Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Hurry!” said Perkus, now sweeping aside the smoking materials and dashing from the kitchen. Enspelled, we crowded around his small computer screen, Richard pulling up a chair and patting his lap to invite Georgina to settle there. I stood and craned over Perkus’s shoulder. I wondered at Richard Abneg’s uncommon passivity, but then I’d hardly equipped him to grasp what was wrong here. He’d have to gather an impression before leaping in with the caustic force I’d been bargaining for.

Perkus rattled his mouse, trying to wake up the dial-up connection. “I think there’s about twenty minutes to go,” he said. “Chase, would you turn up the music? Thanks.”

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

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

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

“Be polite,” said Georgina softly.

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

“I’m in your hands.”

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

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

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

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

“It is beautiful,” she almost whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

“I… want to… fuck it,” said Richard.

“Richard!” said Georgina.

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

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

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