Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.
“Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you,” he said from the doorway. “But I need you to go somewhere else.”
Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. “First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.”
“Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.”
Judson, not budging, said, “What do you feel like doing today?”
A sideways question.
“Right now,” Perry said, “I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.”
“Later, though.”
“I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.”
“They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?”
“Possibly until dinnertime.”
“I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?”
“I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.”
A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.
“I mean, yes,” he said. “But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?”
Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. “Promise?”
Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of Stratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.
But what did that even mean? If the soul was merely a psychic artifact created by the body, it was tautologically self-evident why Perry’s soul was in Perry and not in Judson. And yet it didn’t feel self-evident. The reason he wondered if the soul might be independent and immutable was his persistent sense of how odd it was, how seemingly random, that his soul had landed where it had. Try as he might, altered or sober, he could never quite solve—or even properly articulate—the mystery of his happening to be Perry. It wasn’t at all clear to him what Becky, for example, had done to deserve being Becky, or when exactly （in an earlier incarnation?） she’d earned that privilege. She just found herself being Becky, around whom the heavens revolved; and this, too, confounded him.
A delicious faint skunk smell wafted off the asset when he opened the strongbox. The asset consisted of three ounces of weed, in double Baggies, and twenty-one Quaaludes, the remnant of a wholesale buy that, like every previous buy, had cost him nearly unendurable anxiety and shame. He stared at it in frank disbelief that he was going to part with it for nothing in return but the putative joy of Christmas giving. So very cruel, his resolution. He thought he might love being high a little less than he loved his brother, but he wasn’t sure that when his mind was racing and one night in bed felt like a month of nights he didn’t love two Quaaludes better. Aye, that was the question: whether to shove the whole fucking asset in the pocket of his parka and be done with it, or to sleep tonight. The weed alone would fetch him thirty dollars, more cash than he needed. Why not hold back a few ’ludes? For that matter, why not hold back all of them?
Eleven days earlier, in an eerie correlative of the cosmic lottery in which his soul had drawn the name Perry, he’d plucked the name Becky H from a pile of folded slips on the linoleum floor of the function hall at First Reformed. （What were the chances? About one in fifty-five—a hundred million times greater than the chances of being Perry, but still rather low.） As soon as he’d seen his sister’s name, he’d sidled back toward the pile, hoping to trade in his slip for a different one, but a Crossroads adviser was standing there to guard against this sort of cheating. Ordinarily, when it came time to choose partners for a “dyad” exercise, Rick Ambrose directed everyone to pick a person they didn’t know well or hadn’t shared with recently. The previous Sunday, however, one of the inner-circle twelfth graders, Ike Isner, had stood up and complained to the group that people were choosing too many “safe” partners and avoiding risky ones. In good Stalinist show-trial fashion, with a display of strong emotion, Isner confessed that he was guilty of this himself. The group immediately drenched him with approval for his courageous honesty. Someone then proposed a lottery system, against which another inner-circler argued that they ought to take personal responsibility for their choices, rather than relying on a mechanical system, but the proposal carried a group vote by a wide margin—Perry, as was his habit, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before raising his hand in favor.