Crossroads

“I’m not stupid. I’m looking at it rationally.”

“You know, for a minute, I honestly thought you’d gotten me a present.”

Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship? He hadn’t come to Roder’s intending to end their (passive, complicit, drug-using) friendship. But it was true that all they ever did together anymore was get high.

“How about thirty dollars, then?” Perry’s face, too, was sweating. “So it’s partly a present, partly a, uh…”

Roder had turned away and opened a dresser drawer. He dropped two twenties on the bed. “You could have just asked for forty dollars. I would have given it to you.” He scooped up the asset and put it in the drawer. “Since when are you a dealer?”

Outside again, as he made his way down Pirsig Avenue, Perry tried to reconstruct why, fifteen minutes earlier, he hadn’t thought to just ask Roder for the money, perhaps as a “loan” that both of them knew would not be repaid, and then flush the asset down a toilet, achieving the same result without hurting his friend: why he hadn’t imagined Roder reacting the way he had, which now made perfect sense to him. Never mind the nine-year-old Perry: the fifteen-minutes-ago Perry was a stranger to him! Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

Whether it was the limitations of his intellect, vis-à-vis the mystery of the soul, or the difficulty of reconciling his new resolution with his thoughtless hurting of an old friend’s feelings, he felt a little downward tug inside him, the slipping of a gear, the first shadow of the end of feeling well, as he proceeded into the central shopping district of New Prospect. Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.

As if the feeling could be outrun, he trotted on to New Prospect Photo. The camera he’d found for Judson was a mint-condition twin lens reflex Yashica. It had sat behind the window on a small white pedestal among twenty other used and new cameras, and Judson had agreed it was a beauty. As Perry entered the store, he almost didn’t glance at the window. But the white of an empty pedestal caught his eye.

The Yashica was gone.

Gift of the Fucking Magi.

The store smelled of acid from the darkroom in the rear. Its owner, a hinily bald man, had an air of irritable oppression, understandable at a time when drugstores and shopping centers were killing his business. It was clear that when he looked up from the lens he was cleaning and saw Perry, a long-haired teenager, his first thought was shoplifter or waster of his time. Perry put his mind at ease by wishing him, with the intonation that bothered Becky, a very good afternoon. “I was hoping to purchase the twin lens reflex Yashica you’ve had in your window.”

“Sorry,” the owner said. “Sold it this morning.”

“That is very distressing.”

The owner tried to interest him in a shitty Instamatic, and then some ugly older cameras, while Perry tried not to show how offended he was by the suggestions. They’d arrived at an impasse when his eye fell on a beautiful thing under the glass-top counter. A compact movie camera, European-made. Burnished solid-metal body. Adjustable aperture. He recalled the old movie projector in the storage room at home, the remnant of a more optimistic era, when the Hildebrandts might still have become a family that watched home movies as a close-knit group, and before the Reverend, set upon by wasps, had lost his camera over the side of a rowboat.

“That’s forty dollars,” the owner said. “It sold for twice that, new, in nineteen-forties dollars. It’s Regular 8, though. You have to load it in a bag.”

“May I see it?”

“It’s forty dollars.”

“May I see it?”

When Perry wound the mainspring and took a peek through the viewfinder’s luscious optics, he keenly wanted the camera for himself. Maybe Judson would share it with him?

Precisely the kind of thought that his resolution insisted that he banish.