Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty

He’d spent that whole night right there, huddled at what came to seem the bottom of a well of dark, as though rather than climb to this point he’d fallen, and the snow-covered skylight and the glowing chaldron in its nook were two portals above, representing his only hope of escape. The mayor’s carpeted stair was thick enough to make a comfortable perch, and he chose the stair that split the difference between his need to be as near as possible to the chaldron and to find an angle of view from which the least of its form was obstructed by the underside of the shelf on which it sat, then settled there, fully expecting to be interrupted, rescued, arrested, or assassinated.

But no. Mayor Arnheim never arrived with a flock of policemen or some dark-suited private force, the modern equivalent of Pinkertons. Nor did Richard Abneg or Chase Insteadman or even Georgina Hawkmanaji come. Nor his dangerous new acquaintance Russ Grinspoon, who’d said such disturbing things about Morrison Groom. Nor his cunning old protégée Oona Laszlo, no surprise in that. The mayor’s astounding chaldron had no appreciator besides himself, and Perkus Tooth began to wonder if it had only conjured him into being to provide itself with an imaginary friend, he felt so invisible and unknown there through the passing hours. The party sounds were long gone from the foyer below. The irreverent clangor of a catering staff sealing up and loading its materials soon followed. Abandoning him in silence there. He centered the chaldron in his vision, a matter, paradoxically, of turning his head to disfavor the rebellious eye. Then steeled himself to ignore the portion he couldn’t see, the imperfection of its outline. What was ever perfect? The form pulsed in his vision, beaming concurrence with his most reconciled thoughts, absolving all failure. To abide was not to compromise. At this Perkus fell deeply asleep.

He woke in early-morning light flooding the stairwell, his neck sore where it had rested crookedly against the curved wall. A woman stood on the stair above him. The mayor’s aide, Chase had pointed her out at Arnheim’s table.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” he replied.

“I wondered when you’d wake up,” she said. “My name is Claire Carter, by the way.” How long had she stood there? Was he caught? If so, at what?

“So, I’m Perkus Tooth,” he said.

“We know.”

“You do?”

“You came with the actor,” she said.

“Yes.” He glanced up at the chaldron. In the bright light its unearthly radiance was a little blanched. He wondered whether it would have caught his eye in this light. A ridiculous thought. A chaldron was a chaldron, immeasurable and bright. Yet here Claire Carter stood, just beneath one, and either totally oblivious or uninterested. This weird fact imparted some of the chaldron’s force to the woman herself, whose corn-husky-golden Dorothy Hamill was back-lit to a halo like a solar flare, while her rectangular glasses pitched back to Perkus letterboxed, fish-eye-lens impressions of his own sorry form. Beneath those reflections her own features were precisely serene and nonjudgmental. The mayor’s woman had brought with her no cops or Pinkertons, apparently not fearing him, and she presented nothing for Perkus to fear-not, anyway, apparently. He felt his presence had been lightly tolerated in the stairwell overnight, nothing worse. That “they” knew his name suggested he wasn’t just some phantasm the chaldron had dreamed up to keep itself amused or adored.

“How-”

“There was a single checked overcoat left behind,” she said. “In its pocket was a woolen hat with a distinctive patch featuring bright red lips and tongue. Security found you on the tape, walking in.”

“Ah.” So this was the sense in which he was known, by cultural iconography Claire Carter was apparently too young to identify. Perkus could imagine spadefuls of earth dropping onto a casket where everything that had ever been relevant to him was being quietly buried.

“Your coat is waiting downstairs.”

“You don’t care that I broke in?”

“You didn’t break in,” she pointed out. “You stayed.”

“You don’t want to know what I’m doing here?” He began to feel taken lightly. He didn’t know how he wanted to be taken instead. His heart beat wildly.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’d like to speak with Mayor Arnheim, please.” He stood, gathered himself, joined Claire Carter on the landing so that she no longer loomed above him, smoothed real and imaginary lint from the front of his velvet, hoping she knew it was intended to be wrinkled. Perkus decided he wanted her to understand that he was fundamentally a dandy, a word he’d never precisely applied to himself before but which he felt might pardon his spending the night on the fourth stair from the top. She should consider herself lucky he didn’t have a pet lobster on a string, though that reference was likely beyond the compass of someone who couldn’t identify the Rolling Stones’ logo.

“He’s not here.”

“Isn’t this his home?” Now he detected himself growing uselessly huffy, as though he had some higher ground attainable in this situation. He couldn’t quit trying to make an impression, however, since Claire Carter, with her implacable, nearly mechanized mood of bright efficiency, made him feel invisible.

“The mayor entertains here, but he’s got an apartment he prefers.”

“Did you spend the night here?” Perkus asked. He found himself suddenly stirred by the notion of the two of them alone in the town house together through the long hours of the night, the chaldron really a sort of sexual beacon.

“The mayor’s been very generous in letting me occupy the in-law apartment downstairs.”

“Are you lovers?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.” She appeared unoffended, but regarded him with fresh curiosity, ticking the golden bowl cut of her head sideways like the second hand of an alert clock. Impressively, in meeting Perkus’s gaze she never once took the bait of tracking the wrong eye.

“I’ve got a question for him about… that vase up there.”

“The chaldron, you mean? Jules couldn’t tell you much about that.”

“You know what it is?”

“Sure. I gave it to him. I don’t think he’s glanced at it twice.”

She gratified each question with a little surplus of revelatory value for which he couldn’t have thought to ask. Yet the ease of this exchange felt slippery and corrupt, as though she were toying with him. He preferred to find the question that would make Claire Carter balk. “Where did you get it? Did you buy it on eBay?”

“My brother gave it to me. Do you want to have a look? I think you’ll be surprised.”

At last Perkus could quit trying to make an impression, or to calibrate the nature of this encounter, for he was surely still asleep on the stair, and dreaming. Or perhaps the dream had begun long before. “Who’s your brother?”

“Linus Carter, you may have heard of him. He’s the designer.”

“Designer of what-chaldrons?”

“That and all the rest of it, yes.”

“The rest of what?”

“Yet Another World.”

“I would very much like to see it, yes.”

He followed her through the door at the landing, to find himself surprised, if surprise were still possible, by a curved stair leading up inside what he’d taken for a thin outer wall. Deep-set windows in the turret allowed just slivers of blue above gouts of snow, evidence of the storm Perkus had nearly forgotten. They climbed the steep curled stair in single file, the ascent of her tiny, pear-shaped buttocks before him a transfixing vision, as though one by one a chaldron’s effects were transferring to Arnheim’s Girl Friday.

The room at the top was large enough for the two of them and a chair and small desk, nothing more, making with its single window a kind of lookout or observation room. Perkus thought it would be a spectacular place to get some clear thinking done, to write a broadside or two, but he’d no sooner entertained the thought than Claire Carter unbolted a midget-size door at the level of her waist, swinging it inward, to disclose how it backed to the high nook below which he’d thirsted and pined through the dark hours, before passing out. She reached in and slid the box containing the chaldron onto the floor between them, revealing, among other things, a small power cord, trailing off to a transformer plugged in a socket at the rear of the nook. The thing inside looked watery and nebulous, its glamour and force completely spent in the bright sunlight that suffused the little attic study. Perkus saw immediately that what stood at his feet wasn’t anything as definite as a ceramic, let alone one of some perfect and unearthly density, was less, in truth, than the photograph he’d admired in Strabo Blandiana’s office or the pixel-dense lures he’d ogled on eBay. This chaldron was a hologram, and when Claire Carter switched off the tiny laser at the bottom of the vitrine it blinked out completely. The vessel had appeared so ineffectual that this seemed nearly an act of mercy: last one out, please turn off the chaldron.

“Looks more impressive at night, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, yes, it does. Is there any chance I could get a cup of coffee?” Until the last possible instant Perkus had felt in the grip of an exalted confusion. Even as she debunked chaldrons, Perkus’s encounter with Claire Carter had taken on some of a chaldron’s strange ambiance. With the hologram’s switching off, though, deflation set in. Perkus had begun to recognize the first glimmerings of a cluster prodrome, the inevitable aura preceding a really major headache. Caffeine was his first line of defense, at least the first available-he couldn’t really ask whether any of Grinspoon’s roaches had happened to be still lying in the mayor’s marble ashtrays. The snow’s sideways glare that attacked him through the windows everywhere he turned was possibly implicated, bright-angled light being one of several typical migraine triggers, along with dark chocolate and Richard Abneg’s infernal red wines. Perkus kept his shades drawn low for a reason. There was nothing to do about it now but cope. He dreaded going out into that sunshine.

Linus Carter, though famously camera shy, was real, not, as rumored, just the name behind which some consortium of geniuses had hidden themselves. She should know, since she grew up with his brilliance overshadowing hers, Linus being three years older, though he was also so physically and emotionally immature that they were mistaken, and in some sense mistook themselves, for twins. Certainly they trusted each other more than anyone else, their parents, or the Dalton kids who treated them both a bit like freaks for their closeness, and for their lack of interest in the gossip and status games that defined the place. College divided them only a little, her Harvard, him MIT, and both places ones where they could shake themselves free of the unspoken expectations of the Manhattan castes they’d instinctively set themselves apart from. It was a matter of money, always money, and so when she came back to the city it was in the employ of media conglomerateer Arnheim, then several years from his run for the mayoralty, and if you’d mentioned that possibility it would have seemed a joke. Her first job, for which she found herself scouted before summa cum laude graduation, and working for Arnheim meant that money was never again going to divide Claire Carter from anything. It wasn’t even that he paid her so well, as that she’d put herself right up against money’s large and impassive flank, under its vast scaly wing. As a matter of fact, when some of the really hugely trust-funded kids who’d shit on her and Linus at Dalton resurfaced these days, spaced-out on boards of corporations they didn’t even know whether they owned, she was usually running rings around them, telling them what to do. And when Linus came back to the city with his big idea and needed capital investiture to get it started up, she could take care of him, too, introduce him to the right people.

She explained all this in the town house’s big kitchen, where they sat on stools at a marble counter, over coffee-cappuccinos from a machine that took a little cartridge of coffee under a lever and spat them out perfectly, brimming with foam on top. The device’s brief guttering productions shattered the dawn’s eerie silence. Perkus would have preferred for purposes of headache prevention a bottomless mug of traditional black, but was too polite to say anything. He sipped the hot foam and ignored the background of approaching migraine and listened to what Claire Carter appeared compelled to explain to him as his reward for camping out beneath the hologram. It seemed that her shy and kooky older brother had written all the design protocols for Yet Another World in secret, while working for a Menlo Park company whose contract claimed any idea he originated as their own, and so he’d quit and moved to their parents’ apartment, sleeping in his old room like the unsocialized loser he perhaps felt himself to be, and let five months tick by watching TV Land reruns of Square Pegs and Martyr & Pesty, only afterward whispering to Claire that he was sitting on a gold mine but couldn’t afford the tools to dig with. She set him up with investors, not Arnheim himself but a rich-beyond-rich pajama-wearing Hugh Hefner wannabe, no disrespect, named Rossmoor Danzig.

Two years later three million souls worldwide, a number doubling every six months, conducted some part of their daily lives in the elaborate and infinitely expansible realm that had sprung from Linus Carter’s generous parameters, this pixel paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever. You could play by Linus’s rules or write your own, invent a self unlike yourself, invent a nation for yourself and your friends: Yet Another World made room for it all. A separate economy, originating within the game, had leaked out into the wider world, as players seeking to accumulate in-game wealth and sway by shortcut rather than diligence began hoarding and trading on the small number of unique and unduplicable treasure items Linus had ingeniously tucked into the corners of his world. In a system where any kind of artifact, six-dimensional, invisible, antigravitational, whatever its designer could imagine, was not only possible but replicable ad nauseam, these scattered few objets d’art, known as chaldrons, were capable of driving players insane with acquisitive frenzy. For all the anarchy Linus loosed, he’d kept this one means of playing God: a monopoly on the local equivalent of a short supply of Holy Grails. To protect his symbolic economy from inflation, Linus also designed a few expert subroutines for rooting out and destroying any counterfeits put into circulation, a NetBot goon squad.

So the chaldron quickly became the supreme symbol of the game’s elite. To know someone who could get you access to a chaldron wasn’t bad, so you could spend time communing with the thing, but to own one was far better. The items, fundamentally imaginary though they might be, had begun trading in the “real” world for hundreds then thousands of dollars. No one had yet determined what the ceiling might be, since the hordes of new players arriving every day drove the ratio of chaldron-to-player scarcity continually through the roof. Among players without so much disposable income the objects had nearly a religious aspect, and in some precincts of Yet Another World a community of caretakers, often calling themselves “knights,” had united around the cause of protecting and honoring a single chaldron, forming consortiums of purpose out of what had been a polymorphous libertarian playground.

Linus’s cartel needless to say added a layer of menacing mystique to his legend as the game’s creator. His subsequent fear of irrational chaldron fetishists who might think of him as Chapman did Lennon drove him deeper into seclusion. That, in turn, fueled rumors of his death and secret replacement by a corporate clone, or of his fictional existence from the start. Poor Linus had never been terribly comfortable on the outer side of a computer’s screen to begin with, and now, despite a phenomenal success as others would quantify it, he was miserable. Claire was his lifeline and even she didn’t know what he did with most of his days, though she’d had some reports he wandered his own invented landscape hidden inside an anonymous and humble avatar, perversely dedicating himself to trying to persuade other players of the unimportance of chaldrons in a universe where anything else was as free as oxygen and daylight. As a thank-you to Claire for all she’d done (putting aside the argument that by helping him incorporate she’d wrecked him), Linus had presented her with the hologram that had attracted Perkus’s interest, as well as, inside the realm of Yet Another World, a treasury of ten chaldrons of surpassing quality, hidden in a high and impregnable redoubt. She’d visited this castle and checked her priceless stash once or twice, though, really, she was sorry to say, virtual reality just wasn’t her cup of tea. So her virtual treasures sat gathering virtual dust. The way things were going, she’d be able to put future kids through college on the things.

“Is Linus by any chance a client of an acupuncturist named Strabo Blandiana?” Perkus interrupted. He’d been reminded of that framed poster, Blandiana’s gift from a patient.

“Yes,” said Claire Carter, looking mildly surprised. “I sent him there. I’ve been visiting Strabo for a couple of years. Why do you ask?”

“I met him at the party last night,” said Perkus, hedging.

“Everyone knows Strabo.”

“I guess. Miss Carter, may I ask you why you’re telling me all this?” Perkus had a theory on this subject, actually: he figured he reminded Claire Carter of her brother. Under her glossy surface she had a soft spot for helpless brainy boys. That was to say, too, that despite the gulf between her yuppieish dress-for-success manner and Perkus’s bohemian shambles, she identified with Perkus herself. Being a human being, she sought vindication for the choices that had made her lonely: hence the effort spent to convince him she wasn’t just one of those moneyed Dalton kids. No matter how it looked now, she was an outsider. Claire Carter, Perkus recognized, was from the we-nerds-run-the-universe school, and wanted Perkus to flash the secret hand signals back to her. Square Pegs indeed. Perkus had known this vibe before-the rock critics, always asking him to recite the pledge of allegiance of the Elite Despised. He’d tended to decline politely, just as he now didn’t mention to Claire Carter that he’d never been able to rouse his sympathy for anyone who’d gone to Dalton no matter how sulky they felt about it.

The other possibility, that she was wildly lying to divert him, would seem to have been shut down completely with the blinking off of that laser. Perkus had thrown a lot of himself, too much, down a rabbit hole leading into no Wonderland whatsoever. He’d been pathetically chasing video-game booty. The exhaustion of it was only beginning to set in, along with the cluster headache. He’d sucked the dregs of his cappuccino, uselessly-hoping for that fey foamy beverage to do anything to thwart his massive impending migraine was like bringing a poodle to the beach and siccing it on Melville’s great white whale. Perkus’s vertiginous sexual interest had vanished, too, somewhere in the course of Claire Carter’s narration. He remembered now where he’d heard her name before: Richard Abneg hated this woman, saw her as the symbol of the destruction of the city’s soul. She was certainly an ace disenchanter.

Her reply gave no nod to his theories. “The actor’s got a lot of fans around here,” she said, reverting to her special robotic bluntness, totally unsentimental once the topic migrated from her Seymour Glassian brother. “We’re aware you’re a favorite of Insteadman’s. His story keeps a lot of people enthralled, you know. This is a difficult time in the city.”

So, it was all about Chase Insteadman after all. And: everything Perkus suspected was true. Perkus had suspected so much, so extensively, for so long. But it was different to have a thing confirmed. “I’m not so sure Chase realizes it’s a story.” Perkus could barely believe he’d said this aloud. Again, he experienced the conviction he was dreaming, only Claire Carter was the least dreamlike gorgon he’d ever encountered.

“Well, we all get lost in our roles sometimes. Mr. Tooth, you’ll have to excuse me. I see you’ve finished your coffee, and I do have to get to work.”

So, was this how it happened? When you finally penetrated the highest chambers of power and gazed into corruption’s face, was it neither beautiful nor terrifying, but merely-Claire Carter’s? Apparently so. And her attempt to enlist his consent was so paltry, so half-assed, that it seemed she assumed she’d gained it in advance.

“Chase Insteadman is my friend,” he said weakly. He wondered what there was left to defend or protect. Nothing, most likely.

“Yes,” she allowed.

“That much is real.” Even as he said it, he felt the foolishness of turning to this woman for confirmation of what was or wasn’t real. Now the white whale of his headache broke to the surface and swallowed him completely. Around the penumbra of his blind spot he saw that a man had joined them in the room, a valet or Secret Service agent of some kind-needless to say, Claire Carter hadn’t relied on luck or goodwill to protect her in the town house alone with a party-crashing weirdo; how ludicrous to imagine she would. Maybe he was the one who’d pored over the security tapes and spotted him entering the party with Chase. Now he carried Perkus’s overcoat and hat, holding them at arm’s length as if about to burn contaminated items in a bonfire. Perkus accepted the garments and staggered from the kitchen, toward the foyer. With cluster in full blossom, he had nothing further to fear from the glare of the fresh snow. He was even curious to see the extent of the storm that had, so far as he could tell, completely silenced the city. Claire Carter didn’t escort him out.

He’d have walked the twenty blocks home in any event, since the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable, but there wasn’t any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their walks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed to mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb into drifts that had barely been traversed, fitting his poor shoes into boot prints that had punched deep as his knees. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before even getting to Second Avenue. Under other circumstances he’d have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested by the quality-of-life police for public drunkenness, but on streets the blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him apart from a cross-country skier who stared pitilessly from behind solar goggles, then a few dads here and there dragging a kid or two on a sled. If they saw him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. Nobody would have any other reason to be making their way along impassible streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, their entrances buried in drifts.

When he met the barricade at the corner of Eighty-fourth, he at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood-of course they were letting through the residents of the buildings on the block, even if other pedestrians had to make their way the long way around. But no. His building was one of three the tiger had undermined, and the snowstorm had finished the job. He talked with neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years of dwelling on the same floor, though gripped in the vise of his cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn’t have made too good an impression. You need to find someplace to sleep tonight, that was a fragment that got through to him. They might let you in for your stuff later, but not now. You can call this number… but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away: Get yourself indoors, young man. And: Pity about that one.

Now, as he made his way through the snow to he knew not where, what engulfed Perkus Tooth, as completely as the headache engulfed his brain and the snow the city, was the sense of cumulative and devastating losses in the last twelve hours, since he’d allowed himself to be lured to the mayor’s party, by Chase Insteadman, and upstairs, to see the hologram, by Russ Grinspoon. All of it felt terribly coherent and scripted, down to the last sequence, when Claire Carter, if that was even her real name, had spun out her story just long enough to allow the cluster migraine to eclipse him totally, only then booting him out into the streets to find his apartment barred. For she’d surely known. The tiger was a city operative, hadn’t Abneg confirmed it? Perkus couldn’t think straight, but you didn’t need to think straight to put such simple facts together. Claire Carter and the forces for which she was a mere spokesperson, a bland front, had evidently meant to smash him, and she’d chosen to flaunt the fact by how she toyed with him for the last hour or so. She was, he saw now, a member of the we-nerds-will-destroy-you-so-thoroughly-it-will-leave-you-gasping school. Under the power pantsuits, she was part of that inexplicable generation subsequent to his, the Trench Coat Mafia. Arnheim probably surrounded himself with them, autistic revengers, like Howard Hughes insulating himself with Mormons. Seeing him in the teeth of his ruination, Claire Carter had even told him the whole plot, like Goldfinger with Bond strapped to the death ray.

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.

In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the headache’s dislodging of himself from himself, working with the only body he had, the shivering frost-fingered blind stumbler in sweat-and salt-stained purple velvet.

He trailed a dog and walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain that a volunteer had sought him out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat functioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen modestly lurking in the rooms of certain dogs, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. So Biller gathered Perkus and immediately installed him in what would become Ava’s apartment. It was there, nursed through the first hours by Biller’s methodical and unquestioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nourished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth until it could keep down something more, that Perkus had felt his new life begin. It was a life of bodily immediacy, after Ava’s example. Perkus didn’t look past the next meal, the next walk, the next bowel movement (with Ava these were like a clock’s measure), the next furry sighing caress into mutual sleep.

Biller, attuned to this, minimized, when Perkus brought it up, any talk of Yet Another World. Sure, he knew about chaldrons. They were the crème de la crème of virtual treasure, and people had quit trading them for any accumulation of virtual anything-tracts of land, magnificent architecture, sex slaves, other treasure. They only changed hands for dollars now, and quite a lot of those. But Biller reminded Perkus that if you cared about Yet Another World there was a lot else to care about besides chaldrons. And yeah, he knew the legends of Linus Carter, but so what? Every place had a creator. What made Yet Another World interesting was that it had thousands. You didn’t have to pay any attention to the wishes of the originator of the place if you didn’t care to-a creator who might, after all, be the last person to know what was really going on. Still, Perkus saw Biller’s ears perk up when he told him about the castle hoard of chaldrons Linus had bestowed on his unimpressed sibling. That fact did stir the imagination. Putting the subject aside, Biller promised he would help Perkus set up an avatar, a persona on Yet Another World, if he wanted one. Somehow, at least through January and into February, they failed to get around to it. There was no computer in Ava’s apartment.

Biller wasn’t a hanger-outer. He had his entrepreneurial paces to go through, and his altruistic ones, too, which included checking in with Perkus and, most days, dropping off edible donated items of food and new clothes he thought might fit, most recently a pair of heavy and useful tan work boots. Otherwise, he left Perkus and Ava alone. When Perkus was drawn unexpectedly back a step or two into the human realm, it was Ava’s former walker, Sadie Zapping, who drew him. Sadie had other dogs in the building and still troubled to look in from time to time, always with a treat in her palm for Ava to snort up. This day she also had a steaming to-go coffee and a grilled halved corn muffin in a grease-spotted white bag which she offered to Perkus, who accepted it. This being not a time in life of charity refused or even questioned. She asked him his name again and he said it through a mouthful of coffee-soaked crumbs.

“I thought so,” said Sadie Zapping. She plucked off her knit cap and shook loose her wild gray curls. “It took a little while for me to put it together. Me and my band used to read your posters all the time. I read you in the Voice, too.”

Ah. Existence confirmed, always when you least expected it. “Broadsides,” he corrected. Then he asked the name of her band, understanding it was the polite response to the leading remark.

“Zeroville,” she said. “Like the opposite of Alphaville, get it? You probably saw our graffiti around, even if you never heard us. Our bassist was a guy named Ed Constantine, I mean, he renamed himself that, and he used to scribble our name on every blank square inch in a ten-block radius around CBGB, even though we only ever played there a couple of times. We did open for Chthonic Youth once.” She plopped herself down now, on a chair in Ava’s kitchen Perkus had never pulled out from under the table. He still used the apartment as minimally as possible, as if he were to be judged afterward on how little he’d displaced. Meanwhile Ava gaily smashed her square jowly head across Sadie’s lap, into her cradling hands and scrubbing fingers. “Gawd, we used to pore over those crazy posters of yours, or broadsides if you like. You’re a lot younger-looking than I figured. We thought you were like some punk elder statesman, like the missing link to the era of Lester Bangs or Legs McNeil or what have you. It’s not like we were holding our breath waiting for you to review us or anything, but it sure was nice knowing you were out there, somebody who would have gotten our jokes if he’d had the chance. Crap, that’s another time and place, though. Look at us now.”

Sadie had begun to uncover an endearing blabbermouthedness (and even when not addressing Perkus she’d give forth with a constant stream of “Good girl, there you go girl, aw, do you have an itchy ear? There you go, that’s a girl, yes, yessss, good dog. Ava, whaaata good girl you are!” etc.) but another elegist for Ye Olde Lower East Side was perhaps not precisely what the doctor ordered just now. Perkus, who’d preferred to think he was in the manner of a Pied Piper, influencing a generation following his, didn’t really want to believe that when his audience made itself visible again it would resemble somebody’s lesbian aunt. He sensed himself ready to split hairs-not so much Lester Bangs as Seymour Krim, actually-and thought better of it. He was somewhat at a loss for diversions, however. He couldn’t properly claim he had elsewhere to be. Sadie, sensing resistance, provided her own non sequitur. “You play cribbage?”

“Sorry?”

“The card game? I’m always looking for someone with the patience and intelligence to give me a good game. Cribbage is a real winter sport, and this is a hell of a winter, don’t you think?”

With his consent, the following day Sadie Zapping arrived at the same hour, having completed her walks, and unloaded onto the kitchen table two well-worn decks of cards, a wooden cribbage board with plastic pegs, and two packets of powdered Swiss Miss. Perkus, who hated hot chocolate, said nothing and, when she served it, drained his mug. He’d gone without marijuana now for more than a month, and alcohol (never his favorite anyhow), taking no stimulants besides caffeine and sucrose, both of which the hot chocolate provided in a rather degraded form. The game Sadie taught him was perfectly poised between dull and involving (so any talk could be subsumed to concentration) as well as between skill and luck. The first few days Perkus steadily lost, then got the feel of it. Sadie sharpened, too, her best play not aroused until she felt him pushing back. They kept their talk in the arena of the local and mundane: the state of the building, which had its own minor dramas involving the bureaucratic management imposed by the Manhattan Reification Society versus the pragmatic hands-on knowledge won by the volunteers themselves; the state of the streets, which had borne another two-inch snowfall, a treacherous slush carpet laid over the now seemingly permanent irregularities of black ice wherever the blizzard had been shoved aside; the ever-improving state of Perkus’s cribbage; above all, the state of Ava, who thrived on Sadie’s visits and seemed to revel in being discussed. Perkus could, as a result, tell himself he tolerated the visits on the dog’s account. It was nearly the end of February before Sadie told him the tragedy of Ava’s fourth limb.

“I thought you knew,” she said, a defensive near-apology.

He didn’t want to appear sarcastic-did Sadie think Ava had told him? — so said nothing, and let her come out with the tale, which, together with her age and the names of her former owners and other facts Perkus couldn’t know, Sadie had spied in Ava’s paperwork upon transfer to the canine dorm. Three-year-old Ava was a citizen of the Bronx, it turned out. She’d lived in the Sack Wern Houses, a public development in the drug dealers’ war zone of Soundview, and had been unlucky enough to rush through an ajar door and into the corridor during a police raid on the apartment next door. The policeman who’d emptied his pistol in her direction, one of three on the scene, misdirected all but one bullet in his panic, exploding her shank. Another cop, a dog fancier who’d cried out but failed to halt the barrage, tended the fallen dog, who, even greeted with this injury, only wanted to beseech for love with her tongue and snout. Her owner, a Dominican who may or may not have considered his pit bull ruined for some grim atavistic purpose, balked at the expense and bother of veterinary treatment, so Ava’s fate was thrown to the kindly cop’s whims. The cop found her the best, a surgeon who knew that she’d be better spared cycling the useless shoulder limb, its groping for a footing it could never attain, and so excised everything to the breastbone. It was the love-smitten cop who’d named her, ironically after the daughter whose terrified mom forbade their adopting the drooling sharky creature into a household that already made room for two Norwich terriers. So Ava came into the Friendreth Society’s care.

“She’s got hiccups,” Sadie pointed out another day, a cold one but then they were all cold ones, toward the end of February now. “She” was forever Ava, no need to specify. The dog was their occasion and rationale, vessel for all else unnameable Perkus Tooth and Sadie Zapping had in common. Anyway, it was her apartment, they were only guests. He spotted the start card she’d revealed, the jack of clubs, and shifted his peg two spaces-“Two for his heels,” she’d taught him to say.

“Yeah, on and off for a couple of days now.” The dog had been hiccing and gulping between breaths as she fell asleep in Perkus’s arms and then again often as she strained her leash toward the next street corner. Sometimes she had to pause in snorting consumption of the pounds of kibble that kept her sinewy machine running, and once she’d had to cough back a gobbet of bagel and lox Perkus had tossed her. That instance had seemed to puzzle the pit bull, yet otherwise she shrugged off a bout of hiccups as joyfully as she did her calamitous asymmetry.

“Other day I noticed you guys crossing Seventy-ninth Street,” she said. On the table between them she scored with a pair of queens. “Thought you never went that far uptown. Weren’t there some people you didn’t want to run into?”

He regarded her squarely. Sadie Zapping’s blunt remarks and frank unattractiveness seemed to permit if not invite unabashed inspection, and Perkus sometimes caught himself puzzling backward, attempting to visualize a woman onstage behind a drum kit at the Mudd Club. But that had been, as Sadie earlier pointed out, another time and place. It was this attitude that made her the perfect companion for Perkus’s campaign to dwell in the actual. The perfect human companion, that was, for on this score no one could rival Ava.

Perkus played an ace and advanced his peg murmuring “Thirty-one for two” before shrugging and pulling an elaborate face in reply to her question. “We go where she drags us,” he said. “Lately, uptown.” This only left out the entire truth: that at the instant of his foolish pronouncement a week ago, enunciating the wish to avoid those friends who’d defined the period of his life just previous, he’d felt himself silently but unmistakably reverse the decision. He was ready to see Chase Insteadman, even if he didn’t know what to say or not to say to his actor friend about the letters from space. Ever since, he’d been piloting Ava, rudder driving sails for once, uptown along First Avenue to have a look in the window of Gracie Mews, searching for Chase. Never Second Avenue-he didn’t want to see the barricaded apartment building (regarding which Biller had promised to give him notification if it either reopened or crumbled into the pit of its foundations). Only as far as the pane of the Mews, never farther, and never inside the restaurant, just peering in searching for the actor, of whom he found himself thinking, in paraphrase of a Captain Beefheart song that hadn’t come to mind in a decade or more, I miss you, you big dummy. And Perkus yearned for Chase to meet Ava. The two had certain things in common: root charisma, a versatile obliviousness, luck for inspiring generosity. The hiccuping dog could tell soon enough that they were on a mission, and pushed her nose to the Mews’ window, too, looking for she knew not what, leaving nose doodles, like slug trails, that frosted in the cold.