“No, I guess not.”
“Or three,” I corrected. “I think we’re three fakes, thanks to you. In fact, Janice might be the realest of the three of us.”
Oona fell silent. I’d attained that much, if it was anything to be proud of. I was ready to leave her there, in her precious Chinese Garden Court, yet I couldn’t quite move. We stood in silence, then Oona freed the long-hidden glasses from her purse and showed her true face-I suppose she did it simply because she wanted to see mine, and I’d always been a bit blurry. (The story of my life.) We couldn’t bear the look between us for long, however, and bowed our gazes to the pond instead. A black goldfish meandered there, in and out of rocks directly beneath our feet, and when it wriggled through Oona’s reflection and mine, rippling the tender screen that bore our doubles, Oona turned her head slightly and one hinged corner of the heavy black glasses frames seemed to squirt free for an instant, wholly separate from the glasses or from Oona’s outline, a thing born, tadpole or guppy, and wanting its own life.
CHAPTER
Twenty-seven
This was another kind of waiting room. I had no appointment and so it should not be so strange that I was left there to wait a while. Yet I was left to wait a long time. It began to seem to me that my appointment here was with the room itself, that I’d been installed here in order that I understand what the room had to tell me, and that I was expected to need a while to absorb it completely. At the mayor’s party I’d been cushioned by the occasion, the crowd’s mania, from this room’s full severity, the pressure of that thunderhead of plaster ornament, the gravity of the furnishings, the majesty and provenance radiating from the French chairs, arrayed like bewigged justices. I found it almost impossible to stay seated in one.
The room was not precisely as I’d remembered it. I now saw that inlaid-rosewood panels, so impressive in themselves, were only covers, the room an enormous magician’s cabinet, beautifully joined, made to slide aside in order to reveal a gallery and library, all the fetishes and collected works that had needed to be protected from the grubby hands and eyes of the guests at the champagne reception. I was idiotically proud to recognize the oils as examples of the Hudson River school, verdant mysterious panoramas of the Palisades, of ice floes bottlenecking at West Point. The books were bound or rebound in leather succulent as amber. I tried to read their fine gilt titles and found my eyes stinging. I might have pulled one down to examine it but my fingers felt numb and weak, nearly immaterial, as though the density of a hardbound volume would pass through my hands. This may have been the effect of a day where I’d steered Ava through snow three times, grappling with the weave of her leash in my childishly soft palms.
I was also embarrassed. I no more wished to be caught fondling the books as be seen creeping upstairs to ogle Arnheim’s hologram. I didn’t want the setting to unravel the meager poise that had brought me here to make my stand. Yet by the time Claire Carter appeared, it had almost done that. She’d left me long enough for me to feel she’d rescued me by appearing, that if I’d been there longer the age and force of the place would have wholly disintegrated the small pretense of me. Nearly dark out when I’d approached the town house, the windows were black now, as if I’d risked the vanishing of all nurturing illusion by entering this chamber, this sole place certain of its purposes. I apprehended here the indifference of the ancient and unchangeable city, the incidental nature of its use for me. Claire Carter didn’t say “Any further questions?” but she might as well have. The room was lit by one standing glass lamp, and it didn’t seem to light me at all, but Claire Carter in her peach-sherbet pantsuit glowed like the green shores so luminous with underpainting, glowed like the amber spines of the Collected Works, glowed, yes, like a chaldron, a thing glimpsed only to deny you.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.
“You’re always thanking me, Mr. Insteadman,” said Claire Carter. “But that isn’t what you came for.”
Her brittleness gave me some courage. “No offense, but I hoped to talk to Mayor Arnheim.”
“Here’s how this goes. You get five minutes with me, and the meter’s running on that, so skip the formalities. The mayor will join us at some point. You should tell me anything you need him to know.”
“Is he listening now?”
“How can we help you, Mr. Insteadman?”
Again I was voiceless. No wonder the Polish starlet fucked the writer. I wanted to spellbind and scald Claire Carter with a hiccup-punctuated tour de force of accusation. Yet after all I knew nothing, had no evidence, only dubious questions wilting on my tongue. “Is the tiger… being used to destroy… the city’s enemies?” I asked her.
“The tiger is a distraction,” said Claire Carter firmly, as if placing it in a bureaucratic category beyond further consideration. I recalled Perkus’s commandment, no conspiracies but of distraction. I didn’t suppose Claire Carter was about to use that other word. If I used it myself I was a fool.
“Does Richard Abneg know the truth?”
“The truth about what?”
“About distractions like the tiger… and me.” I surprised myself.
“Richard’s like you,” she said. “He forgets a lot of what he knows, forgets everything except what he needs to carry on, and do his job.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you forget?”
“I’m the same as anyone else,” said Claire Carter. “Don’t mystify things.”
“Do you know Oona Laszlo?”
“We’ve met.” The weary tone suggested my questions had drifted into irrelevance, that she’d begun wondering why she’d bothered to grant me even these five minutes.
“My friend died,” I blurted out, not wishing to fail in my only secure complaint. Yet I didn’t wish to give Perkus’s name aloud here, feeling as superstitious as I’d been in the police-station basement, though I believed him beyond Claire Carter’s or the mayor’s harm now, either dead or gone underground… I’d begun telling myself that if Marlon Brando could be alive, the same was possible for Perkus. The medical world could form an anti-conspiracy, a form of underground railroad originating in hospital emergency rooms, to hide the Non-Dupes from their enemies. I remembered a phrase Strabo Blandiana had mentioned, Médecins Sans Frontières, which might be a cover name for this secret society.
“Richard mentioned it,” she said.
“My friend told me… a lot of things. He believed Manhattan had become a fake. A simulation of itself. For some purpose… he couldn’t guess, but he died trying.”
“What on earth makes you think it could possibly be only one purpose?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Pay attention, Mr. Insteadman. I’m astounded at your naïveté. How could a place like Manhattan exist for just one purpose, instead of a million?”
I had no answer.
“Do you personally believe Manhattan is fake?” asked Claire Carter.
How could I reply? Perkus’s theories proved themselves ludicrous while demolishing any castles of consolation to which I might hope to retreat. They unmade those as they unmade themselves. Our sphere of the real (call it Manhattan) was riddled with simulations, yet was the world at hand. Or the simulation was riddled through with the real. The neat pink seam of Ava’s surgery scar, which I’d traced with my finger this very morning while giving in to her cuddling demands in my bed; the brown stripe-the “milk map”-across Georgina’s pregnant belly which, though I hadn’t witnessed it myself, had plainly reordered Richard Abneg’s helpless mind; the exact flavor of Oona’s kisses (or Ava’s, for that matter), the sugar dust on a Savoir Faire almond croissant (I have my weaknesses); these details could no more have been designed and arranged than Laird Noteless could have thought to include discarded baby carriages and crushed crack vials in his sketches for Urban Fjord. The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions, the West Side Highway of the self, to shattering encounters with the wider reaclass="underline" bears on floes, the indifference and silence of the climate or of outer space. So retreat. Live in a Manhattan of your devising, a bricolage of the right bagel and the right whitefish, even if from rival shops. Walk the dog, dance with her to Some Girls. Why did Perkus have to be killed for his glance outside the frame? But maybe he hadn’t been killed, had only died. And again, maybe absconded. I was sick with ignorance, and my own complicity.