Perry grasped the arms of his pawn and looked into his eyes. “Just do it. You’ll thank me for it later.”
To observe his power over Larry was to push back the edge of the crater. There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person. From the outer doorway, he watched Larry hustle across the parking lot.
While Laura Dobrinsky, now seated at the church’s baby grand piano, belted out a Carole King song, he returned to the crowd and maneuvered through it, stopping for a hug from a Crossroads girl who’d confessed to being awed by his vocabulary, and a hug from a girl who’d challenged him to be more emotionally open, and a hug from a girl with whom he’d improvised a skit about the hazards of dishonesty, to much approbation, and a hug from a girl who’d vouchsafed to him, in a dyad, that she’d gotten her first period before she turned eleven, and then a thumbs-up from the boy who’d helped him with the concert posters, and a friendly nod from no less an eminence than Ike Isner, whose face he’d once palpated, while blindfolded, in a trust exercise, and whose blind fingers had then palpated his own face. None of these people could see inside his cranium, all had been fooled into applauding his emotional candor and collectively propelling him, with a kind of gently pulsing group action, like macroscopic cilia, in the direction of belonging to the Crossroads inner circle. The hugs in particular were still pleasant, but the edge of the crater was creeping up on him again, now taking the form of a classic depressive question: What was the point? The inner circle had no actual power. It was merely the goal of an abstract game.
Near the corner of the stage, by an American flag, which the church for unknowable reasons felt obliged to display on a pole, he found all his old friends in one tight group. Bobby Jett and Keith Stratton were there with David Goya and his ill-complected girlfriend, Kim, and also Becky, by whose side stood an older man, unfamiliar to Perry, lavishly sideburned and wearing a belted orange leather coat, who might have stepped off the set of The Mod Squad. Kim promptly hugged Perry, and he was pleased to detect a whiff of skunk in her hair. Where there was dope, there was hope. Becky only waved to him, but not unkindly. She looked taller to him somehow, radiantly okay, as if to accentuate his own runtiness, his galloping not-okayness.
Onstage, Tanner Evans had taken up an acoustic guitar, his Afro’d friend a banjo, and the Bleu Notes had rolled into a theologically tendentious ballad whose lyrics were known to Perry, because it was the semiofficial theme song of Crossroads, purportedly written by Tanner Evans himself, and was often sung at the end of Sunday-night meetings.
The song is in the changes not the notes
I was looking for a thing
Couldn’t find it in myself
Until I met somebody else
And I found it in between
Yeah, the song is in the changes not the notes
Becky seemed enthralled by the performance, the sideburned modster possibly a bit enthralled with Becky, but David Goya, who enjoyed amending the line I found it in between to I found it between her legs, was gazing at the crowd like a deaf old man puzzled by visual evidence of sound. Perry tugged on his sleeve and led him out into the hallway.
“Are you holding?” he said.
In the hallway light, Goya’s eyes were bloodshot, his expression wistful. “Sadly, I am not.”
“Then who is? If I may ask.”
“At this late hour, I couldn’t tell you. Demand was early and brisk.”
“David. Did you think I wasn’t coming?”
“What can I say? Events have taken their course. And now, yes, all pockets are empty. You should have been here with your sister.”
“My sister?”
“Is there a problem? Do we not like Becky?”
Something evil, the edge of the crater, was nipping the undersides of Perry’s heels. Evidently, despite the recent forward stride in relations with his sister, the cessation of hostilities, her larger project of dispossessing him was ongoing.
“Apropos of which,” Goya said. “Were you aware that she’s with Tanner Evans? Did you know this and not tell us?”
Perry stared at the brass handles of the doors to the function hall, behind which the Bleu Notes were doing better justice to “The Song Is in the Changes” than was done on Sunday nights.
“We have eyewitness reports of smooching,” Goya said. “Kim is—what’s the word. Kim is agog.”
Down down down. Perry was going down.
“Can we go to your house?” he said. “I was—that is … Can we do a resupply run?”