Oh, I missed him, and his ridiculous language. I wanted to hear Perkus speak it again, everything revealing its opposite, everything incommensurate and irreconcilable and unbereaved. In the same spirit, we’d been too briefly chaldroned, and now were unchaldroned. Was it better to have loved chaldrons and lost, or never to have loved them at all? And what came after?
In this interval I barely saw a newspaper, but I gathered that the chocolate smell cleared up without explanation. Also I heard that the cold front wouldn’t budge, the slate skies winter-locked, and that the tiger wrecked a York Avenue temple gymnasium where aging Jewish men played pickup ball every Monday and Wednesday in a game that had been regular for thirty years. The following day the mayor’s office unveiled a Web site for tracking the tiger’s movements, and recommended it to those seeking forewarning of traffic tie-ups and subway cancellations. All this came to me while flipping channels, and when I passed over a news station I never lingered. I avoided news and newspapers because I feared getting word of Janice’s heroic self-biopsy, and what it would reveal. I learned anyway, from breaking-news crawls at the bottom of my screen, that she had a malignant cancer in her foot, and spreading to other regions. That plans were under way for a course of improvised chemotherapy, using what they had on hand in Northern Lights’ medical supplies. Possibly an attempt would be made to launch a small rocket filled with better meds past the Chinese mines, into orbit, where the Russians could grapple it into the space station. Failing chemical intervention, there was talk of the possibility of a desperate surgery, even amputation.
In my head I composed tormented letters, but I’d been warned that Mission Control would refuse their delivery, so I never put a word on paper. I screened my calls. The only news I wanted, finally, was outside my window: that the birds still attacked their routes around the spire, those pathways to nowhere that seemed to articulate my own invisible urgencies. The birds couldn’t interpret the stone, but by their proximity they could seem to define it, adore it, abide with it. That was as near to a sense of valuable work in the world as I could imagine myself having. Only I would need, when I was well again, to make sure of what my own church spire should be. I knew the plan for Chase Insteadman was that I should wait for Janice. Yet something nearer at hand, some person or artifact, some situation or scene, was calling. I didn’t know whether I was bereaved or unbereaved, but I wasn’t bereaved the way I felt I ought to be.
Richard Abneg and Georgina Hawkmanaji came on Thursday. I was almost well. They learned not from Perkus (who might be oblivious, so far as I knew) but from Maud Woodrow, whom I’d telephoned just hoping for some breath of gossip in my loneliness, not because I hoped she’d visit or even be particularly sympathetic. When I’d then been contacted by Richard I explained I was really fine, but he said Georgina insisted they look in. The two of them arrived just before noon with a caterer’s roasted turkey and some sides, shocking me. Richard seemed to think it was incredibly funny, and maybe it was. He wore an expensive Burberry coat, unmistakably new, and after he helped Georgina out of her own he went into my wardrobe and found wooden hangers for them both. The Hawkman helped me set a small table, scooping sweet-potato mash and creamed spinach from plastic quarts into rarely used serving bowls, gravy poured into a coffee mug, and dusting off a batch of cloth napkins I’d forgotten I owned. We even switched on the television to catch the end of the Macy’s parade, the kooky giant balloons, supermen and Gnuppets and unrecognizable new personae bobbing through the sleety canyons, the kids toughing it out in the cold.
“May I ask, what does that represent?”
“That represents SpongeBob SquarePants, Georgie.”
My appetite suddenly savage, I was, yes, thankful, wildly so, to have the turkey’s inexhaustible flesh before me, ate white and dark in a gravied pile together, felt myself plundering the bird’s life forces, stripping it free of the obedient skeleton. Recovering with each bite, I felt a teenager’s strength and greed rising in me. Richard laughed. They ate, too, more decorously, though threads of dry breast lodged in Richard’s beard until Georgina picked them out, and gossiped absently, remarking on items of paltry interest in my apartment, which was revealing, truthfully, only in its hotel-ish anonymity, order, booklessness.
Something in the parade caught my eye, a golden-swelling outline among the balloons filing down Broadway. The distracting balloon wasn’t the focus of the shot, which framed instead a swollen Spider-Man, but trapped behind the blue-and-red superhero that golden shape bobbed in and out of visibility between the lampposts, its vinyl skin peppered with sleet and confetti. The balloon, I was fairly certain, was meant to depict a chaldron. My mouth, I think, fell open. Anyway, my eyes widened, chewing stopped. Richard Abneg followed my attention to the television screen, and before I could speak he’d already raised a finger to his lips and shook his head to silence me, even while raising his brows and rolling his eyes to acknowledge that yes, he’d recognized it too. This petition wasn’t threatening or duplicitous; rather, his look conveyed hope I’d keep it from Georgina in the manner of an indulgence between henpecked husbands, as if Richard were a sworn quitter sneaking a cigarette.
Georgina made a visit to my bathroom and Richard immediately leaned across the turkey’s carcass to whisper an apology. “I’m trying to get her mind off those things,” he said. “She just gets too worked up, it’s not healthy. You’d be amazed, there are little reminders, hints of them everywhere, once you know what you’re looking for.”
I was amazed. “You’ve been bidding in auctions?”
He frowned annoyance. “Just a couple of times. The supply’s dried up at the moment.”
“You haven’t won?”
“Nope. But, you know what? Stay tuned. The Hawkman’s accustomed to getting what she wants. Shhhhh.” Georgina had returned, closing off further questions. Yet I’d had answered the one question I never meant to ask, had avoided even framing. Phenomena I’d in some way been hoping were circumscribed within the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, within Perkus’s computer or broadsides or ravings, weren’t. Even when I-and Perkus, possibly-ignored them, chaldrons, for instance, went on being chaldrons. For some people, apparently, they were a way of life. I’d be forced to make my peace with the fact.