“Really. And so you’re selling … It’s like that story—Gift of the Madgie?”
“Mā-jī.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if Jay sold his, I don’t know, so he could buy you a water pipe? Et cetera.”
“‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a story about irony, yes.”
Roder poked at the asset, perhaps counting the pills. “How much money do you need?”
“Forty dollars would be good.”
“Why don’t I just loan it to you.”
“Because we’re friends and I don’t know how I’d pay you back.”
“You mowing lawns again next summer?”
“I’m supposed to be saving for college. There’s some oversight of my earnings.”
Roder shut his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. “Then how did you manage to buy this shit? Have you been stealing?”
Perry’s palms began to sweat. “That’s really neither here nor there.”
“But don’t you think it would be a little weird if you ended up burning this with me after I had to buy it off you?”
“I won’t do that.”
Roder made a skeptical sound. This was the moment for Perry to announce, per the terms of his resolution, that he wouldn’t be burning anything with anyone anymore. But, again, the reluctance.
“Look,” he said, “I know I can’t be as generous as you are. But if you consider it rationally, I don’t see why it matters who you bought from if the outlay is the same either way.”
“Because it does, and I’m surprised you can’t see why.”
“I’m not stupid. I’m looking at it rationally.”
“You know, for a minute, I honestly thought you’d gotten me a present.”
Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship? He hadn’t come to Roder’s intending to end their （passive, complicit, drug-using） friendship. But it was true that all they ever did together anymore was get high.
“How about thirty dollars, then?” Perry’s face, too, was sweating. “So it’s partly a present, partly a, uh…”
Roder had turned away and opened a dresser drawer. He dropped two twenties on the bed. “You could have just asked for forty dollars. I would have given it to you.” He scooped up the asset and put it in the drawer. “Since when are you a dealer?”
Outside again, as he made his way down Pirsig Avenue, Perry tried to reconstruct why, fifteen minutes earlier, he hadn’t thought to just ask Roder for the money, perhaps as a “loan” that both of them knew would not be repaid, and then flush the asset down a toilet, achieving the same result without hurting his friend: why he hadn’t imagined Roder reacting the way he had, which now made perfect sense to him. Never mind the nine-year-old Perry: the fifteen-minutes-ago Perry was a stranger to him! Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?
Whether it was the limitations of his intellect, vis-à-vis the mystery of the soul, or the difficulty of reconciling his new resolution with his thoughtless hurting of an old friend’s feelings, he felt a little downward tug inside him, the slipping of a gear, the first shadow of the end of feeling well, as he proceeded into the central shopping district of New Prospect. Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.
As if the feeling could be outrun, he trotted on to New Prospect Photo. The camera he’d found for Judson was a mint-condition twin lens reflex Yashica. It had sat behind the window on a small white pedestal among twenty other used and new cameras, and Judson had agreed it was a beauty. As Perry entered the store, he almost didn’t glance at the window. But the white of an empty pedestal caught his eye.