The first globs had begun drifting to earth three hours before the mayor’s party, not so much flakes as frost-spun jigsaw chunks rotating themselves into view as if an invisible examiner were hoping to puzzle them together on arrival. None of these were pure six-pointed specimens, those famously symmetrical and fingerprint-unique skic-halet-wallpaper darlings, instead rough amalgams of three or four or six that had clotted together somewhere above the city, assembling into eerie contours, snow-cartoon images of docking spacecraft or German coffeemakers or shattered Greek statuary. This advance wave melted so smoothly it was as though ghosts slid through the wet pavement’s screen to some realm below. Then, abruptly, the stuff quadrupled and began to lodge, the ghosts denied entry to the subterranean world, too many to welcome there, their bodies heaping uselessly against the former portal.
Then suddenly the drifting globs had gone torrential, bidding to replace the windless air itself entirely with white material, undertaking a crazy campaign to outline every contour in Manhattan, each sill and rearview mirror, each knuckle of crossing-signal plumbing, each midget newspaper dispenser, all the things too dumb to scurry through the cold. Perkus and I, we’d dashed from our taxicab, which had plodded its way down Park Avenue to Sixty-fourth Street, its tires chewing along the echo-deafened streets. The steps of the wide, curved stoop of the mayor’s town house had been scraped and salted; our footing confident, we took them two at a time, eager to get out of the suffocating clots of white that swarmed into our noses and clung to our lashes, and though we’d both have denied it, each buzzing with adrenaline at the occasion of the party. Perkus, the practical one for once, wore a black toque decorated with a knit patch depicting the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, something likely exhumed from deep in his collection, its wool everywhere pilled and knobbed, like a scalp showing beginnings of dreadlocks. I’d had to pray he’d stuff the hat into his coat pocket the moment we were through the door. For myself, I’d been vain about my haircut, left my head bare, and so had meltage trickling through my sideburns and behind my ears for the party’s first half hour.
Now we mingled in the mayor’s vast parlor, a scene of glowing golds and browns against monumental windows showing blizzard, backdrops blue and silent as aquarium views. We’d entered into a scrum of arrival, another type of blizzard, guests busy emptying flutes of Prosecco and vodka shots and trays of tiny sushi and blini shopped among us by the catering staff, all of us tabulating faces we knew and others we recognized, all awed beneath a thirty-foot-high plaster scrollwork ceiling painted and lit to resemble buttercream icing on an inverted wedding cake. Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji stood in one corner pleasantly receiving admiration as though they themselves were the gathering’s hosts, Richard in his renovated elegance, shined shoes where he’d have ordinarily flown Converse high-tops as his freak flag, even his beard trimmed closer than I’d seen it, exposing a disconcerting chinlessness; Georgina lordly and tall, her dress an unrevealing cone of black, her silver earrings and piled hair imparting aspects of Gothic Christmas tree. I also saw, at a first survey, Strabo Blandiana (no surprise, he knew everyone), Naomi Kandel, Steve Martin, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, David Blaine, and Richard’s co-op-board enemy and my sitcom mom, Sandra Saunders Eppling, accompanied by a graying distinguished man who was not Senator Eppling. Mayor Arnheim had decorated his party with a cultural crowd, for the holidays. I couldn’t find Oona and Laird Noteless, but my search was compromised by trying to keep tabs on my own “date.”
Perkus had treated us to the airing of another secret costume for the occasion, a purple velvet suit, the velvet either intentionally “crushed” or badly stored and in need of pressing-I really didn’t know which-over a crimson shirt and matching tie. I thought it would be simple to follow the purple velvet, but Perkus flitted after someone or something, his thin shoulders vanishing sideways through some brief entranceway through the crowd that shut to me as simply as subway doors. I’d lost him. Assorted pleasantries imposed themselves, a round of reintroductions that wouldn’t make the next round any less necessary, followed hard and fast by those evermore-dire condolences for Janice’s sickness. I gulped Prosecco, too much right off the bat, trying to keep from screaming in their faces that though I appreciated their good wishes I didn’t have cancer, personally-that in fact every possible human tumor was geographically nearer to us, here where we stood, than Janice’s, and didn’t they find that odd? And incidentally, had they seen a doctor themselves anytime lately?
I remembered my vows, though, to disburse a field of love to enclose all within my range, which certainly should include the walls of this parlor. Oona might be watching, after all. So I gathered their well-wishes and their sadness to me, took their hands in mine, and thanked them. If you plumb into a person’s eyes at an occasion like this one, you can usually spook them in a moment or two, and be done. The trick was not to try to break the circuit too soon but to wait, until they’d had their tiny fill. Trying to manage the migration of my gaze elsewhere from the persons it should be attending, I felt like Perkus even as I searched for him, an acolyte to his brand of double and wandering vision.
A young man in a tuxedo and obnoxiously slicked-back hair was suddenly before me, putting a finger in my chest.
“Chase!”
“Yes?” Now I recognized but couldn’t place him.
“How do you like the script?”
He was one of that pair of “producers” that had tried, so long ago, to enlist me in their dream project. The role of my lifetime, they’d promised.
“I didn’t get it,” I said.
“I love it, you didn’t get it. There’s nothing to get, Chase!”
I felt irritated, even beyond my anxiousness that Perkus had slipped free of my caretaking. “I mean it never arrived, I never received it.”
“That’s a good one, you’re a riot, Chase. Just keep on doing what you’re doing-”
Then I heard Perkus’s voice, in full harangue, rising out of the gregarious babble: “…rock critics are like little animals that live in holes… they defend themselves by scraping up fortifications of dirt and shit and regurgitated food…” Someone must have introduced him as a former famous Rolling Stone columnist, so Perkus was elaborating his standard defense. I tipped up on my toes to locate him. Perkus stood not far off, his back to me. He addressed his spiel to Mayor Arnheim, who looked to be listening. It was the first time I’d seen the mighty billionaire in person. I tried to believe he was nothing more than another graying operative in a suit, but like other truly powerful men Arnheim seemed a bit of gravitational sinkhole, a place where other men’s hopes had gone to die. His eyes and teeth gleamed with bonus luminosity, his stance and posture arranged to support an extra density. Arnheim might in truth be many men crushed together, like a diamond.
“Excuse me,” I said to the wolfish producer. “I’ve got to go… over there.”
“Talk later?”
“You bet,” I said to brush him off.
I elbowed in toward the mayor, in time to collide with a shortish thirtyish attractive blonde in tense eyeglasses, who though well dressed seemed unfestive, no guest. I could feel agendas humming around her head, as though she were checking prioritized lists in the very air. Though her glance sliced me into a pie chart, I assumed we were on the same side here, had come to chaperone and disentangle. I’d be happy to get my introduction some other time. I edged Perkus from the mayor just as the blonde, recovering from our little tangle, power-pointed Arnheim in another direction.
“Come with me, my little purple friend,” I said. “Help me find Oona.”
Perkus held an emptied Prosecco flute-a first warning I should heed, since he always refused Richard Abneg’s fine red wines, and I doubted he could hold the stuff-and now waved it overhead as if toasting or blessing the whole crowd. His mood was already electric, though it might have nothing to do with meeting the mayor. “I’ll help you find Oona, sure,” he said. “But after that we have to go talk to Russ Grinspoon. I just saw him come in.”
“Russ Grinspoon the singer? He’s here?” I thought of Grinspoon as the lamer half of a well-forgotten seventies smooth-rock duo, Grinspoon and Hale. I was surprised Perkus much cared.
“He’s Manhattan’s arts commissioner,” said Perkus chidingly. “You of all people should know that. He’s at Arnheim’s elbow at the gala openings of museum wings and restored opera houses and so on.”
“Is that how you see me?” I asked. “A hack among hacks?” A snippet of “The Night Takes Back What You Said,” the act’s early, Dylanesque hit and one tolerable song, ran now through my brain. Grinspoon was the guy doing the high lilting harmonies, not the “genius” one who’d written the lyrics-sort of the girl in the act, I’d always thought. But then by some lights I was probably the girl in Insteadman and Tooth. “I resent your notion of me as a specialist in superficial occasions.” No tone of irony was enough to secure my protest, not here.
Perkus was after bigger game than my pride, anyhow. “Forget what you know of his music,” he said. “In another lifetime Grinspoon hung out with the Semina Culture guys in L.A. He was an extra in that Monte Hellman movie I was telling you about, Two-Lane Blacktop. He’s actually one of only two actors to be directed by both Morrison Groom and Florian Ib, the director of The Gnuppet Movie.”
“I know you’re going to tell me who the other one is.”
“Marlon Brando,” he said with maximum satisfaction.
So the game was afoot. Tonight, I gathered, we’d attempt to penetrate one or several vital questions, pertaining to Marlon Brando’s aliveness or lack thereof, his Gnuppet interlude and its sinister importance, as well as Morrison Groom’s suicide: Faked, or Not? I felt involuntary jubilation and horror. Here was what I’d conducted Perkus into this midst for, unknowingly. I was an instrument, and among my duties was to resound with excitement at mad quests I couldn’t comprehend. Semina and Hellman, for instance, were names I hadn’t retained, but they carried with them a scent of summer, of Perkus as I’d first met him, and a time when, I now realized, my life changed totally. I’d never pass a pop quiz, yet these obsessions felt as rich to me as sexual pursuits, and hence it seemed perfectly appropriate that Perkus had bargained one for the other.
“I’m amazed that Arnheim’s not more wary of letting a Brando mole like Grinspoon this deep into his organization,” I teased. “Seeing as how Brando’s about to topple Arnheim for mayor of New York. But I suppose that’s the typical arrogance of power, to taunt a rival by stealing his people.”
Perkus put his finger to his lips to silence me, his severity seeming to ratify even my looniest implication. Meanwhile, his mugwump eye was busy elsewhere.
“Okay,” I said, before I lost my chance, seeing Perkus eager to reel off along his own foggy trail. “But Oona first.” I wasn’t going to let him off my leash, but I couldn’t bear to think of Oona and Noteless working this room unpatrolled by me. In my mind’s eye they looked as complacently coupled as Abneg and the Hawkman.
Then, as though I’d really needed him for my dowsing rod, Perkus took my elbow and steered me right into them, the party opening like a door. Noteless stood, tall and imposing as in one of his iconic photographs, shoulders square in loose black linen, face crevassed with significant doubts, hair a platinum flume. I had to admit I saw why the man had gone into sculpture. Oona, at his side, was the bird perched on the alligator’s fang. In a room where we all frolicked with bubbly wine, she’d somehow cadged a perfect-looking twist martini.
Perkus dashed the silence. It turned out he had a program here, too. “So, I’ve been wanting to speak with you, Laszlo,” he said.
“Yes?” said Oona. They hadn’t seen each other since the tiger’s destruction of Jackson Hole. I’d barely seen Perkus since, and not once at his place. Eighty-fourth Street was still cordoned while the city engineers measured structural damage beneath the blocks adjacent to the crater. He and I had met for a couple of feeble, pot-deprived encounters at Gracie Mews, Perkus giving my haunt a desultory audition.
“I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about simulated worlds,” Perkus launched in. “About the simulators shutting us off if we started running our own simulations, because it might use too much juice…” For Perkus every meeting was only tabled, every ruling merely given a continuance (for this reason, if no other, Marlon Brando could never die).
“Right, sure, what of it?” Oona slurped at her martini, awfully blithe about apocalypse. That might be because she shepherded apocalypse in gelled human form through the world at the moment, and for her living presently took His dictation. Noteless, maker of chasms, swayed gently, perhaps tracking Perkus’s eye, his whole looming form like a nudged metronome. The party seemed to have receded around us, or perhaps that was only my sensation of its unimportance, the mayor and all the flies in his web of no relevance now that I had Perkus beside and Oona before me.
“Here’s my second thought,” said Perkus. “The fact that we develop simulations of our own only drains their computing power if the way they simulate is to make everything exist whether we look at it or not. If, on the other hand, the simulators only trouble to put stuff where we’re going to look at it, then the amount of effort and energy is exactly the same.”
“I don’t get you,” said Oona.
“It’s like this. Picture a man in a library. The books are all blank, until he picks one out. Then the simulator-or whatever-fills in that book, only for as long as he leafs through it, inscribing the minimum number of words, just in time for his eyes to meet the page. If he drops that book and selects another, the simulator’s efforts go to making that book exist. But the preponderance of the library is a bluff, just a lot of book spines that wouldn’t even have titles if you didn’t look too closely.”
“Probably the man only goes there because he thinks the librarian is hot,” said Oona.
“The point is, Biller’s computer universe might not make any difference to these guys at all. Our little simulated brains have got to be paying attention to something. Who says it’s any harder for them to put some virtual-reality gobbledygook in front of our eyes than it is to, I don’t know, persuasively cobble up a visit to the Cloisters or a cheeseburger deluxe.”
“I’ve personally never found the Cloisters persuasive in the least,” said Oona. “I don’t care how old it’s supposed to be.”
I now had another wave of my straddling-universes feeling. Perkus and Noteless could meet each other, yet they were forever apart, impenetrable essences. Only I had the freedom to dabble in each of their realities and feel the native absurdity of their simultaneous distance and proximity. Who needed computers to simulate worlds? Every person was their own simulator. But give him credit, Noteless didn’t flinch at Oona’s witticisms, or Perkus’s non sequiturs. His eyes only flared as if he thought the Cloisters might make a nice locale for a monumental pit. And then tilted forward to issue a non sequitur of his own: “Potemkin villages.”
Oona and I were silent, demurring to the gnomic imperious, while Perkus blurted, “Yes, that’s it, Potemkin villages, exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Oona.
“Potemkin villages, you know-huts and bonfires and flocks of sheep, false fronts, stage sets, like they used to fool Catherine the Great,” said Perkus impatiently, before returning to his main thread. “So, I was thinking it might even be cheaper on the computing power, because a simulation of the Cloisters or this room or whatever has to obey certain dictates of time and space, all our different impressions have to be brought into alignment, whereas from what I’ve gathered about a virtual space like Yet Another World, it’s sort of rubbery and expansible, full of jump cuts and glitches. So, maybe that would be easier, since no one’s expecting smooth continuity.”
“It is only our wishful senses that give continuity to chaos,” said Noteless ominously.
“That’s amazing,” I said. “Because I was just about to say the exact same thing.” Standing in Noteless’s shade had brought out a twitchy, hectoring humor in me. I’m taller than most men, and when I look up at one, it makes me feel like Bugs Bunny. Or perhaps I was sick of watching Noteless burn holes in Perkus with his eyes, wanted the great man to know I was his proper rival, the one to hate. “You really ought to give virtual reality a chance, Mr. Noteless.”
“Ought I?”
Oona’s glance said I’d better squelch this impulse, but I had one more jape in me, at least. “A place like Yet Another World might be a terrific opportunity for one of your installations. Without applying for a permit you could insert the Grand Canyon between Seventy-second and Seventy-third Streets, and no one would be in any way inconvenienced.”
“I don’t work in pixels,” intoned Noteless, with the self-regard of a Stella Adler student declaring he refused to consider commercials. “I work in stone and soil.”
“Like a rock critic,” I suggested. Now all three stared, and I shut up. I’d at least gained my share of Noteless’s scorn. Before I could screw myself deeper into this hole-call it One-Man Fjord-a member of the catering staff intruded to announce that dinner was served, and we should feel free to move into the dining room, and to take any seat we liked. Aroused from my fixation, I saw the guests had been trickling away for a while now.
“Let’s go,” said Perkus, instantaneously frantic. His radar had gone off: he meant to sit near enough to interrogate Russ Grinspoon, and I felt I should sit near enough to monitor Perkus.
“Your date needs you,” said Oona, with the relish of a savored line. Noteless ignored us, returned to his mental aerie. I gave her one look I hoped could say I contained as large a love as she’d ever require, but that obviously no love could encompass Laird Noteless, then let myself be swept off in the direction the party was flowing, helpless Alice to Perkus’s Red Queen.
Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money had its solvent powers, could dissolve the rear walls of a nineteenth-century town house to throw a dining room into what must have been the backyard, under a glass atrium that now worked as a blizzardy planetarium. Admittedly, the effect was thrilling, and the guests fell into a nice hush as they sorted out into seats around the six circular, candelabra-lit tables. Perkus, true to my guess, made a beeline for a far table where I now spotted Russ Grinspoon, albeit a demurely suited, balding, and goateed rendition of the singer I remembered. He still had the languor of a congenital sidekick (it takes one to know one), and I could restore his frizzy reddish halo of hair and Nehru jacket in mind’s eye easily enough. Perkus grabbed us two places beside him, and then seated himself in the middle. I followed, distantly aware of Oona and Noteless taking places in the room’s opposite corner.
Grinspoon played our table’s host, I suppose in his role as the mayor’s man, shaking hands, kissing the ladies, remaining standing until the chairs were full. I couldn’t tell whether this was something planned or not, but at the table to our left Richard Abneg took a similar role, while at the mayor’s table the small steely blonde still acted as Arnheim’s usher and protector. Only after this ritual settling did Grinspoon turn to Perkus Tooth, a curious expression on his face, and under cover of the jocular roar and babble that now rose to the snow-mad skylights to drown out any soft-spoken comment, said wryly, “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know each other?” I said.
Grinspoon wrinkled an eyebrow, and let a beat pass. “No.” I understood he meant he’d simply heard his freak alarm go off-purple velvet over crimson didn’t make it too hard-and that it amused him to find someone like Perkus here, where Grinspoon himself was accustomed to defining the perimeter of the outré. He offered his hand to Perkus, then me, and it was droopy and soft as an empty glove. “I haven’t had that pleasure.” We said our names, and Grinspoon looked at me a moment longer, and said, “Right.” But it was Perkus who interested him. “You want to get high?” Grinspoon said, not whispering, relying that others were engaged elsewhere, showing the assurance of a veteran of a hundred such evenings.
“Sure!” said Perkus.
“Okay, but down, boy. We’re going to have to wait until after the appetizers.” With that, Grinspoon turned decisively from us, to the guests at his right, leaving me with Perkus, who seemed totally gratified but also mastered, as if in some preemptory maneuver, by Grinspoon’s offer. All his verbal imperatives stifled for the moment, the stuff I imagined he’d been saving to tell or ask a man who, however unimportant an artist himself, had been directed by two men who’d also directed Brando. Perkus was a little beside himself, in the glittering room, recognizable faces everywhere, and the throne of power, too. When he found his tongue again he began yammering disjointedly in my ear, charting associations the party’s inhabitants and scenery held for him, and I trusted myself to appear to be listening even as I phased him out for my own relief. I felt bad, almost, for overstimulating Perkus. I’d ushered a kind of Rip Van Winkle from the gentle bed of his fantasies to this harsh tableau of real fame and influence, and jarring a sleepwalker incurs responsibility.
It was all I could do, though, to keep from craning my neck at Oona’s far table. As Russ Grinspoon had implied, this getting-to-know-you interlude, while only wine had been poured but no plates set down, would be an impolite moment to break from our table. Later, in the rhythm of such things, we could browse between the tables. I had a good excuse for going over to Oona’s. Sandra Saunders Eppling was seated there, and it was in the nature of male-to-female etiquette, as well as the duties of a sitcom son to a sitcom mom, that I should approach Sandra for the reunion scene I could safely guess many bystanders quietly anticipated. Oona and Noteless were chatting with Sandra now.
First we had to eat what now appeared, tongues of eggplant and bell pepper rolled into a juicy little vortex or eye at the center of a plate spattered with pesto, and then depart the table in the flurry as these dishes were cleared, following Russ Grinspoon, who’d ever-so-suavely placed his fishy hand on the bare shoulder of his rapt listener and asked her to excuse him, explaining that he’d promised to show me and Perkus a certain rare vase in Arnheim’s collection. Out we went, incredibly, easily, through the maze of tables and up the mighty staircase, afraid to touch a polished banister too wide for mortal hands, on steps so plushed by carpet that our footfalls felt ungravitied, so that we might have been ghosts, or snowflakes, riding an updraft instead of settling to earth where we belonged. In a dim, swank study at the top of the stairs, walls lined with leather-bound sets, storm-giddy windows overlooking the top of the greenhouse roof and, within it, the dinner party we’d vacated, Grinspoon sparked a ready joint.
“You’re the cat with the astronaut gig,” said Grinspoon. He was nothing if not an aging, red-haired hepcat, his freckles sunburned at Christmastime. I might be predisposed to dislike him because his present career echoed mine, only with the difference he’d just pointed out. His job was just to preside, while I had to play Janice’s fiancé.
“Yes.”
“And you-just along for the ride?” He gave the joint to Perkus.
“I like to keep my eye on this kind of thing,” said Perkus coolly, taking the pose of the first hard-boiled detective to crash a scene in purple velvet. I recalled him telling me I could “learn a lot” from my vantage amid the privileged. He drew on the joint and blew a gust toward the bookshelves. “You worked with Morrison Groom, didn’t you?”
“Funny you should mention that name,” parried Grinspoon. “It doesn’t come up so often these days.” He smirked as if despite his words he’d been expecting Perkus’s question, as though he knew what I didn’t: that Perkus and I had really come here to enact this weird interrogation in a room apart. I hadn’t even smoked yet and the party seemed to be melting away into some more essential reality of Perkus’s devising-this one, unexpectedly, a detective movie starring a crapped-out ’70s star whose songs had been used, I believed I now remembered, as the soundtrack to a Robert Altman film about young orderlies at an old-age home, who ducked into broom closets to get high just as we were doing. Or possibly I remembered wrong. Perkus would tell me later. For now he passed me the smoldering joint.
“Actually, I’m working on a piece,” said Perkus, as if this explained anything. A piece of what? I received an involuntary vision of the name “Morrison Groom,” clipped and pasted beneath an ice-floe polar bear.
“None of those movies made any money,” said Grinspoon.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“No?” Grinspoon shrugged. “Okay.”
Game, set, and match, Grinspoon. Perkus would have to organize his indignant feelings into some more impressive foray. “Any one of those unprofitable movies is worth all the rest of the films you appeared in put together.”
Grinspoon showed his palms, a Nazi officer so decadent he was pleased to surrender. “Sure, but I was never much of an actor.” With this he winked at me, the fucker. “You didn’t dig Bartleby Rising?”
“You were in that?”
“I’m Bartleby’s boss.” Grinspoon now peered through his fingers to mimic spectacles, and pursed his lips like Scrooge. “Guess you missed it, huh?” Grinspoon kept mutating his appearance and affect, as though sensing, and wishing to mock, Perkus’s investment in matters of authenticity. He was rather obligingly monstrous, I thought.
“I wasn’t curious. Florian Ib’s comedies are everything that’s wrong with Hollywood since 1976. At least George Lucas made American Graffiti. Ib should be forbidden from working with humans. He was better with Gnuppets.”
“See, that’s the difference between us,” said Grinspoon. “To me they’re pretty much the exact same thing.” He gestured for me to return the joint to him, even as he glanced to check the progress of the party below.
“Humans and Gnuppets?” asked Perkus with alarm.
“No, no,” laughed Grinspoon. “Groom and Ib. But hey, man, I’m not an expert on film, like you.”
“Groom and Ib are two opposed principles.”
“I was thinking more of the joy they each took in a plate of carbonara, or a drunk hooker. Actually, I used to wonder if under that Santa Claus beard and beer belly, Florian might actually be Mo, hiding behind an assumed name.”
“What?” Perkus’s response was electric, one eye riveted to Russ Grinspoon, the other pleading with me to attend this emergency.
“You’ve heard the rumor that Groom’s suicide was staged, right?” said Grinspoon. “Nobody really believes coyotes could drag a corpse away and chew off all identifying features in twenty-four hours.”
I was happy not to have another suck at the joint, for this evening was already dangerously distorted, the mayor’s home colonized by the magic zone of Perkus’s kitchen. How was it possible that Grinspoon could so acutely push Perkus’s buttons, molest his sacredest theories? Well, I watched Perkus gather himself, summoning forces reserved for a crossroads like this one. His first instinct was to outflank Grinspoon. “Sure, that’s common knowledge. But Groom wouldn’t waste his time on the kind of stuff Florian Ib’s been doing…” Then, despite himself, he turned the possibility over. “Though it would certainly explain why Brando would appear in The Gnuppet Movie…”
I didn’t want Brando’s name spoken here. Russ Grinspoon would say he not only was dead but had never been alive. Mercifully, Grinspoon pinched the joint’s tip dark, then used it to point through the layers of glass and snow, to where I now saw the whole party with its attention turned to the mayor’s table. Arnheim stood speaking. We’d been missing a toast. I couldn’t see Oona’s table from here.
“I gotta get down there and make a show of things,” said Grinspoon. “Hope the stuff is good to you boys. Enjoy.” Though we’d be returning to the same table, Grinspoon seemed to be offering fair notice that the present conversation wasn’t to be continued downstairs.
“Mr. Grinspoon?” It was strange to hear Perkus default to this formality, addressing the hipster Grinspoon. But I saw clearly now how Perkus wasn’t really any kind of hipster at all. He was too grimly intent on his pursuits to waste time in such poses. The other difference was rage. Grinspoon had none, was breezy to his bones.
“Yep?”
“You mentioned… a vase?”
“Oh yeah, one more flight, in the stairwell, look all the way up. It’s really cool, especially if you’re”-Grinspoon made one more face for us, fingers wriggled in front of his eyes-“stoned.”
Back at the landing Perkus sprinted up the next wide staircase, into the muffled dark. Grinspoon turned the other way, to redescend to the party. I stood between, my mind coursing with marijuana confusion and possibility, my body paralyzed. Grinspoon turned and beckoned to me in my helplessness.
“You’ve got a part to play downstairs too, I think. Have you met the mayor yet?” He checked my glance backward, up that stair. “Don’t worry, he’s a big boy, he won’t get lost.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. What if I’d wanted to see the vase, too? Somehow cowed, I didn’t speak, but followed Grinspoon down the main staircase. A part of me wanted to monitor Oona and Noteless, but also, more prosaically, I was really eager now to greet Sandra Saunders Eppling. The pot smoke had brought up some well of sentiment inside me, for that lost time in my life when I had a simple avocation, to go each day to the cheesy set of Martyr & Pesty, that Potemkin village, and pretend that Sandra was my mom. I wanted to meet the mayor, too, and to talk to Richard and Georgina, to know their news. I missed them. They seemed entrenched in a daily world I missed, too. When was the last time I’d gossiped about anyone’s sex life? Meanwhile, Perkus was gone. He was the birds, the party was the tower. So what if I’d glimpsed both worlds-to which did I belong? I was a middling figure, a dabbler, much like Russ Grinspoon, who’d been directed by Groom and Ib and didn’t see much difference, who could decorate a variety of scenes. Like him, I went downstairs.
Straightaway I was prisoner of my plate’s arrival, roast brown glistening something. I dutifully spread it around my plate, while Perkus’s sat at his empty place beside me, glistening and cooling. Wineglasses emptied and were filled, the party at a boil, and I leaned across Perkus’s vacancy to join the niceties at my own table until fair excuse came to abandon it. The pot I’d smoked-it was very good pot-meant I relied on the purely sonic aspects of friendly talk to stand in for comprehension. Had anyone asked me to give the topic of the conversation I’d entered, let alone the names of the speakers, I’d have been reduced to clucking like a chicken. Grinspoon turned his back to me, plainly unconcerned at Perkus’s long absence. In that I took my cue from him again. When one or two others had broken from their seats to commune elsewhere, I was up like a shot to cross the room, and from a place behind Oona’s chair leaned in for an embrace with Sandra Saunders Eppling. I hoped my movements weren’t as raw and hungry as I felt.
Sandra’s features had long since taken on a kind of ageless flensed quality, but when I drew her to my chest I felt with a guilty shiver the brazen torso that had been the uncomfortable object of fantasy for my on-set self as well as for so many teenage boys on the other side of the television screen (I’d spent my life since as the involuntary recipient of such confessions). Could it really be that Sandra squirmed into my embrace as she stood, as if to be sure I knew what she still had? Or was I sexualizing what shouldn’t be, because of the proximity of Oona? Whichever, it was the case that in retrospect this instant was the one where the evening or I began to disintegrate, so that all I’d recollect from this point on was a series of particulate elements strung incoherently in the void-the first of these being the disconcerting volumetrics of Sandra’s breasts, the second her voice maternally pronouncing my first name, introducing me to her evening’s (totally uninterested) companion, then inquiring, as she would have to do, after Janice’s health. I waved her off with a gesture designed to imply a burden beyond speech.
“And have you met…?” Sandra had forgotten Oona’s name, a fact she didn’t trouble to conceal, off-loading the task of introductions with the candid indifference of an air kiss.
“Oona Laszlo,” I said. “Selfless autobiographer. I’m a fan.”
“Mr. Insteadman,” said Oona, barely playing along. Noteless sat stiff and remote, his chair pushed back from the table so he could evaluate the room for possible demolition.
“So you’ve met my mom.”
Sandra took this as incitement to lean in, again, it seemed to me, lasciviously. “Oh, Chase, you never write, you never call, you never visit…” I clutched her waist, fishing for jealous reaction, and registered her unsteadiness on her heels. Drunk Sandra and I verged on reviving that treacherous sentimental fiction of theater people, and I was already disgusted with how we appeared through Oona’s eyes. I took it out on Oona’s silent friend. “And have you met Laird Noteless, Sandy? He’s the living master of dystopian public sculpture.” Dystopian was a Perkus word I’d fished up-I was probably too cowardly to insult Noteless as myself, but I could do it if I pretended to be Perkus filleting some cosmic mediocrity.
Sandra knit her brow, exaggerating sobriety. “But of course. I sit on the board of the memorial, Chase.”
“Ah!”
Now Noteless grumbled to life. “There’s nothing dystopian in my work, young man.” My borrowed dart had found its mark. “In point of fact, I operate strictly on what Robert Smithson termed an atopian basis. That is to say, my work attempts to erase received notions or boundaries, and hence to reinstate the viewer in the world as it actually is, without judgment.”
“So if a viewer were to, say, stumble into one of your holes and break his foot, henceforth that would have to be considered a strictly atopian broken foot.”
“You must forgive Chase,” said Oona to Sandra Saunders Eppling, as if she were the one who should feel affronted. “He’s sensitive on the subject of injured feet lately.”
“I am not.” My voice struck me as issuing from some place other than my body, and sounding rather bratty, too. Perhaps it was my inner child.
“Excuse me,” said Oona to the others, as she stood and swept me from the group there, into the zone between tables, now occupied by milling bodies exploiting the lull before dessert. Since this departure was what I’d most have wished to have happen, it wasn’t difficult for Oona to accomplish. I smiled at her to show it was a happy thing, however coerced.
“I spotted you lads sneaking off upstairs like the band at a wedding.” She mimed a sniff, as if catching the tang of smoke on my jacket. I doubted she could, but since her guess was right I gave her the point. Anyway, I felt proud to be stoned, at that exact moment. Oona and I had shed our dates and stood paired in full view of the party, a total fulfillment of my childish yearning. Go figure: I’d only had to set free my brat for him to be instantly gratified! That I’d also cut Perkus loose to some macabre, unauthorized quest in the mayor’s private rooms, I pushed out of mind. I further decided I didn’t need to apologize for insulting Laird Noteless.
“See that blizzard outside?” I asked, fluttering my fingers to indicate the blue fever overhead. “That’s how I feel inside, when I see you.”
“Would a cup of coffee help? Because I promised to drag you over to meet Arnheim, and I think I’d better quickly, before you get any further unspooled.”
“You know Mayor Arnheim?”
“We’ve met a few times.”
“He knows-about us?”
“Don’t be idiotic. He knows I know you, that’s all. People see us talking, Chase.”
“Why does he care about meeting me?”
“The things that escape your notice, Chase-it isn’t always the case that you’ve escaped theirs. You’re a public person.”
“Now you’re going to remind me of my duties.”
“You used to remind me of them, not so long ago.”
I glanced back. The chair beside Russ Grinspoon was empty. “He’ll want to meet Perkus, too.” I overlooked the fact that, technically, they’d met at the start of the party. “We should wait.”
“Nobody here cares about Perkus.” Oona left this blatancy between us, her gaze merciless. It seemed to demand I grant how distant we were from broadsides and glue pots.
“I’d better find him.” My resistance was meek.
“Have a coffee with the mayor and then I’ll help you find him.” It made the reverse of the deal I’d struck with Perkus at the party’s beginning, but I doubted I’d amuse Oona pointing out this symmetry. What I liked about the present situation was how it didn’t include Noteless. I nodded.
The party had broken out beyond espresso and biscotti. Cigars, banned in public places, were the order here. Borne around in silver boxes, surprising numbers of us found no way of refusing, including many of the women. The mayor himself gave grandiose lessons on the pruning of a cigar tip, and the proper method of lighting one. Oona and I crashed the golden circle and were made to join in the corrupted smoky revels, which seemed to place us above the law and a little out of time, too, the ultimate luxury. In front of Oona and what had become a number of other female observers I was pleased to demonstrate that even in my state I knew well enough how to handle one of the leaf-stinky things, though I had to remind myself not to suck the fumes to the far tendrils of my lungs as I had the pot smoke upstairs. Chairs were now pulled away and rearranged, our corner a pocket drama within the larger room, consisting of Arnheim and Insteadman and any number of women, and I was glad that Oona was seeing me this way, and that Perkus was away elsewhere for the time being. Only that same blonde, the professional watcher at the mayor’s hand, didn’t seem at all charmed by me.
I didn’t care. Jules Arnheim was all he was cracked up to be, fully manifesting power’s great refractive tendency. I found him almost impossible to regard directly, he was like a black hole or a blot on my vision in the shape of a small Jewish man, yet I could enjoy the gravitational warpage effects, the way we all seemed denser and more luscious in his presence. I couldn’t actually hear my voice, except as a kind of damped trembling echo in the wake of his pronouncements, which emerged in cigar gusts, between flame blasts from his silver lighter.
“Chase Insteadman.”
“Mr. Mayor.”
“I like the way you do things.”
“What things?”
“You keep the faith.”
“Thank you.”
“You bring honor to this city.”
“I do?”
“We learn from your example.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Keep an eye on this one, ha ha ha ha ha.” He threatened Oona with his cigar, turning the ember downward. The mouthy part glistened, so gross and juicy it might have been politer, actually, to point the fiery end. “She’s a troublemaker.”
“I’ll do that, Your Honor.” I liked the way Arnheim seemed to place her in my care, and hoped she was listening. I realized, a happy surprise, that I was better off with Oona in public groupings tonight. Here we exchanged complicated glances, intimations of the layered parts we played in each other’s stories, and I could enjoy knowing we were a conspiracy. Off alone, as we had been in the room’s center, with no one listening, Oona was free to inform me we were nothing.
“We mustn’t let Janice Trumbull die up there in space,” said the mayor, with surprising directness, even bullying force.
“Well, we’re all doing our best.”
“I hope so.”
“She is quite sick,” said Oona. Sympathetically, it seemed to me.
“That doesn’t mean she has to die,” said Arnheim. He seemed to insinuate this outcome was in our power, adding to my sense of a man accustomed to nudging galactic bodies in and out of orbit with gesticulations of his furry eyebrow.
Into this arena came a disturbance, someone or thing moving at cross-purposes, without deference to the postures and attitudes that made us all like a painting of Dutch burghers around the mayor’s table. Perkus, shooting in like an unanticipated and hence uncontrolled galactic body in his velvet and red, emergency colors, his high narrow forehead and flop of hair a semaphore flag of panic. At this gathering he was akin to a tiger erupting from beneath the pavement, I saw it now. What had I been thinking, bringing him? I’d already fitted myself so naturally to the mayor’s company that our renegade jaunt upstairs with Grinspoon seemed implausible at best.
Well, this group did what Dutch burghers would have done: pretend he was invisible, and reformat the table to push me to the outside, forcing me to cope with him, like an antibody. My cigar was no help, I was back in Perkusland, while Oona went on dwelling in the exalted domain of Arnheim.
“You have to see it.” Perkus plumped down beside me in a loose chair.
“See what?”
“Grinspoon’s dope must have been Ice.” He spoke in a hoarse stage whisper, only no one listened besides me. “The mayor’s got a chaldron upstairs, a real one, and zowie, that thing just pops!” Curled fingers springing outward, Perkus mimicked eyes bugging from head, not a far reach for him. Under the pressure of his excitement his vocabulary defaulted to Maynard G. Krebs.
“You’re sure it’s not just some Ming vase with a nice glaze on it?” I offered my soothingest tone, but behind it I’d caught his thrill like a fever. After all, if chaldrons were attainable wouldn’t the mayor have one? Maybe it was my brain that had a nice glaze on it, Prosecco and Grinspoon’s pot, but I wanted to see for myself.
“Oh, I’m sure. Come and have a gander yourself.”
“I don’t want to cause a stir,” I said, as evenly as I could. “We can’t both go running upstairs again.”
“You go. The thing’s burned into my retinas anyway. Did I miss the coffee?” Perkus spoke from the corner of his mouth, we both did, like spies, whether our words were secrets or not.
“I’m sure they’ll pour you some.”
“Look up,” he said. “When you’re at the top, look up.”
I didn’t think of what havoc Perkus might invent downstairs in my absence. There was only the havoc of possibility he’d seeded in my head as I edged from the partyers and then skipped up the wide silent staircase. Past the landing and the entrance to the study where Grinspoon had parked us, up the next flight and into the dark. I ran out of steps, ended holding my breath at the floor of a conical turret streaked with shadow and reflection, facing numbers of doors and corridors at the topmost landing. Then recalled Perkus’s instructions and tilted my head. Two beacons loomed high overhead: another skylight, this one a mere hatch to the sky, possibly no bigger than a manhole, its pitched sections of glass flurried with snow. And, in a recessed nook in the turret’s curved wall, well beyond reach, tucked within a neat glass vitrine and radioactively shimmering with oil-slick rainbows, the chaldron.
I backed against the wall, craning upward, stretching to get the whole of it into view, though the angle was impossible. It sure did “pop.” The real thing retroactively obliterated the recollection of our eBay encounters. More than diminished, these were overwritten, turned into rehearsals, premonitions of a future encounter: this. What the chaldron revealed now, that no image could ever reproduce, was its sublime and superb thingliness (again this word came unbidden). Perkus had been merciful, I now saw, leaving me to ascend here in solitude, to permit me first contact unmediated. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to share. Like Georgina, I fought an urge to shed my clothes.
Time, among other things, was destroyed. I don’t know how long I sagged there, feeling the cool plaster through the shoulders of my suit, a Saint Sebastian in continuous ecstatic surrender to the one ubiquitous and unceasing arrow of the chaldron streaming toward me from above. My vision was irritated by the portion of the form I couldn’t see from that angle, a minor failing, but it was perhaps this which kept me grounded in the everyday fact of the party downstairs, and my duties there. I’d say I pulled out of my trance for Oona, except that this healing and encompassing chaldron seemed to catch up and resolve within it the fact of Oona, too. That she was so nearby didn’t hurt. I could bring her to see it. Maybe we’d fuck on this landing, in this light. In the chaldron’s holistic force I also saw that Perkus’s apparently schizophrenic inquiries all led to the same place, whether I could follow them or not. They sprang from the certainty that a thing as splendid as the chaldron could be hidden, hogged, privatized by the mayor and other overlords. This theft in turn described the basic condition of Manhattan and the universe. Whatever Perkus mourned or beckoned from the brink of vanishing-Morrison Groom and his fabulous ruined films, Brando, the polar bear and Norman Mailer, ellipsis, every thwarted gasp of freedom-all were here, sealed for safekeeping, and at the same time so healthy their promise grinned from the container.
I’d never been drawn to conspiracy theories, not being smart (or high-functioning autistic) enough to nourish the mental maps they demanded. This, however, was uncomplicated: the chaldron belonged not to Arnheim but to everyone (which was to say, probably, especially, exactly, to myself and my friends). On this thought, I broke away to rush downstairs, an inevitable step in my assignment, the unwrecking of the world. I didn’t miss the chaldron now that I’d seen it. Like Perkus it was burned into my retinas, but also into my brain, giving instruction.
How perfect, that the whole consortium was in attendance tonight. As I breached into the party again Perkus attached himself to me, and I simply nodded, to let him know I knew what he knew. Then I pointed us to the table where Richard Abneg and Georgina sat. Richard would manage the intricacies here, know how we should cope with the reality of a chaldron coming to light in the nest of power, where he’d negotiated his own career. If Richard’s radical origins made him a kind of long-term mole, a one-man sleeper cell in the Arnheim administration, then this was the moment he’d been waiting for. His lifetime’s slide into compromise could be redeemed in an instant.
Their table’s population hadn’t dissolved so much into wider circulation in this dessert-and-cigar phase. They sat formed into one convivial group, including Strabo Blandiana, Naomi Kandel, and David Blaine, with Richard dominating the conversation. “… these floor-length urinals, all arranged in somber rows, and everybody pissing in silence, the Stonehenge restroom was a more holy scene than Stonehenge by far, I’m telling you…”
His audience was rapt, including Georgina. The two seemed to have receded into some glow even deeper than sexual satiation, though I couldn’t give it a name. Was Richard some bore who told this story everywhere? Perhaps Stonehenge restroom was a trigger phrase, a code Richard Abneg had to let drop each time he mingled in the world of wealth and privilege, until the time he heard the reply come back to him, the shrouded reply that would foment revolution. I had Perkus, here at my side, to blame for the plague of overinterpretation that left me feeling that Richard was trying to communicate something to me personally: much of my whole life had been a kind of Stonehenge restroom, a cartoon of depth, in the shadows of some large truth before which I’d balked.
Well, I had a code word to lay on Richard in return. I had to get him away from the table, though. Strabo Blandiana was obviously party to chaldron manipulations, but he was too much a pet of power to be trusted. Naomi Kandel, too, though I liked her. She was a sieve of gossip. I thought of how in my earlier innocence I’d mentioned chaldrons directly to Maud Woodrow and Sharon Spencer, and shuddered. I trusted no one with whom I hadn’t smoked Ice. I leaned in and asked Richard if I could have a word with him. He saw Perkus at my shoulder and scowled, but excused himself. The table’s others looked us over and shrugged, returning to other talk.
“I would have come over, but I saw you two consorting with that eagle hugger, Epping.”
“Sandra,” I said, hoping to humanize her. “My mom. She doesn’t mean any harm.”
“I had to hire a licensed ornithologist to get a few keepsakes out of that eagle hatchery that was once my apartment. He went in dressed in a suit of leather armor.”
Perkus leaned in, impatient with our small talk. “So, there’s a chaldron upstairs, Abneg.”
I saw Richard make the same conjugation I’d done, so recently. Automatic skepticism couldn’t hide what went deeper than curiosity, straight to appetite. He first had to put up a front, though. “Funny you should say that, Tooth. Because looking at you, I was thinking you’d come dressed as a chaldron, and I was going to have to explain how it wasn’t Halloween.”
Perkus never seemed more valiant than when faced with Richard’s or Oona’s glibbest mockery. “It never snows on Halloween, even I know that.”
“So you were just rummaging around in the mayor’s belongings and you happened to come across this… chaldron?” In the hitch in his speech I saw how, like me, Richard had tried to control thoughts of chaldrons by censoring the word. Uselessly.
“He’s got it mounted on a high shelf, out of reach,” said Perkus. “It’s a tricky spot, on a curved wall. We’re going to need an extension ladder.” His leaps to the next implausible thought would have seemed more outrageous if they didn’t anticipate my own.
“What are you guys, the Marx Brothers?” said Richard. “Stay cool, for fuck’s sake, and let me have a look at this so-called chaldron before you start burgling.”
“Should we include Georgina?” I suggested, excited to restore the whole team. This was strategic as well as generous: I wanted to gather up Oona, too, and I remembered how the two women had bonded at Gracie Mews.
Richard Abneg darted a look back at the table, where Georgina remained caught up in glamorous attentions. She seemed to feel his eyes, and glanced back. He smiled at her, but shook his head at us. “No, no shenanigans for the Hawkman tonight,” he warned. “I’ll go. You two keep a handle on yourselves.”
I wanted to remind Richard he was the first to bring Bolshevik rage into this pursuit-to propose seizing the chaldrons of the rich. I suppose then he hadn’t had Arnheim in mind. But my tongue was clotted with smoke and drink. Anyway, Perkus, looking not in the least hurt about Marx Brothers or shenanigans, with full faith in the persuasiveness of what awaited, gave chaldron-spotting instructions. Then, putting finger to lips, extra admonishment to good behavior in his absence, gait revealing the eagerness I’d likely also displayed, Richard slipped upstairs.
The decadence that mobbed around us now seemed worse than random, the scrollwork ceiling itself, the wide shadowy stair, the four walls, all a pen for conspirators, villainous overbidders. How many of them hoarded chaldrons at home? I’d never look at Strabo Blandiana or Steve Martin the same way. (Grinspoon I couldn’t quantify-either he’d betrayed the trust of the chaldron controllers, or was a conspirator so secure he felt free to taunt us.) I wanted to round up the catering staff for protection, make them a proletarian corps, radicalizing them instantly with a glimpse of chaldron. The selfishness I’d felt upstairs turned itself inside out, for an instant. Then reversed again. My little gang was fine. I didn’t want to share so promiscuously. I only had to tell Oona, immediately. Again I dragged Perkus, against the grain of the party, which seemed arranged to deny us movement in the mayor’s direction. Some music had been started, and it floated overhead, chunks of oppressive jazz. I lowered my head, ignoring shouted greetings, shunning the call of my own decorousness for once.
I found myself at a juncture where I could neither advance nor retreat, but did catch Oona’s eye. I motioned for her to join us where we stood, aware my gesticulations had become wild, yet willing to play Perkus’s card, and let my clownishness protect me from any suspicion.
“You found your friend,” she said when she reached us. “Was he rolled up in a rug somewhere? Because you both look a little wrinkled and flustered, if you don’t mind my saying so. Also your eyeballs are pink. Hello, Perkus.” She waved at him as if swabbing a dirty pane between them. Without Noteless nearby Oona had gone into her chipper routine.
“Listen, Oona, have we ever discussed chaldrons?” I honestly wasn’t sure.
“I never figured I’d be very good with chaldrons,” she said. “Though I’ve never been asked in the pluperfect before, I’ll admit that. When you put it so charmingly, I might have to reconsider.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry-little boytrons and girltrons, cleaning their poop trails and teaching them alphabeticals, isn’t that what we were discussing?”
“Seriously, Oona. We found one.”
“I think you can get a medal for that, if you redeem them at a police station.”
Perkus interrupted. “Forget it, Oona, it isn’t your kind of thing.” The old petulance between them was always near the surface. “I could have told you not to bother, Chase.”
“Ah, more boy games, I should have known.” Now she feigned hurt. I saw we couldn’t win with Oona, not in our present condition, doubly or triply intoxicated. She’d only take pleasure in running rings around us. Since Richard had excluded Georgina, I couldn’t precisely argue Oona’s point. Mind’s-eyeing Abneg alone with the prize, my suspicion now forked: What if, holy smokes, it was Richard we shouldn’t trust? He’d co-opted to the mayor everything placed in his care-what kind of fools were we, after all? That we had Georgina in our clutches might be our only insurance. So we needed to take the Hawkman hostage-that’s how far I’d gone down this slippery slope, before Richard rejoined us, and a hungry, Rasputin glint in his eyes told me all I needed to know about his allegiances. The party erupted in laughter and applause, and for an instant I thought we were being mocked for our transparent plotting. But no, some unseen voice had dragged the room back to toasting. Under cover of huzzahs we resumed skulduggery. Oona was meanwhile our bewildered witness.
“You should leave this to me,” Richard began.
“Not on your life.” Perkus had spotted the thing tonight, as he had to begin with, and was in every sense our spearhead into chaldrondom.
“I’ve got an in here.”
“We don’t need an in, we need an extension ladder.”
“How the fuck do you imagine you’re going to-?” Richard left the implication open.
“I’ll go upstairs,” said Perkus. “None of the other guests knows me.”
“Forget guests,” said Richard. “Don’t you think Arnheim has security staff in this joint?” Involuntarily I turned my head to examine the room, bringing a sneer from Richard for my lapsed discretion. The catering staff, moments ago my prole army, now struck me as Secret Service operators, prepared to drop their cloth napkins and pull out Glocks.
“Calm down, Chase. I’ll figure out something.”
“I am calm!”
Already the guests spilled disastrously out through the front hall, to filter back toward the grand parlor. Some lined up for their coats, others settled in with an after-dinner drink for more talk. A few had even camped on the bottom steps, blocking the way upstairs. We’d never recover the privacy we’d enjoyed in our little solo raids. Our mission needed, probably, Spider-Man.
“You’re in this cabal, Richard?” asked Oona. “I’m impressed. I was thinking these two were just high on something.” We tried to ignore her, and failed. “What exactly are you subversives bent on? You’ve got me curious, though I’m sure the answer will be woefully disappointing.”
Richard scowled at Oona, but addressed Perkus. “When did you decide the more the merrier, Tooth? Because, no offense, but we’ve got no time to waste persuading Madam Skeptic here.”
“Ask Chase,” shrugged Perkus.
Richard gave me the stinky eyeball. “Why don’t you and Oona shove off, Chase. Make a drunken distraction in the far room.”
“I’m not drunk!” I was stunned Richard could favor Perkus in a pinch.
“Not only drunk, but somewhat famous,” said Richard. “You’re no help.”
How clownish had I become in their eyes? Was I blackballed from the Chaldron Club for Men? At that moment another element overtook us: Georgina Hawkmanaji appeared, with Sandra Saunders Eppling in tow. Both looked drunk on some plot of their own, an eagle armistice, perhaps.
“Darling, Sandra would like to say something to you.”
“Richard, Richard… this has all gotten out of hand. When I saw you here, with dear Chase… I thought, I’m just going to march over there and-” Sandra used her body, bombing into Richard’s unwilling embrace. “Come back to the building, sweetheart!”
Richard’s eyes took on a trapped-animal cast. I remembered his injunction against drawing Georgina into chaldron-hunting, and kept my tongue. Maybe I could sweep Oona upstairs, somehow. Make some coupleish reason that we needed to visit some private room together. And there, rifle closets to find a ladder, or some suction cups. Only Oona and I weren’t meant to be a couple. At that instant I turned to find Laird Noteless helping her into the sleeves of her coat. The whole party, now that I noticed, was being helped into its coats. A member of the staff, an attractive girl in a tuxedo and ponytail, with an apologetic-lustful gaze, held my own coat and scarf, waiting for her chance to dress me in them. Just then the idiot producer-with-no-script hailed me with a grin and a beckoning wave. I waved back, miming helplessness to cross the room. It wasn’t so hard to mime.
“They say the streets are becoming impassible in the storm,” said Oona. I must have been staring at her with the dumb helplessness I felt. Forget Secret Service: my coat and scarf were as fatal to our plans as a Glock. “The limousine drivers want to go immediately. Apparently the taxicabs have given up already. The limousine drivers want to go home to their families.”
“We didn’t come in a limousine,” I said stupidly.
“Ask Richard and Georgina to give you a ride in theirs.”
Noteless guided Oona by the shoulders away from our group which was no longer a group, Richard leaning in to Georgina as he extricated himself from Sandra Eppling, whispering something I couldn’t hear, others with names I couldn’t recall jostling in to make farewells, clotting around us as they fitted into their dressy coats and oohing and ahhing at the gusts of cold as outer doors were pried open against the battering snow. I saw Grinspoon now, shaking hands like a politician, bearing away whatever forbidden knowledge of Brando and chaldrons he possessed. I watched Oona and Noteless go. Noteless was taller than me. We were the two tallest men in the vicinity. It didn’t mean I knew his secrets. Or that he had any. I felt sick. The girl gentled me into my coat. I turned to find Perkus, but he was gone. My eyes knew where to search before I was conscious of the thought. I sighted him, just barely, sprinting alone upstairs into dark. With Richard and Georgina and a tide of guests I streamed out to the frigid blue transformed city, wet static hazing every personal screen, all objects and persons nearer than they appeared, all of us impossibly vague to one another as we laughed and sneezed into the backseats of limousines, leaving him behind.
January 8
C.,
Severed-foot disposal in a pocket biosphere is really a daft problem, one I hope you never need face, love. We considered air-lock ejection, a sailor’s funeral, but to send my pedal appendage spinning down to Earth, or worse yet, to trigger a mine, seemed florid, flamboyant, a bit of a flambé, and not in the least flame-retardant, even if we wrapped it in a foil boot. (If we had a thousand feet among us, a millipede’s supply to lop off and defenestrate, maybe we’d kick our way out of this crate!) So we opted for a somber burial in the Greenhouse, under the shade of the tallest of the mangroves, though in truth it meant a slightly watery grave after all, stuff seeping up through the muck to swallow the foot, bubbles of mud detaching and floating among us during our tiny, foot-size ritual observances. Sledge, having scooped up the dead bees from the shelf in the Nursery, embedded these in the gunk to form a ring of bee emissaries, the better to passport the foot into whatever afterlife it deserves. Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstislav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.
Afterward, back to work or to moping in our various private nests. I’m not so much an occasion, anymore, for renewed bonhomie. My ailment is another ambient backdrop now, another machine falling apart with no parts to replace the scrapped ones, another grim dispatch from the various quadrants of the deadly dull but not yet quite deadly enough condition our condition is in. My cancer is a mood. We all of us up here have our moods.
Now a part of me will never touch Earth again, Chase.
Happy New Year!
Footloose,
J.