Crossroads

In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.

On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.

Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequelae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities. His rationality was blazing and tireless and all-seeing, and the problem of Larry made him sensible of the cost of ceaseless blazing, the body’s need for a little boost. The emptier of his two aluminum film canisters was in his pants pocket. He could rub sustenance into his gums without a sound, but he was plagued by unknowns, such as whether his sleeping bag would sufficiently muffle the sound of a lid’s unscrewing. Whether he could open the canister blindly without spilling. (Even a microgram of spillage was unacceptable.) Whether it was wise to partake at all from a canister already so depleted. Whether he shouldn’t at least wait until he could give himself a superior boost nasally. Whether, on second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to strangle the person whose interminable throat clearings were standing between him and that boost …

Unh! The whether whether whether was of the body and its arrangement, its side deal, with the powder. Wholly apart from his body, lambent in his mind even now, was a key to millennia of fruitless speculation. It happened that, very recently, less than a week ago, he’d solved the puzzle of the world’s persistent talk of God. The solution was that he, Perry, was God. The realization had frightened him, but it was followed by a second realization: if a felonious and drug-addicted New Prospect Township High School sophomore was God, then anyone at all could be God. This was the amazing key. The amazement, indeed, was that he hadn’t seen it sooner. It had stared him in the face the previous summer, when he’d inked out the Gods in the Reverend’s clerical magazine and replaced them with Steves. How had he failed, that day, to grasp a key so exquisitely simple? The key was that Steve could be God. So could every other Tom, Dick, and Harry—all any of them had to do was open his eyes to his divinity. The instant a person experienced the mind’s truly limitless capacities, God’s existence became the opposite of preposterous. It became preposterously self-evident.

The revelation had occurred on Maple Avenue, minutes after he’d withdrawn $2,825.00 from his brother’s passbook account at Cook County Savings Bank. The teller had counted the bills and then counted them again out loud, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty, and five, and tucked them into a nifty brown envelope. The rush of success was so titanic, he imagined an ejaculation blotting out the heavens. Knowledge so perfect could only have been God’s, and if he, Perry, possessed it, then what did this make him? In his earlier lunch-hour casings of the bank, he’d ascertained that the older, gray-haired teller, with whom he’d had dealings, was nowhere to be seen at 12:15. Behind the window, instead, was a frizzy-haired mademoiselle still sporting orthodontia, thus undoubtedly (beyond all question!) too new at the bank to know Clem. The scarlet-nailed hand that had taken his passbook was marvelously inexpert.