Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

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.