Crossroads Page 55

  “I’m not surprised,” Bear said. “That shit is pure evil.”

  That Perry liked Bear was irrelevant. That Bear liked Perry, and allowed him to make house calls, was a blessing portending a new phase of rightness. Bear, who’d also sold to Ansel Roder, had zero personal attributes in common with the guy on Felix Street. He was burly and mellow, seemingly unafraid of the law, and reassuringly acquainted with several such Crossroads alumni as Laura Dobrinsky. His house, a trek of thirty minutes from the Crappier Parsonage, belonged to a grandmother who now dwelt in a nursing home. Perry had never had a grandmother, but he recognized the grandmaternal smell in the walls, the grandmaternal hand in the embroidered sheer curtains in the living room, where Bear, of an afternoon, drank Löwenbräu and read the many magazines he subscribed to. Clearly, the key to longevity as a dealer was to be like Bear. He dealt exclusively in naturally derived substances, mostly pot and hash but also, as Perry learned after explaining his energy requirements, the odd gram of cocaine, to oblige some of the musicians among his clientele.

  On his first visit, Perry left with a forty-dollar sample. Did someone say love at first snort? He was back two days later. This time, Bear had company, a comely personage in a leather miniskirt, drinking her own Löwenbräu, and Perry feared that his arrival was unwelcome. But Bear was mellow, and his lady friend, on learning what Perry was about, brightened as though she’d remembered that today was a holiday. Already, after only two days, Perry wondered how a person even casually acquainted with cocaine could ever, for a moment, not be wondering if some of it might be close at hand; how the thought had managed to absent itself from her head. Further speeding his heart, as Bear convivially treated them, was the thrill of his singularity (if anyone else at New Prospect High had used the fabled drug of Casey Jones, Perry was unaware of it) and his inclusion by two sophisticated people in their twenties. Among their topics of lively discussion were the most interesting drug they’d ever taken, the drug they were keenest to try (“Peyote,” Bear declared), the lucky star that Perry could thank for not having been robbed by a needle-using freak, the contrasting benignancy of a plant-based alkaloid that didn’t turn its users into paranoid maniacs, the experiments of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the hypocritical distinction between prescription drugs and street drugs, and the rumors of the Beatles reuniting, the grating self-importance of Grand Funk Railroad. Perry was very merry, and his very merriness served the ends of his unsleeping rationality. His first-order need was that Bear like him and trust him. His second-order need was to deflect attention from a glaring difference between himself and Bear, namely, that Bear was mellow. One snort made Bear an even happier Bear and was enough. Perry, who was the nth degree of the opposite of mellow, struggled fiercely to control his eyeballs, which wanted only to follow the coke.

  Bear’s mellowness, it emerged, concealed a stubborn will. His coke sales were a sideline, subject to constraints of availability at the wholesale level, and his other buyers, though few and irregular, were loyal to him. Perry, as a newcomer, was eligible for only half a gram. When he offered to pay a premium for more, Bear pretended not to hear him. Bear was being irrational—it was tiresome and risky to make Perry come a-scoring so often—but Perry, guided by rationality, gave their relationship some weeks to grow before he made his proposition.

  Bear whistled. “That’s a shitload.”

  “I’m more than happy to prepay you for your trouble.”

  “Cost isn’t the issue.”

  “As much as I enjoy our little chats, it might be better if we had them less frequently. Don’t you think?”

  “Honestly? I think you’ll blow through whatever you get and be back here in a week.”

  “Not true!”

  “I’m not cool with where this is going.”

  “But—you’ll see—that is—it’s cool. Just give me a chance.”

  It might have been the sight of twenty fifty-dollar bills, crisp from the presses, satisfying to riffle, that turned the tide in Perry’s favor. Bear grumpily took the money and sent him away with his nearly weightless allowance. In the ensuing fortnight, Perry visited him twice more without getting his thousand dollars’ worth. Did there then come a night when he focused the full might of his mind on imagining into existence—on willing into being—a trace of the powder that had so lately and whitely existed but now, owing to a traitorous improvidence of the body, did not? There came more than one such night. And did there then come a day when Bear answered the doorbell and merely handed him a slip of paper?

  “His name is Eddie. He’s got what you paid for.”

  “May I come in?”

  “No. Sorry. You’re a sweet kid, but I can’t see you anymore.”

  The door closed. For various reasons, sheer physical exhaustion perhaps primary among them, Perry burst into tears. Was it then that the speck of dark matter first appeared? He felt that he loved Bear, admittedly on short acquaintance, more than he’d ever loved any other person. His forfeiture of Bear’s affection was a blow so devastating that it actually chased from his mind all thought of white powder. Only when he was home again, having blubbered himself out, did he recollect what the seven digits on the slip of paper represented. His mind exploded as if he’d inhaled the whole of it.

  He did not love Eddie, and Eddie did not love him. Their first encounter had a flavor of Felix Street, and their one subsequent transaction, which more than completed the exhaustion of the funds that Becky had transferred to him, left him seething with hatred of Eddie, who he was absolutely sure had cheated him. Again, it was only afterward that he recalled how fucking much drug, even after being cheated, he’d come to possess. Three tightly lidded film canisters: that was something. Never again, or at least not for an extremely long while, would he find himself dying of empty-handedness.

  And yet, if three canisters was excellent, how much more excellent six would have been. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. Was there a multiple of three of whiteness large enough to permanently set his mind at rest? The dark speck, the mental floater, was there again. It no longer seemed that money spent brought double benefit. Money spent was simply money gone. In his savings passbook, perilously exposed to prying parental eyes, stood the sorry figure of $188.85, and even genius had its limits. He didn’t see how one hundred and eighty-nine dollars could be compounded, quickly, into thirty-five hundred …

  Larry was snoring. The sound accorded so closely with the platonic form of “snore sound” that Perry wondered if it might be fake. He lay still, and the snores grew louder. By and by, they terminated in a choking gasp, the rustle of Larry repositioning himself. There followed fainter snores, unquestionably authentic. Perry now dared—first things first; throw the nerves a bone—to open the canister and insert a moistened finger. He tapped the finger on the canister’s rim, very carefully, and introduced it to his mouth. He dipped again and pushed the finger deep into a nostril, removed it and breathed deeply, sucked the finger clean and used his tongue as a gum swab. The localized numbing was metonymic of a more general cessation of his nervous system’s hostilities against the mind. Although the rush had of late been feeble, he at least was no longer at odds with himself. He capped the canister and slowly sat upright. His boots were by the door, the money in the toe of one of them, everything perfectly foreseen. The now deafening beating of his heart served also to deafen Larry, because it had to; because the sound was God’s own. As maternal heartbeats were said to soothe prenatal babies, His own cosmic heartbeats lulled every one of His children. Oh, how He loved them! He felt He could have killed them all or saved them all, just by willing it, so loud were His coked-up heartbeats as He proceeded to ease open the dorm-room door.

  An exit sign glowed in the dark hallway. At the far end, fluorescent light spilled weakly from the lounge. It was difficult to return to human chronology and make sense of his watch, but he grasped that he still had thirty-five minutes. He pocketed the money, put on his boots, and crept past other rooms commandeered by Crossroads. From one of t
hem, he could hear the muted squeak of girl voices, distressingly awake. What needed to be done about them must have been self-evident, because he found himself, a seeming instant later, sitting in a bathroom stall and propelling into his sinuses, from the base of his thumb, a large and sloppy pour. It was very curious. How did an all-seeing Entity end up on a toilet seat without knowing how he’d gotten there? Casting his mind’s eye back over the preceding moments, he encountered an occlusion. The speck of dark matter now seemed larger; could, indeed, no longer be referred to as a speck; was perhaps better described as an uneasy semitransparency, a poorly demarcated blob. He couldn’t pin it down for examination, but he sensed its malignant saturation with knowledge contradicting his own. It was unbelievable! Unbelievable that God Himself should have a floater in His eye! God was very, very wrathful. His wrath, having nowhere else to vent itself, took the form of three further massive boosts in quick succession. If wild excess killed the body, then so be it.

  He got his pants down just in time. The body, rather than dying, was defecating like an upside-down volcano. Into the stench, amid a flashing of alien lights, an apocalyptic pounding in his chest, came a blessedly rational insight: this was what happened when a person overindulged. To entertain this thought, however, was to perceive its irrelevance. Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit. Instead he shat again, and none of this had been foreseen. If foreknowledge of this supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression had resided anywhere, it had been in the hazy blob of dark matter, not in his mind.

  Wiping his ass in a cramped Navajo bathroom stall, shackled by dropped trousers and distracted by the flashes of a thousand splinters, by the choking engorgement of his carotid, he forgot to be mindful of his canister’s whereabouts. As soon as he remembered, he confidently foresaw that he’d capped it and set it aside. But no. Oh, no no no no no. He’d knocked it over on the floor. Its scattered contents were thirstily absorbing a trickle from the toilet’s leaking seal. They’d formed a watery paste that he now had no choice but to urge, with the side of his finger, back into the canister, even at the cost of dampening the powder still inside it. Nothing made any sense. The embodied clairvoyance that had crept down the hallway toward the execution of its masterstroke was now wiping up, with bits of toilet paper, a whitish alkaloid smear contaminated with fecal and perhaps even tubercular bacteria, sullying itself with the question of whether the alkaloid had antiseptic properties, whether the toilet paper could later be applied to his gums without the swallowing of pathogens, and whether, although he still felt close to throwing up, it wouldn’t be better to lick the floor than let any milligrams go to waste.

  A gag reflex dissuaded him from licking. He tamped the saturated toilet paper into the canister and screwed on the lid. And just like that—in an n-dimensioned wave of ecstasy, a rolling pan-cellular orgasm—he recalled that the object of his masterstroke was to secure an abundance of drug better measured in kilograms than in milligrams. Just like that, he emerged from life-threatening turbulence into the smoothest of highest-altitude flying, and everything made sense again. How had he questioned the rightness of his actions? How had he imagined that he’d overindulged? God didn’t err! He was superb! Superb! He’d pushed through the body’s limits to the highest realm of being. The speck of dark matter had shrunk to the point of disappearing, was again so tiny that God could love it, was dear and unthreatening and did not, after all, know anything, or maybe one small thing …

  now you’ve seen hadn’t you better won’t take but a minute

  Getting the speck’s message—that there might come, tonight, a moment when he felt a notch less superb, which couldn’t be allowed to happen—he stole back down the hallway and slipped into his room. His other canister, the full and fully dry one, was at the center of a sock ball in his duffel bag. He’d brought it along with no intention of dipping into it. He’d been motivated by a last-minute paranoia, a seemingly irrational fear of leaving his entire reserve in the parsonage basement, well hidden behind the oil burner but unguarded. Now he saw that it hadn’t been irrational at all. It had been perfect foresight.

  “Perry?”

  The voice, in the dark, sounded like Larry’s, but this didn’t mean that Larry was awake. Part of becoming God was hearing the voices of His children’s thoughts. So far, the voices had been too low to be intelligible. More like the random murmur in Union Station. He unballed the sock and put the wonderfully weighted canister in the leg pocket of his painter pants. Sweet-caustic alkaloid juices continued to drain behind his septum.

  “What are you doing?”

  If Perry’s vision had truly been perfect, unmarred by the dark speck, he might have succeeded in extinguishing Larry. The power to kill by thinking was divine. The flaw in his power was like a smudge on the lens of an infinitely powerful telescope.

  “Perry?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to the lounge. Stick your nose in the bathroom if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m having the opposite problem. I’m totally constipated.”

  Perry stood up and moved toward the door. Already he felt a notch less superb.

  “Can we talk for a minute?”

  “No,” Perry said.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?”

  “All I do is talk to you. We’re together all the time.”

  “I know, but…” Larry sat up on his bunk. “I don’t really feel like I’m with you. It’s like you’re in some kind of … place. Do you know what I mean? You haven’t even had a shower since we got here.”

  If Larry couldn’t see the absurdity of showering, didn’t have a deity’s intense distaste for it, there was no point in explaining.

  “I’m trying to be honest,” Larry said. “I’m telling you how you seem to me. And one thing I think is you really need to take a shower.”

  “Understood. Sleep tight.”

  “It’s not just me, though. People think you’re being really weird.”

  Perry now sensed an alliance between Larry and the speck of dark matter, a kindred possession of contradictory knowledge.

  “I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you,” Larry said. “I’m your friend, we’re in Crossroads. You can tell me anything you want.”

  “I think you’re evil,” Perry said. The rightness of this verdict was thrilling. “I think the powers of darkness are gathered in you.”

  Larry produced an emotional sound. “That’s—a joke, right?”

  “Far from it. I think you want to fuck your mother.”

  “Jesus, Perry.”

  “My dad’s the same way—I have it on good authority. You need to mind your own business. All you people, just stay the fuck out of my way. Can you do that for me?”

  There was a silence made imperfect by a Navajo’s distant hot rod. Larry’s pale face, in the obscurity above, was like a death’s-head. The thought came to Perry that infinite power was infinitely terrible. How could God endure all the smiting He had to do? With infinite power came infinite pity.

  Larry swung his legs off the bunk. “I’m getting Kevin.”

  “Don’t do that. I was—my joke was in poor taste. I apologize.”

  “You’re really scaring me.”

  “Do not get Kevin. What we both need now is shut-eye. If I promise to take a shower, will you go back to sleep?”

  “I can’t. I’m worried about you.”

  However he might extinguish Larry, whether with blunt-object blows or strangling hands, there was bound to be an overhearable commotion.

  “Just let me visit the facilities again. I’m having quite the roiling and boiling. Quite the industrial gas factory. Just stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  Without waiting for a response, he darted from the room and flew down the h
allway on wings of powder. As if he’d sailed off a cliff, he achieved fabulous velocity before hard ground, in the form of coronary limits made stricter by low atmospheric oxygen levels, stopped him dead. He turned, gasping, to see if the evil one had left their room. Not a sound!

  The dormitory doors were locked at night, but from the lounge’s window to the pavement was a jump (or climb, as the case would later be) of only five feet. Outside, in freezing air, he paused to touch the money in his jacket, the canisters in his pants. One more quick boost: advisable? Though he was now perhaps two notches below the most sensational high he’d ever experienced, the cold was bitter. A metallic taste of blood was in his windpipe, and he still wasn’t far from throwing up. Press on, sir. Press on.

  The young Navajos he’d befriended the night before were meeting him at the off-brand gas station up the road from the dormitory. He’d found the two of them shooting baskets beneath a billboard for the Best Western Canyon de Chelly whose lights indirectly illuminated a hoop and a crude backboard bolted to one of its stanchions. The younger Navajo had a deep, irregular scar from the bridge of his nose to his jaw. The older fellow was groovier and longer-haired, dressed in bell-bottom corduroys with a large silver belt buckle. At their urging, Perry had displayed his pathetic lack of ball skills, and by submitting to their derision, giggling along with it, he’d secured their trust. When he then broached the crucial subject, their laughter reached new heights.

  “But seriously,” he said.

  Their hilarity was ongoing. “You want to try peyote?”

  “No,” he said. “That is—no offense intended—it’s not for my own use. I’m looking to obtain a large quantity. Perhaps a pound of it or more. I have the money.”

  Of everything he’d said, this was apparently the most pants-wettingly funny. His foresight had allowed for the necessity of casting many a line before he got a bite, and he judged that it was time to try a different pond. He sidled away.