching the top of the list, perhaps not even driving the others. We never held on the item’s main page long enough for Perkus’s rotten dial-up connection to complete the chaldron’s image, so it now remained elusive, jittery, wreathed in chunky pixels as if fatigued by our strident love. In the bathroom behind us Georgina could be heard decorously puking, the intervals between heaves filled by labored snuffling breath and a kittenish, unself-pitying whimper, as if in time to what now sounded like a psychedelic banjo number from Sandy Bull.

“Keep it on-screen!” yelled Richard. “Quit checking their names! Who cares!”

“You’ll want to see this,” Perkus promised.

“Richard,” I said. “Do you want to… go to Georgina? Do you want me to do something?”

He waved me off. “She’ll be okay. She barfs easily, it’s no big deal.”

What Perkus revealed to us was the list of bidders, Crazy4Chaldrons and Chaldronlover6, not to mention Brando12’s feeble contributions, now buried beneath two other rivals whose names were veiled beneath the words “private listing-bidders’ identities protected.” From this vantage we watched as this masked pair ran away with the bidding, topping one another by hundred, then two-hundred, then at last five-hundred-dollar increments, each time Perkus tapped Refresh. Our pretenses were shattered. We’d never been in the game, never been near to in it. The Hawkman’s heaving tailed away, and we heard the toilet flush twice. The digital clock ticked out the fateful irreversible instant. The chaldron had sold for fourteen thousand dollars.

“They can’t hide like that, it’s un-American,” said Richard despondently, his heart not in his own bitter joke.

“So, the way I see it, Crazy and Lover are fools like us, they’ve never been any nearer than bidding, never held a chaldron in their hands, never even been in the same room with one…” Perkus began this monologue absently, to no one of us in particular. Richard and I had fallen back, distraught and disenchanted, from the screen, while Georgina staggered back into our midst, breathing heavily, moistening her lips with her tongue, and Sandy Bull put down his banjo and picked up his guitar again. Losing the auction felt like soul-death, or at least a soul-shriveling, like the endorphin debt incurred by an all-night binge on Ecstasy, a trauma for which all among us but Perkus had been grievously unready. “They never win, so far as I can tell. Who knows, they may have my attitude, that the rapture is contained merely in bidding. One of those anonymous heavyweights always blows them out of-what did you call it, Abneg? — the soup, at the last second. Collectors with money to burn, they’re surely stacking up warehouses full of the things, like at the end of Citizen Kane. And their computers are probably a lot faster than mine, it’s a terrific advantage. I’ve heard it’s possible to set up subroutines that fire off a bid at the last second, mechanically ensuring that no one else can top it.”

I understood that Perkus was applying a balm, filling the doomy silence, offering us at once a whole menu of the rationalizations he’d concocted for staunching failure at these auctions. Perkus really was the expert here. Even his arcane eye seemed now to glance at wisdom that lay outside the boundaries of these rooms. I wondered how many chaldrons he’d communed with and lost.

“We should break into their fucking palaces and steal their treasure,” snarled Richard Abneg. He seemed to have reverted to a squatter’s paranoia, some feudalist rage predating accommodation to his role at the mayor’s hand.

“The prices really have shot up,” I said, stupidly showing off my slender familiarity in front of Richard and Georgina.

“It’s exponential,” agreed Perkus. “Who knows how many people are only just learning about these things?”

I gulped back revelation of my guilty fear: that we’d been bidding against Maud and Thatcher Woodrow, or Sharon Spencer, or others of their acquaintances with bottomless funds, all the result of my daft teasing insolence in mentioning Perkus and his chaldrons, during that lunch at Daniel. Countering that uncomfortable suspicion was the sense that the vision the chaldrons had opened to our eyes, however hopeless to define generally, was in part a glimpse of a world in which the Woodrows and Spencers, their empire of inherited privilege, of provenances and exclusions, was exposed as ersatz, fever-stricken, unsustainable. The object seemed to explode in our hearts with a wholeness that disproved Manhattan’s ancient powers, though those towered everywhere around us. A chaldron was fundamentally a thing beyond, or beside, money. Yet we’d done nothing but hurl cash at it, as if pitchforking hay into a furnace. Everything disproved everything else. The Hawkman might have been the one to vomit up the contradictions, but she’d done it for all of us. I felt ill.

I wasn’t alone. We all wavered in the apartment as if aboard a seasick vessel. Perkus drew out four clean glasses and filled them with tap water, which we sipped thankfully. He switched the music, stuck in a Rolling Stones CD, Some Girls. Mick Jagger’s cartoon raunch was another balm, beguiling us into a version of our worldly selves we could live with, the song “Miss You” calling up synesthetic recollection of discotheques, harmless sniffs of cocaine, skinny asses in gold lamé, stuff to make us grateful the chaldron hadn’t translated us out of our discrete and horny bodies just yet. Perhaps a teasing glimpse of that possibility was enough, perhaps Perkus was right that we wished to be window-shoppers, not buyers, not yet, of the purifying apparition. Richard clutched Georgina to him and they danced again, with charming formality, as if suddenly aware they’d come bursting into this scene in a tuxedo and party dress. Then, keeping with the black-and-white motif, Perkus tore open a package of Mallomars, unveiling rows of nestling breast-like cookies, and we fell on them like grateful scavengers, even Georgina (though I did now spot a small pink crumb of vomit on her pale cheek), collapsing their marshmallowy tops to gunk in our back molars, causing our heads to swim with sugar.

We returned from the kitchen to the meager comforts of Perkus’s living room, but his computer screen had defaulted to its saver, the branch-stranded raccoons, and none of us were troubled that one twitch of his cursor, or two, could feasibly unshade the light of a chaldron again. We were resplendent enough in the memory of the last one. And now, restored from the ordeal of losing the auction by pop songs and chocolate cookies, could afford to realize we were substantially in the black for the whole of the experience. We knew so much more than we had an hour before, never mind that it was nearly impossible to agree upon, or even to say clearly, what it was we knew.

“Perhaps you will understand when I say I felt undressed.” Georgina gulped in embarrassment having blurted this, and for an instant I feared she’d flee the room again. Instead, divertingly, she whirled from Richard, putting her long arms in the air. It seemed in another moment she might whirl her dress off over her head.

Wishing in my genteel way to give sanction and cover to Georgina’s observation, I found myself testifying, speaking in tongues. “For something so warm… it casts a sort of… brusque… watery… shadow… over so much else… that I took for granted…”

“Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you,” said Richard. “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector-”

“Sure, and what it detects is that your city’s a sucker, Abneg.” Perkus spoke with startling insistence, but his tone wasn’t needling. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream.” This was somehow the case, the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment. An object, the chaldron testified to zones, realms, elsewheres. Likely we’d lost the auction because one couldn’t be imported here, to this debauched and insupportable city. The winners had been rescuing the chaldron, ferrying it back to the better place.

“You think I’m going to get defensive, you guessed wrong,” said Richard, watching the Hawkman sway to the Stones’ “Just My Imagination.” “I wouldn’t defend anything right now, except, you know, your right to say it, and that with my life, Comrade Tooth.”

“What… are we going to… do?” I said, gullible enough for anything. Was a chaldron a beacon of revolution, was that what Richard signaled in calling Perkus Comrade? One if by land, two if by sea?

“Make coffee,” said Perkus.

“We’re going to get our hands on one of those goddamn things, that’s what we’re going to do,” said Richard.

Georgina Hawkmanaji had wound down, and curled her long body like a greyhound’s on the heaped-up coats and furs on Perkus’s sofa. She tucked her knees up between her arms, bracelets clicking together, her head slipping to one side as she began to snooze, revealing the curve of her neck, the pulse there. Richard and I were nicely energized, though, even before Perkus put mugs of fresh coffee in our hands. The evening, though filled with wild purpose, was slanting toward the shape of our old all-nighters, those corrosive binges that were only weeks behind us yet seemed a forsaken oasis, one island in time now revealed as a stop on our way to another. Perkus industriously rolled joints of Ice and changed the music again, Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece, something Georgina could nap to and a transitional bridge (we didn’t need to ask to be certain of this) back to the limbic strummings of Sandy Bull.

Richard hovered over Georgina, leering like a villain. “Look,” he said, as he ran his hand over the astonishing contour that began at her long ribs and narrow waist, to the jut of her wide hip, his hand less than an inch from the fabric of her dress. Georgina slept on, languid breath rippling her upper lip. “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you? Where did it come from?” Richard didn’t have to say what we were all thinking, that the curve of the Hawkman’s bottom made us think of the chaldron, that we’d hopelessly muddled the lust for one with lust for the other. If we indeed were a kind of gestalt entity, Perkus the perennially overwrought brain, myself the trite glamorous face, then I suppose Richard Abneg was our raging erection.

“So, the next auction closes at midnight,” Perkus informed us casually. “What I’d suggest is we hold off for another twenty minutes or so, the impact is usually best when it’s nearer the finish line. Now that you see what we’re after we don’t have to fidget around, we can just reside with it, dwell in that place-”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t bid?” asked Richard, with an edge of alarm.

“No, no, we’ll bid. You get closest to the feeling in that instant when your name tops the list. But, you know, afterward we don’t have to get so… frantic.” Perkus was a master of the order, walking initiates through their graduation ceremony in advance.

“I wasn’t frantic,” said Richard, lapsing in his vow of undefensiveness.

Perkus had taken care of us, in every way so far cradled us through the bewildering night. How did I reward him? I began to cover the whole event in denial and, filled with the special arrogance of denial, tried to turn the tables, to take care of Perkus as I’d vowed to do. My tough-love intervention: I clung to that scrap of agenda in my confusion. I wanted Richard Abneg to understand why I’d enlisted him, and that even if a new religion or Marxist plot had been founded on Eighty-fourth Street tonight, Perkus was still crazy and helpless and needed our help, needed a reality check. I reminded myself that only that morning I’d discovered Biller on the Eighty-sixth Street pavement, selling Perkus’s books.

“So should we talk about Brando?” I said.

“What?” said Perkus.

“Tell Richard about Marlon Brando, how you, you know, realized he was destined to save New York City from itself.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Richard.

Was it my imagination, or did the vigilante eyeball in Perkus’s head rotate laser beams of hatred at me for this betrayal? I somewhat hated myself, but pushed on. “Perkus told me Brando was the key, but I didn’t quite understand it at the time. Brando and Gnuppets.”

“What does that have to do with anything else?” said Richard, suspicious of us both.

“Maybe Brando owns a chaldron,” I said lamely.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Perkus. He leaned back in his seat, legs crossed ankle-over-knee, bare fringe of leg hairs exposed beneath his pants hem, held up a joint of Ice and his lighter, ready to bring them together but not doing it yet, and despite leaping into a verbal assault, kept his physical comportment cool, apart from that eye. “You’re just staggeringly useless, Chase, to understand what’s right in front of you. You’re even part of this culture, albeit a foolish part, and yet you can’t see it, or won’t. The breadth of awareness that’s embodied in a figure like Marlon Brando, the aspects of American possibility that he’s tasted on all our behalves, well, that wouldn’t probably interest you. The fact that for you he’s maybe only some kind of laughingstock, that says it all, doesn’t it, about what flourishes in this world of commodities and cartoons. And about what’s exiled, made into a safe caricature, or just outright expunged and forgotten. Brando’s a figure of freedom, just as much as that chaldron we just saw, yes, sure, and fuck you totally, Chase.”

“He’s not a laughingstock to me,” I said, unable to keep a little hurt from my voice. Brando and I were members of the same guild, after all. “He’s our greatest living actor, everybody knows that.”

“He’s not an actor,” said Perkus with stubborn ease.

“He’s not living,” commented Richard, but we paid him no attention, not yet. We spoke in full voice, giving no consideration to Georgina Hawkmanaji’s nap. She slumbered on in our midst, tucked pet-like atop that mound of coats, sublimely oblivious.

“I agree with all of what you say.” There was a stubborn part of me, too. “I just hoped you’d explain to Richard about how Brando was coming out of exile soon, to overturn all this plastic stuff. You said he might run for mayor. You wanted me to get in touch with him for you.”

“My mistake,” said Perkus stiffly. “I’ll contact him another way.”

“Listen, guys, not that Marlon Brando wouldn’t make a fucking excellent mayor,” said Richard, chortling in his beard. “But nobody’s contacting him anytime soon, because he’s kaput.” Richard reached out, took the joint and the lighter from Perkus’s hands, and ignited it. “Big fat old corpse, loads of sad tributes, few months ago. Anyway, Arnheim would crush him.”

We stared at Richard.

“Dead. He died. Not my fault. Hey, aren’t we missing an auction, fellas?”

“Marlon Brando isn’t dead,” said Perkus, in a voice shredded with fear.

“Sure he is, even Chase knows, he’s just too polite to mention it, aren’t you, Chase?”

I had no idea either way. But this wasn’t what I wanted for Perkus. Our intervention, barely begun, was already too harsh, our reality check too real. “A world without Marlon Brando in it,” I began, “would be a far poorer place… so I prefer to believe he’s alive. Of course he’s alive.”

“Who’s alive and dead isn’t a matter of belief,” said Richard.

“I remember now, he lives on an island…” I went on, desperately, “Trinidad-in-Tobago… or… Mustique…?”

“Everybody lives on some island,” said Richard. “Marlon Brando lately inhabits the Isle of the Dead. You could look it up.”

“What makes you the authority on who’s inhabiting what island?” said Perkus, now summoning fury to cover his trepidation. “You’ve been looking over your shoulder for months, you only act like you know more than the rest of us, but you’re bluffing.”

“Bluffing about what, exactly?” Richard Abneg’s voice tightened, as it had earlier, when he’d reacted with real discomfort to Perkus’s jibe about arrests and interrogations. I couldn’t say what was at stake between the two of them, yet I felt the room almost seesaw.

“What’s happened to this city,” said Perkus. “The tiger, for instance. You can’t even catch a tiger. For fuck’s sake, you’re eagle-hunted, Abneg.”

“Those eagles and that tiger have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”

“Why should I believe you even know?”

“The tiger is… not what people think it is. I’d explain it to you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

The feeble joke seemed to belittle Richard Abneg’s usual ominous aura without quite dispelling it, and so restored a measure of equilibrium to our little company. Perkus’s point hadn’t been refuted, only bargained with. Now Perkus turned in scorn to the computer keyboard, began rattling. “Good idea,” I said, in cheerleader mode. “We don’t want to miss our window of opportunity…”

I moved into the kitchen and swapped the Van Morrison for Sandy Bull, skipping ahead a few tracks, to where I figured we’d left off. Bull was playing his banjo again, this time a bluegrass version of Carmina Burana, calling up a vision of Disney dinosaurs transversing a primordial wasteland. Perfect. The music offered a sense of purpose, of destiny claimed. I wished to lure Perkus back to fugue and, for that matter, join him there myself. Returning, I entered a cloud of expelled Ice fumes, Richard bogarting the joint mercilessly. I plucked it from his lips and passed it to Perkus, who accepted it, puffing distractedly as he typed. “Here,” he said at last, his tone petulant. The new screen began to resolve.

It was my first green chaldron. (Like sexual positions or travel to distant locales, I’d begun semiconsciously cataloguing seminal moments, breakthroughs.) With Richard, I leaned over Perkus’s shoulder and let it seep into my wide-open eyes and heart. Music and smoke swirled to form a vertiginous cone or funnel of attention, as though we lay at the bottom of a deep well and the chaldron had peered over the top to gaze down at us. The top bid was already sixteen thousand dollars. Three-quarters of an hour remained.

“Christ, look at the price tag on that one,” said Richard.

“The green ones are rarer,” said Perkus. “Incidentally, Marlon Brando is alive.”

“Move,” said Richard.

“What?”

“Get up,” he said. “Get out of your chair, let me.”

“We can’t bid,” said Perkus. “It’s over my PayPal limit. Let’s just enjoy this one for what it is.”

“Step aside.” Richard shucked his tuxedo jacket onto the floor, fumbled off his cuff links and thrust them into a pocket, then shoved his sleeves up carelessly and plunked himself in Perkus’s chair and commandeered the keyboard, tackling the Internet as if it were a basin full of sudsy dishes. Perkus passed the joint to me and dithered into the kitchen, his marionette limbs twitching.

“Not only is Marlon Brando dead,” Richard muttered into the screen, “but we’re going to land one of these mofos tonight. Get me the Hawkman’s purse.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s got pearl bead things, it’s right under her ass.”

“Are you sure?”

“She’d want us to, Chase. Believe me, she can afford it. Go!”

Under Richard’s guidance I dug out Georgina’s neat, pale-calfskin wallet and, skirting the temptation to learn what wonders I’d find browsing there, handed him her American Express card. The Hawkman never stirred. Richard, typing madly, flinging oaths at the recalcitrant dial-up connection, brought up a fresh window, and fit Georgina’s name and digits into online forms. View of the chaldron was blocked, yet I was sure I could still sense its vitality leaching around the screen’s boundary. I snuffled at the soggy last inch of joint, waiting. Perkus still hung in the kitchen. Then Richard switched back, and it awed us again. Perkus, perhaps alert to the intake of my breath, snooped around the doorway’s edge, sullen but tempted. I watched as Richard, under a new name, UpYours1, committed twenty-five thousand of the Hawkman’s dollars to purchase of a vase, that ceramic that was more than a ceramic and yet also so much less: a rumor, a chimera, a throb, a map. We had ten minutes to learn whether it was ours. I had a feeling if it was that it would be living, necessarily, in Georgina’s penthouse apartment.

“Now, look.” Richard conjured up another screen. “We’re online, we don’t have to wonder about these things.” He narrated aloud from Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia entry, “Final years and death… notoriety, troubled family life, obesity attracted more attention than his late acting career… earned reputation for being difficult on the set… Okay, skip all that, here, On July 1, 2004, Brando died in the hospital… age of eighty… the cause of his death intentionally withheld… lawyer citing privacy concerns… cremated, ashes scattered partly in Tahiti and partly in Death Valley-” I leaned in over Richard’s shoulder, wanting anything now but to confirm it and strand Perkus in a Brando-less landscape, yet inescapably curious. At that moment Richard hurried back to the auction, to see how Georgina’s thousands were holding up-or rather he tried to, and the computer screen went dark. “Fuck!” he yelped.

We turned to find Perkus leaning out his kitchen’s back window, a chill wind whistling in around him. “What’s wrong?” he asked when he pulled his head in and slammed it shut.

“Your computer crashed or something,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I heard Biller. You had more than two windows open, didn’t you? Well, that’s what crashes it.”

“Did… you hear… what Richard was-”

“What?”

“Never mind.” We stood back while Perkus hurriedly restarted the computer and chased a new connection. Richard, beside himself at the delay, crashed around in the kitchen, igniting another joint’s tip on the burner of Perkus’s stove. Sandy Bull’s banjo urged evolution forward. Richard returned in a new cloud of smoke, waving the smoldering Ice in my direction, and I partook, but maybe we were stoned enough already, or too stoned, yes, unmistakably we were horrendously stoned, our mission curdled, our new Coalition of the Chaldron singed at the edges. Was it worse to tell Perkus that Brando was dead or not? I couldn’t decide. Richard Abneg’s distress was tangible, too, his gloating dynamism sapped by so many sweaty compromises with eagles, tigers, mayors. A dozing Hawkman no longer prize enough, despite any resemblance. The green chaldron was not only more costly, it was ruining us, exposing our underbellies, whether we were privileged to pay its ransom or not. And now there was no Marlon Brando to redeem us, only chaldrons to salve loss of chaldrons. Perkus brought up the page. The auction bragged a bid of twenty-six thousand. Richard had been topped. Three minutes remained. I felt a green stab in my heart.

Unspeaking now, Richard scrambled to bid. He got it up to thirty-four thousand, a heroic labor of blunt hairy fingers, tooth-grinding jaw visible even through his beard. His white shirt was widely stained under the arms and stank fiercely. The effort took two minutes, more. At forty-eight seconds another veiled bidder drove it to thirty-six thousand, then another, with five seconds to spare, took the jewel at an even forty grand. I think we all three groaned as if gutshot, but it was well covered by Sandy Bull’s thrumming music. Georgina Hawkmanaji then punctuated our stunned silence with a long whining exhalation, gleaning disappointment in her sleep. I examined the page, the image there, for any trace of psychedelic vigor I could draw on for repair, but nothing reached me now. Perkus, likely familiar with the effect, spared us, reaching past Richard’s numbed hands to click on a box and close the window.

The convocation found its end there, human fragments amid the ashtrays and crumpled rolling papers, Mallomar crumbs, shed evening clothes. The three of us left Georgina in the dark with the screen-saver raccoons, and retreated to the place where we used to thrive, a month or so before, around Perkus’s kitchen table. Perkus changed the music, to a band called Souled American, and I didn’t know whether it was my imagination or the band’s special distinction that they sounded as unspooled as we felt, the bass player and guitarist and singer each absently mumbling their contribution seemingly with no regard for the others.

It was after Perkus fished out a dusty, half-filled bottle of single-malt Scotch, twelve-year-old Caol Ila, something Richard had left behind some ancient evening before I’d made their acquaintance, and we began sipping the amber poison from juice glasses, that Richard, uncorking some deeper material from himself as if in reply to the booze, began his disquisition on the tiger. At the start his tone was as diffuse as Souled American’s music, so that I almost might have imagined he was singing along. “It’s pretty goddamn funny that everyone calls it a tiger in the first place,” he said. “Even those of us who know better have fallen into the habit… a testament to what Arnheim likes to call the power of popular delusions and the madness of crowds…” Perhaps this was Richard’s way of consoling us with distraction, as Perkus had before. Yet his words took on the urgency of a confession. “That it’s a problem I’d never deny. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, but it’s become partly my responsibility to deal with it, that’s fine, it’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be good at…” Neither of us had spoken, let alone challenged him, yet it was as if Richard were negotiating, to persuade not only Perkus and myself but whole invisible balconies of skeptics. “When the Transit Authority began researching ways to build the Second Avenue line, you see, they brought in the engineers who’d built the Channel tunnel, in England-I mean between England and France. They’d built these machines that went underground and burrowed through bedrock. They’d had good luck with them, but ours went a little out of control-”

“You’re saying the tiger is a machine?” said Perkus.

Richard nodded glumly, and sipped from his juice glass. “A machine, a robot, that’s right, for digging a subway tunnel. The thing is, in Europe they had two of them. One started in France, the other in England.” He raised and spread his hands to model this for us in the air in front of his face. “Two identical machines, they’d never met, but they went underground and began digging toward each other.” His hands progressed downward, toward a meeting point at his chest, clawing like moles at the imaginary earth. “Day and night, just digging that tunnel for months, these two woebegone creatures moving ever incrementally closer-”

“What happened when they met?” I asked. Déjà vu clung to Richard’s description; I felt as if I recognized it from some baleful fairy tale or allegorical medieval painting. Our evening had drifted into another register, a fatigued postlude, the air in Perkus’s apartment impossible to clear of stale smoke and unnameable regret. Each of us leaned back in his chair as if not conversing but enacting a kind of disconsolate séance, Richard’s voice punctuating our trance like a deathbed dictation.

“Well, they were… retired, I suppose that’s the word for it, when the tunnel was completed. It would have been too expensive to drag them out, so they’re buried there together, deep under the ocean, off to one side of the passage. We made a mistake, though. We cut corners when we commissioned our own project. We only had them build a single machine, just digging in one direction, with nothing coming from the other side. I guess the thing got lonely-”

“That’s why it destroys bodegas?” asked Perkus.

“At night sometimes it comes up from underneath and sort of, you know, ravages around.”

“You can’t stop it?” I asked.

“Sure, we could stop it, Chase, if we wanted to. But this city’s been waiting for a Second Avenue subway line for a long time, I’m sure you know. The thing’s mostly doing a good job with the tunnel, so they’ve been stalling, and I guess trying to negotiate to keep it underground. The degree of damage is really exaggerated. Anyway, a certain amount of the buildings it’s taken out were pretty much dead wood in the first place-”

“That’s how urban renewal works,” Perkus mused. “You find an excuse to bulldoze stuff so that the developers can come in. Richard’s career in civic service is founded on that kind of happy accident.”

“Fuck you, Tooth.”

I worked to put my mind around all he’d told us. “So the mayor’s cover story is that this… machine… is an escaped tiger? I can’t understand why anyone would accept that.”

“It’s not a cover story, or maybe it is now, but we completely backed into it. After last year, you remember when that coyote wandered across the George Washington Bridge and took up residence in Central Park, and you know, with all this recent talk about displacement of species, including, yes, okay, the fucking eagles, blah blah blah, I guess some old lady saw it and told the news that it was a tiger and the image just colonized the public imagination. It happens that way sometimes, we don’t control all this stuff, Chase, no matter how Machiavellian you might think we are.”

Was it possible Richard Abneg was somehow mistaken or misled? Might he be unwittingly propagating a cover to a cover, a story he’d been handed himself? “Have you ever actually seen it, Richard?” I asked.

“I’ve seen footage.”

“The Daily News had footprints on page three the other day,” said Perkus distantly. “This cop was standing in the tiger’s footprint, this huge thing with giant claws, it was like ten times longer than the cop’s shoe.”

“Not footprints, footage. Any footprints are a total hoax.”

“Doesn’t seem like you people have a lot of ground to stand on, calling things hoaxes,” said Perkus, refilling his glass with Scotch. His wild eye wasn’t wild. It maundered instead.

“I don’t know why I ever try explaining anything to you two,” said Richard affectionately. He yawned without covering his mouth. “I hate to be the party pooper but I think it’s time to extricate the Hawkman from this slough of despond.”

I felt a slippage toward vertigo, as though if I allowed Richard Abneg to leave too soon something would be lost. Not my intervention, I’d given up that scheme. But after all we’d come through, we’d arrived at a sort of summit between us, a summit in doubt, even dismay. Who knew how, the name of the treasure we’d sought and lost already seemed hard to recall, the fact of it violently unlikely, yet in that weird quest we’d passed through our everyday delusions, to a place of exalted uncertainty. Perkus, though he might not wish to admit it, had surrendered Marlon Brando. His last layer of cultural armor laid aside or at least suspended. Richard, relinquishing his sinister pretense of confidentiality, had clued us in about the tiger. That he’d done so made me love him. No one pitted themselves against my cherished illusions here, but I felt they should. I needed to carve my way into Perkus’s and Richard’s good faith by surrendering up some secret, too. I feared to be untouched or unseen.

“I don’t… I can’t really remember Janice Trumbull,” I said aloud.

Richard had projected himself from his chair, into the other room. Over the loopy music I heard him rustling in the mound of coats and Georgina, heard her dopey murmur as he got her on her feet and into her heels. I looked to Perkus. He’d passed out where he sat, nose tipped back, lips parted as he silently snored, his juice glass hovering above his banker’s-pinstripe lap like a bucket swinging in a well. I freed it from his damply clinging fingers and set it on the table.

“I mean, I feel like I remember falling in love with her, but somewhere after that I can’t remember anything at all.”

From the other side of the wall came sounds of panting and then chortling, as if in the course of helping the Hawkman into her coat Richard and Georgina had fallen into a clinch and begun dancing again, or perhaps making out.

“Sometimes I can’t even remember what she looks like.”

The music ran out and for an instant all was calm and silent in the apartment except for a hint of cheeping, like a bird’s peep, presumably from Georgina. Involuntarily I pictured Richard running his hands inside her dress, goosing a quick orgasm from her with his clubby fingers, a wake-up call. Hearing this, or imagining I did, I pined for the wrong woman, the clandestine part of my own life. Whatever the facts, after another instant the two of them, fully restored in their evening’s glamour apart from Richard’s missing bow tie, scooted arm in arm through the kitchen and out, Richard delivering a farewell bow to me as if at the close of a theatrical performance, Georgina only widening her eyes slightly, and parting her lips. They were gone, my confession unheard.

A draft whistled in around the kitchen window frame and I shivered. The digital clock on Perkus’s stove read 3:33. I stood and reached for the overhead light’s pull string, darkening the kitchen, then helped Perkus gently to his feet, my arm cradling his thin bony shoulders. He shrugged me off. I trailed him into the living room, lit only by his screen saver’s treed raccoons, the couch now cleared of the bed of coats, except for mine. Perkus sat again at the computer and clicked up his Web browser, calling up the dumb beep of digits, then the electronic squirt-and-wheeze of a portal’s opening. I was terribly afraid Perkus would summon another auction. I doubted I could stand it. But no. He scrolled into his browser’s history and refreshed the Wikipedia entry on Marlon Brando. So he’d been listening after all, had only ostensibly stuck his head out of his window looking for Biller to avoid giving Richard the satisfaction of knowing he’d heard. He scrolled impatiently through the page, squinting close to the screen in the dark room, his thin figure in his chair like a lighthouse on some storm-racked shore. He’d been holding his breath, and now he exhaled deeply, ending, to my surprise, in a satisfied snort, even a bitter little chuckle. He pointed and I read over his shoulder. The rumors of Brando’s death circulated in the summer of 2004 and again in early 2005, in both instances triggering a wave of mourning and tributes both on the Internet and in major media outlets… At the top of the page, a boxed notice read: The truthfulness of this article has been questioned. It is believed that some or all of its contents may constitute a hoax… Elements of this article may be deleted if this message remains in place for five days…

“You see,” said Perkus. “Richard doesn’t know everything.”

I didn’t want to have to try to understand all I’d seen tonight, this perhaps least. Perkus shut down his computer and scuffed through his bedroom’s French doors with weary finality. He waved without turning, a lighthouse now crumbling into the sea. “Make sure the door locks when you go.” I took my coat and went into the dark kitchen. The rising wind still whistled through the kitchen’s back window. I saw that it remained open, just a crack, and as I moved to shut it more firmly I now spotted a black electrical extension cord rising up across the sill, and threaded outside, to drape down into the courtyard. There, below, was Biller. He squatted in a corner of the courtyard, sheltering from the wind, wearing a shiny silver down-stuffed parka with a fake-fur-lined hood, different from the black wool coat he’d worn just this morning, when I’d handed him a hot dog and twenty dollars and confiscated Obstinate Dust. (Perhaps I’d financed the new coat.) The cord from Perkus’s window trailed to a small white laptop computer, its screen brightly lit, though I couldn’t make out whether that screen showed text or images or what. Biller, his back to the window, breath misting in steady bursts from his nostrils, pale moons of his fingernails themselves like ten floating cursors protruding from the darkness of his fingerless black-wool gloves streaming on the laptop’s tiny keyboard keenly, unhesitatingly, with all apparent expertise.

November 14

Dearest Chase,

I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Ha ha ha ha ha, imagine please my convulsive laughter. (I read this opening line aloud to Zamyatin, who happens to be running on a treadmill in the room as I type this letter to you, and he found it as hilarious as I did. Moments like these are all we have to savor anymore, please don’t begrudge them.) The good news, surely, you will have read in the newspaper and perhaps even seen on some cable news station (except I can’t for one instant imagine you bothering with cable television-last I recall you were searching for your remote and failing to find it, then accusing the housekeeper of hiding it in a drawer or throwing it out): we survived the space walk to repair the tile damaged in Keldysh’s botched module launch. Better than survived, the space walk was a thrilling success. I myself was even the heroine of the incident, and Northern Lights will carry on, to drift unmoored in orbit for another day, or month, or however long until we are rescued or choose to destroy ourselves by a deliberate collision with the Chinese mines, which I suspect could happen any minute now, especially if I am judging the Captain’s and Keldysh’s moods correctly-but pardon me, I was telling you the good news! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Suffice to say no straws were drawn because no one wanted to see Sledge anywhere near the air lock; our dour Captain asserted the leadership he’s lately so much abrogated, tapping myself and Keldysh for the walk, Mstislav and Zamyatin for on-board mission guidance, and inventing some kind of make-work for Sledge which did or didn’t get done, something back in the Greenhouse, something to do with Mstislav’s doomed reclamation project involving the leaf-cutter bees, those expert pollinators. (We’ve been ignoring our bees.) I find myself unwilling to bother with the technical stuff, which I’m certain makes your eyes glaze over. Such labors as the forty-eight hours that the walk’s mission preparation entailed are wearisome enough to get through, let alone describe for a bored boyfriend. Anyhow, preparation’s a poor word. Nothing had or could have prepared myself and Keldysh for the sensations that overcame us upon ejecting from the air lock. Essentially, of falling, like Wile E. Coyote, off a cliff, into a bottomless well of darkness and silent velocity.

We’re soaring atoms, Chase, that’s what orbit consists of, the inhuman hastening of infinitesimal speck-like bodies through an awesome indifferent void, yet in our cramped homely craft, its rooms named to recall childhood comforts, with our blobs of toothpaste drifting between our brushes and the mirror, our farts and halitosis filling the chambers with odor, we’ve defaulted to an illusion of substance. Inside Northern Lights we’ve managed to kid ourselves that we exist, that we’re curvaceous or lumpy or angular, bristling with hair and snot, taking up a certain amount of room, and that space and time have generously accorded a margin in which we’re invited to operate these sizable greedy bodies of ours, a margin in which to reside, to hang out and live our pale, stinky stories. The space walk destroyed all that. (No wonder Mission Control has tried to keep this from ever being necessary.) Oh, the lie of weightlessness! We only feel we’re floating because we’re forever falling, as in an elevator with no bottom floor to impact. And so, inside the elevator, the human party continues oblivious, the riders flirt and complain and mix zero-G cocktails, or chase bewildered zero-G leaf-cutter bees. Outside the ship, our consoling elevator’s walls dissolved, Keldysh and I were two specks falling forever, specks streaming down the face of the night. Ourselves plummeting downward to the gassy blue orb, the gassy blue orb also plummeting at the same mad rate away from us.

Well, after clinging to our telescopic guide-rods in a riot of metaphysical horror for upward of twenty minutes, our eyes locked on each other’s while Zamyatin and Mstislav gently beckoned in our ears to explain, please, why we weren’t moving a muscle to make the needed repairs to the tile, Keldysh and myself completely mute, we finally managed to bluff ourselves into taking one step into the void, and then another, until like brain-locked automatons we began executing the commands we’d rehearsed. The repair consisted of little beyond the clipping of a hangnail of tile and the application of a sealant (think: Krazy Glue) to the gash the misdirected module had carved into the Den’s upper sill. One crumpled signal dish was judged irretrievable; we detached it and let it spin off, down toward the minefield. I think it got through, the reward being, of course, immolation upon reaching the atmosphere-a small blessing of fire sent down in your direction, my Chaseling. My heroism, such as it was, lay in persuading poor Keldysh, who after seeing the dish spiral away, pooped his drawers and reverted to panic, clinging to the tile in a bear hug, to free himself from the ship’s exterior and let the guiderod telescope him home to safety. I had to whisper into Keldysh’s private channel for another five minutes or so, the others on the ship all stymied, waiting for us to budge, before I got him to go.

Now, love, for the bad news. A few days after the space walk, Mstislav, in his dutiful way (he’s keeping the whole place running!), scheduled checkups for both myself and Keldysh, a routine caution we’d generally neglected for too long. We both came up clean for effects from the walk, but Mstislav seemed puzzled by my white-blood-cell profile. We ran a few successive days’ counts, just to be sure we had a meaningful sample, Mstislav trying not to say what he feared he was on the trail of, me gamely offering various bogus notions of female physiology reacting differently to the Greenhouse’s oxygen deprivation, joking that Mstislav had gone too long without a lady patient. Eventually our efforts devolved to a sit-down for the ever-humbling medical questionnaire, Mstislav narrating me through a series of self-exams, a drill we’d practiced on the ground but hoped never to see put to use. None of us much like dwelling on the slow erosion of our bodies in this environment, bone-density decay, the pale starved skeletons we’ve substituted for our old selves. I liked even less what Mstislav guided me toward: acknowledgment that I’d been managing an uncanny pain in my right foot’s arch for weeks, at least. Do you remember I said I was having a problem with cramping? That cramp was a tumor, Chase. Funny, huh? Oh, you should have seen the looks on the faces of the Russians, and Sledge. Even Sledge. I think they realized too late that I was a sort of mascot here, their woman. The whole mother-earth thing, unavoidable. Now a good-luck charm with cancer. Not to say, you know, that we don’t all still hate one another.

That was yesterday. I’ll know more soon, but I doubt we’ll be able to much delay a leak to the media, and I wanted to tell you before you learned by other means. (Oh, this is going to be a mess, this is going to be hell.) Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma may apparently drain the exultation from one’s prose.

Remember (please remember) the Chinese garden at the Met, that unlikely bit of outdoors indoors? It shouldn’t feel so expansive, yet somehow it does. My favorite place in Manhattan, I think. Remember that we went there together, Chase? Did I already ask this? One of our first days in New York, we were so tired and drunk on sex and the sense of recognition of those early days of our love, and we meandered into the Met, not with any plan, and the suffocating heaviness of those endless European oil paintings made us drowsy and we escaped (I never remember the path exactly, always have to rediscover it) to the Chinese Garden Court, and were nearly alone there, and anyway the gurgling of the water and the rustling of the grasses, the bamboo, seemed to cover any human sound, and we lay down there on that stone that had been chiseled out and shipped from its ancient source and no guard troubled us and soon with our heads tipped together on that dark slate we fell coolly asleep, dozed for who knows how long. Do you remember, Chase? I remember, too, when we woke, and turned to look into the pool beside our heads, and you thought you saw a fish, a little black darting goldfish-type fish, but it was only the reflection of my glasses, a black shimmering reflected shape that had separated, for an instant, from the reflection of my head and from the rest of my glasses, and seemed a separate darting thing, a fish, or a tadpole. Please remember Chase remember please remember, I adore you, my terrestrial saint, my angel wandering avenues, I’m your cancerous angel adrift,

Janice