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.
Biller was the one he needed now. As though Perkus had been keeping Biller in the bank, feeding and strengthening a daily soldier accustomed to Life During Wartime. Well, here, trudging sickened in the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately convinced. There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t. Perkus had gotten complacent in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go underground. Biller knew how to live off the grid, even in a place like Manhattan that was nothing but grid. Even better, Biller had an encampment in the enemy terrain of Yet Another World. Biller could tell him what he knew about Linus Carter and chaldrons-now Perkus would be patient enough to listen to what had always seemed a little pointless before. With the virtual realm seeming to have penetrated Perkus’s city at any number of points, Biller was the essential man, with means for survival in both places. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without resources. Perkus laughed at himself now: Biller was like Old Man McGurkus in Seuss’s Circus McGurkus, who’d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants’ shit, and also do the high-wire aerialist act.
In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the headache’s dislodging of himself from himself, working with the only body he had, the shivering frost-fingered blind stumbler in sweat-and salt-stained purple velvet.
He trailed a dog and walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain that a volunteer had sought him out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat functioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen modestly lurking in the rooms of certain dogs, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. So Biller gathered Perkus and immediately installed him in what would become Ava’s apartment. It was there, nursed through the first hours by Biller’s methodical and unquestioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nourished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth until it could keep down something more, that Perkus had felt his new life begin. It was a life of bodily immediacy, after Ava’s example. Perkus didn’t look past the next meal, the next walk, the next bowel movement (with Ava these were like a clock’s measure), the next furry sighing caress into mutual sleep.
Biller, attuned to this, minimized, when Perkus brought it up, any talk of Yet Another World. Sure, he knew about chaldrons. They were the crème de la crème of virtual treasure, and people had quit trading them for any accumulation of virtual anything-tracts of land, magnificent architecture, sex slaves, other treasure. They only changed hands for dollars now, and quite a lot of those. But Biller reminded Perkus that if you cared about Yet Another World there was a lot else to care about besides chaldrons. And yeah, he knew the legends of Linus Carter, but so what? Every place had a creator. What made Yet Another World interesting was that it had thousands. You didn’t have to pay any attention to the wishes of the originator of the place if you didn’t care to-a creator who might, after all, be the last person to know what was really going on. Still, Perkus saw Biller’s ears perk up when he told him about the castle hoard of chaldrons Linus had bestowed on his unimpressed sibling. That fact did stir the imagination. Putting the subject aside, Biller promised he would help Perkus set up an avatar, a persona on Yet Another World, if he wanted one. Somehow, at least through January and into February, they failed to get around to it. There was no computer in Ava’s apartment.