Sometimes Cory’s aunt and uncle came to visit from Fall River, and occasionally they dragged his cousin Sab along. The cousins had disliked each other ever since their teenaged fissure over porn. Sab was still known in the family as a hopeless case, but also a bad influence. The little kids were kept away from him. The situation was delicate; whenever family gatherings were held at Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe’s house, Sab was usually on the premises, and the other parents took notice. “Leave Cousin Sab alone,” was the repeated refrain to the little cousins. Or, “Cousin Sab is tired.” Or, “Cousin Sab’s room is off-limits.” By nineteen, Sab and his friends had been reputed to be using and selling cocaine and Xanax. His parents, anguished, kicked him out, then took him back in again, and there he lurked.
Home on winter break from Princeton each year, Cory had seen Sab looking more and more broken; the only mitigating factor was that he no longer seemed mean, just ruined, barely filling out his shirt collars, his head bopping forward to an internal beat, a wavy smile always in half play. “Hey, Cousin Cory,” Sab said whenever the families were together. “Give me a hug, college man.”
“What’s up, Sab,” Cory would say wearily, putting his arms around his Ichabod Crane–looking first cousin.
“Not much, not much. Getting into the Christmas spirit, you know what I’m sayin’?”
But now, once again back at the Pereira household in Fall River for Sunday dinner, two months after Alby’s death, hoping the visit would somehow force a little bit of life into his depressed and dazed mother, Cory deposited her into the blobby arms of a recliner in the den, with the aunts nearby and a couple of little cousins running around. Then he climbed the stairs to the second floor and banged on the door that he hadn’t approached in years.
“S’open!” Sab called, and Cory entered the fetid room where his cousin sprawled on a heavy carved teak bed, smoking a green bong. Sab held up a finger, let the smoke roll from his mouth, and then said, “I am truly surprised to see you here. You must be desperate for friends, living at home and all.”
“Something like that.”
“That whole time you were away at your Ivy League college, did you feel better than all of us in the family? Be honest.”
“All of you? No, just you.”
Sab tipped his head up and laughed; he was uncharacteristically friendly in response to Cory’s visit to his room. “You got me there, and I deserved it. Sit down already.”
Cory sat in an armchair and took a hit from the bong; the column of old water burbled like a Roman fountain. Soon the room wasn’t as grotty, and his cousin not as awful. Cory was feeling fairly relaxed when Sab pulled out a tiny glassine envelope from his dresser and said, “And now, the main attraction. Better than Beaverama.”
It was heroin—“snorting heroin, see, like drinking chocolate,” Sab explained. “Designed to be snorted and never injected. A mellow feel,” he went on like a sommelier. “What do you say? Want a bump?”
Cory, stoned, said, “Okay.”
“Well, this is a big day in Fall River.” Sab chopped a little brown powder onto glass. “Cory the Great snorts H with his fucked-up loser cousin.”
“Cory the Great, that’s a good one.”
“Well, you’ll feel great in a minute anyway,” said Sab, handing him the square of glass and a short piece of plastic straw. Cory remembered drinking Strawberry Quik with Sab through this same kind of straw. Circus Straws, the name on the box had read; he didn’t know why he remembered this, but the memory arrived in an image of tremendous sadness and regret: a box of straws that bore a picture of an elephant trapped behind bars in a car of a circus train, and two boys sitting together with pink milk mustaches.
Now the powder went into his nostril as easily as if it were coke, which had sometimes been in evidence at parties at Princeton, where so many people had money. There was an MSG taste in Cory’s throat from the heroin—part fish and part brine, chemical and fake but intriguing. Yet almost immediately his brain was seasoned with a vigorous and lacerating flurry of poison salt that seemed to stream from the holes of some hidden shaker. He seized forward and vomited a straight column of amber onto his cousin’s carpet.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry, Sab,” he said, clapping a hand to his mouth, and then he vomited some more through the spaces between his fingers. At first he felt only this sick feeling, nothing more, and it seemed as if the drug wasn’t going to work on him. In his grief he must have been drug-resistant, like one of the newer forms of bacteria caused by overuse of hand sanitizer. But then he thought that that was a strange thought to be having right now, so maybe the heroin was starting to work after all. Cory lifted his head a little, and the room buckled and sank as if the whole house had been built on a sand pit. Cory sank down with it, falling on his side onto the shag carpet, bracing himself with one arm.
He stayed there with his eyes shut for a long time, until he heard a reedy-voiced version of Sab distantly saying to him, “You can open them now.” He licked his lips and took a moment to try to remember what those words meant. What was he supposed to open? Presents?
No, not presents, eyes.
Open your eyes, Cory. So he did.
Incredibly, the world had been cleansed, rinsed off, made softer and ineffably better. Sab was smiling gently from what appeared to be a patch of sunlight on the bed, and Cory smiled up at him, two beneficent cousins finally reunited in the love they had once felt when they used to kick a soccer ball around the street, and look at porn with their teeny tiny Q-tip boners, imagining the way the world would one day take shape for them both.
They should drink glasses of Strawberry Quik together again now, he thought. They should ride a circus train throughout the land, their arms thrown around the neck of the sweet lumbering elephant that patiently looked out from behind the bars. Cory remembered that Alby was still dead, but he also knew that he didn’t have to wrestle with that thought every hour of every day.
Right now was one of those times when Alby’s death simply wasn’t relevant. He hummed to himself as liquid pleasures rolled across him from a chemical tidal pool. He wanted to tell Sab how relieved he felt, but he had entirely lost the ability to talk, and his tongue was just a wet fish lying in his mouth. So instead of talking, Cory closed his eyes again and was grateful for quiet and immobility.
The two cousins stayed that way for hours, barricading themselves in the bedroom and ignoring the bangs on the door of family members who called to them, “The lamb is on the table! The Sunday lamb!” and then, “The lamb is getting cold!” and then finally, “Cory, your mom wants to leave right now.”
By the time he made it downstairs the sky was dark, the little-kid cousins had all fallen asleep and been carried out to the cars in their fathers’ arms, and his mother was dozing in the same easy chair she’d been placed in that morning. Aunt Maria was scraping lamb bones into the garbage and loading the dishwasher, and Uncle Joe was already in bed for the night.
“What were you boys doing up there? You missed my entire meal,” Aunt Maria said, looking them over with a suspicious eye. “Were you drinking?” she asked.
“Sorry, Mama,” Sab said, though of course neither of them smelled of alcohol.
“Drinking will get you nowhere. You’ll turn into a bum.”
“I know. It won’t happen again.”
Outside under the street lamp Cory helped his mother into the car. Through a miracle, driving twenty-five miles per hour in the breakdown lane and forcing himself to stay awake and alert, he safely got them home, although it took a long time.