Crossroads

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 them, 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.