“His name is Eddie. He’s got what you paid for.”
“May I come in?”
“No. Sorry. You’re a sweet kid, but I can’t see you anymore.”
The door closed. For various reasons, sheer physical exhaustion perhaps primary among them, Perry burst into tears. Was it then that the speck of dark matter first appeared? He felt that he loved Bear, admittedly on short acquaintance, more than he’d ever loved any other person. His forfeiture of Bear’s affection was a blow so devastating that it actually chased from his mind all thought of white powder. Only when he was home again, having blubbered himself out, did he recollect what the seven digits on the slip of paper represented. His mind exploded as if he’d inhaled the whole of it.
He did not love Eddie, and Eddie did not love him. Their first encounter had a flavor of Felix Street, and their one subsequent transaction, which more than completed the exhaustion of the funds that Becky had transferred to him, left him seething with hatred of Eddie, who he was absolutely sure had cheated him. Again, it was only afterward that he recalled how fucking much drug, even after being cheated, he’d come to possess. Three tightly lidded film canisters: that was something. Never again, or at least not for an extremely long while, would he find himself dying of empty-handedness.
And yet, if three canisters was excellent, how much more excellent six would have been. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. Was there a multiple of three of whiteness large enough to permanently set his mind at rest? The dark speck, the mental floater, was there again. It no longer seemed that money spent brought double benefit. Money spent was simply money gone. In his savings passbook, perilously exposed to prying parental eyes, stood the sorry figure of $188.85, and even genius had its limits. He didn’t see how one hundred and eighty-nine dollars could be compounded, quickly, into thirty-five hundred …
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.