Chronic City

CHAPTER Five

Perkus Tooth read The New York Times as he rode the F train downtown. He’d lifted the copy from a neighbor’s doorstep-up at this ungodly hour, he felt entitled to it. He hadn’t purchased a copy since the day Richard Abneg had called to insist he read about the eagles, and before that, not for many months. Perkus refused to pay for the Times, wasn’t interested in giving subsidy to hegemony. The paper was nearly useless to him anymore. He used to light on items that spoke to him, elements in the larger puzzle. These he’d clip and try to shift out of context, pinning them above his kitchen table, onto the layered backdrop of his own broadsides, to see what age would do to their meaning as they yellowed, as they marinated in pot fumes. Lately this never happened. The front page seemed recursive, every story about either a species of animal collapsing into extinction or the dispersal of the Matisse collection of some socialite who’d died intestate. Yesterday a minke whale, its motives perhaps deranged by ocean fungus, had wandered up the East River nearly to Hell Gate: FROLICKING VISITOR DELIGHTS HEARTS, AND THEN DIES. Another animal story that had made the front page concerned the latest depredations of the escaped tiger, who’d razed a twenty-four-hour Korean market on 103rd Street.

Then there was the requisite update from space, another installment in the travails of Janice Trumbull and her Russian cohort, the crew doomed to orbit. The piece on the space station took up a third of the front page, and where it continued on the interior the Times had run substantial excerpts of Janice Trumbull’s latest letter to Chase Insteadman. A soap opera. Perkus’s attitude toward his new friend Chase’s situation was an area of suspended judgment, only flooded with Perkus’s usual conspiratorial searchlights. That the situation reeked of fakery was only natural-what wasn’t? Oona Laszlo, too, had dropped a few hints, though she often teased Perkus’s grave suspicions, and was at bottom untrustworthy. In making Chase’s acquaintance, Perkus had alluded heavily that he not only knew but understood and forgave-for who hasn’t found themselves enlisted in this city’s reigning fictions from time to time? Yet Chase seemed entirely sincere and heartbroken, as much hanging on the updates from space as any other punter. Perkus felt sorry for him. But then the whole New York Times seemed phony to Perkus, even or perhaps especially when it featured his friends. He checked the Metro section, but there was no update on Abneg’s eagles. The Arts section was of course useless. Perkus recognized none of the names. It struck him as largely consisting of rewritten press releases. Yet this paper as a whole felt more insubstantial even than usual-where were all those pieces nobody ever read, but everybody relied upon to be there? He glanced at the front, the top-right corner: WAR FREE EDITION. Ah yes, he’d heard about this. You could opt out now. He left the paper on his seat when he exited the train at Twenty-third Street.

Aboveground, he walked north on Sixth. This was the farthest afield Perkus had traveled in many months, perhaps in over a year. However absurd, he couldn’t recall the time previous, or what exactly last had drawn him out of the bounds of what had become his quarantine: east of Lexington, north of Grand Central Station. Even midtown east, where he’d occasionally drop into the Rolling Stone or Criterion offices, was disorienting to Perkus; the part of Manhattan he encountered here, with its lingering echoes of an older, ethnic-mercantile realm, and the proprietary and jocular gay enclave that overlaid those garment-district ghosts, the complacently muscular pairs holding hands as they strolled-all this was like another city to him. Perkus joked uneasily to himself that he ought to have a guidebook, he felt so foreign here.

A pair of Chinese-dissident protesters occupied a part of the sidewalk on Sixth; they squatted in cages and wore T-shirts decorated with fake blood, commemorating some crackdown against their politicized variety of meditation or worship. One of these caged persons met Perkus’s eye before he could avoid it, and pointed, first at herself, then at him, seeming to say, You and Me Are the Same. Another of their group stood beside the cages, urging pamphlets on passersby, all of whom veered expertly aside, alert within their cocoon of earbuds or cell conversation, raising preemptive hands like Indians in a Western. All except Perkus: he ended up clutching a scuffed and incoherent pamphlet. Glancing at it, he saw a primitive drawing, repeating the image of the sidewalk tableau, a figure in a cage barely big enough for a dog. He crumpled the pamphlet into a trash can and tried to walk as steadily as the human stream of which he was part.

In truth, Perkus felt ill. That was the reason for the jaunt and why he was so vulnerable to dislocation, yet it made him wish to reverse course before he’d taken some irrevocable step. He’d shaved and showered, for the first time in many days, understanding it was likely someone would be examining his undressed body. Then, defensively prideful, he’d donned his best suit, a deep-maroon pinstripe three-piece that would have risked seeming clownish had the vents and pockets not been so impeccably detailed, the fit to his wiry body so trim and modish. The suit wasn’t tailored for Perkus. He’d gotten lucky, found it at the Housing Works Thrift Shop on Seventy-seventh. He made a daylight dandy in the maroon suit, and now, like a lush who’d woken drunk, weaved slightly on the pavement, he couldn’t help it. The sun was bright and the day was bitterly cold. Better to get indoors and face whatever it was he’d gotten himself into. He found the building on Twenty-fifth Street and pushed a button at the intercom, gave his name, was buzzed into the lobby. These were the offices of Strabo Blandiana, the celebrated master of Eastern medicine, who catered almost exclusively to stars-Chase Insteadman had been in his care since that time, ten years past, when he’d qualified as something of a star himself. Chase had induced Strabo to make an exception to his long waiting list for Perkus, then pleaded with Perkus to keep the appointment. Incredibly, Perkus had agreed. Now, at the threshold, he fought every impulse to flee.

Neither Strabo’s candle-scenty reception area nor the gentle, fair-haired, dippily smiling young man who welcomed Perkus to a seat there inspired any hope that Perkus’s prejudices against Eastern medicine might be disappointed. But the vibe, so to speak, was mellow, palliative in itself, and Perkus really didn’t want to be out on the street again too soon. Couldn’t hurt to fill out the clipboard’s two pages of questions on health history and “Present Areas of Complaint”-Perkus laughed to himself that he had plenty of those. He specified “cluster headache, a subvariant of migraine,” not wanting to be mistaken for having fantasized his symptom, and preemptively disdaining any curative gesture that veered too much into fantasy itself. Then defiantly listed caffeine and THC under “Medicines.” Perkus had brewed himself a pot of coffee (Peet’s Colombian roast) and smoked a joint (Watt’s Ice) this morning before walking to the subway, and could feel both medicines still buzzing pleasantly in his bloodstream. He sat alone in the waiting room, apart from the blond kid, who each time Perkus looked up from the clipboard grinned welcome as if for the first time. No sign of other patients, no clue to what was expected of Perkus or what he should expect. Perkus reminded himself he wasn’t into astrological symbols or archetypes of any kind. He had a fucking headache. Actually, it was gone, though this had been one of the cruelest, lasting a week and a half, with barely any oases of relief. In its wake he was enfeebled, that was all, and needed an infusion or two of what he liked to call, only half jokingly, “replacement lipids”-a Jackson Hole vanilla malted and an extra slice of Swiss on his burger deluxe.

When Strabo opened a door Perkus was disarmed utterly. The Romanian was so much younger than Perkus had imagined, and devastating in his calm. Strabo’s personal style was minimalist, hair cropped in a close Caesar, the sleeves of his black turtleneck, some superfine knit, pushed to mid-forearm, revealing on his left a tremendous gold Rolex. No ascetic renunciation of worldly treasure here. Strabo’s gaze penetrated quickly, satisfied itself, and moved on, declining to make a show of hypnotic spookiness. Despite himself, Perkus felt disappointed. Did he rate just a glance? Strabo hadn’t even hesitated over Perkus’s morbid eye.

Strabo Blandiana’s examination room was neither encouragingly medical nor New Agey enough to justify Perkus’s balking. Just a couple of Danish Modern chairs, in which the two now sat as equals, a brushed-steel cabinet on wheels, and beyond it a long, flat daybed covered with a neatly folded sheet. One silver-framed photograph, of an enigmatic orange-glowing ceramic vase against a blank white backdrop. From the moment Strabo opened his mouth no question of negotiation remained. He spoke decisively, each word acute. The tone suggested they’d agreed beforehand never to waste an instant of the other’s time. Perkus’s clipboard results were in evidence nowhere, and the word headache was never spoken.

Strabo explained quickly that Perkus was-surprise! — “out of balance.” He could see that Perkus worked with his mind, and that he did so with the urgency of one who knew that if he faltered in his chosen task no one could possibly carry on in his stead. This sense of special purpose motivated Perkus to accomplish extraordinary things but also made him lonely, and defiantly angry. Strabo surprised Perkus by finding nothing shameful in this: Perkus evidently made use of productive fear and rage. Each insight Strabo offered as if describing the workings of a car, some fine-tuned Porsche or Jaguar, to its interested owner. There was no air of metaphysics. Strabo went on to explain that Perkus’s constitution was strong. If it wasn’t he wouldn’t have made it even this far, nor accomplished what he had. The suggestion being that this Porsche’s owner had brought his car limping into the garage just barely in time. Strabo’s intuition of Perkus’s special accomplishments and challenges allowed Perkus to feel them himself as though for the first time. What burdens he carried! That Perkus couldn’t go on as he had been was simply manifest and true.

Strabo Blandiana paused now, as if catching himself too much showing off what one glance had collected from the subject before him. He might be about to turn to the question of treatment, whatever that consisted of. Perkus was at this point only dazzled. Then Strabo again turned that gaze of total discernment in Perkus’s direction. “You understand,” Strabo said, as if incidentally, “that beneath your anger is really mourning. But you feel you can’t afford to mourn.”

“Mourn who?” said Perkus, feeling a breath disappear, so he had to gulp to replace it. The description seemed to tip him headfirst into self-understanding, as if from a high diving board. But he hadn’t hit the water yet.

Strabo shook his head, refusing the obvious. “Before your parents were taken from you, the loss you felt was already real.” Yes, Perkus’s parents had both died, but how did Strabo know this? Or was this one of those specious bold guesses with which a charlatan secured your confidence? Perkus’s suspicions were aroused, but they were overrun by his hunger to understand what Strabo was on about. What loss?

“You mourn a loss suffered by the world. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You see it as your sole responsibility to commemorate this loss.”

With this astonishing pronouncement, Strabo shifted efficiently and permanently to the practical effort of the Porsche’s maintenance. Was Perkus aware that he breathed only into his upper chest, never into his stomach? This distinction anyone would be likely to have noted a hundred times, but Strabo, with a guiding touch, made Perkus feel the difference. Perkus then tried to reopen the conversation, but Strabo, with a shrug, conveyed the sense that their talk had been conclusive. He deferred to Perkus’s expertise. “You know what you need to do to continue your work, I can’t teach you anything about that. Let’s just get you balanced, and then we’ll discuss strategies for leaving aside the useless pain. When you were younger you could carry more, but it isn’t efficient or necessary now. Please undress and lie under the sheet, I’ll return momentarily.”

To reject anything now was out of the question. Perkus made himself ready, folding his suit neatly on a chair back. Strabo returned and got to business. Acupuncture needles didn’t look as Perkus had imagined them, but then he’d never bothered to imagine anything other than a sewing needle. Thin as threads, each with a tiny flag at their end, they entered his body at various points, neck and wrists and shoulders, painlessly. Only a hint of tightness, a feeling he shouldn’t move suddenly, confirmed Strabo had used them at all. Then Strabo lowered the lights and switched on some music, long atmospheric tones that might have been vaguely Eastern. “To someone like you this CD may sound a bit corny,” he said, surprising Perkus. “But it’s specially formulated, there are tones underneath the music that are engaging directly with your limbic system. It works even if you don’t like the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”

“Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.

“I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”

“What if I fall asleep?”

“It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pinned like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it come to this? How could I have been allowed to persuade him? Puttylike Chase Insteadman, so eagerly enlisted in absurd causes-Chase had talked Perkus into this?

Well, he’d frightened me. For a week Perkus hadn’t answered his phone, nor his apartment buzzer when I resorted to dropping by unannounced. Then, my own phone had rung, at six thirty AM, an hour at which, even had I been driving deep through evenings in Perkus’s company, I’d reliably have been dozing. I fumbled the receiver up to my ear, expecting I don’t know what, but always guiltily terrified of dire updates from the space station, some further revolution in Janice’s fate.

His voice was dim, smoke-tight, wreathed in hours. No question of his having slept anytime recently.

“So, I need your help with something.”

“Yes?” I croaked.

“I have to talk to Brando. Can you get his number?”

“Brando?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, miming groggy disbelief for an invisible audience. “You mean Marlon Brando?” I thought Brando was recently dead, but this was exactly the sort of thing I get mixed up about. Maybe Paul Newman had died, or Farley Granger.

“Yes, Chase, Marlon Brando. Can you call, I don’t know, someone at your talent agency?” However depleted, however absurd the hour, Perkus seemed in a rage of impatience.

“Doesn’t he live on some island?”

“So you’re saying you can’t?”

“I–I don’t know. I guess I can try.”

“Only Brando can save us.” He croaked out the line as if he’d been saving it for the crucial moment, a bombshell revelation.

“Perkus, what’s going on? What time is it? Are you okay?”

Silence.

“I tried to call, five or six times.”

“I had cluster,” he said after a moment, the grandiosity leaked from his voice. “I turned the ringer off.”

“I rang your doorbell.”

“I know. It sounded like an atom bomb, whistling toward the Nagasaki of my brain.” Perkus tittered at his own joke, his voice seeming to fall away from the receiver. Having failed the Brando test, I was losing him.

“Have you been in all week? When did you last eat something?”

“I don’t know…”

“Can I come over?” I asked, astounding myself. He didn’t answer. “I’ll stop at H&H and grab some bagels and stuff.” Now I bargained, pathetically.

“Go to East Side Bagel, they’ve got better whitefish spread.”

“Okay.”

“And Chase?”

“Yes?”

“Get some extra for Biller. I haven’t had anything for him for a couple of days.”

It might have taken me an hour to rally myself, get bagels, and arrive to ring Perkus’s bell. This was a day or two before Halloween, the morning fiercely cold, a first taste of winter. I worried for a long chilly moment on his doorstep that Perkus had changed his mind, but no, without troubling with the intercom he buzzed me through. His door was unlocked when I tried the handle, and a sour smell escaped to the corridor. Inside, Perkus’s tightly managed chaos had tipped into squalor, his sink’s basin like a geological site, heaped with unrinsed cups and a rain of grounds emptied out of his gold filter, ashtrays too, their contents muddily mixed with the coffee, his living-room floor a mad tatter of clippings, books with spines pressed open by whatever lay to hand-more coffee cups, a stapler, a brown banana, a pot of rubber cement-and with their pages mutilated, paragraphs excised and stickily transferred to gigantic cardboard backings, collaged into wild conjunctions, like vast scholarly punkrock liner notes. I’d never seen Perkus destroy a book. Rather they were holy objects, whose safety he compulsively patrolled when he placed them in your hands, forehead veins bulging in panic if you turned one down on its open face, though he reserved the right to do this himself. But no more. Now his precious collection was only fodder on some quest. Perkus sat on the floor amid this disaster, his hair dripping wet, his chin and throat peppered with a week’s beard, his expression smashed and dark. He wore a green sharkskin three-piece suit’s pants and vest, nothing else-I suppose he’d made a lastminute effort to neaten up for me and could locate no clean shirts. His chest was, somehow, scrawnier than I’d allowed myself to imagine. The television screen was frozen on a stop-motion frame of Marlon Brando, smiling ominously as he scratched a large blue felt-and-fur tree-sloth Gnuppet behind its ears. I turned from him to the kitchen, pushed aside heaps of ancient magazines, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Esquire, to clear a spot on his table for the bag of bagels and spreads, then went back in and confronted him.

“Perkus, tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m trying to reconstruct an epiphany.”

“An epiphany? I thought you had a headache.”

“I don’t know if the cluster’s passed, but I had a great ellipsis a few days ago, between episodes, really revelatory. I couldn’t do anything about it then, I was so fucked up. I could barely walk for two days at the peak, Chase! The blot on my vision was like an elephant in my apartment this time, crowding to the edges of the room, I felt like I could stroke its pebbly hide.” He spoke in a feverish rasp, all the while concentrating on piloting scissors to free a few sentences from their surrounding page. “Then the epiphany came, I could see everything, the whole landscape at once, like it was lit by the moon. This enormous undescribed thing in every detail, I have to get hold of it while I can, I don’t know how long I’ll be allowed this time.”

“Get hold of the epiphany, you mean?” The Venn diagram of ellipsis, epiphany, and episode of cluster was already too much for my mind’s eye. I feared what I would never again dare suggest: that it was All One Thing. The pebbly hide of the elephant and the moonlit landscape, the first so close it was oppressive and useless, the other so distant he’d never reach it even if he grew wings, One and the Same.

“Yes.”

“So that’s what all this is?” I indicated the project arrayed on the floor. “An… epiphany… from last week?” I craned my neck to read the filleted sentences draped in Perkus’s hand-The Beatles family goes back to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. They want to get to American freedom; they don’t understand that American freedom is itself horribly complicated and conflicted… Another slip continued, There’s also a kind of Less Than Zero thing about being the Beatles; they’re not quite the Beats. There’s a kind of Bret Easton Ellis about the whole Beatle phenomenon, and that has to do with the tragedy of John Lennon. Being a kind of Beetle, being a kind of insect in a way… And then a third excerpt, in a different font: But in truth, moderns live in a world-order in which the primitive “physics” or “chemistry” of things (“reality,” the measurable and controllable thingliness of things strictly taken) is overwhelmingly eclipsed, reduced nearly to negligibility by the power-relations or actualities that have strategized and shaped the thing-complexes among which moderns live…

“Not last week,” said Perkus, patiently straightening me out. “Last week, I told you, I was in a death glaze, mostly. I’m reconstructing an epiphany from five years ago, at least. Probably ten.”

I wanted many things, but for starters I wanted us to quit saying the word epiphany. “What do you want on your bagel?”

“Let’s make coffee.”

When I’d performed what triage I could on his kitchen and we sat with coffee in fresh cups and pumpernickel halves frosted with whitefish, Perkus said, “So, what about Brando?”

What about sleep? I wanted to reply. “I honestly think it’ll be difficult to get hold of him.”

“Sure, but we have to try.” Between starved attacks on his bagel, gobbets of pureed fish and mayonnaise dripping from between his fingers, Perkus named Brando as the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era. His lordly vulnerability, his beauty overwritten with bulk, his superbly calibrated refusal to oblige, all made Marlon Brando the name of that principle which nemeses as varied as Mayor Jules Arnheim, the War on Drugs, Jack Nicholson’s museum-defacing scene as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had conspired to unname.

“You know Brando’s single most crucial moment?” Perkus quizzed me.

“Uh, not On the Waterfront?”

“Not even close. Too compromised by McCarthyism.”

I hated this game. “Apocalypse Now?”

“Well, that’s an important one, with the whole Heart of Darkness subtext, but what I have in mind is when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Oscar in his place. I mean, it’s the most amazing conflation of the American Imaginary, just think about it! In one gesture Brando ties our rape of the Indians to this figure of our immigrant nightmare, this Sicilian peasant doing the American dream, capitalism I mean, more ruthlessly than the founding fathers could have ever dreaded. We’re as defenseless against what Don Corleone exposes, the murderous underside of Manifest Destiny, as the Indians were against smallpox blankets. And in the vanishing space between the two, what? America itself, whatever that is. Brando, essentially, declining to appear. Because the party’s over.” Here Perkus hesitated for breath, like a jazz soloist tipping his horn to one side. His unruly eye tested the bounds of its socket. He also snuck in another bite of whitefish and pumpernickel-at least I was getting some calories into him. “By refusing to show up Brando took on the most magnificent aspect, it’s as if Toto sweeps the curtain aside and the great and powerful Oz has absconded, leaving you to contemplate the fact that behind the illusion there’s nothing. The Oz of American history, for all its monstrousness, is all we’ve got. Brando could have done anything at that moment. Come home to us, instead of remaining in exile. He should have run for mayor of New York.”

“Like Mailer?” I might not pass many tests, but I recalled a recent Tooth History of New York.

“Sure, but Mailer had it all fouled up, he still bought the romance of Marilyn Monroe, all that Andy Warhol crap. Brando was pure because he’d been out there, had Marilyn, knew it didn’t matter. He was our captain. Maybe it’s not too late.”

“Not too late-?” To lure Brando here to run for mayor? I hesitated to complete the thought aloud, fearing I’d lead Perkus to this conclusion if he hadn’t reached it already. I wasn’t sure which was more worrisome, Perkus’s careening logic or that I’d mostly been able to follow it.

“No, Brando’s keeping faith. That’s what I realized, Chase. He’s still out there, sending up flares, if anyone’s paying attention.”

“What flares?”

“His most recent film, that spy movie, Footholds-you know how it was supposedly ruined by his battles with the director, Florian Ib, the guy who made The Gnuppet Movie? There’s this one anecdote from the set, seems like typical Hollywood gossip, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Yes?”

“So, there’s a scene they’re shooting, Ib’s setup calls for a wide shot, but Brando demands a close-up. They argue over it, but neither backs down, and then Brando goes back to his trailer, and when he comes out for the shot, he’s wearing only the top half of his costume. Right there, with the whole crew watching, Brando’s nude from the waist down. He’s basically daring Florian Ib to shoot the wide shot.”

“I’m somehow guessing Marlon got his close-up.”

He tried to contain his impatience with me. “Sure, but if that was the whole point it wouldn’t be more than showbiz vanity. The thing is, by that time Brando’s figured out Footholds won’t be much of a vehicle for what he needs to say, so he sends out this message.”

“What message?”

“It took me a while to decipher it, but think, Chase-what’s the Platonic form of a Gnuppet?” My baffled look told Perkus not to wait for my guess this time. “Your quintessential Gnuppet stands behind a wall, right? You only ever see them from the waist up. Remove the wall, or the edge of the frame, and you’d see the hands of the operators, making them move. I’ve been studying Brando’s scene in The Gnuppet Movie, there’s a reason he’s pointing us back to that work-the key is the relation between the actors and the Gnuppets. We’re players in a Gnuppet realm, reading from the same script. We’re All Gnuppets. Brando was saying: abolish this boundary, tear down the wall or the curtain, and let’s have a look at the Gnuppeteers.”

“Or at his genitals.”

“Haven’t you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn’t because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame’s edge, which reminds them of all they’re not seeing. That glimpse is intolerable. When your gaze slips beyond the edge of a book or magazine, you notice the ostensible texture of everyday reality, the table beneath the magazine, say, or the knee of your pants. When your eye slips past the limit of the letterboxed screen, you’re faced with what’s framed and projected in that margin-it ought to be something, but instead it’s nothing, a terrifying murk, a zone of nullity. But the real reason it’s so terrifying is because it begs the question of whether they’re the same thing. Maybe the tabletop or the knee of your pants bears no more relation to the contents of the magazine than the images on the screen do to the void above and below.”

I rinsed a glass and handed Perkus some cold tap water, wanting to see something going in besides coffee.

“I think I ought to put up a broadside,” he said.

“It’s been a long time.” I spoke cautiously, not wanting to jar him, and anyway uncertain of my facts.

“Yes.”

We both glanced in at the paperscape of his living-room floor, the unreconstructed epiphany. Was it a broadside in progress? That groping collage seemed a kind of wan parody of the maniacal hand-scrawled rants of his heyday. It dawned on me that by lighting on a champion whose triumph was in declining to appear, Perkus might elaborately forgive his own years of inactivity, his hide-and-seek muse. That Brando had frittered away much of his prime gave them something in common. (Me, too, if I bothered to think in those terms.) Even better, absence could form a statement, especially if punctuated with a well-timed and phantasmal return, the broadside equivalent of Sacheen Littlefeather. Manhattan might have forgotten Perkus and his broadsides, but never mind. He’d send up a flare.

“Would you help me put it up?” he asked.

“Like Oona Laszlo?” I joked. “You want me for your glue-girl?”

“Seriously.”

This figure before me-with bare-knuckly shoulders, cheek sinews tensed beneath beard bristles, fingernails mooned with newsprint dirt, unmoored eye careening-I’d sooner chaperone to Bellevue’s intake door myself than allow onto the street to be swept up by Mayor Arnheim’s quality-of-life squad. “On one condition,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll let me make an appointment for you with my Chinese practitioner.”

I didn’t kid myself that Perkus felt obligated. Rather, he’d agreed out of a kind of pity for me that I pitied him, and out of embarrassment at my worry. Plus I saw I’d made him curious, with my wild claims for Strabo Blandiana’s visionary and remedial powers. What if Perkus could be freed of the cluster headaches? How much more ellipsis would that leave time for? Any gambit might be worth that chance. Some rare medical gift might come shrouded in the mystical wrapping paper.

So here he was, pocked with needles, a Saint Sebastian of aromatherapy and pan-flute solos, when he could have been home studying Brando’s Gnuppet moment frame by frame, like it was the Zapruder film. Well, it was relaxing, at least. Obediently breathing all the way to the pit of his stomach, he expected to feel sleepy. Instead experienced the opposite effect, grew strangely excited inside his total stillness, whether creditable to needles, the somatic tones dwelling underneath the fake-Asian music, residual traces of coffee and pot, or Strabo’s uncanny pronouncements. The loss you felt was already real. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You know what you need to do to continue your work. These phrases continued to sink through Perkus. He couldn’t feel Strabo’s needles at all, but if he closed his eyes his body seemed to float toward the ceiling, a disconcerting sensation he avoided by opening his eyes instead. There at the center of vision was the framed photograph he’d passingly noted before, of the orange ceramic vase glowing, as if lit from within, against the minimal white backdrop. The line of the table on which the vase sat was barely detectable, so near was the tone of the tabletop to the wall behind it. The vase was lit to throw no shadow against either wall or table. It had a translucence, perhaps opalescence would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle. Under the circumstances, the vase seemed to have its own message for Perkus: Have you neglected Beauty? Even as he believed he contemplated the photograph with idle curiosity, killing time as he would with a copy of Sports Illustrated in a dentist’s waiting room, Perkus felt the tears begin to seep across his cheeks, toward his ears, the salt stinging tiny fresh cuts that edged his sideburns, cuts he’d incurred shaving with shaky hands.

Now Perkus felt himself float without closing his eyes. Not toward the ceiling, but up and, however impossible, into the orange vase in the photograph. He dwelled there, was held there, for a long and outrageously pure instant. The vase sheltered Perkus like a kindly cove. And when it couldn’t continue to shelter him the failure wasn’t a rejection, a spitting out, but a sigh. Perkus understood that he and the vase couldn’t abide with each other any longer than that instant, not here in these absurd surroundings, not stuck full of acupuncture needles and separated by the boundaries of a framed photograph. This had been a mere taste. But what a taste. The orange vase spoke to Perkus, simply, of not the possibility but the fact of another world. The world Perkus or anyone would wish to discover, the fine real place where the shadowy, tattered cloak of delusion dissolved. The place Perkus had tried his whole life to prove existed. Only lately he’d lost the thread. Fuck ten-year-old epiphanies made of scraps of yellowing articles from the London Review of Books and Comics Journal! Perkus had nodded off the night before, seated on the floor, and woken to find his scissors nearly glued to his thumb and forefinger. But even to taste what the orange vase promised was to feel weariness lift away entirely. Just to know it was out there, like a beacon calling.

Strabo Blandiana returned and removed the needles, a process which Perkus now barely noticed, then allowed Perkus a moment to collect himself and dress. The exit interview was brief, Perkus as eager to wrap up as Strabo, who obviously needed the room for his next patient-Chazz Palminteri, or Lewis Lapham, or whomever. (It was this that always surprised and amused me, too, how Strabo whisked you through, as much as any Western doctor.) Perkus didn’t want to stare at the vase too intently, fearing he’d give himself away. He did manage a quick inspection of the photograph’s margin, to make certain there was no signature or other mark he’d need to memorize for his later quest. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything.

“How do you feel?” asked Strabo.

“Great,” said Perkus truthfully.

“You respond well. We’ll eventually want to talk about caffeine and other substances, but there’s no hurry. For now I’d like you to think about your breathing, and this may seem strange to you, but I’d like you to eat more meat.”

“I can do that.”

“And while in the outer office I couldn’t help noticing you came here wearing nothing but your dress jacket. You should have a coat in this weather.”

“You’re right, of course.”

“If you’d like a copy of the CD I played, you can rebalance yourself at home this way. One purchases it from a Web site, it’s quite simple.”

Perkus consented, and Strabo scribbled the Web address on a slip. Then, before stepping out to take a receipt from Strabo’s receptionist (I’d insisted on paying for the visit in advance), he asked about the photograph of the vase. It was silly to lose the chance.

“Ah,” said Strabo. “The chaldron, yes, it’s quite beautiful. A gift from another patient. At first I hesitated to place it so prominently, but as it happens several patients have mentioned that they find it quite consoling. I’ve forgotten the name of the photographer, alas.”

“I’m sorry, what did you call it?”

“I understand that type of ceramic is called a chaldron.”

“Thank you.”

That evening, Perkus home from the fateful appointment, he called me and I hurried over. Appearing both radiant and exhausted from the adrenaline Strabo’s treatments typically unblocked, Perkus effused as much as I could have hoped, but his exact subject bewildered me. Crumbled marijuana buds from a container labeled ICE were strewn across the tabletop I’d sponged clean for him a few days before, and he waved a half-consumed, temporarily extinguished joint in his fingers as he explained that he’d already looked up “chaldron” on the Internet, and found two for sale on eBay, advertised with photographs much like that he’d seen on Strabo’s wall. They weren’t cheap, but he’d entered bids. He’d get one into his apartment as soon as possible, and then I’d see what he’d seen-that, in so many words, he’d detected proof of another, better world. “Like reverse archaeology, Chase, but just as thrilling as contemplating the lost remains of the past. A chaldron is treasure from the future, if we deserve a future that benign.” Meanwhile, did I want to see an image of one? Even in cold pixels, he promised, they conveyed a certain force.

I slowed him as well as I could, as his tale tumbled out, frantic, careless, ridiculous, the whole visit a pretext for his encounter with the chaldron. Had I seen it myself? Yes, I recalled the framed print, vaguely. No, it hadn’t had such an effect on me. Or rather, I hadn’t credited any effects to the photograph. Was Perkus certain he wasn’t transposing the results of Strabo’s treatments-the twin penetration of his needles and his insights into Perkus-onto the artwork? Perkus corrected me: it wasn’t an artwork, it was an artifact. Evidence. A manifestation. Furthermore, he wasn’t so impressed with Strabo as all that. The acupuncture hadn’t been unpleasant, but it also hadn’t been anything at all beyond a self-evident placebo. Perkus found the propagation of ancient ritual into an upscale urban setting innocuous and charming, in its way. The needles imparted a gravitas to Strabo that his customers, who otherwise paid handsomely to lie on a table and be reminded to breathe, must find reassuring.

As for Strabo’s so-called insight, Perkus was sorry I was so credulous. For it had only taken him a second thought to be certain Strabo employed techniques perfected by British mediums during the great Victorian craze for psychic phenomena of all types: safely evocative and flattering generalizations with which anyone would agree, combined with precise secret research into the subject’s background in order to provide a clinching detail or two. I ought to do a little reading on the historical techniques, I’d find it fascinating. “Strabo’s brilliant, I’ll give you that, Chase. Unmistakably, he’d been reading my work carefully in those two days between your call and my appointment. He must have a hot-shit researcher tucked away somewhere. What’s incredible is that he distilled my basic themes so quickly. He was feeding me back to me, neatly mixed up with his own brand of stuff.” Perkus widened his eyes, his expression that of exaggerated admiration for what he regarded as a top-notch stunt. Where could I begin? To attack the first premise, that Strabo Blandiana-who’d added the appointment as a favor, and who was in my experience often sweetly oblivious that clients like Marisa Tomei or Wynton Marsalis were renowned themselves rather than merely friends of others he’d helped-could ever have had the interest or means to discover Perkus’s marginal writings, might seem an assault on Perkus’s frail sense of his own relevance. I said nothing. Perkus relit the joint and after drawing on it himself handed it to me. “Enough of this,” he said. “Let’s go win an auction!”

Well, we lost a couple. If anything epitomized Perkus’s curious disadvantages, his failure to find traction in the effective world, it was the state of his computing. Perkus was the type to be Web-delving on some sleekly effective Mac, I’d have thought. Instead his lumpy Dell looked ten years old, Cro-Magnon in computer years. He connected by his phone line, which he transferred by hand from his living-room Slimline, and which bumped him offline if anyone rang, but also, it seemed, intermittently and at random. Watching that Dell painstakingly assemble a page view, images smoothed pixel by pixel, was agony. Perkus was enchanted-he’d just discovered eBay, by way of the chaldron hunt. The format and rules fascinated him, and as we watched the hour tick toward the resolution of the two chaldron auctions-one half an hour later than the other-he gleefully refreshed the pages again and again in turn, to see if anyone had trumped his bids. No one had. As things stood he’d be collecting two chaldrons, one for three hundred and fifty dollars, the other for one hundred and eighty-five. I suggested Perkus bow out of the first, but he waved me off.

Then, thirty seconds left, Perkus refreshed the page again. After excruciating delay, a verdict was coolly levied: another bidder had raised on Perkus with fifteen seconds to go. Unanswered, this rival had taken the chaldron. Better luck next time! Indignant, muttering, Perkus hastened back to the other auction. He lurked intently over the screen, as if the scouring of his hot breath might be telling in the effort. Again he looked to be in command with less than a minute to go, until a speedier bidder stole the chaldron away at the last instant. Game over.

I saw Perkus crumble then, drained of spirit, sagging into him-self, an imploded building in slow motion. Despite all care he’d taken to shave and wash and dress for the morning’s appointment, he looked heartbreakingly worse, his vessel stranded even higher on the shoals than before I’d sent him downtown. In my experience Strabo’s needles uncorked vast energies in the weeks following a treatment, but on the day of their entry into one’s body they took a severe toll. Even so, I had to persuade Perkus not to resume his hunt. If there had been two chaldrons the first time he’d looked there’d be more tomorrow. He’d mentioned Strabo’s advice to him to eat meat, so what about a burger? I joshingly mentioned replacement lipids, appealing to his self-medicator’s vanity. Perkus smiled wanly. He made motions of consent to the expedition downstairs, but couldn’t seem to get out of his chair. I detached the phone line from the computer and replaced it in the telephone, enforcing my little prohibition. Someone might want to call. I might want to call. Perkus didn’t have the gumption to argue. He moved through the French doors to his little bedroom, slid his jacket onto a hanger, then curled onto his bedspread like a dog. The temperature outside was dropping, in Perkus’s kitchen I’d felt a chill draft on my neck from gaps in the window to Biller’s inner courtyard, but the building’s clanking, whistling radiators were at work and the bedroom was practically a sauna. Perkus’s lids sagged to veil the good eye and the irascible one, which still lolled in the direction of the living room, seeking the Dell’s screen, which had reverted to a screen saver featuring comical raccoons huddled in the upper branches of a towering redwood. Then his lids at last tucked over his aggravated orbs, to meet the parchment-yellow skin beneath. For what it was worth, my four-day campaign was victorious: I’d put Perkus to bed. As he drifted off, he honorably swore he’d wait until morning to chase chaldrons.

Oh yes, and one other thing: he still relied on me to locate Brando.