Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“Perhaps you will understand when I say I felt undressed.” Georgina gulped in embarrassment having blurted this, and for an instant I feared she’d flee the room again. Instead, divertingly, she whirled from Richard, putting her long arms in the air. It seemed in another moment she might whirl her dress off over her head.

Wishing in my genteel way to give sanction and cover to Georgina’s observation, I found myself testifying, speaking in tongues. “For something so warm… it casts a sort of… brusque… watery… shadow… over so much else… that I took for granted…”

“Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you,” said Richard. “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector-”

“Sure, and what it detects is that your city’s a sucker , Abneg.” Perkus spoke with startling insistence, but his tone wasn’t needling. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream.” This was somehow the case, the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment. An object, the chaldron testified to zones, realms, elsewheres. Likely we’d lost the auction because one couldn’t be imported here, to this debauched and insupportable city. The winners had been rescuing the chaldron, ferrying it back to the better place.

“You think I’m going to get defensive, you guessed wrong,” said Richard, watching the Hawkman sway to the Stones’ “Just My Imagination.” “I wouldn’t defend anything right now, except, you know, your right to say it , and that with my life, Comrade Tooth.”

“What… are we going to… do?” I said, gullible enough for anything. Was a chaldron a beacon of revolution, was that what Richard signaled in calling Perkus Comrade? One if by land, two if by sea?

“Make coffee,” said Perkus.

“We’re going to get our hands on one of those goddamn things, that’s what we’re going to do,” said Richard.

Georgina Hawkmanaji had wound down, and curled her long body like a greyhound’s on the heaped-up coats and furs on Perkus’s sofa. She tucked her knees up between her arms, bracelets clicking together, her head slipping to one side as she began to snooze, revealing the curve of her neck, the pulse there. Richard and I were nicely energized, though, even before Perkus put mugs of fresh coffee in our hands. The evening, though filled with wild purpose, was slanting toward the shape of our old all-nighters, those corrosive binges that were only weeks behind us yet seemed a forsaken oasis, one island in time now revealed as a stop on our way to another. Perkus industriously rolled joints of Ice and changed the music again, Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece , something Georgina could nap to and a transitional bridge (we didn’t need to ask to be certain of this) back to the limbic strummings of Sandy Bull.

Richard hovered over Georgina, leering like a villain. “Look,” he said, as he ran his hand over the astonishing contour that began at her long ribs and narrow waist, to the jut of her wide hip, his hand less than an inch from the fabric of her dress. Georgina slept on, languid breath rippling her upper lip. “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you? Where did it come from?” Richard didn’t have to say what we were all thinking, that the curve of the Hawkman’s bottom made us think of the chaldron, that we’d hopelessly muddled the lust for one with lust for the other. If we indeed were a kind of gestalt entity, Perkus the perennially overwrought brain, myself the trite glamorous face, then I suppose Richard Abneg was our raging erection.

“So, the next auction closes at midnight,” Perkus informed us casually. “What I’d suggest is we hold off for another twenty minutes or so, the impact is usually best when it’s nearer the finish line. Now that you see what we’re after we don’t have to fidget around, we can just reside with it, dwell in that place-”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t bid?” asked Richard, with an edge of alarm.

“No, no, we’ll bid. You get closest to the feeling in that instant when your name tops the list. But, you know, afterward we don’t have to get so… frantic.” Perkus was a master of the order, walking initiates through their graduation ceremony in advance.

“I wasn’t frantic,” said Richard, lapsing in his vow of undefensiveness.

Perkus had taken care of us, in every way so far cradled us through the bewildering night. How did I reward him? I began to cover the whole event in denial and, filled with the special arrogance of denial, tried to turn the tables, to take care of Perkus as I’d vowed to do. My tough-love intervention: I clung to that scrap of agenda in my confusion. I wanted Richard Abneg to understand why I’d enlisted him, and that even if a new religion or Marxist plot had been founded on Eighty-fourth Street tonight, Perkus was still crazy and helpless and needed our help, needed a reality check. I reminded myself that only that morning I’d discovered Biller on the Eighty-sixth Street pavement, selling Perkus’s books.

“So should we talk about Brando?” I said.

“What?” said Perkus.

“Tell Richard about Marlon Brando, how you, you know, realized he was destined to save New York City from itself.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Richard.

Was it my imagination, or did the vigilante eyeball in Perkus’s head rotate laser beams of hatred at me for this betrayal? I somewhat hated myself, but pushed on. “Perkus told me Brando was the key, but I didn’t quite understand it at the time. Brando and Gnuppets.”

“What does that have to do with anything else?” said Richard, suspicious of us both.

“Maybe Brando owns a chaldron,” I said lamely.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Perkus. He leaned back in his seat, legs crossed ankle-over-knee, bare fringe of leg hairs exposed beneath his pants hem, held up a joint of Ice and his lighter, ready to bring them together but not doing it yet, and despite leaping into a verbal assault, kept his physical comportment cool, apart from that eye. “You’re just staggeringly useless, Chase, to understand what’s right in front of you. You’re even part of this culture, albeit a foolish part, and yet you can’t see it, or won’t. The breadth of awareness that’s embodied in a figure like Marlon Brando, the aspects of American possibility that he’s tasted on all our behalves, well, that wouldn’t probably interest you. The fact that for you he’s maybe only some kind of laughingstock, that says it all , doesn’t it, about what flourishes in this world of commodities and cartoons. And about what’s exiled, made into a safe caricature, or just outright expunged and forgotten. Brando’s a figure of freedom, just as much as that chaldron we just saw, yes, sure, and fuck you totally, Chase.”

“He’s not a laughingstock to me,” I said, unable to keep a little hurt from my voice. Brando and I were members of the same guild, after all. “He’s our greatest living actor, everybody knows that.”

“He’s not an actor,” said Perkus with stubborn ease.

“He’s not living,” commented Richard, but we paid him no attention, not yet. We spoke in full voice, giving no consideration to Georgina Hawkmanaji’s nap. She slumbered on in our midst, tucked pet-like atop that mound of coats, sublimely oblivious.

“I agree with all of what you say.” There was a stubborn part of me, too. “I just hoped you’d explain to Richard about how Brando was coming out of exile soon, to overturn all this plastic stuff. You said he might run for mayor. You wanted me to get in touch with him for you.”