Now Perkus felt himself float without closing his eyes. Not toward the ceiling, but up and, however impossible, into the orange vase in the photograph. He dwelled there, was held there, for a long and outrageously pure instant. The vase sheltered Perkus like a kindly cove. And when it couldn’t continue to shelter him the failure wasn’t a rejection, a spitting out, but a sigh. Perkus understood that he and the vase couldn’t abide with each other any longer than that instant, not here in these absurd surroundings, not stuck full of acupuncture needles and separated by the boundaries of a framed photograph. This had been a mere taste. But what a taste. The orange vase spoke to Perkus, simply, of not the possibility but the fact of another world. The world Perkus or anyone would wish to discover, the fine real place where the shadowy, tattered cloak of delusion dissolved. The place Perkus had tried his whole life to prove existed. Only lately he’d lost the thread. Fuck ten-year-old epiphanies made of scraps of yellowing articles from the London Review of Books and Comics Journal! Perkus had nodded off the night before, seated on the floor, and woken to find his scissors nearly glued to his thumb and forefinger. But even to taste what the orange vase promised was to feel weariness lift away entirely. Just to know it was out there, like a beacon calling.
Strabo Blandiana returned and removed the needles, a process which Perkus now barely noticed, then allowed Perkus a moment to collect himself and dress. The exit interview was brief, Perkus as eager to wrap up as Strabo, who obviously needed the room for his next patient-Chazz Palminteri, or Lewis Lapham, or whomever. (It was this that always surprised and amused me, too, how Strabo whisked you through, as much as any Western doctor.) Perkus didn’t want to stare at the vase too intently, fearing he’d give himself away. He did manage a quick inspection of the photograph’s margin, to make certain there was no signature or other mark he’d need to memorize for his later quest. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything.
“How do you feel?” asked Strabo.
“Great,” said Perkus truthfully.
“You respond well. We’ll eventually want to talk about caffeine and other substances, but there’s no hurry. For now I’d like you to think about your breathing, and this may seem strange to you, but I’d like you to eat more meat.”
“I can do that.”
“And while in the outer office I couldn’t help noticing you came here wearing nothing but your dress jacket. You should have a coat in this weather.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“If you’d like a copy of the CD I played, you can rebalance yourself at home this way. One purchases it from a Web site, it’s quite simple.”
Perkus consented, and Strabo scribbled the Web address on a slip. Then, before stepping out to take a receipt from Strabo’s receptionist (I’d insisted on paying for the visit in advance), he asked about the photograph of the vase. It was silly to lose the chance.
“Ah,” said Strabo. “The chaldron, yes, it’s quite beautiful. A gift from another patient. At first I hesitated to place it so prominently, but as it happens several patients have mentioned that they find it quite consoling. I’ve forgotten the name of the photographer, alas.”
“I’m sorry, what did you call it?”
“I understand that type of ceramic is called a chaldron.”
“Thank you.”
That evening, Perkus home from the fateful appointment, he called me and I hurried over. Appearing both radiant and exhausted from the adrenaline Strabo’s treatments typically unblocked, Perkus effused as much as I could have hoped, but his exact subject bewildered me. Crumbled marijuana buds from a container labeled ICE were strewn across the tabletop I’d sponged clean for him a few days before, and he waved a half-consumed, temporarily extinguished joint in his fingers as he explained that he’d already looked up “chaldron” on the Internet, and found two for sale on eBay, advertised with photographs much like that he’d seen on Strabo’s wall. They weren’t cheap, but he’d entered bids. He’d get one into his apartment as soon as possible, and then I’d see what he’d seen-that, in so many words, he’d detected proof of another, better world. “Like reverse archaeology, Chase, but just as thrilling as contemplating the lost remains of the past. A chaldron is treasure from the future, if we deserve a future that benign.” Meanwhile, did I want to see an image of one? Even in cold pixels, he promised, they conveyed a certain force.
I slowed him as well as I could, as his tale tumbled out, frantic, careless, ridiculous, the whole visit a pretext for his encounter with the chaldron. Had I seen it myself? Yes, I recalled the framed print, vaguely. No, it hadn’t had such an effect on me. Or rather, I hadn’t credited any effects to the photograph. Was Perkus certain he wasn’t transposing the results of Strabo’s treatments-the twin penetration of his needles and his insights into Perkus-onto the artwork? Perkus corrected me: it wasn’t an artwork, it was an artifact. Evidence. A manifestation. Furthermore, he wasn’t so impressed with Strabo as all that. The acupuncture hadn’t been unpleasant, but it also hadn’t been anything at all beyond a self-evident placebo. Perkus found the propagation of ancient ritual into an upscale urban setting innocuous and charming, in its way. The needles imparted a gravitas to Strabo that his customers, who otherwise paid handsomely to lie on a table and be reminded to breathe, must find reassuring.
As for Strabo’s so-called insight, Perkus was sorry I was so credulous. For it had only taken him a second thought to be certain Strabo employed techniques perfected by British mediums during the great Victorian craze for psychic phenomena of all types: safely evocative and flattering generalizations with which anyone would agree, combined with precise secret research into the subject’s background in order to provide a clinching detail or two. I ought to do a little reading on the historical techniques, I’d find it fascinating. “Strabo’s brilliant, I’ll give you that, Chase. Unmistakably, he’d been reading my work carefully in those two days between your call and my appointment. He must have a hot-shit researcher tucked away somewhere. What’s incredible is that he distilled my basic themes so quickly. He was feeding me back to me, neatly mixed up with his own brand of stuff.” Perkus widened his eyes, his expression that of exaggerated admiration for what he regarded as a top-notch stunt. Where could I begin? To attack the first premise, that Strabo Blandiana-who’d added the appointment as a favor, and who was in my experience often sweetly oblivious that clients like Marisa Tomei or Wynton Marsalis were renowned themselves rather than merely friends of others he’d helped-could ever have had the interest or means to discover Perkus’s marginal writings, might seem an assault on Perkus’s frail sense of his own relevance. I said nothing. Perkus relit the joint and after drawing on it himself handed it to me. “Enough of this,” he said. “Let’s go win an auction!”
Well, we lost a couple. If anything epitomized Perkus’s curious disadvantages, his failure to find traction in the effective world, it was the state of his computing. Perkus was the type to be Web-delving on some sleekly effective Mac, I’d have thought. Instead his lumpy Dell looked ten years old, Cro-Magnon in computer years. He connected by his phone line, which he transferred by hand from his living-room Slimline, and which bumped him offline if anyone rang, but also, it seemed, intermittently and at random. Watching that Dell painstakingly assemble a page view, images smoothed pixel by pixel, was agony. Perkus was enchanted-he’d just discovered eBay, by way of the chaldron hunt. The format and rules fascinated him, and as we watched the hour tick toward the resolution of the two chaldron auctions-one half an hour later than the other-he gleefully refreshed the pages again and again in turn, to see if anyone had trumped his bids. No one had. As things stood he’d be collecting two chaldrons, one for three hundred and fifty dollars, the other for one hundred and eighty-five. I suggested Perkus bow out of the first, but he waved me off.