“Go in hard, stick it to them, make them think twice,” said Richard. “Five grand. We’ll pay.”

“Go ahead, Perkus,” I heard myself say. “Do it, please.” Meanwhile the chaldron just went on shining its strange light on our absurd lusts, egging us on and shaming us all at once.

“It’s a good investment,” said Richard, in his crude way reading my mind exactly. “That thing’s obviously worth ten times that much. If it’s trading like this on eBay, for fuck’s sake, imagine what it would bring if it were handled right. It should be for sale at Sotheby’s.”

Georgina Hawkmanaji gripped Richard’s arm. “You wouldn’t dare speak of reselling it.”

“No, no, I’m just saying we should blow these small-time operators out of the fucking soup. Bid already, Perkus.”

“I am.” He entered the five thousand as a reserve bid, to be allocated in hundred-dollar jumps, so when he checked the bid list his on-screen name-Brando12-now appeared at the top, bearing the current leading offer of thirty-one hundred. Someone else lurking as we were must have already offered a reserve to the tune of three thousand. We all four breathed at a different rate, breathed at all for the first time really, since learning the ghostly ceramic was destined for some other hands than ours.

Only Richard wasn’t satisfied. “Why doesn’t it say five grand?”

“We don’t want to pay more than we have to,” I said, thinking it needed explaining.

“To hell with that. I want them to feel who they’re up against!” As if to confirm that our rivals were simultaneously more pathetic and more expert than ourselves, the bidders we’d topped were named Chaldronlover6 and Crazy4Chaldrons. That they seemed to have no other life confirmed that we deserved the chaldron more, yet this was no consolation, for not to have a chaldron was to have no life at all.

“Spoken like a representative of the Arnheim administration,” said Perkus. “Maybe you should have the other bidders all arrested. Then you can seize the chaldron as evidence.”

“No,” said Richard, with a husky note of urgency, even terror, in his voice, as if Perkus’s taunts outlined some real prospect, one within Richard’s scope. “This isn’t for… them. This is for us.”

“Yes, for us,” said Georgina, almost singing the words. Her tone, balm to Richard’s fury, was at the same time beseeching, a prayer or invocation over the battle we’d entered.

“We’ll keep the chaldron at my place,” I said, thinking ahead. “Seeing as how I live sort of at the midpoint of our various apartments. We can build some kind of special display case-”

“Perhaps this marvelous pottery ought to spend time in each of our homes,” said Georgina.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to treat it like a child in a divorce,” said Perkus.

“We need four,” said Richard.

“We don’t even have one yet,” said Perkus.

We spoke wildly, one eye on the clock ticking down on-screen, feeling invisible enemies crawling nearer to our prize with each silent digital heartbeat. Maybe the music and Ice were wearing off, maybe we weren’t entirely worthy, maybe we weren’t remotely worthy, anyway somehow the chaldron seemed to recede before us, no less potent but more distant, as if preparing us for goodbyes. The chaldron wasn’t to blame, we’d hardly hold it against that pale magnanimous container, but it seemed to wish to ease us toward an inevitable farewell, toward heartbreak. We were going to have to try to pretend we were content to be just friends. Perkus refreshed the page. The current bid was at five thousand and fifty. Perkus checked the history-the bidder was Crazy4Chaldrons. The auction closed in four minutes.

“Who are these fucking fucks?” said Richard.

“Tax-paying citizens like yourself,” said Perkus impartially.

“You don’t know for a fact that I pay taxes,” said Richard. “Raise on them, hurry up.”

“Five thousand, one hundred?” I suggested.

“Fifty-dollar increments is Tinkertoy stuff,” said Richard. “That’s how I know we’re going to kick the ass of these clowns. Make it fifty-five hundred.”

“Neither of these two is going to win it,” Perkus predicted, even as he entered the new bid. “One of the really big players will be coming in any second now.”

Perkus entered the bid, and we stared as his computer reconstructed the page with agonizing slowness. By the time it resolved an image our offer was irrelevant, had already been surpassed. The present sum was six thousand. Then, six thousand and fifty, Crazy4Chaldrons pitting against Chaldronlover6, ourselves an afterthought, fans in the upper deck bellowing inaudibly at the on-field action.

“Nooooo,” wailed Richard.

“Excuse me,” said Georgina Hawkmanaji. “I fear I am going to be ill.” She lurched out of Richard’s lap. “Where… I’m sorry…”

“Off the kitchen,” said Perkus, bearing down on his keyboard.

Georgina teetered on her heels. Richard didn’t glance away from the screen. I took the Hawkman by the elbow and steered her through the kitchen, aimed her at Perkus’s small bathroom. She raised her hand in hasty thanks, then shut the door behind her before finding the pull string for the bare bulb overhead. It was too late to point it out. I returned to Richard and Perkus and the calamitous auction. They’d bid seven grand, now waited for the screen to confirm it. With less than two minutes to the auction’s close, the top number came in at seven thousand and fifty.

“More, more!”

Perkus tried, heartlessly, I could see. The number swelled to eight, then nine thousand, our own bids never even reaching the top of the list, perhaps not even driving the others. We never held on the item’s main page long enough for Perkus’s rotten dial-up connection to complete the chaldron’s image, so it now remained elusive, jittery, wreathed in chunky pixels as if fatigued by our strident love. In the bathroom behind us Georgina could be heard decorously puking, the intervals between heaves filled by labored snuffling breath and a kittenish, unself-pitying whimper, as if in time to what now sounded like a psychedelic banjo number from Sandy Bull.

“Keep it on-screen!” yelled Richard. “Quit checking their names! Who cares!”

“You’ll want to see this,” Perkus promised.

“Richard,” I said. “Do you want to… go to Georgina? Do you want me to do something?”

He waved me off. “She’ll be okay. She barfs easily, it’s no big deal.”

What Perkus revealed to us was the list of bidders, Crazy4Chaldrons and Chaldronlover6, not to mention Brando12’s feeble contributions, now buried beneath two other rivals whose names were veiled beneath the words “private listing-bidders’ identities protected.” From this vantage we watched as this masked pair ran away with the bidding, topping one another by hundred, then two-hundred, then at last five-hundred-dollar increments, each time Perkus tapped Refresh. Our pretenses were shattered. We’d never been in the game, never been near to in it. The Hawkman’s heaving tailed away, and we heard the toilet flush twice. The digital clock ticked out the fateful irreversible instant. The chaldron had sold for fourteen thousand dollars.

“They can’t hide like that, it’s un-American,” said Richard despondently, his heart not in his own bitter joke.

“So, the way I see it, Crazy and Lover are fools like us, they’ve never been any nearer than bidding, never held a chaldron in their hands, never even been in the same room with one…” Perkus began this monologue absently, to no one of us in particular. Richard and I had fallen back, distraught and disenchanted, from the screen, while Georgina staggered back into our midst, breathing heavily, moistening her lips with her tongue, and Sandy Bull put down his banjo and picked up his guitar again. Losing the auction felt like soul-death, or at least a soul-shriveling, like the endorphin debt incurred by an all-night binge on Ecstasy, a trauma for which all among us but Perkus had been grievously unready. “They never win, so far as I can tell. Who knows, they may have my attitude, that the rapture is contained merely in bidding. One of those anonymous heavyweights always blows them out of-what did you call it, Abneg? — the soup, at the last second. Collectors with money to burn, they’re surely stacking up warehouses full of the things, like at the end of Citizen Kane. And their computers are probably a lot faster than mine, it’s a terrific advantage. I’ve heard it’s possible to set up subroutines that fire off a bid at the last second, mechanically ensuring that no one else can top it.”