Chronic City

“Not only is Marlon Brando dead,” Richard muttered into the screen, “but we’re going to land one of these mofos tonight. Get me the Hawkman’s purse.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s got pearl bead things, it’s right under her ass.”

“Are you sure?”

“She’d want us to, Chase. Believe me, she can afford it. Go!”

Under Richard’s guidance I dug out Georgina’s neat, pale-calfskin wallet and, skirting the temptation to learn what wonders I’d find browsing there, handed him her American Express card. The Hawkman never stirred. Richard, typing madly, flinging oaths at the recalcitrant dial-up co

“Now, look.” Richard conjured up another screen. “We’re online, we don’t have to wonder about these things.” He narrated aloud from Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia entry, “Final years and death… notoriety, troubled family life, obesity attracted more attention than his late acting career… earned reputation for being difficult on the set… Okay, skip all that, here, On July 1, 2004, Brando died in the hospital… age of eighty… the cause of his death intentionally withheld… lawyer citing privacy concerns… cremated, ashes scattered partly in Tahiti and partly in Death Valley-” I leaned in over Richard’s shoulder, wanting anything now but to confirm it and strand Perkus in a Brando-less landscape, yet inescapably curious. At that moment Richard hurried back to the auction, to see how Georgina’s thousands were holding up-or rather he tried to, and the computer screen went dark. “Fuck!” he yelped.

We turned to find Perkus leaning out his kitchen’s back window, a chill wind whistling in around him. “What’s wrong?” he asked when he pulled his head in and slammed it shut.

“Your computer crashed or something,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I heard Biller. You had more than two windows open, didn’t you? Well, that’s what crashes it.”

“Did… you hear… what Richard was-”

“What?”

“Never mind.” We stood back while Perkus hurriedly restarted the computer and chased a new co

Unspeaking now, Richard scrambled to bid. He got it up to thirty-four thousand, a heroic labor of blunt hairy fingers, tooth-grinding jaw visible even through his beard. His white shirt was widely stained under the arms and stank fiercely. The effort took two minutes, more. At forty-eight seconds another veiled bidder drove it to thirty-six thousand, then another, with five seconds to spare, took the jewel at an even forty grand. I think we all three groaned as if gutshot, but it was well covered by Sandy Bull’s thrumming music. Georgina Hawkmanaji then punctuated our stu

The convocation found its end there, human fragments amid the ashtrays and crumpled rolling papers, Mallomar crumbs, shed evening clothes. The three of us left Georgina in the dark with the screen-saver raccoons, and retreated to the place where we used to thrive, a month or so before, around Perkus’s kitchen table. Perkus changed the music, to a band called Souled American, and I didn’t know whether it was my imagination or the band’s special distinction that they sounded as unspooled as we felt, the bass player and guitarist and singer each absently mumbling their contribution seemingly with no regard for the others.

It was after Perkus fished out a dusty, half-filled bottle of single-malt Scotch, twelve-year-old Caol Ila, something Richard had left behind some ancient evening before I’d made their acquaintance, and we began sipping the amber poison from juice glasses, that Richard, uncorking some deeper material from himself as if in reply to the booze, began his disquisition on the tiger. At the start his tone was as diffuse as Souled American’s music, so that I almost might have imagined he was singing along. “It’s pretty goddamn fu

“You’re saying the tiger is a machine?” said Perkus.

Richard nodded glumly, and sipped from his juice glass. “A machine, a robot, that’s right, for digging a subway tu

“What happened when they met?” I asked. Déjà vu clung to Richard’s description; I felt as if I recognized it from some baleful fairy tale or allegorical medieval painting. Our evening had drifted into another register, a fatigued postlude, the air in Perkus’s apartment impossible to clear of stale smoke and u