Despite his appearance they welcomed him into a booth, recognizing a friend of the actor’s, or anyway one of their few likely customers under present weather conditions. Perkus had about forty dollars in his pocket-good thing he hadn’t been able to hail a cab. He ordered a poached egg, if only to have something to try to center in his vision, a peg to drink coffee around. Drink coffee he did, though it was too late. Cluster had risen like a sea over his head. Perkus was now (at least) triply divided from the world, riven by loss and snow and the imposition over his senses of that state of half-life which would have kept him from even noticing the restoration of those other things.
He told himself he was waiting in Chase Insteadman’s place for Insteadman to come, but after the first hour or so of nodding in and out of a psychedelic caffeinated coma right there in the booth, he admitted to himself that he couldn’t really imagine the former child star budging from his apartment in this stuff for love or money. It wasn’t as if Chase knew he was here. Perkus would have to go from the Mews eventually, back out into the cold. The obvious thought was to find his way to Chase’s building, if he could manage it by memory, crippled by migraine. Yet the more he lived with Claire Carter’s taunts the less eager he was to face the actor soon. Associations with the Mews gave him cause to meditate on the actor’s part in things, the changes that had crept over the city and Perkus’s life since late last summer, since their meeting in Susan Eldred’s office at Criterion.
Perkus lived as much inside a conundrum as he did a city. At any given moments the conundrum presented itself in some outward form, a vessel or symbol. Chase Insteadman might be the thing that had come along to replace chaldrons, which had themselves probably replaced some other emissary pregnant with undisclosed messages-Gnuppets, say, or Marlon Brando, Perkus couldn’t always say which was the preeminent form conundrum took at a given time.
Unlike Brando or any of the others, however, Chase Insteadman had presented himself at Perkus’s own door, offered himself as a friend.
Perkus had been readying himself to tell the actor what he knew: that his life was a lie, an entertainment. That there was no beautiful heartbreaking astronaut alive overhead, dropping sad notes from space. Perkus had been astonished that Claire Carter had let this secret be confirmed. Yet why fall into such a simple trap? There must be more. There was more. Why explain Yet Another World so laboriously to him? The answer lay in plain sight: Claire Carter wanted Perkus Tooth to consider the extent to which he lived as much in a construction as Chase Insteadman.
Perkus held to one ethos above all, a standard drawn from early drug episodes, Ecstasy, mescaline, one memorable day a silver tray heaped full of psilocybin-mushroom tea sandwiches, crusts trimmed by a friend steeped in WASP manners, as with companions he experienced side-by-side plunging in and out of brief dazzling revelation, while others lurched into bad trips, negative worlds, needing to be retrieved: don’t rupture another’s illusion unless you’re positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you’re wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you’re reaching to shatter? Perkus, operating from a platform of cultural clues arranged into jigsaw sense, had gone years certain his solipsism was a pretty good home. Plastering the city with broadsides, he’d done his best to widen it to let passersby be drawn inside, so sure he was of its grounding in autodidactic scholarship and hard-won ellipsis.
Now, all certainty had fled him at once. If a man found himself consoled inside a virtual chalice, wasn’t he possibly a virtual man? Maybe Perkus’s Manhattan was as fragile a projection as Yet Another World, crafted by an unnamed maker or makers as erratic and helpless as Linus Carter. Did he want to destroy it? The city was a thing of beauty, however compromised at its seams, however overrun with crass moola, however many zones were hocked to Disney or Trump. Claire Carter had done the impossible, inspiring in Perkus a yearning sympathy for anyone who kept this mad anthill running, even developers throwing up vacuous condos in place of brown-stones, or the sorrow-stricken moneymen working beneath the gray fog. They were all pitching in, and who was Perkus to let them down if they liked reading about Janice Trumbull on their folded-over front page as they stood crammed into the IRT? Perkus’s present bit of business, she’d not-so-subtly implied, might be to keep the actor happy, like a spear-carrier on the Met’s stage who was really the lead tenor’s rent boy or coke dealer. Did that mean jolting Chase from his astronaut dream? No, don’t accuse any other person of functioning as a Gnuppet unless you are ready, like Brando, to walk onto the set without pants to prove what you’ve got underneath, to show that no hand has climbed up your shirt to operate your hands and head and to speak through your mouth. Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone! Here was how extensively Claire Carter had destabilized him: Perkus Tooth now knew he might be a Gnuppet, though operated by whom he couldn’t say.
So he couldn’t face Chase Insteadman, at least not yet. He wouldn’t know what to say to him.
This fugue wasn’t instantaneous. On a more tangible plane, the Mews’ waiters eventually took away the yolk-curdled remains of Perkus’s egg, swabbed with a string mop at the slush as it unclung from his velvet cuffs and from between his shoelaces, and refilled his coffee five or six times. They must love that ritual of refilling, either that or feel their customers got a kind of macho charge from emptying so many cups, they gave you such a shallow coffee mug at these places. A noisy couple of customers, a chortling example of pair-bonding at its most lelf-congratulatory, had come and gone what might be hours ago. At last, from within his zone of self-erasure, his chalk outline, Perkus’s raging bladder signaled the risk of soaking his pants right here in the booth. For an instant he calculated that it might pass as more melted snow, then decided he’d haul himself to the Mews’ bathroom. When he returned he found his place cleared, a check on the table, decorous dinerese for the old heave-ho.
If not to Chase’s, where? Richard Abneg? The eagles had preempted that destination. He had no idea where Georgina Hawkmanaji lived. Oona? Hah! Perkus might as well return and appeal to Claire Carter for shelter, that’s how low his regard for Oona Laszlo had sunk.
No, there was only one inevitable haven, and as in a merciful desert vision the information Biller had jotted on a scrap of receipt on Perkus’s kitchen table appeared before him, oasis in a blind spot: Biller’s new street, the dog apartments, Sixty-fifth near York. Not the numerical address, but he didn’t need that, from Biller’s descriptions he’d surely be able to stake out the volunteer walkers crisscrossing the lobby with their leashed clientele.
His warming and elliptical passage of hours within the Mews had served another purpose, allowing more streets to become negotiable, though still the city’s official life was charmingly on hold, giving way to the goofy storm-trooperish skiers, and kids in bright plastic saucers. Perkus tried and failed to remember doing such a thing himself. On a snow day he’d have been indoors with a pile of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In Dell Pocket editions-he could still see Cat’s Cradle in red, The Sirens of Titan in purple, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in blue, fox-blond pages softened by his eager thumbs. Cluster couldn’t drag him deep enough into half-life to blot from mind’s eye the beacon of those Dell Vonneguts.