Richard hovered over Georgina, leering like a villain. “Look,” he said, as he ran his hand over the astonishing contour that began at her long ribs and narrow waist, to the jut of her wide hip, his hand less than an inch from the fabric of her dress. Georgina slept on, languid breath rippling her upper lip. “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you? Where did it come from?” Richard didn’t have to say what we were all thinking, that the curve of the Hawkman’s bottom made us think of the chaldron, that we’d hopelessly muddled the lust for one with lust for the other. If we indeed were a kind of gestalt entity, Perkus the perennially overwrought brain, myself the trite glamorous face, then I suppose Richard Abneg was our raging erection.
“So, the next auction closes at midnight,” Perkus informed us casually. “What I’d suggest is we hold off for another twenty minutes or so, the impact is usually best when it’s nearer the finish line. Now that you see what we’re after we don’t have to fidget around, we can just reside with it, dwell in that place-”
“Are you saying we shouldn’t bid?” asked Richard, with an edge of alarm.
“No, no, we’ll bid. You get closest to the feeling in that instant when your name tops the list. But, you know, afterward we don’t have to get so… frantic.” Perkus was a master of the order, walking initiates through their graduation ceremony in advance.
“I wasn’t frantic,” said Richard, lapsing in his vow of undefensiveness.
Perkus had taken care of us, in every way so far cradled us through the bewildering night. How did I reward him? I began to cover the whole event in denial and, filled with the special arrogance of denial, tried to turn the tables, to take care of Perkus as I’d vowed to do. My tough-love intervention: I clung to that scrap of agenda in my confusion. I wanted Richard Abneg to understand why I’d enlisted him, and that even if a new religion or Marxist plot had been founded on Eighty-fourth Street tonight, Perkus was still crazy and helpless and needed our help, needed a reality check. I reminded myself that only that morning I’d discovered Biller on the Eighty-sixth Street pavement, selling Perkus’s books.
“So should we talk about Brando?” I said.
“What?” said Perkus.
“Tell Richard about Marlon Brando, how you, you know, realized he was destined to save New York City from itself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Richard.
Was it my imagination, or did the vigilante eyeball in Perkus’s head rotate laser beams of hatred at me for this betrayal? I somewhat hated myself, but pushed on. “Perkus told me Brando was the key, but I didn’t quite understand it at the time. Brando and Gnuppets.”
“What does that have to do with anything else?” said Richard, suspicious of us both.
“Maybe Brando owns a chaldron,” I said lamely.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Perkus. He leaned back in his seat, legs crossed ankle-over-knee, bare fringe of leg hairs exposed beneath his pants hem, held up a joint of Ice and his lighter, ready to bring them together but not doing it yet, and despite leaping into a verbal assault, kept his physical comportment cool, apart from that eye. “You’re just staggeringly useless, Chase, to understand what’s right in front of you. You’re even part of this culture, albeit a foolish part, and yet you can’t see it, or won’t. The breadth of awareness that’s embodied in a figure like Marlon Brando, the aspects of American possibility that he’s tasted on all our behalves, well, that wouldn’t probably interest you. The fact that for you he’s maybe only some kind of laughingstock, that says it all, doesn’t it, about what flourishes in this world of commodities and cartoons. And about what’s exiled, made into a safe caricature, or just outright expunged and forgotten. Brando’s a figure of freedom, just as much as that chaldron we just saw, yes, sure, and fuck you totally, Chase.”
“He’s not a laughingstock to me,” I said, unable to keep a little hurt from my voice. Brando and I were members of the same guild, after all. “He’s our greatest living actor, everybody knows that.”
“He’s not an actor,” said Perkus with stubborn ease.
“He’s not living,” commented Richard, but we paid him no attention, not yet. We spoke in full voice, giving no consideration to Georgina Hawkmanaji’s nap. She slumbered on in our midst, tucked pet-like atop that mound of coats, sublimely oblivious.
“I agree with all of what you say.” There was a stubborn part of me, too. “I just hoped you’d explain to Richard about how Brando was coming out of exile soon, to overturn all this plastic stuff. You said he might run for mayor. You wanted me to get in touch with him for you.”
“My mistake,” said Perkus stiffly. “I’ll contact him another way.”
“Listen, guys, not that Marlon Brando wouldn’t make a fucking excellent mayor,” said Richard, chortling in his beard. “But nobody’s contacting him anytime soon, because he’s kaput.” Richard reached out, took the joint and the lighter from Perkus’s hands, and ignited it. “Big fat old corpse, loads of sad tributes, few months ago. Anyway, Arnheim would crush him.”
We stared at Richard.
“Dead. He died. Not my fault. Hey, aren’t we missing an auction, fellas?”
“Marlon Brando isn’t dead,” said Perkus, in a voice shredded with fear.
“Sure he is, even Chase knows, he’s just too polite to mention it, aren’t you, Chase?”
I had no idea either way. But this wasn’t what I wanted for Perkus. Our intervention, barely begun, was already too harsh, our reality check too real. “A world without Marlon Brando in it,” I began, “would be a far poorer place… so I prefer to believe he’s alive. Of course he’s alive.”
“Who’s alive and dead isn’t a matter of belief,” said Richard.
“I remember now, he lives on an island…” I went on, desperately, “Trinidad-in-Tobago… or… Mustique…?”
“Everybody lives on some island,” said Richard. “Marlon Brando lately inhabits the Isle of the Dead. You could look it up.”
“What makes you the authority on who’s inhabiting what island?” said Perkus, now summoning fury to cover his trepidation. “You’ve been looking over your shoulder for months, you only act like you know more than the rest of us, but you’re bluffing.”
“Bluffing about what, exactly?” Richard Abneg’s voice tightened, as it had earlier, when he’d reacted with real discomfort to Perkus’s jibe about arrests and interrogations. I couldn’t say what was at stake between the two of them, yet I felt the room almost seesaw.
“What’s happened to this city,” said Perkus. “The tiger, for instance. You can’t even catch a tiger. For fuck’s sake, you’re eagle-hunted, Abneg.”
“Those eagles and that tiger have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”
“Why should I believe you even know?”
“The tiger is… not what people think it is. I’d explain it to you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
The feeble joke seemed to belittle Richard Abneg’s usual ominous aura without quite dispelling it, and so restored a measure of equilibrium to our little company. Perkus’s point hadn’t been refuted, only bargained with. Now Perkus turned in scorn to the computer keyboard, began rattling. “Good idea,” I said, in cheerleader mode. “We don’t want to miss our window of opportunity…”
I moved into the kitchen and swapped the Van Morrison for Sandy Bull, skipping ahead a few tracks, to where I figured we’d left off. Bull was playing his banjo again, this time a bluegrass version of Carmina Burana, calling up a vision of Disney dinosaurs transversing a primordial wasteland. Perfect. The music offered a sense of purpose, of destiny claimed. I wished to lure Perkus back to fugue and, for that matter, join him there myself. Returning, I entered a cloud of expelled Ice fumes, Richard bogarting the joint mercilessly. I plucked it from his lips and passed it to Perkus, who accepted it, puffing distractedly as he typed. “Here,” he said at last, his tone petulant. The new screen began to resolve.