Crossroads

“It’s too late to go back,” he said. “She’s leaving in the morning.”

The receiver burst into an off-the-hook yammering.

“Then go there now,” his mother said.

Why Perry, late in the evening, was on the far side of the tracks, in the prospectless part of New Prospect where streets of sorry little houses dead-ended at the rail embankment, was a question answerable only in the narrowest pragmatic sense. To address the greater why of it required a framework of ratiocination whose pointlessness was now evident. As he trotted along Terminal Street, the snow squeaking beneath his feet, he felt pursued by an expanding black crater. Before it caught up and swallowed him, he needed to reach the house whose threshold he hadn’t expected to cross again. Under the circumstances, this seemed excusable.

The crater had appeared after he confessed to his mother that he’d sold contraband. Although the confession had been strategic, a matter of securing her complicity against the raging of his father, should his misconduct ever come to general light, he’d been prepared to shed some tears, as he’d done with impressive success at Crossroads, in order to be forgiven. But his mother hadn’t seemed to care. She hadn’t scolded him; hadn’t even asked questions. The effect, when he left her to her cigarette and went downstairs, had been to render him defenseless against the mental crater that had opened.

He’d set out in the snow for Ansel Roder’s house. Surely, if only tonight, he was permitted to get very high. The anticipation of toke after toke in the trusty seclusion of the Roder swimming-pool shed, the foretaste of deliberately massive excess, the imminence of futurity-banishing befuddlement, was giving him a boner that grew harder as he imagined the pleasure of servicing it, while extremely high, in the bathroom Roder shared with his skinny, non-bra-wearing sister, Annette, when she was home from college. Annette was dry of wit, a junior at Grinnell, and had an oily, rough complexion that only added to her allure. She was close to Perry’s ideal, female-wise, and seemed approximately as attainable to him as the Andromeda Galaxy.

Embarrassingly, Annette herself answered his ringing of the Roder doorbell. He couldn’t look at her face; could barely find the voice to ask for Ansel. In his cheap parka, his dorkoid rubbers, his arrant craving, he was every inch the repulsive little worm. All he could do was wait for her to turn away. His desperation to be high and by himself, in a locked bathroom, was approaching intolerable. Through the open front door, he saw scintillant orange in the Roder fireplace. The fireplace was outsized, manorial, and burned longer split logs than he’d seen anywhere else.

Roder, when he came to the door, barefoot, seemed pre-annoyed. “What do you want?”

“I’d like to come in,” Perry said. “If I may.”

“Not a good time. We’re playing canasta.”

“Canasta.”

“It’s a holiday tradition. It’s actually pretty fun.”

“You and your family are playing a card game.”

“Troll the ancient yuletide carol and the like. Yes.”

The Roders were even less a family unit than the Hildebrandts. Their doing a fun thing together was unusual to the point of seeming cosmically unjust. Without looking behind him, Perry could sense the dark crater widening toward him.

“Well, then,” he said, his throat thick with disappointment, “I wonder, if you have a second—I made a small error in judgment today. A miscalculation.”

“Seriously, man.” Roder began to close the door. “Not a good time.”

“If you could just quickly run and get me one of the bags. Help a friend.”

“We’re playing a game here.”

“You mentioned that. If you’d like, I can give you some cash.”

Roder made a face, as if repulsed by a worm.

“Ansel, come on. When have I ever come to you like this?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned money. That was a mistake—I’m sorry.”

Roder shut the door in his face. Out of reach, not fifty feet from where he stood, in a drawer in Roder’s bedroom, were three ounces of weed, schoolyard in quality but adequate to the task at hand, and he couldn’t even blame the cosmos. It was he who’d offended Roder. By proposing a deal today, he’d rendered glaring a fact heretofore overlookable in the bonhomie of being high, of Roder’s generosity and his own capacity to amuse. The fact was that he didn’t love Roder. He loved drugs.

Pursued by the crater’s edge, he made his way to First Reformed. Of the friends of his who might be holding, only Roder wasn’t in Crossroads, and so the concert was his only recourse. His mother had lost her mind. She’d been committed to a loony bin, her father had drowned himself, and she’d named these facts to Perry—named two outcomes that had lurked behind doors in his head which he’d never permitted himself to open, not even on the most sleepless of nights. And yet, as if with X-ray vision, telekinetic intelligence, he must have seen through the shut doors, because nothing she’d told him had surprised him. He’d had only a dull sense of recognition. The outcomes were ugly but not shocking; he knew their faces.