Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“ Nooooo,” wailed Richard.

“Excuse me,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “I fear I am going to be ill.” She lurched out of Richard’s lap. “Where… I’m sorry…”

“Off the kitchen,” said Perkus, bearing down on his keyboard.

Georgina teetered on her heels. Richard didn’t glance away from the screen. I took the Hawkman by the elbow and steered her through the kitchen, aimed her at Perkus’s small bathroom. She raised her hand in hasty thanks, then shut the door behind her before finding the pull string for the bare bulb overhead. It was too late to point it out. I returned to Richard and Perkus and the calamitous auction. They’d bid seven grand, now waited for the screen to confirm it. With less than two minutes to the auction’s close, the top number came in at seven thousand and fifty.

“More, more!”

Perkus tried, heartlessly, I could see. The number swelled to eight, then nine thousand, our own bids never even reaching the top of the list, perhaps not even driving the others. We never held on the item’s main page long enough for Perkus’s rotten dial-up connection to complete the chaldron’s image, so it now remained elusive, jittery, wreathed in chunky pixels as if fatigued by our strident love. In the bathroom behind us Georgina could be heard decorously puking, the intervals between heaves filled by labored snuffling breath and a kittenish, unself-pitying whimper, as if in time to what now sounded like a psychedelic banjo number from Sandy Bull.

“Keep it on-screen!” yelled Richard. “Quit checking their names! Who cares!”

“You’ll want to see this,” Perkus promised.

“Richard,” I said. “Do you want to… go to Georgina? Do you want me to do something?”

He waved me off. “She’ll be okay. She barfs easily, it’s no big deal.”

What Perkus revealed to us was the list of bidders, Crazy4Chaldrons and Chaldronlover6, not to mention Brando12’s feeble contributions, now buried beneath two other rivals whose names were veiled beneath the words “private listing-bidders’ identities protected.” From this vantage we watched as this masked pair ran away with the bidding, topping one another by hundred, then two-hundred, then at last five-hundred-dollar increments, each time Perkus tapped Refresh. Our pretenses were shattered. We’d never been in the game, never been near to in it. The Hawkman’s heaving tailed away, and we heard the toilet flush twice. The digital clock ticked out the fateful irreversible instant. The chaldron had sold for fourteen thousand dollars.

“They can’t hide like that, it’s un-American,” said Richard despondently, his heart not in his own bitter joke.

“So, the way I see it, Crazy and Lover are fools like us, they’ve never been any nearer than bidding, never held a chaldron in their hands, never even been in the same room with one…” Perkus began this monologue absently, to no one of us in particular. Richard and I had fallen back, distraught and disenchanted, from the screen, while Georgina staggered back into our midst, breathing heavily, moistening her lips with her tongue, and Sandy Bull put down his banjo and picked up his guitar again. Losing the auction felt like soul-death, or at least a soul-shriveling, like the endorphin debt incurred by an all-night binge on Ecstasy, a trauma for which all among us but Perkus had been grievously unready. “They never win, so far as I can tell. Who knows, they may have my attitude, that the rapture is contained merely in bidding. One of those anonymous heavyweights always blows them out of-what did you call it, Abneg? — the soup , at the last second. Collectors with money to burn, they’re surely stacking up warehouses full of the things, like at the end of Citizen Kane . And their computers are probably a lot faster than mine, it’s a terrific advantage. I’ve heard it’s possible to set up subroutines that fire off a bid at the last second, mechanically ensuring that no one else can top it.”

I understood that Perkus was applying a balm, filling the doomy silence, offering us at once a whole menu of the rationalizations he’d concocted for staunching failure at these auctions. Perkus really was the expert here. Even his arcane eye seemed now to glance at wisdom that lay outside the boundaries of these rooms. I wondered how many chaldrons he’d communed with and lost.

“We should break into their fucking palaces and steal their treasure,” snarled Richard Abneg. He seemed to have reverted to a squatter’s paranoia, some feudalist rage predating accommodation to his role at the mayor’s hand.

“The prices really have shot up,” I said, stupidly showing off my slender familiarity in front of Richard and Georgina.

“It’s exponential,” agreed Perkus. “Who knows how many people are only just learning about these things?”

I gulped back revelation of my guilty fear: that we’d been bidding against Maud and Thatcher Woodrow, or Sharon Spencer, or others of their acquaintances with bottomless funds, all the result of my daft teasing insolence in mentioning Perkus and his chaldrons, during that lunch at Daniel. Countering that uncomfortable suspicion was the sense that the vision the chaldrons had opened to our eyes, however hopeless to define generally, was in part a glimpse of a world in which the Woodrows and Spencers, their empire of inherited privilege, of provenances and exclusions, was exposed as ersatz, fever-stricken, unsustainable. The object seemed to explode in our hearts with a wholeness that disproved Manhattan’s ancient powers, though those towered everywhere around us. A chaldron was fundamentally a thing beyond, or beside, money. Yet we’d done nothing but hurl cash at it, as if pitchforking hay into a furnace. Everything disproved everything else. The Hawkman might have been the one to vomit up the contradictions, but she’d done it for all of us. I felt ill.

I wasn’t alone. We all wavered in the apartment as if aboard a seasick vessel. Perkus drew out four clean glasses and filled them with tap water, which we sipped thankfully. He switched the music, stuck in a Rolling Stones CD, Some Girls . Mick Jagger’s cartoon raunch was another balm, beguiling us into a version of our worldly selves we could live with, the song “Miss You” calling up synesthetic recollection of discotheques, harmless sniffs of cocaine, skinny asses in gold lamé, stuff to make us grateful the chaldron hadn’t translated us out of our discrete and horny bodies just yet. Perhaps a teasing glimpse of that possibility was enough, perhaps Perkus was right that we wished to be window-shoppers, not buyers, not yet, of the purifying apparition. Richard clutched Georgina to him and they danced again, with charming formality, as if suddenly aware they’d come bursting into this scene in a tuxedo and party dress. Then, keeping with the black-and-white motif, Perkus tore open a package of Mallomars, unveiling rows of nestling breast-like cookies, and we fell on them like grateful scavengers, even Georgina (though I did now spot a small pink crumb of vomit on her pale cheek), collapsing their marshmallowy tops to gunk in our back molars, causing our heads to swim with sugar.

We returned from the kitchen to the meager comforts of Perkus’s living room, but his computer screen had defaulted to its saver, the branch-stranded raccoons, and none of us were troubled that one twitch of his cursor, or two, could feasibly unshade the light of a chaldron again. We were resplendent enough in the memory of the last one. And now, restored from the ordeal of losing the auction by pop songs and chocolate cookies, could afford to realize we were substantially in the black for the whole of the experience. We knew so much more than we had an hour before, never mind that it was nearly impossible to agree upon, or even to say clearly, what it was we knew.