“Would you help me put it up?” he asked.
“Like Oona Laszlo?” I joked. “You want me for your glue-girl?”
“Seriously.”
This figure before me-with bare-knuckly shoulders, cheek sinews tensed beneath beard bristles, fingernails mooned with newsprint dirt, unmoored eye careening-I’d sooner chaperone to Bellevue’s intake door myself than allow onto the street to be swept up by Mayor Arnheim’s quality-of-life squad. “On one condition,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll let me make an appointment for you with my Chinese practitioner.”
I didn’t kid myself that Perkus felt obligated. Rather, he’d agreed out of a kind of pity for me that I pitied him, and out of embarrassment at my worry. Plus I saw I’d made him curious, with my wild claims for Strabo Blandiana’s visionary and remedial powers. What if Perkus could be freed of the cluster headaches? How much more ellipsis would that leave time for? Any gambit might be worth that chance. Some rare medical gift might come shrouded in the mystical wrapping paper.
So here he was, pocked with needles, a Saint Sebastian of aromatherapy and pan-flute solos, when he could have been home studying Brando’s Gnuppet moment frame by frame, like it was the Zapruder film. Well, it was relaxing, at least. Obediently breathing all the way to the pit of his stomach, he expected to feel sleepy. Instead experienced the opposite effect, grew strangely excited inside his total stillness, whether creditable to needles, the somatic tones dwelling underneath the fake-Asian music, residual traces of coffee and pot, or Strabo’s uncanny pronouncements. The loss you felt was already real. Something in living memory, but not adequately remembered. You know what you need to do to continue your work. These phrases continued to sink through Perkus. He couldn’t feel Strabo’s needles at all, but if he closed his eyes his body seemed to float toward the ceiling, a disconcerting sensation he avoided by opening his eyes instead. There at the center of vision was the framed photograph he’d passingly noted before, of the orange ceramic vase glowing, as if lit from within, against the minimal white backdrop. The line of the table on which the vase sat was barely detectable, so near was the tone of the tabletop to the wall behind it. The vase was lit to throw no shadow against either wall or table. It had a translucence, perhaps opalescence would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle. Under the circumstances, the vase seemed to have its own message for Perkus: Have you neglected Beauty? Even as he believed he contemplated the photograph with idle curiosity, killing time as he would with a copy of Sports Illustrated in a dentist’s waiting room, Perkus felt the tears begin to seep across his cheeks, toward his ears, the salt stinging tiny fresh cuts that edged his sideburns, cuts he’d incurred shaving with shaky hands.
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.