The next afternoon, having slept for thirteen hours, Cory awakened to a cracking headache that seemed at the cerebral-hemorrhage level, and then he remembered the dirtlike powder that his cousin had chopped on a piece of glass and handed him. The headache was the least he might have expected as an aftereffect, never having snorted heroin in his life. There was a text from Sab, who said, “u want to hang later? More bumps in store for us.” As if they were friends now and could return to their early days back in Fall River without any mention of the intervening schism. Cory ignored the message. But when Greer called he made the mistake of picking up.
She was in one of those outstandingly articulate moods she’d been in sometimes lately when she called from New York. She would usually spend the beginning of the conversation asking him how he was doing, using the hushed and joyless voice that people used when speaking to someone who had experienced a terrible loss. But he didn’t want to talk about that with her anymore; he had other concerns these days: namely, taking care of his mother and the house, and also taking care of Elaine Newman’s house. Treating it all with the seriousness with which he had treated a client’s presentation during his brief career at Armitage & Rist.
Then, when Cory wasn’t particularly responsive, Greer would tell him about herself and her own life, which was what she was doing on the phone now, as if everything were normal between them. “Faith gave a special sermon at All Souls. You know, the Unitarian church on the Upper East Side,” she was saying. “It was all about sexism in everyday life. She can speak to anyone about anything. A reporter from the New York Times came; she’s doing a profile. She said this is a great moment for this kind of piece. What with Fem Fatale, and those newer websites, and Opus still being so visible, and now, amazingly, us. Loci. ‘The place where women come together to talk about what matters,’ is how she put it. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I guess now we’d better make it accurate.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Greer.”
“You sound peculiar; are you okay?”
“I’m tired.”
“Me too, actually. Very tired. I’m working a lot,” she went on. “Even though the first summit’s over, it now starts all over again for the second one. Listen,” she said after a moment. “I have some news.” When he didn’t say anything, she said, “Do you even want to hear it?”
“Of course I do,” he said, but having been questioned, he thought: Do I want to hear it? He realized that he was exhausted at the prospect of hearing it. He was already pre-exhausted by whatever it was she was going to say.
“You know that multimedia event we’re going to do?”
“No.”
“The one about girls and safe schools around the world.”
“Yeah.” He remembered nothing of such an event, but suddenly he saw girls in burqas and saris and kilts and rags, swinging satchels, riding shaky thin bicycles, heading down sunbaked dirt roads toward distant, low school buildings. The image was so vivid that he wondered if it was the product of a few last misguided opiate-addled neurons firing into the weeds.
“We’re actually going to need to hire a consultant,” Greer said. “I know that’s your area of expertise, and I can tell you more about it if you’re interested.” They were both silent, him taking this in and her letting him take it in. He didn’t say anything, so she quietly said, “What do you think?”
“No. Thanks, but no.”
“Are you sure? You answered so quickly.”
“Sorry. There’s no way I could do something like that.”
“But why not? You’ve been home for a couple of months now, Cory. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about your life again. Even just a little. Would that be the worst thing? It wouldn’t take away from your mother.”
“This is my life.”
“Well, yes, a temporary version.”
“I don’t differentiate,” said Cory, his voice tight. “It’s all temporary, obviously. Everything is. My brother died, Greer, my dad left, my mom collapsed. That’s the order of things. The world doesn’t need my consulting skills, believe me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There are plenty of people who can take my job at Armitage and do it just as well or much, much better. I’m sure they already have. I was a fake in a suit and tie in Asia, that’s all. It’s easy to take a recent college graduate and say, ‘Okay, come be a consultant,’ and I’m sure there’s real merit to that. But at some point that recent college graduate is going to need to figure out the world a little, beyond consulting. The noncorporate parts. The human parts. The corners, you know?”
“So that’s what you’re doing now when you stay at your mom’s house all day cooking and sitting in Alby’s room? You’re figuring out the world and all of its corners?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”
“Well, I thought I was supposed to be figuring out the world alongside you,” she said, her voice shaking a little.
“You were,” he said. “And you will be. And I’ll be doing it with you too,” he added quickly.
The call ended in mutual unpleasantness, and Cory staggered up and fed his mother, and then fed Slowy. He let the turtle sit on Alby’s carpet for a while, until finally it opened its eyes and blinked twice, like a coma patient trying to send a message, saying: I’m still here.
* * *
? ? ?
How was it, Cory kept thinking, that when a person died they were no longer anywhere? You could search the entire world and never find them. It was one thing for a body to stop working and be carted away under a sheet; it was another thing for the sense of that person to evaporate. The textural and indisputable sense, as strong but as hard to pinpoint as a gas. Cory opened one of his brother’s notebooks and turned to a clean page, then began to write:
DATE: MONDAY, MAY 23
CONDITIONS: UNBEARABLE SADNESS EXACERBATED BY FOOLISH HEROIN USE. [HEROIN SHAKEN NOT STIRRED, AKA INHALED NOT INJECTED, BECAUSE I AM NOT ACTUALLY A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ASSHOLE, DESPITE MY LINGERING, NONSTOP SADNESS.]
OBSERVATION: ALBY IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. NOWHERE. NOT HERE, NOT ANYWHERE. YOU AREN’T HERE, ARE YOU, BRO? IN YOUR OLD POWER RANGERS SWEATSHIRT? NO, YOU’RE NOT. SOMEHOW, THIS IS NOT AN ELABORATE PRANK, EVEN THOUGH IT TOTALLY FEELS LIKE IT.
TIME SPENT THINKING ABOUT THIS TODAY: 45 MINUTES.
AMOUNT THAT UNBEARABLE SADNESS WAS LESSENED BY DIRECT THOUGHTS OF ALBY: 0.0000%
Every day for five days, Cory wrote his observations in the journal, but he soon became aware that nothing was changing for him, there were no glimmers of improvement, so by the time the weekend arrived he left the journal on the desk and sat down on the bed and turned on the PlayStation. All the video games that Alby had loved were in a shoe box beside the bed, and he went rifling through them.
If Cory couldn’t be with Alby, then at least he could feel what it had meant to be Alby. He sat cross-legged on the small bed, playing game after game that Alby had played. He played Peep Peep and Growth Spurt and Mixed-Up Kids and all the other games; mostly they were loud and clownish and pulled you right in so that you felt yourself leaving this world and entering that other, differently lit one. Some of them were mystical, ambient worlds, like Calyx, a game for adults that Alby had loved.
While Benedita slept or wandered around whispering or picking at herself, Cory played. “Go, go, go!” he quietly called to the screen as his little car roared along the M?bius strip of a cartoon track, and he felt himself galvanized by the colors and the music, and then, when he’d had enough, he calmed down by playing an hour of Calyx.
He snorted heroin once more with Sab, but shortly after that second time, he understood from his own wretched response, and the days of recovery afterward, even longer than last time, that that was enough, and that any more than that, he would be taken up by it; he would be taken. Instead, he let himself be taken by Alby’s video games and notebooks, that whole compact and abandoned world.