Cult Classic(29)

Then Clive got his own show. Just like that. This career for which people jockey all their lives fell into his lap. With the show came his own car service, his own dressing room, and his own shiny new girlfriend, a makeup artist named Chantal who’d been smudging concealer over Clive’s pores for months. She had a heart-shaped face and her own line of blush brushes. She got him into Bikram yoga and sage-smudging. Pedicures. When the show was canceled, Clive became a parody of himself. He posted Carl Jung quotes on social media. The bookshelves of his office were now lined with titles like The Anxiety of Presence and Past Life Regression. A four-hundred-page book called How to Breathe sat open in the corner where the DSM had once been. He also started closing his door to meditate, which we thought was bad until he stopped closing the door. We’d walk by and see him, sitting ramrod straight, eyes closed.

“Inner peace as outer performance,” Zach said, loud enough for Clive to hear.

“Don’t,” I said, sensing that ridicule might drive him further away.

“He can’t hear me. Can you, Clive?!”

Zach lamented that it was impossible to tell where Old Clive stopped and New Clive began. Still, I defended him. There was no such thing as New Clive. It was all an act on behalf of the magazine, on behalf of this institution we were rebuilding together. We would do the same if we were in his shoes. Sure, Clive would fold in the occasional pat therapy phrase—one had to “set one’s boundaries” and “keep one’s side of the street clean.” But he was still the person to whom I confided during the nights we put the magazine to bed. I knew him. I knew him best. But this was before. Before Clive began disappearing just as the magazine was dying, just when we needed him the most, before he began babbling about parallel universes and metaphysics.

And well before I’d been dragged to a secret lair on the Lower East Side with a fucking garden in it.

Clive said nothing. He just stood there, waiting for me to speak.

“And to think,” I said, “you’re not even Jewish.”

“Call it a rental,” he said, relaxing. “This place used to look like Dresden after the bombs.”

“You’re flipping synagogues now?”

“Have you had the coffee?”

“Did you guys drug the coffee?!”

Errol looked mortally offended. He coughed into his pocket square and excused himself from the room with a bow, the glass door rattling closed behind him.

“Forgive him,” Clive said. “The coffee bar is his baby. That’s a twenty-one-thousand-dollar machine. Italian. There’s usually a line but there’s practically no one here right now. Vadis and I didn’t want to freak you out.”

One thing that had never changed about Clive was that twinkling look in his eyes that said, you’re the experiment, I’m the control.

“I can’t imagine what you’re thinking,” he continued. “Will you sit? Please?”

I pulled out a chair across from Vadis, who was pretending to inspect her pussy willows for phantom abnormalities. Overcome with annoyance at her, I reached across the table and chucked them to the floor. Then I sat back. She folded her hands in her lap. There was a knock on the glass. Errol was back, gesticulating at the briefcase by Clive’s side.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Errol shouted, his voice muffled.

“Okay,” Clive snapped. “I know.”

Clive flicked open the latches of the briefcase and removed a piece of paper and a pen, both of which he slid in my direction, but not quite far enough. I reached for them. The paper had the same bowler hat logo in the corner as I’d seen on the card Vadis gave me. The paragraphs that followed forbade me from divulging “any proprietary information related, but not limited to, development projects to be performed by the Undersigned and those clients, customers, and entities now and in perpetuity.”

“An NDA? Are you serious?”

“Just sign it,” Vadis snapped. “I did.”

“That’s a comfort,” I said. “Is Errol your lawyer?”

“Errol manages this place,” he explained.

“Ah, yes. Someone to do all the work while you piss off to do radio appearances. Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Vadis snorted. Clive shot her a look. I scrawled my name.

“Welcome,” Clive said, lifting his arms in victory, “to the Golconda.”

“The who?”

“It’s the name of a very famous impenetrable seventeenth-century citadel in central India.”

“Not that famous.”

“It also happens to be the name of this…”

Clive swiveled and gestured at the painting behind him, at the men in bowler hats, arms at their sides. Dozens of men were spaced equally apart so that the effect was more like wallpaper. The eye had nowhere safe to land and so it was forced to treat the men as a natural phenomenon, like rain or dust. I preferred the one with the pipe.

“Neither floating nor falling,” Clive spoke to the painting. “Suspended. Paralyzed. Unable to move forward.”

“That’s not a print, is it?”

“It’s on loan.”

“Call it a rental?”

“Exactly. And now I have given the Golconda a third association. It’s the name of our little club or society, however you prefer to think of it.”