He got his pants down just in time. The body, rather than dying, was defecating like an upside-down volcano. Into the stench, amid a flashing of alien lights, an apocalyptic pounding in his chest, came a blessedly rational insight: this was what happened when a person overindulged. To entertain this thought, however, was to perceive its irrelevance. Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit. Instead he shat again, and none of this had been foreseen. If foreknowledge of this supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression had resided anywhere, it had been in the hazy blob of dark matter, not in his mind.
Wiping his ass in a cramped Navajo bathroom stall, shackled by dropped trousers and distracted by the flashes of a thousand splinters, by the choking engorgement of his carotid, he forgot to be mindful of his canister’s whereabouts. As soon as he remembered, he confidently foresaw that he’d capped it and set it aside. But no. Oh, no no no no no. He’d knocked it over on the floor. Its scattered contents were thirstily absorbing a trickle from the toilet’s leaking seal. They’d formed a watery paste that he now had no choice but to urge, with the side of his finger, back into the canister, even at the cost of dampening the powder still inside it. Nothing made any sense. The embodied clairvoyance that had crept down the hallway toward the execution of its masterstroke was now wiping up, with bits of toilet paper, a whitish alkaloid smear contaminated with fecal and perhaps even tubercular bacteria, sullying itself with the question of whether the alkaloid had antiseptic properties, whether the toilet paper could later be applied to his gums without the swallowing of pathogens, and whether, although he still felt close to throwing up, it wouldn’t be better to lick the floor than let any milligrams go to waste.
A gag reflex dissuaded him from licking. He tamped the saturated toilet paper into the canister and screwed on the lid. And just like that—in an n-dimensioned wave of ecstasy, a rolling pan-cellular orgasm—he recalled that the object of his masterstroke was to secure an abundance of drug better measured in kilograms than in milligrams. Just like that, he emerged from life-threatening turbulence into the smoothest of highest-altitude flying, and everything made sense again. How had he questioned the rightness of his actions? How had he imagined that he’d overindulged? God didn’t err! He was superb! Superb! He’d pushed through the body’s limits to the highest realm of being. The speck of dark matter had shrunk to the point of disappearing, was again so tiny that God could love it, was dear and unthreatening and did not, after all, know anything, or maybe one small thing …
now you’ve seen hadn’t you better won’t take but a minute
Getting the speck’s message—that there might come, tonight, a moment when he felt a notch less superb, which couldn’t be allowed to happen—he stole back down the hallway and slipped into his room. His other canister, the full and fully dry one, was at the center of a sock ball in his duffel bag. He’d brought it along with no intention of dipping into it. He’d been motivated by a last-minute paranoia, a seemingly irrational fear of leaving his entire reserve in the parsonage basement, well hidden behind the oil burner but unguarded. Now he saw that it hadn’t been irrational at all. It had been perfect foresight.
“Perry?”
The voice, in the dark, sounded like Larry’s, but this didn’t mean that Larry was awake. Part of becoming God was hearing the voices of His children’s thoughts. So far, the voices had been too low to be intelligible. More like the random murmur in Union Station. He unballed the sock and put the wonderfully weighted canister in the leg pocket of his painter pants. Sweet-caustic alkaloid juices continued to drain behind his septum.
“What are you doing?”
If Perry’s vision had truly been perfect, unmarred by the dark speck, he might have succeeded in extinguishing Larry. The power to kill by thinking was divine. The flaw in his power was like a smudge on the lens of an infinitely powerful telescope.
“Perry?”
“Go to sleep.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to the lounge. Stick your nose in the bathroom if you don’t believe me.”
“I’m having the opposite problem. I’m totally constipated.”
Perry stood up and moved toward the door. Already he felt a notch less superb.
“Can we talk for a minute?”