Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-seven

This was another kind of waiting room. I had no appointment and so it should not be so strange that I was left there to wait a while. Yet I was left to wait a long time. It began to seem to me that my appointment here was with the room itself, that I’d been installed here in order that I understand what the room had to tell me, and that I was expected to need a while to absorb it completely. At the mayor’s party I’d been cushioned by the occasion, the crowd’s mania, from this room’s full severity, the pressure of that thunderhead of plaster ornament, the gravity of the furnishings, the majesty and provenance radiating from the French chairs, arrayed like bewigged justices. I found it almost impossible to stay seated in one.

The room was not precisely as I’d remembered it. I now saw that inlaid-rosewood panels, so impressive in themselves, were only covers, the room an enormous magician’s cabinet, beautifully joined, made to slide aside in order to reveal a gallery and library, all the fetishes and collected works that had needed to be protected from the grubby hands and eyes of the guests at the champagne reception. I was idiotically proud to recognize the oils as examples of the Hudson River school, verdant mysterious panoramas of the Palisades, of ice floes bottlenecking at West Point. The books were bound or rebound in leather succulent as amber. I tried to read their fine gilt titles and found my eyes stinging. I might have pulled one down to examine it but my fingers felt numb and weak, nearly immaterial, as though the density of a hardbound volume would pass through my hands. This may have been the effect of a day where I’d steered Ava through snow three times, grappling with the weave of her leash in my childishly soft palms.

I was also embarrassed. I no more wished to be caught fondling the books as be seen creeping upstairs to ogle Arnheim’s hologram. I didn’t want the setting to unravel the meager poise that had brought me here to make my stand. Yet by the time Claire Carter appeared, it had almost done that. She’d left me long enough for me to feel she’d rescued me by appearing, that if I’d been there longer the age and force of the place would have wholly disintegrated the small pretense of me. Nearly dark out when I’d approached the town house, the windows were black now, as if I’d risked the vanishing of all nurturing illusion by entering this chamber, this sole place certain of its purposes. I apprehended here the indifference of the ancient and unchangeable city, the incidental nature of its use for me. Claire Carter didn’t say “Any further questions?” but she might as well have. The room was lit by one standing glass lamp, and it didn’t seem to light me at all, but Claire Carter in her peach-sherbet pantsuit glowed like the green shores so luminous with underpainting, glowed like the amber spines of the Collected Works, glowed, yes, like a chaldron, a thing glimpsed only to deny you.

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

“You’re always thanking me, Mr. Insteadman,” said Claire Carter. “But that isn’t what you came for.”

Her brittleness gave me some courage. “No offense, but I hoped to talk to Mayor Arnheim.”

“Here’s how this goes. You get five minutes with me, and the meter’s running on that, so skip the formalities. The mayor will join us at some point. You should tell me anything you need him to know.”

“Is he listening now?”

“How can we help you, Mr. Insteadman?”

Again I was voiceless. No wonder the Polish starlet fucked the writer. I wanted to spellbind and scald Claire Carter with a hiccup-punctuated tour de force of accusation. Yet after all I knew nothing, had no evidence, only dubious questions wilting on my tongue. “Is the tiger… being used to destroy… the city’s enemies?” I asked her.

“The tiger is a distraction,” said Claire Carter firmly, as if placing it in a bureaucratic category beyond further consideration. I recalled Perkus’s commandment, no conspiracies but of distraction. I didn’t suppose Claire Carter was about to use that other word. If I used it myself I was a fool.

“Does Richard Abneg know the truth?”

“The truth about what?”

“About distractions like the tiger… and me.” I surprised myself.

“Richard’s like you,” she said. “He forgets a lot of what he knows, forgets everything except what he needs to carry on, and do his job.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you forget?”

“I’m the same as anyone else,” said Claire Carter. “Don’t mystify things.”

“Do you know Oona Laszlo?”

“We’ve met.” The weary tone suggested my questions had drifted into irrelevance, that she’d begun wondering why she’d bothered to grant me even these five minutes.

“My friend died,” I blurted out, not wishing to fail in my only secure complaint. Yet I didn’t wish to give Perkus’s name aloud here, feeling as superstitious as I’d been in the police-station basement, though I believed him beyond Claire Carter’s or the mayor’s harm now, either dead or gone underground… I’d begun telling myself that if Marlon Brando could be alive, the same was possible for Perkus. The medical world could form an anti-conspiracy, a form of underground railroad originating in hospital emergency rooms, to hide the Non-Dupes from their enemies. I remembered a phrase Strabo Blandiana had mentioned, Médecins Sans Frontières, which might be a cover name for this secret society.

“Richard mentioned it,” she said.

“My friend told me… a lot of things. He believed Manhattan had become a fake. A simulation of itself. For some purpose… he couldn’t guess, but he died trying.”

“What on earth makes you think it could possibly be only one purpose?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Pay attention, Mr. Insteadman. I’m astounded at your naïveté. How could a place like Manhattan exist for just one purpose, instead of a million?”

I had no answer.

“Do you personally believe Manhattan is fake?” asked Claire Carter.

How could I reply? Perkus’s theories proved themselves ludicrous while demolishing any castles of consolation to which I might hope to retreat. They unmade those as they unmade themselves. Our sphere of the real (call it Manhattan) was riddled with simulations, yet was the world at hand. Or the simulation was riddled through with the real. The neat pink seam of Ava’s surgery scar, which I’d traced with my finger this very morning while giving in to her cuddling demands in my bed; the brown stripe-the “milk map”-across Georgina’s pregnant belly which, though I hadn’t witnessed it myself, had plainly reordered Richard Abneg’s helpless mind; the exact flavor of Oona’s kisses (or Ava’s, for that matter), the sugar dust on a Savoir Faire almond croissant (I have my weaknesses); these details could no more have been designed and arranged than Laird Noteless could have thought to include discarded baby carriages and crushed crack vials in his sketches for Urban Fjord. The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions, the West Side Highway of the self, to shattering encounters with the wider real: bears on floes, the indifference and silence of the climate or of outer space. So retreat. Live in a Manhattan of your devising, a bricolage of the right bagel and the right whitefish, even if from rival shops. Walk the dog, dance with her to Some Girls. Why did Perkus have to be killed for his glance outside the frame? But maybe he hadn’t been killed, had only died. And again, maybe absconded. I was sick with ignorance, and my own complicity.

I’d been like Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, playing scenes opposite phantasms, figures unreal and deceased. Yet Perkus had made me peculiarly brave. The Polish starlet was also the detective who couldn’t kill or be killed by guns, but might brandish love. It struck me that Oona had done me a favor, too, enmeshing me in such a lame script. How many ever know they’re in one? “Being until recently one of the local fakes,” I told Claire Carter, “I take the matter seriously. Forgive me if it strikes you as tendentious.”

“Let me make a suggestion,” she said. “Follow the money.”

“Sorry?” The glib cliché shattered my reverie, returned me to the tangible fact of the mayor’s operative, her dress-for-success pugnacity, her horrific completeness, how she made in her whole earthly self Perkus Tooth’s true opposite, and how vile she was to me, real or fake. She might begin clubbing me, as a pelt prospector clubs a baby seal, with further phrases such as do what you love, the money will follow and show me the money, and I might die here yelping on the mayor’s superb Oriental. I couldn’t brandish love in this encounter, had to choose my battles, flee.

“Take a look at who signs your checks. If it isn’t a city agency, and it isn’t, then you’ve brought your complaints to the wrong door.”

I wondered, for the first time, if my residuals weren’t all residuals. “I get… direct deposit.”

“We’re in the coping business around here,” said Claire Carter, ignoring me. “Like any administration, we inherited the problems we’re trying to solve.” Her tone was almost sulky. Perhaps my accusations had reached her, in whatever slight place she could be reached. Or maybe the phrases were a secret signal, for now the mayor arrived. He wore a brocade robe over silk pajamas, and inspected me like a disgruntled father in a black-and-white comedy, or Sherlock Holmes resigning himself to lecturing Watson on the obvious. He should have been carrying a candelabra. But these weren’t Hugh Hefner or Rossmoor Danzig pajamas, tailored to jollify ugliness, these were no laughing matter, the pajamas of power wakened from its deserved repose. I had to make myself worthy of interrupting these pajamas. I felt I might have wandered into another joke besides the riddle about the Polish starlet now, that like a penitent who’d ascended a snowy Tibetan mountain to speak with the hermit guru, I’d be permitted a single question before being returned to my exile. Why is it snowing? Is Marlon Brando alive or dead? On what support does the weight of the world rest? I couldn’t choose, and so exhibited my traditional mask of placid stupidity. Yet before the swarming pressure of the unreal rose up and swallowed us three where we stood, Arnheim’s impassive features deflated in an approximation of human sorrow, and he beckoned with his short arms to encircle me, and like a giant infant I was for a moment comforted against his shoulder, which was surprisingly knobby under my cheek, as though it had knuckles.

“I’m deeply sorry for your loss,” he said. “Our city mourns with you.”

“Thank you, sir.” I tried to conceive that Perkus would be granted this tribute after all, and whether I should accept it for him. On the other hand, it might be an attempt to persuade me not to look into the circumstances of his “death.”

“She won’t be forgotten.”

“She?”

“The Chinese will pay some price for this, don’t doubt it.”

Arnheim meant Janice Trumbull. The ghost-astronaut had been declared dead at last, I gathered, though I’d have to buy the Times the following day to learn that rather than linger any more in fetid cancer and agriculture, the space captives had serenely directed their station into the path of the mines, to be cleansed in vacuum fire. Did the mayor believe I still believed that stupid tale? Did he? Perhaps Claire Carter was simply being truthful when she told me I’d come to the wrong door.

I had nothing at all to say to him, or anyone, about Janice Trumbull. But in the comedy we now played, in which the billionaire Arnheim, veins so notoriously icy, now steadied me by the elbows and gazed into my eyes with avuncular wartime bonhomie as if I were some far-posted confidential agent coming in briefly to receive encouragement from the home office, I could let “her” stand for Perkus Tooth. This suited me. Perkus could be everywhere and nowhere, as I’d often felt him to be. I hungered to dismay Arnheim, to let him wonder if the operative in his embrace had gone over to the other side, even if I had no idea whether another side existed. “I learned certain secrets from her, before she died,” I told him. “Secrets about the city. The tiger, for instance.”

Arnheim stepped back from me, placing his hands in his robe’s deep pockets as if he were suddenly ashamed of them. He didn’t have to bend his elbows to do so. “I’m glad you mention it.”

“I didn’t want there to be any confusion.”

“There’s a Sufi aphorism that’s apropos to this situation-have I ever mentioned it to you?”

I stared in confusion. Arnheim spoke as though we enjoyed some long association.

“The secret protects itself.”

“That’s the Sufi aphorism?”

“Go with it, my friend. You can do no wrong. The secret protects itself.”

I found this notion, that I could do no wrong, demoralizing in the extreme. If I believed it I might have to hurl myself into one of Noteless’s chasms, perhaps the Memorial to Daylight, during the opening ceremonies. Though I suppose my most flamboyant suicide could be incorporated readily enough into a tale of the astronaut-fiancé’s bereavement. Better to drift into the gray fog and be forgotten. I noticed I’d now officially contemplated suicide, an act no one warns you is involuntary, unfolding as it does in contemplation. All it had taken was the crushing force of this parlor’s decor, and a mayor who might himself be a memorial to daylight, as though he’d drunk it all for himself and left nothing on the table. Who required even hiccups to destroy me? In my despair I tried one more code word on Jules Arnheim, a gesture in commemoration of the now-dissolved Fellowship of the Chaldron. “Les Non-Dupes refuse!” I said, producing the slogan with all the useless courage of Nathan Hale on the gallows.

The mayor had a ready response, one which seemed to gratify him, not at the layer of his bogus joviality but in the deeper stirrings of his killer’s soul, on view at last. “Les Non-Dupes errant,” he said, gazing unblinking and unavuncular into my eyes. My own high-school French, flickering in memory, supplied the interpretation. Like knights-errant, we non-dupes were not only lost but mistaken. We wandered in error. To be unduped was not to live. There was no way out, only a million ways back in.

“What do I do now?” I asked him, helpless not to turn to the authority before me, the father we dream of in joy and fear.

“Go back to a city that needs you.”

“You mean, Manhattan?”

“No one disputes your place here. You own your apartment outright, don’t you? I understand it has a fine view.”

If I stayed a moment longer Arnheim might describe those birds and that tower, my heart’s last sacred quadrant of sky. I fled into the night and snow before I could hear it.