When Strabo opened a door Perkus was disarmed utterly. The Romanian was so much younger than Perkus had imagined, and devastating in his calm. Strabo’s personal style was minimalist, hair cropped in a close Caesar, the sleeves of his black turtleneck, some superfine knit, pushed to mid-forearm, revealing on his left a tremendous gold Rolex. No ascetic renunciation of worldly treasure here. Strabo’s gaze penetrated quickly, satisfied itself, and moved on, declining to make a show of hypnotic spookiness. Despite himself, Perkus felt disappointed. Did he rate just a glance? Strabo hadn’t even hesitated over Perkus’s morbid eye.
Strabo Blandiana’s examination room was neither encouragingly medical nor New Agey enough to justify Perkus’s balking. Just a couple of Danish Modern chairs, in which the two now sat as equals, a brushed-steel cabinet on wheels, and beyond it a long, flat daybed covered with a neatly folded sheet. One silver-framed photograph, of an enigmatic orange-glowing ceramic vase against a blank white backdrop. From the moment Strabo opened his mouth no question of negotiation remained. He spoke decisively, each word acute. The tone suggested they’d agreed beforehand never to waste an instant of the other’s time. Perkus’s clipboard results were in evidence nowhere, and the word headache was never spoken.
Strabo explained quickly that Perkus was-surprise! — “out of balance.” He could see that Perkus worked with his mind, and that he did so with the urgency of one who knew that if he faltered in his chosen task no one could possibly carry on in his stead. This sense of special purpose motivated Perkus to accomplish extraordinary things but also made him lonely, and defiantly angry. Strabo surprised Perkus by finding nothing shameful in this: Perkus evidently made use of productive fear and rage. Each insight Strabo offered as if describing the workings of a car, some fine-tuned Porsche or Jaguar, to its interested owner. There was no air of metaphysics. Strabo went on to explain that Perkus’s constitution was strong. If it wasn’t he wouldn’t have made it even this far, nor accomplished what he had. The suggestion being that this Porsche’s owner had brought his car limping into the garage just barely in time. Strabo’s intuition of Perkus’s special accomplishments and challenges allowed Perkus to feel them himself as though for the first time. What burdens he carried! That Perkus couldn’t go on as he had been was simply manifest and true.
Strabo Blandiana paused now, as if catching himself too much showing off what one glance had collected from the subject before him. He might be about to turn to the question of treatment, whatever that consisted of. Perkus was at this point only dazzled. Then Strabo again turned that gaze of total discernment in Perkus’s direction. “You understand,” Strabo said, as if incidentally, “that beneath your anger is really mourning. But you feel you can’t afford to mourn.”
“Mourn who?” said Perkus, feeling a breath disappear, so he had to gulp to replace it. The description seemed to tip him headfirst into self-understanding, as if from a high diving board. But he hadn’t hit the water yet.
Strabo shook his head, refusing the obvious. “Before your parents were taken from you, the loss you felt was already real.” Yes, Perkus’s parents had both died, but how did Strabo know this? Or was this one of those specious bold guesses with which a charlatan secured your confidence? Perkus’s suspicions were aroused, but they were overrun by his hunger to understand what Strabo was on about. What loss?
“You mourn a loss suffered by the world. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You see it as your sole responsibility to commemorate this loss.”
With this astonishing pronouncement, Strabo shifted efficiently and permanently to the practical effort of the Porsche’s maintenance. Was Perkus aware that he breathed only into his upper chest, never into his stomach? This distinction anyone would be likely to have noted a hundred times, but Strabo, with a guiding touch, made Perkus feel the difference. Perkus then tried to reopen the conversation, but Strabo, with a shrug, conveyed the sense that their talk had been conclusive. He deferred to Perkus’s expertise. “You know what you need to do to continue your work, I can’t teach you anything about that. Let’s just get you balanced, and then we’ll discuss strategies for leaving aside the useless pain. When you were younger you could carry more, but it isn’t efficient or necessary now. Please undress and lie under the sheet, I’ll return momentarily.”
To reject anything now was out of the question. Perkus made himself ready, folding his suit neatly on a chair back. Strabo returned and got to business. Acupuncture needles didn’t look as Perkus had imagined them, but then he’d never bothered to imagine anything other than a sewing needle. Thin as threads, each with a tiny flag at their end, they entered his body at various points, neck and wrists and shoulders, painlessly. Only a hint of tightness, a feeling he shouldn’t move suddenly, confirmed Strabo had used them at all. Then Strabo lowered the lights and switched on some music, long atmospheric tones that might have been vaguely Eastern. “To someone like you this CD may sound a bit corny,” he said, surprising Perkus. “But it’s specially formulated, there are tones underneath the music that are engaging directly with your limbic system. It works even if you don’t like the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”
“Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.
“I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”
“What if I fall asleep?”
“It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pinned like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it come to this? How could I have been allowed to persuade him? Puttylike Chase Insteadman, so eagerly enlisted in absurd causes-Chase had talked Perkus into this?
Well, he’d frightened me. For a week Perkus hadn’t answered his phone, nor his apartment buzzer when I resorted to dropping by unannounced. Then, my own phone had rung, at six thirty AM, an hour at which, even had I been driving deep through evenings in Perkus’s company, I’d reliably have been dozing. I fumbled the receiver up to my ear, expecting I don’t know what, but always guiltily terrified of dire updates from the space station, some further revolution in Janice’s fate.
His voice was dim, smoke-tight, wreathed in hours. No question of his having slept anytime recently.
“So, I need your help with something.”
“Yes?” I croaked.
“I have to talk to Brando. Can you get his number?”
“Brando?” I pinched the bridge of my nose, miming groggy disbelief for an invisible audience. “You mean Marlon Brando?” I thought Brando was recently dead, but this was exactly the sort of thing I get mixed up about. Maybe Paul Newman had died, or Farley Granger.
“Yes, Chase, Marlon Brando. Can you call, I don’t know, someone at your talent agency?” However depleted, however absurd the hour, Perkus seemed in a rage of impatience.
“Doesn’t he live on some island?”
“So you’re saying you can’t?”
“I–I don’t know. I guess I can try.”
“Only Brando can save us.” He croaked out the line as if he’d been saving it for the crucial moment, a bombshell revelation.
“Perkus, what’s going on? What time is it? Are you okay?”
Silence.
“I tried to call, five or six times.”
“I had cluster,” he said after a moment, the grandiosity leaked from his voice. “I turned the ringer off.”