Ten Thousand Saints

Eight





Johnny gave him a key, said “Mi casa es su casa.” Played him No for an Answer, Straight Ahead, Wide Awake, Project X. Took him to his friend’s half-pipe on Houston, to the Cyclone at Coney Island, the elm tree in Tompkins where the first Hare Krishna ceremony had taken place, with Swami Prabhupada and Allen Ginsberg, to all the places he would have taken Teddy if he’d been the one alive and living in New York. He showed him how to empty the coins from a pay phone, where to find lead slugs for video games, how to suck subway tokens. (First you slipped a matchbook into the slot. Then you waited for someone to get his token jammed. Then when he left you put your mouth to the slot and sucked it out. One of the few useful lessons Johnny’s father had shared with him during their brief association.) Jude ate up everything. “What are these?” he asked, stabbing a chickpea from his chana masala at one of the many Indian restaurants down Johnny’s street. “They look like little asses.”

Now that the scene was exploding in New York, everyone had started to look the same—kids from Westchester and Connecticut loitering on the sidewalk in front of CB’s, sporting the band T-shirts they’d bought the previous weekend, looking for drunk kids to beat up. Johnny had tattooed every inch of their bodies—SXE on the inside of their lips, Xs on their hands—and he was running dry. Even his own band, Army of One, which was as central to the scene as any other, which sported legions of fans who knew his lyrics by heart, who spit them back at him onstage, had begun to disenchant him. Not long ago, one of his customers, no older than Teddy, had asked him to tattoo ARMY OF ONE across his chest. Johnny had declined. “You’re going to regret that one, kid,” he said, and he realized then how fleeting the scene was. He believed ardently in all the virtues his own body was tatted up with, but his brother was dead, and one day Johnny would be, too. Permanent ink only lasted so long.

But now, here was Jude, wide-eyed and green and full of gratitude, and every word that came out of Johnny’s mouth was a marvel. The kid was an empty canvas. So he lived with a drug dealer. That couldn’t be helped. “When you going to take me to the temple?” he’d ask. “When you going to take me to a show?”

Johnny gave straight edge a soft sell, combining good-natured ridicule with a casual dose of guilt tripping.

“How you like living with your dad, Jude?”

“It’s all right.”

“I hear his weed is out of this world.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“So, how long you plan on walking around like a zombie? Like, indefinitely?”

“I guess.”

“Good plan, kid. Sounds like you got it all figured out.”

The band was practicing at Johnny’s place, waiting raptly in their positions. Nothing got them off more than watching the exhortation of a new kid, and they knew it had to be handled with care. They hadn’t objected when Jude had shown up smoking a cigarette; they’d even invited him to jam with them and agreed he wasn’t bad. “Taught him everything he knows,” Johnny said. He’d introduced Jude as an old friend, leaving out any mention of a brother. After they covered Minor Threat’s “Straight Edge,” the song that spawned the phrase, Johnny told Jude that Ian MacKaye had written it for a friend who died of an overdose, and that was the closest they got to talking about what happened to Teddy. Johnny could see it sinking in, though, the dots connecting before Jude’s frozen eyes, the straight edge constellation. Any day now, he’d be taking the plunge.

“You seen any of that girl Eliza?” he asked Jude after the band had left. “Your dad’s girlfriend’s . . . ?” Johnny’s cat Tarzan purred obscenely against Jude’s chest. Johnny reached over, picked up the cat, and placed him in his own lap.

“Just that once,” Jude said.

Ever since Johnny’s own father had ripped him off, he had been wary of anyone whose intentions appeared too pure. Eliza was no exception. She’d been with Teddy the night he died—surely she had been present for the cocaine, surely she could have done something to save him—but she’d sworn that they’d hardly spent any time together, that they had been split up at the party. The closest she’d been to him was when she’d helped him put in his contact lens. The idea of Teddy stumbling blindly through his last night on earth, and the intimacy, however brief, with which this girl had known him, had filled him with a loneliness that dispelled his suspicion.

The restaurant where Diane Urbanski had made a lunch reservation for four was a Japanese place on Amsterdam that Les called “schmancy.” Aside from the red floor pillows and the menu, the place had no pretense of authenticity—its single waitress was a blond woman dressed head to toe in black, and Prince streamed from the speakers. The building had an airy, industrial feel, with silver air ducts hanging from the high ceiling and walls cushioned with black leather, as if to protect diners from injuring themselves. Besides Jude and Les, however, the place was empty, a fact that didn’t prevent their waitress from seating them at the bar while they waited for the rest of their party. Diane and Eliza were late. They were always late, Les said. He took the opportunity to order another decanter of saki. It was a stormy March afternoon, and through the window, they watched the sky open up. They drank the saki from miniature cups that had the name of the restaurant printed in red on the side—Rapture. It looked as though it had been written in lipstick. “Crapture,” said Jude bitterly, which made Les chuckle.

By the time the woman entered the restaurant—shaking off her umbrella, high-heeled boots clicking on the tiles—Jude was full of a warm, heady fuel. Despite the umbrella, Di was soaked—her jeans dark at the thighs, black hair spilling from her braid—but her dark eyes were giant with relief, a nearly sensual pleasure from getting out of the rain. She was a petite, boyish woman, the size of Eliza, who was not there. Jude felt his own relief steam off of him. Di shook Jude’s hand vigorously and gave him a noisy kiss on each cheek. “I’m all wet,” she said, her British accent thick and throaty as she slipped out of her coat. “I’m so sorry.” Her perfume smelled like some sultry jungle flower.

They were seated at one of the low glass tables in the front window, Les and Di on one side, Jude on the other. Les made a show of getting down on the ground, exaggerating his drunkenness, saying his bones were too old to sit on the floor. “No Eliza today?” he asked.

Di shook her head somberly. “She’s not been feeling well. I fear it’s the flu. The flu frightens me so.”

Jude spread open his menu. Maybe Eliza was avoiding him. Maybe she was faking. Les recounted for Jude Di’s résumé, beginning with the flu that killed her grandfather. She was born in London, had moved to the States at eighteen to be a part of the New York City Ballet. Now she taught ballet to little girls at Lincoln Center. Les went on nervously, Di deflecting his praise.

“I don’t know why we couldn’t meet at Dojo,” Les said, frowning at the menu. “They have Oriental crap there.” It was becoming clear to Jude that, despite Les’s apparently bottomless pockets, his tastes were still those of a Lintonburg boy.

“They have better Oriental crap here,” said Di. She inserted her hand into the pocket of Les’s jeans, gemmed rings sparkling on her fingers, retrieved his cigarette lighter, and lit the two tea candles on the table. When the waitress came over, Di ordered without looking at the menu, then poured tea for all of them when it came.

“I’ve been dying to meet you, Jude, but you have to practically clobber this guy over the head to get your way.” With her black hair and powder white skin, Di looked almost Japanese herself. “Tell me how you like New York.”

“I like it,” Jude said. The tea tasted like dirt, but after the pissy aftertaste of the wine, he welcomed the warmth. Johnny drank tea. Herbal, no caffeine. “It’s a lot cooler than Vermont. There’s a lot more things to do. I like that there’s so much music everywhere.”

Di nodded appreciatively. “What sort of music do you enjoy, Jude?”

Jude put down his cup. “Lots of kinds, but mostly hardcore?”

“What does that sound like?”

“You know what punk is?”

“Darling, I’m from England. The Clash? The Sex Pistols?”

“Yeah, it’s like that,” Jude said, becoming excited, “but faster.”

“Faster?” Di said skeptically.

“Why does it have to be so fast?” Les wondered. “What’s wrong with slow?”

“Darling, there’s such a thing as being too slow.”

“I know what I’m talking about here. I recall escorting your daughter to five or six hundred punk concerts. I don’t understand the hurry.”

“Your father’s a tough critic. If it’s not Creedence Clearwater Revival . . .”

“And in New York,” Jude went on, “lots of the hardcore scene’s straight edge, which means no one does drugs.”

“Really? Is it religious or something?”

“Well, sort of. Like, my friend Johnny said Gandhi once took a vow to abstain from eating meat, and drinking, and, you know, being promiscuous. It’s kind of like that.”

“Fascinating.”

Les gave a dismissive chuckle. “Straight edge? That’s what they’re called now? In my day, we called them squares.” He took out his cigarettes, lit one up, and scooted the pack across the table.

“It’s not like they’re too lame to do drugs,” Jude said, ignoring the cigarettes, suddenly defensive of Johnny and his friends. “Some of them are recovering addicts,” he said, using Johnny’s phrase. “Some just have parents who are addicts.”

“Well, I think that sounds like a wonderful organization,” said Di, waving away Les’s smoke and Jude’s remark as the waitress set down their food. Everything was cold and pink. Jude slipped out his retainers when Di wasn’t looking and hid them in a napkin under the table. “I wish Eliza would get involved in something like that. She never took to ballet. She’s not normally one for self-discipline.” She took a bite of something slippery-looking. “Salmon. It’s good. Try it.”

Jude captured a jiggly piece with his chopsticks.

“But, do you know, I believe she’s turned a corner? Knock on wood.” She knocked lightly on Les’s bald head. “She’s been positively sober. Doesn’t take wine with dinner. And quite studious. She barely even comes home anymore, stays at school all weekend to study.” She spewed a few grains of the rice she was chewing. “I wonder if she’s finally growing up,” she said. “Is it possible?”

Jude looked to his father, who was putting out his cigarette. Which of them was she asking? “Sure,” Jude finally said, with false enthusiasm. How did he know? He barely knew the girl.

“Or perhaps,” Di began. She stared dreamily into her plate, fiddling with her chopsticks.

“What?” said Les.

“Perhaps . . .” She looked directly at Jude. “I know she didn’t know your friend terribly well. But I do believe she was quite shaken by what happened to him. Having to speak to that detective. And having spent the evening with the two of you, just before it happened. That sort of brush with death can cause one to reexamine lifestyle choices. Don’t you think?”

Jude looked out the window at the rain-soaked street. Suddenly he was sure that Eliza had been with Teddy while Jude had searched the house for them, and there was nothing he could do about it then, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

“I’m sorry, darling. I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, it’s okay,” Jude said.

“We’re so glad you’re here with us.” She gave Les a sideways smile and stole a roll of sushi from Jude’s barely touched plate. “Don’t you like your food?”

After lunch, they all took a taxi downtown. It was Jude’s first cab ride, and he studied the map of dick-shaped New York posted on the back of the driver’s seat. Here they were—Di showed him with a wine red pinky nail, leaning across his father’s lap—and here was where they were going. They were full of food and tea and wine, sleepy and dry. Out one window, Central Park sped past, and on the other side, blocks and blocks of gray. It was the sterile, efficient, adult New York Jude had figured didn’t exist, but somehow it was reassuring to him, the boundless span of this island. So many blocks between Upper and Lower—it made his stomach lurch with pleasure. They flew through the yellow traffic lights, rain blurring the bare trees, taxis kicking up puddles.

When the cab dropped them off in front of Les’s apartment, an ambulance was parked at the curb. One of the guys shooting up on the steps of the rehab center had OD’d, and the paramedics were sliding his stretcher into the back like a sheet of cookies into an oven.

Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down—how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?—he’d remember that ambulance, just like the one he’d been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, was an X on its side.

He didn’t follow his father into the apartment. Instead, he got on his skateboard and flew to Johnny.

“Don’t get too attached to these,” Johnny told Jude. “It’s just so you don’t get your ass kicked in the pit.” When he was finished with one hand, he started on the other, two Sharpie-black Xs, each leg an inch wide.

“Where’s the X come from?” Jude wanted to know. The smell of the marker was making him dizzy.

Johnny told him. When Ian MacKaye’s first band, the Teen Idles, wanted to play all-ages shows in D.C., they proposed that the 9:30 Club mark kids’ hands with an X, the way they did on the West Coast, to show that they were underage. Before long, the straight edge scene had co-opted the symbol. “You don’t want us to drink? F*ck you, we don’t want to drink anyway!”

“How long’s this going to last?” Jude asked. He held up his hands, making two fists.

“Long as you want it to,” Johnny said.

In the fall, CBGB & OMFUG had banned Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Side By Side for stage diving, a legendary show according to Johnny, but Army of One was still allowed to play. The place was dark and small and packed with bodies and Johnny strolled onto the stage as though he were not a person who appeared in fanzines pasted up by fourteen-year-olds in their tighty whities in Albany, Cleveland, and L.A. He strolled out with Rooster and the rest of the guys and, midstride, without a word of introduction, began convulsing. There seemed to be a malfunction with the sound system, a tape in fast-forward, a ribbon of feedback. Then the guitar started up, and the nuclear explosion of drums, and Jude realized that the sound he’d heard was Johnny’s voice. He was not having a seizure but singing. Not singing but vomiting a ceaseless torrent of small, sharp objects—nails, needles, gears, batteries, Hot Wheels, pennies—which came clanking out as though they’d been swallowed.

The shrooms had been a bad idea.

They used to hunt for them, Teddy and Jude, on the farms along Dairy Road, leaving their bikes in the ditch and crawling on hands and knees through the dark. Maybe a cow pie would be flung, maybe a cow would be tipped. Maybe they’d eat a handful right there in the grass, like hunter-gatherers, and trip on the stars, and go or not go to class the next morning.

So when the guy approached Jude at the edge of Tompkins that afternoon, selling not some sidewalk-cooked chemical compound but Mother Earth’s gold-flecked mushrooms, Jude had bought a bag and eaten two right there, popping them like Twinkies. It was his exception to his father’s rule—an exercise in reminiscence. Still, Johnny had promised to take him to his show today, and then to the temple in Brooklyn. If he knew he was on something, he’d leave his ass at home. As they walked together to CB’s, Jude had tried hard to straighten the bending buildings, to calm the breathing trees. He was good at nothing if not faking sobriety.

But now, safe inside the club, there was no reason to fight the trip anymore. No one was looking at anyone but Johnny. The stage wasn’t a stage but a knee-high platform, and Jude was drawn to it, as if tied to a rope. Was it fame? The band was glowing. It was the yellow lights, the vibration of the speakers through the concrete floor, but it was also just the band, it was Johnny, the loops in his ears shining like real gold. It wasn’t fame. Famous people were untouchable, unknowable. Jude could see the pores glistening on Johnny’s scalp. It was unfame, the opposite of fame—he was touchable and entirely knowable, he was memorizable, like a sister or a dog. Jude fought through the field of bouncing bodies. A dance had started up in front of the stage, a boisterous, good-natured ritual that involved hurling one’s body, like a sack of flour, at other bodies. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Everything within an inch of stage diving. Jude was close enough to the band to feel the radiance of their sweat, their spit.

He found himself in the middle of things. Or he put himself there. He jumped, and his body remained in the air for several hours before he landed on somebody’s shoulder. He was half helped up, half shoved away. He spun sideways into another wall of people, his chin smashing against someone’s tattooed head, his sweat-soaked T-shirt sealed to someone else’s back. Not one of them was a girl. One girl, or two. Some dude, passed above their heads, fell on him. The rubber heel of a sneaker came first. For a second, he stood on Jude’s arm, climbing down him like a ladder. Then there was Johnny—was the show over, or just his set?—helping them both to their feet.

“Steady!” Johnny called. Or had Jude only read his lips? He couldn’t hear him. Johnny mouthed something else, smiling sadly, and then was sucked back into the crowd. The words formed a silent space in Jude’s empty head.

Steady!

Teddy!

He felt suddenly that he was in hell. It was wonderful. The room was black and close and singed with the forbidden, it felt miles underground, the perfect expression of testosterone and the structures of sound stimuli. The set wasn’t over; Johnny was still singing. He’d stepped down from the stage. Johnny drifted back toward him, his face appearing and disappearing like a strobe. Jude shoved him, without malice, only because that was physics, only because Johnny had a body and so did Jude. Between them, a pit opened, the size of a body that could have dropped from Earth but didn’t.

Then the train rocketed beneath the river, transporting him from one room to another. But the room he landed in was the same one he’d left: bodies, music, stage. Only here they left their sneakers at the door, and this room was bigger, big as a ballroom, and filled with an apricot light and incense so sweet Jude had the urge to wet himself. From each corner of the room, a voice wailed

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

It was the walls. It was God. God was singing. Then he saw the man sitting in the middle of the room. He was an ancient Indian man in a white robe, playing an organ and singing into a mike. Around him, men and women sat chanting with him, some on mats, some on the lacquered wooden floor. In front of him, gold curtains hid the stage; behind him was another man, also old, also Indian, propped in a throne, draped in orange, topped with what looked like an orange bathing cap. He sat very still. Men and women and children approached him with candles and incense and flowers, sprinkling the petals at his feet. They bowed down to him, kneeling and pressing their foreheads to the floor. Jude watched from the sidelines as Johnny did this, as naturally as if he were putting on a kettle for tea. It was only when Johnny returned to him that Jude saw that the man was a statue.

“That’s Krishna?” he whispered.

Johnny shook his head. “His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada. Before we worship Krishna, we worship his devotees.”

A drum circle was forming around the organ player, boys and men joining him one by one. They wore robes or jeans, sherbet orange sweatshirt over sherbet orange skirt. Some wore beads like Johnny’s around their necks; some wore a smudge of white paint on their foreheads; some had bald heads with a tuft of hair at the back. The drums were grenade-shaped, two-headed; someone was playing hand cymbals; then someone else was, too. Jude had a rubbery memory of the gymnastics class he’d taken with Prudence as a kid, the two of them tumbling across the slippery floor in their socks.

Then the music stopped. Slowly, the gold curtains drew back. Bodies scattered, found an empty space, bowed to the floor. On the stage, nestled in an elaborate, canopied throne, adorned with a jeweled crown and a brightly colored lei, was Krishna. Krishna was smiling a beatific smile. Krishna’s face was milky blue. He was rosy-cheeked, bare-chested, no bigger than a fifteen-year-old boy. Krishna looked like a mannequin in the window of Macy’s, a queenless king riding a float in the homecoming parade.

The organ started up again, then the drums. People sprang up from prayer, started dancing. They sang, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare. They sang to the stage, swaying, as though watching Krishna perform. Jude would not have been surprised if they had raised their lighters. Bodies pressed in. Painted women danced by, raising carnations to his nose; he breathed them in. He closed his eyes for some time, floating, and when he opened them, Johnny was gone. Jude turned, blinded by the golden stage—there were lighters, darting around the room like fireflies—and stumbled into a log. It was a soft log, damp and mossy. The log was Johnny! Johnny was still lying facedown on the floor, his arms spread out in front of him like Superman.

Heavily, Jude fell to his knees and cat-stretched out beside him. The floor was cold and smooth and smelled of a piney wax. Here were the parts of his body that touched the ground: his forehead, his armpits, his chest, his belly, his hips, his knees, his toes. His hands, each scored with an X. He had never lain like this before. A socked heel stepped apologetically on his pinky; a gauzy skirt tickled the nape of his neck. His eyelashes fluttered against the floor. He felt long, emptied, flattened.

A tide ripped through him, first a ripple, then a roar.

The subway.

The train sped under him, rattling his ribs. Head still down, Jude slipped the bag of mushrooms from the pocket of his jacket and gobbled the rest of them up. Maybe because he feared his trip would wear thin, because he wanted, why not, for the night to go out with a bang. Maybe because he knew already it was the last night he’d be high. He felt himself peel away from the past, saw the hollow corpse of his former self, lying like a log, as he stood.

The room was on fire. Krishna was aglow on the stage, smiling at Jude through the flames. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Bodies passed, hand over hand, above the crowd. They levitated above him. The wax dummy smiled his Mona Lisa smile at Jude. Half-boy, half-god. Half-Indian, half-white. Jude danced for the god boy, and the god boy let him dance.

The flames came up to greet him. Jude passed one of his X ’d hands through them, felt the white heat melt his fingertips, then his wrist, then catch his sleeve. Then he fell to the ground.

Les Keffy had just sat down on his futon, to the Yankees’ opening game, to a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and three hot dogs bedecked with mustard and relish, when the phone rang. It was April already, and the breeze floating through the open door to the fire escape carried the promise of reasonable temperatures, and the smell of fried food from the restaurants downstairs, and the voices of the fifty thousand fans 150 blocks north, his own not among them. He had scored two MVP tickets from a guy he knew who sold faux Rolexes in Chinatown, but Jude had turned him down to attend a show at the Ritz. Di was at a dance conference in Chicago, but he wouldn’t have asked her to go with him anyway, had stopped asking her years ago, and Eliza, who was usually reliable for that sort of thing, he hadn’t seen in weeks. He had sold the tickets to one of his distributors, lost twenty bucks.

With reluctance he stood and moved away from the TV, where Mattingly was walloping a double. Picking up the phone on its fifth or sixth ring, Les muttered, “Good boy.”

“What?” It was Eliza.

“I’m watching the game. Yanks and the Twins.” He stretched the cord as far as it would go, craning to see. Only when he was on the phone did his apartment seem large. Standing at the kitchen counter, he might as well have been watching the TV across the street. “How lovely to hear from you. I thought you were MIA. Were you sick or something?”

“I was. I’m better. Now I’m better.”

“I wish you’d called earlier. I could have used a date for this game.”

“Is . . . air?”

Di’s cordless phone, for which she had paid six hundred dollars, produced an irksome static; it sometimes captured the voices of her neighbors, or the line of her live-in housekeeper, who wandered in and out of the conversation, oblivious. Les called them the voices in his head.

“Stand still and say it again, honey.”

“IS JUDE THERE?”

Strikeout for Ward. A cordless phone would come in handy now. “He’s not. He bailed on me. It’s too much to ask that my one and only son show an interest in baseball. Or meat eating, or any other, you know, institution of male bonding. He’s not even smoking reefer with me anymore.”

“Really?”

“You think he’s maybe a queer?”

“I don’t know.” Eliza sighed. “I don’t even know him. I met him once! Where is he?”

“He’s at a show. With his pal Johnny.”

“Johnny?”

“They’re thick as thieves. He’s brainwashing my boy. He quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating meat. You want to come over and eat some wieners? Smoke some happy stuff?”

“Jude quit all those things?”

“He saw the light. He had a conversion experience. An eight-hundred-dollar conversion experience. Stuck his hand in a plate of candles at the Krishna temple and got second-degree burns up his arm. Landed in the ER.”

“Oh, shit. A plate of candles? Is he okay?”

“Aside from having his arm all wrapped up. Johnny tackled him before the burn got too deep. It’s his left one, so he can still wipe his ass.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

Who was at bat? He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. “What do you want with Jude, anyway?”

“I need to talk to both of them. I really want to talk to them.”

“You whine about meeting my kids, and then when one of them finally materializes, you disappear.”

“I’ve just been busy. You told me to apply myself. I’ve had a lot going on!”

“Wait, what are you doing home on a weekday?”

“Who . . . home?”

“What? Say it again.”

“ALL RIGHT, FINE. I’m on my mom’s phone. I wasn’t feeling well, so I took the train home.”

“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?”

“You wrote a note, saying you were taking me on a trip.”

“That was nice of me.”

“Les,” said Eliza through a burst of static, “ . . . tell you anything, right?”

“Sure, honey.”

Then a kid’s voice, not Eliza’s, said, “ . . . not fair, it’s totally not fair.”

“Quit your whining, man,” said Les, eyeing the hot dogs across the room, surely gone cold, as the Twins performed a double play that was truly not fair, and Eliza’s voice danced inextricably with the ghost of a stranger’s, their words sometimes nearly making a sort of sense.

“JUST TELL HIM TO CALL ME,” said Eliza, and Les hung up.

The doorman was expecting them. They rose in the mirrored elevator, Jude’s stomach dropping through the floor. Inside the apartment, a vacuum cleaner was running, and they had to ring the bell several times before a small, dusky-skinned woman answered the door. She was wearing a sports bra and leggings, between which, bisecting a lumpy stomach, ran a scar the same purple as the polish on her fingers and toes. A red spot hovered just above her eyes. “Thank goodness,” she said. “She been cry and cry.” Through a living room that looked like a wing of the White House, down a hallway hung with the frowning visages of Eastern Europeans, the woman led them to Eliza’s room, opening the door without knocking. “Two boys in your room okay?” she said, but then left, closing the door behind her. A moment later the vacuum cleaner started up again.

Jude had never been in any girl’s room but his sister’s, but Eliza’s looked just as he would have expected one to. A Beastie Boys poster hung on the rose-papered wall, and a pair of ballet slippers was slung over the back of a rocking chair, in which sat a family of stuffed bears, one wearing a Yankees cap. On the dresser was a cluster of photographs: a man who was not Les with a dark-haired baby swathed in his arms; a long-locked Eliza aloft in a bat mitzvah chair. In the wicker wastebasket beside the bed were clouds of Kleenex and four or five empty Yoo-hoo bottles, and in the double bed, which was pink and ruffled and plump with pillows, Eliza lay with the covers pulled up to her chin. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

He had known, as soon as his father had relayed the message, that it was about Teddy. There was no other reason for Eliza to summon them to her mother’s apartment. “Just come over,” she’d said, “and you’ll see.” On the silent train uptown, Jude felt a calm settle over him. Not because he looked forward to whatever revelation Eliza had in store, but because he welcomed the relief of pressure. It was as though Johnny and Jude had been engaged in a staring contest, each daring the other to speak Teddy’s name first, and even though it meant he would lose, Jude was desperate to blink.

“What happened to your hair?” Her voice was hoarse, her eyes and nose red.

Jude and Johnny both put a hand to their heads. “I cut it,” Jude said.

“Nice sling.” It wasn’t a cast, but Jude had never broken a bone before, so he had people sign it. Johnny, Les, Rooster, a nurse named LaCarol, the couple who owned the Smoke Sho. “There should be a marker in my desk drawer.” Johnny retrieved the marker and Jude sat on the edge of the bed while she found a blank space to print her name in capital letters. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really. When I change the bandages. Mostly it itches. This guy saved my life,” he said, slapping Johnny hard on the back.

“Stop, drop, and roll,” Johnny explained.

“What happened, exactly?”

Jude could sense she was stalling, but he didn’t mind stalling with her. “These women carry around these plates of candles. You’re supposed to wave your hands through the fire and over your head”—he imitated with his free hand, as though washing his hair—“but I held my hand in there too long and it got my sleeve. I was tripping on shrooms.”

He had confessed this to Johnny, who had not been surprised, as well as to the receptionist, the doctor, and LaCarol, who had swaddled him in ointment and bandages. No one arrested him, no one blinked. But it had felt good to come clean under those penetrating hospital lights. Last time I do that, he’d told the nurse, loud enough for Johnny to hear.

On a white television with a built-in VCR, a soap opera was unfolding. Jude and Johnny watched it for a moment. They looked at each other, then at Eliza.

“What’d you want to tell us?” Johnny finally asked.

Eliza muted the television, but she kept her eyes on the screen. “Well, two things. And the first is very bad. You’ll want to kill me, probably.”

Jude and Johnny did not dispute this. Johnny stood in the middle of the room; Jude sat on the bed.

“Damn, I’m starving,” she said. “I don’t know when’s the last time I ate.”

When they said nothing, made no move to cajole her, she sighed. She looked as though she had been in this bed for a long time. Jude smelled the familiar sour-milk smell of body and bedsheet.

He said, “You’re the one who gave Teddy the coke.”

In the other room, something expensive collided with the floor. The vacuum cleaner squealed, purred, and died. Slowly, nearly undetectably, Eliza nodded. Jude looked at Johnny: his face registered nothing.

“I’ve stopped using it, though. Not right away, but I’ve stopped. As soon as I knew for sure. You don’t even have to say anything, because I know. I’m already being punished.” She was sniffling repeatedly. “I didn’t want to stop but I stopped! That must mean something, right?”

She reached for her bottle of Yoo-hoo and took a ravenous gulp, spilling the milk down her chin, down her throat, following the silver chain into her cleavage. It was a little girl’s nightgown, white, cotton; at the neckline was a bow with a pearl in the center. Maybe it was that pearl, maybe it was just seeing her again, maybe it was the consolation of having an accomplice, but even before she started to cry, Jude felt an empathetic loosening in his own chest. Johnny sat down beside Jude, and they dabbed her gingerly with tissues, mopping up chocolate milk and tears. She covered her face with her hands, talking into them as she cried.

“What are you saying?” Johnny said. “What’s she saying?” he asked Jude.

“All I want is Yoo-hoo!” she yelled, removing her hands. “Why does it have to be Yoo-hoo? Why can’t I crave something that won’t make me fat? And I don’t have any friends!”

“I don’t think it’ll make you fat, necessarily,” said Jude helplessly, inspecting the label.

“I feel enormous. I’m enormous.”

“You’re not enormous,” Jude said.

“I’ve been studying. I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm!”

“Eliza, is there something else?” said Johnny. “Just tell us.”

“I didn’t think it would show this quickly,” she whispered, very still now, her eyes very wet. “It was practically overnight.” She pushed back the covers and lifted her nightgown enough to reveal her belly. She stared down at it, her hair veiling her face. It looked like his sister’s belly, only plumper. Eliza’s belly button was stretched wide.

“You can’t tell?” Eliza asked.

Jude and Johnny both began to stand. Then they lowered themselves again. Jude thought of Ingrid Donahoe. He thought of his birth mother.

“You’re not . . . ?” Johnny said.

Eliza covered her belly.

“Jeezum Crow,” Jude whispered.

Later, Jude and Johnny would admit that they’d thought the same thing. Jude had looked at Johnny, and Johnny had looked at Jude, and for a moment each was certain that the other was the father. And then as quickly as this thought had appeared, before Eliza could withdraw from her nightgown the subway token, dangling from her necklace among the other charms like a hypnotist’s watch, another thought, awful, miraculous, displaced it.