CHAPTER
Five
Perkus Tooth read The New York Times as he rode the F train downtown. He’d lifted the copy from a neighbor’s doorstep-up at this ungodly hour, he felt entitled to it. He hadn’t purchased a copy since the day Richard Abneg had called to insist he read about the eagles, and before that, not for many months. Perkus refused to pay for the Times, wasn’t interested in giving subsidy to hegemony. The paper was nearly useless to him anymore. He used to light on items that spoke to him, elements in the larger puzzle. These he’d clip and try to shift out of context, pinning them above his kitchen table, onto the layered backdrop of his own broadsides, to see what age would do to their meaning as they yellowed, as they marinated in pot fumes. Lately this never happened. The front page seemed recursive, every story about either a species of animal collapsing into extinction or the dispersal of the Matisse collection of some socialite who’d died intestate. Yesterday a minke whale, its motives perhaps deranged by ocean fungus, had wandered up the East River nearly to Hell Gate: FROLICKING VISITOR DELIGHTS HEARTS, AND THEN DIES. Another animal story that had made the front page concerned the latest depredations of the escaped tiger, who’d razed a twenty-four-hour Korean market on 103rd Street.
Then there was the requisite update from space, another installment in the travails of Janice Trumbull and her Russian cohort, the crew doomed to orbit. The piece on the space station took up a third of the front page, and where it continued on the interior the Times had run substantial excerpts of Janice Trumbull’s latest letter to Chase Insteadman. A soap opera. Perkus’s attitude toward his new friend Chase’s situation was an area of suspended judgment, only flooded with Perkus’s usual conspiratorial searchlights. That the situation reeked of fakery was only natural-what wasn’t? Oona Laszlo, too, had dropped a few hints, though she often teased Perkus’s grave suspicions, and was at bottom untrustworthy. In making Chase’s acquaintance, Perkus had alluded heavily that he not only knew but understood and forgave-for who hasn’t found themselves enlisted in this city’s reigning fictions from time to time? Yet Chase seemed entirely sincere and heartbroken, as much hanging on the updates from space as any other punter. Perkus felt sorry for him. But then the whole New York Times seemed phony to Perkus, even or perhaps especially when it featured his friends. He checked the Metro section, but there was no update on Abneg’s eagles. The Arts section was of course useless. Perkus recognized none of the names. It struck him as largely consisting of rewritten press releases. Yet this paper as a whole felt more insubstantial even than usual-where were all those pieces nobody ever read, but everybody relied upon to be there? He glanced at the front, the top-right corner: WAR FREE EDITION. Ah yes, he’d heard about this. You could opt out now. He left the paper on his seat when he exited the train at Twenty-third Street.
Aboveground, he walked north on Sixth. This was the farthest afield Perkus had traveled in many months, perhaps in over a year. However absurd, he couldn’t recall the time previous, or what exactly last had drawn him out of the bounds of what had become his quarantine: east of Lexington, north of Grand Central Station. Even midtown east, where he’d occasionally drop into the Rolling Stone or Criterion offices, was disorienting to Perkus; the part of Manhattan he encountered here, with its lingering echoes of an older, ethnic-mercantile realm, and the proprietary and jocular gay enclave that overlaid those garment-district ghosts, the complacently muscular pairs holding hands as they strolled-all this was like another city to him. Perkus joked uneasily to himself that he ought to have a guidebook, he felt so foreign here.
A pair of Chinese-dissident protesters occupied a part of the sidewalk on Sixth; they squatted in cages and wore T-shirts decorated with fake blood, commemorating some crackdown against their politicized variety of meditation or worship. One of these caged persons met Perkus’s eye before he could avoid it, and pointed, first at herself, then at him, seeming to say, You and Me Are the Same. Another of their group stood beside the cages, urging pamphlets on passersby, all of whom veered expertly aside, alert within their cocoon of earbuds or cell conversation, raising preemptive hands like Indians in a Western. All except Perkus: he ended up clutching a scuffed and incoherent pamphlet. Glancing at it, he saw a primitive drawing, repeating the image of the sidewalk tableau, a figure in a cage barely big enough for a dog. He crumpled the pamphlet into a trash can and tried to walk as steadily as the human stream of which he was part.
In truth, Perkus felt ill. That was the reason for the jaunt and why he was so vulnerable to dislocation, yet it made him wish to reverse course before he’d taken some irrevocable step. He’d shaved and showered, for the first time in many days, understanding it was likely someone would be examining his undressed body. Then, defensively prideful, he’d donned his best suit, a deep-maroon pinstripe three-piece that would have risked seeming clownish had the vents and pockets not been so impeccably detailed, the fit to his wiry body so trim and modish. The suit wasn’t tailored for Perkus. He’d gotten lucky, found it at the Housing Works Thrift Shop on Seventy-seventh. He made a daylight dandy in the maroon suit, and now, like a lush who’d woken drunk, weaved slightly on the pavement, he couldn’t help it. The sun was bright and the day was bitterly cold. Better to get indoors and face whatever it was he’d gotten himself into. He found the building on Twenty-fifth Street and pushed a button at the intercom, gave his name, was buzzed into the lobby. These were the offices of Strabo Blandiana, the celebrated master of Eastern medicine, who catered almost exclusively to stars-Chase Insteadman had been in his care since that time, ten years past, when he’d qualified as something of a star himself. Chase had induced Strabo to make an exception to his long waiting list for Perkus, then pleaded with Perkus to keep the appointment. Incredibly, Perkus had agreed. Now, at the threshold, he fought every impulse to flee.
Neither Strabo’s candle-scenty reception area nor the gentle, fair-haired, dippily smiling young man who welcomed Perkus to a seat there inspired any hope that Perkus’s prejudices against Eastern medicine might be disappointed. But the vibe, so to speak, was mellow, palliative in itself, and Perkus really didn’t want to be out on the street again too soon. Couldn’t hurt to fill out the clipboard’s two pages of questions on health history and “Present Areas of Complaint”-Perkus laughed to himself that he had plenty of those. He specified “cluster headache, a subvariant of migraine,” not wanting to be mistaken for having fantasized his symptom, and preemptively disdaining any curative gesture that veered too much into fantasy itself. Then defiantly listed caffeine and THC under “Medicines.” Perkus had brewed himself a pot of coffee (Peet’s Colombian roast) and smoked a joint (Watt’s Ice) this morning before walking to the subway, and could feel both medicines still buzzing pleasantly in his bloodstream. He sat alone in the waiting room, apart from the blond kid, who each time Perkus looked up from the clipboard grinned welcome as if for the first time. No sign of other patients, no clue to what was expected of Perkus or what he should expect. Perkus reminded himself he wasn’t into astrological symbols or archetypes of any kind. He had a fucking headache. Actually, it was gone, though this had been one of the cruelest, lasting a week and a half, with barely any oases of relief. In its wake he was enfeebled, that was all, and needed an infusion or two of what he liked to call, only half jokingly, “replacement lipids”-a Jackson Hole vanilla malted and an extra slice of Swiss on his burger deluxe.