Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Hey, wait, man, where you going?”

  “It was nice to meet you both.”

  “You said money. What’s your money?”

  “Do you mean, is it legal tender?”

  “How much you got? Twenty?”

  Offended, he turned back to them. “A pound of peyote for twenty dollars? I have a hundred fifty times that much.”

  This disclosure ended the hilarity. The groovier Navajo asked him, with a frown, what he knew about peyote.

  “I know that it’s a powerful hallucinogen employed in Navajo ceremonies.”

  “That’s wrong. Peyote isn’t Navajo.”

  No word in the world hurt more than wrong. All his life, it had made Perry want to cry.

  “That’s disappointing,” he said.

  “Peyote’s not our thing,” the groovier fellow said. “It’s only for people in the church.”

  “They take it and they sweat,” his friend said.

  “It doesn’t even grow here. It comes from Texas.”

  “I see,” Perry said.

  Out of the now revealed imperfection of his knowledge rose a weariness compounded over many weeks of sleepless nights, a weariness so immense that he suspected no amount of boosting could overcome it. He shut his eyes and saw the überdark speck against the blackness of his lowered eyelids. The two Navajos were exchanging words that he was tantalizingly close to understanding. The gap between knowing no words of Navajo and knowing all words of Navajo seemed no wider than a micron. Were it not for the dark speck, the weariness, he could have crossed it effortlessly.

  “So there’s a guy,” the groovier fellow said to Perry. “Guy named Flint.”

  “Flint, right.” The younger fellow seemed excited to remember him. “Flint Stone.”

  “He’s in New Mexico, just over the state line.”

  “Just over the state line. I know the place.”

  “Who is Flint?” Perry said.

  “He’s the man. He’s got what you need. He brings peyote up from Texas.”

  “He’s a Navajo?”

  “Didn’t I just say that? He’s in the church and everything.” The groovier fellow turned to his scar-faced friend. “Remember that time we went out there?”

  “Yeah! That time we went out there.”

  “He had a bag of buttons in his shed. It was like a five-pound bag of coffee, pure peyote.”

  “That wasn’t coffee?”

  “No, man. I saw it. He opened the bag, he showed me. It was all peyote. He gets it for the church.”

  Flint Stone was a name from a cartoon. Perry’s doubts about the story, which were substantial, all emanated from the speck. The speck’s essence was that everything was hopeless and he was deathly tired. For a moment, in the billboard’s reflected light, he sank deeper into weariness. But then—O ye of little faith!—his rationality blazed forth. His weariness was itself the proof that he could go no farther; didn’t have the strength to accost further Navajo strangers. By definition, if he could go no farther, he’d reached a logical terminus. In the light of perfect logic, the coffee sack overflowing with peyote became incontrovertibly real. The surety was the balance of $13.85 in his passbook account, the scarcely larger sum in Clem’s. The only way to replenish these accounts, while realizing a profit sufficient for his ancillary drug needs, was to buy peyote in bulk and resell it at a fivefold markup in Chicago. Ergo, there had to be a man by the unlikely name of Flint Stone, the man had to sell peyote at a depressed reservation price, and the first individuals Perry had accosted had to know it. Had to! It couldn’t have been otherwise, because God had only one plan.

  Weightless with logic, ebullient, he’d arranged to return in twenty-four hours. In the small eternity of those hours, the sack of peyote had become even realer, so real that he could feel the heavy weight of it; he could smell its earthy fungal smell. The weight and the smell were a turn-on that persisted through a morning of scraping paint from the side of a tribal meetinghouse, an afternoon of holding forth to Larry on the atomic structure of matter, the creation of matter in a Big Bang that even now propelled the universe ever outward, the key role of Cepheid variable stars in the discovery of this expansion, the unbelievably providential circumstance (it had to be) that a Cepheid’s period of variation was proportional to its absolute luminosity, thus enabling precise measurement of intergalactic distances, across which an all-seeing mind could zip at will, zoom in for closer looks at the quasars and nebulae of its Creation, survey the dark outer limits of material existence …

  Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage. The air had an acrid scent of burned heating oil, and the only glow of warmth was in his head. He considered the possibility that he’d erred in not wearing long johns and a second sweater before dismissing it as incompatible with perfect foresight. His nose and mouth were so numb that his snot ran onto his chin before he noticed it. He pushed it into his mouth and savored the everfreshness of the naturally derived substance dissolved in it. Conceivably he’d snorted more than half a gram …

  The gas station was closed. Standing outside its dark office were the scar-faced fellow and, smoking a cigarette, a shaggy figure Perry didn’t recognize. Mr. Stone, I presume? The figure was much younger than he’d imagined Flint.

  “This is my cousin,” the scar-faced fellow said. “He’s driving.”

  The cousin had a thick neck and radiated stupidity. Types of this sort haunted the high-school locker room.

  “Where is our other friend?” Perry said.

  “He’s not coming.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  The cousin threw his cigarette toward the gas pumps, as though daring them to ignite (stupid), and walked over to a dusty station wagon parked in shadow. When Perry saw that the car was of the same make and model as the Reverend’s, and of similarly advanced decrepitude, he felt a pinprick on his scalp. Pure goodness and rightness coursed through him, washing away his last lingering speck-sponsored doubts. The cousin’s vehicle had to be a Plymouth Fury. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!

  He wouldn’t have guessed the speeds of which a Fury was capable. On the state highway, from the back seat, he saw the speedometer needle enter regions that recalled his overindulgence in the bathroom. But there had been no overindulgence, and the cousin wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, his driverly intelligence was profound. Lone lights flashed by like the galaxies God glimpsed in his zooming. Supernaturally invisible, slouched behind two Indian heads silhouetted like rock formations in a desert lit by headlights, he stickied his finger inside the tainted canister and applied it to his gums and nostrils. He took a deep, sweetened breath and sniffed repeatedly.

  “You can totally trust me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more perfectly indifferent to the particulars of our buttons’ provenance. Whether every last link in the chain of possession was strictly legal is no concern of mine. Indeed, I might argue that larceny, being forbidden, entails a level of risk that could be considered hard labor, as deserving of reward as any other form of labor.”

  He chuckled, divinely pleased with himself.

  “The counterargument would be that larceny deprives a second party of the fruits of his own hard labor, and it becomes an interesting economic question—how value is created, how lost. If we had time and you had basic algebra, we could look into the mathematics of larceny—whether it really is zero-sum or whether there’s some x factor that we’re failing to account for, some hidden deficit in the party who’s been stolen from. Although, again, for the narrow purposes of our transaction, it’s no concern of mine. By the same token, if there’s one link in the chain that you don’t have to—”

  “Man, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that however legitimate, or perhaps less than legitimate—”

  “Why are you talking? Shut up.”

  His scar-faced best of buddies!
Perry giggled at how colossally he loved him. That God had chosen specially to favor a disfigured Navajo whose education had probably ended in eighth grade: all the angels in heaven were laughing with Him.

  “What’s so funny? What are you laughing at?”

  “Stop laughing,” the cousin said. “Shut up.”

  He kept laughing, but at a wavelength deeper than hearing, a radio or telepathic wavelength that entered every heart, waking or sleeping, around the world, and brought a comfort that human understanding could not explain. Into his own hearing came a multitude of voices, a collective murmur of gratitude and gladness. One voice, rising above the murmur, distinctly said, “That’s a crock.”

  The voice was insidiously close and stopped his silent laughter. The voice sounded like Rick Ambrose, and the sentiment was odd. Crock of what? Only shit and butter came in crocks.

  “Not butter,” the voice clarified. And added—one was tempted to say snarled—something in a language (Navajo?) that would have been intelligible if spoken more slowly. Hearing an alien language in one’s head was nearly as frightening as recognizing one’s divinity, but it was likewise followed by a reassuring realization: the mind that could speak all human languages without having studied them could only be God’s. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  Like overindulgence inverted, the Fury’s smooth sailing gave way to spine-crunching turbulence. On a narrow dirt road whose craters were inky in the headlights, the cousin maintained a speed inviting reassessment of his intelligence. One needed both hands to steady oneself, three further hands to ensure that the two film canisters and the folded envelope of cash weren’t falling from one’s pockets. A chalky-tasting powder filled the passenger compartment, and the road went on and on. One could only hope that they were rushing to meet an impatient seller at some appointed hour; that the return drive could be taken at lower velocity. Beneath the physical pain of being battered by armrest and door and one’s own flying limbs, a deeper kind of pain began to grow, but the accelerations and counteraccelerations were so unpredictable and violent that to open a canister was out of the question …

  The Fury stopped.

  No longer the best of buddies, the scar-faced fellow turned and put his elbow on the backrest. “Give me the money and wait here.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather go with you.”

  “Wait here. He doesn’t know you.”

  This made enough sense to be construed as foreordained necessity. The fellow took the envelope of money, and his cousin cut the engine and the lights. The sky must have clouded over the moon. After the door had opened and closed, the only light was from the fellow’s flashlight. Its beam, crisply defined by the dust the car had raised, caught barbed-wire fencing, a corroded cattle guard, pale weeds along a rocky driveway, before it receded into negligibility. The cousin lit a cigarette and inhaled like a gusting wind. There was much to say and nothing that could be said. The speck of dark matter was malignant, and yet its darkness was tempting. One became so very tired of the brightness of one’s mind …

  The flashlight beam bobbed back into view. The back door opened.

  “He’s got the peyote, but he wants to talk to you.”

  As cold as the air in Many Farms had been, it was twice as cold in the dark of nowhere. The flashlight beam kindly pointed out stones and holes to be avoided on the driveway. Ahead, in its incident light, a stone structure became visible, a fence of bleached wood, the rear end of a skeletal truck. The fellow kicked open a sagging gate in the fence. “Go on,” he said.

  It was difficult to speak with jaws clenched against the chattering of teeth. “Give me the money.”

  “Cliff’s got it. He’s counting it.”

  “Who’s Cliff?”

  “Flint. He wants to talk to you.”

  Deep pain and brutal cold, a shuddering of chest muscles. He’d still had his wits in the warmth of the car. The thing he’d always had was wits, but now they’d abandoned him. He was stone-cold stupid.

  “Go on. Take the flashlight.”

  He took the flashlight and proceeded through the gate. Stupidity had reduced him to hoping for the best. Hope was the refuge of the stupid. A paddle-limbed cactus loomed up, a nest of rust-eaten oblong cans, ragged sheets of unidentifiable building material, a charred tree stump. The signs of abandonment were unmistakable, but he went around to the back of the stone structure.

  There was no back of it. Only the edges of a wall that had collapsed into rubble.

  He heard a sound as familiar as his father’s voice, the whinny and rumble of a Fury wagon’s engine starting up. He heard wheels spinning, an automatic transmission shifting gears.

  He was too cold to be angry, too shaky-limbed to run.

  The speck of dark matter had been tiny only in spatial dimension. It was the negative image of the point of light that had given birth to the universe. Now, in its explosive expansion and consumption of the light, the speck’s hyperdensity became apparent: nothing was denser than death. And how tired he was of running from it. All he had to do was lie down on the ground and wait. He was so malnourished and exhausted, the cold would quickly do the rest—he knew this; could feel it. The dark negative that had replaced his rationality was equally rational, everything equally clear in its antithesis of light.

  But the body wasn’t rational. What the body’s nervous system wanted, absurdly, at this moment, was more drug. His money had been stolen but not his canisters.

  He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.

  Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.

  Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.

  His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.

  A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.

  Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.

  Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.

  Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.

  The moment he stopped to spit, his chest was gripped with chills. He was getting no warmer, and the flashlight’s batteries had failed to the point where he could see no worse by turning it off.

  This was a thought and his last one. His mind went dark with the flashlight, and then there was only a frigid blackness, its only features a slightly less black sky, a matchingly less black passage forward. The passage seemed eternal, but by and by it developed an incline. At the top of the incline, the sky lightened to reveal a boxy shape in the distance, darker than the road, higher than the horizon.

  He was still trudging toward this shape after flames had engulfed it.

  He still wasn’t there when he’d been there for a while.

  Even as he stood clear of the inferno and toasted himself, he was still on his way to it.

  A thing that hadn’t happened yet had happened. A large wooden building with a metal roof and wide doors had been broken into. The frozen metal of the tractors it contained, the deep chill of its concrete floor, had made the inside even colder than the outside, but the totality of the darkness had made even a dim flashlight useful, and there had been a box of matches. There had been a tower of wooden pallets. Gasoline. A splash of gasoline, just enough to kindle one pallet for some warmth. And then a blue flame snaking with terrible speed.

  A bird blazing yellow, an o
riole, was singing in a palm tree. In the background, around the pool at the apartment complex, she could hear the cheeping of smaller birds, the clacking of hedge clippers, the sighing of the megalopolis. Somewhere in the night, her third in Los Angeles, she’d regained an acuity of hearing that she hadn’t noticed losing. A similar thing had happened toward the end of her confinement in Rancho Los Amigos. A return of ordinary presence.

  Of the city she remembered, only the mild weather and the palm trees hadn’t changed. East of Santa Monica, where the streetcar had run, there was now a freeway ten lanes wide, an elevated immensity of automotive glare. Driving from the airport, she’d been tailgated, veered in front of, honked at. Formerly orienting mountains had vanished in a claustrophobic smog. The buildings that loomed up in it, mile after mile, were like players in some cancerous game of trying to be the largest. The city no longer invited her mind to be sky-wide. She was just a frazzled tourist from Chicago, an ordinary mother who was lucky that her boy could read a road map.

  It wasn’t so bad, being ordinary. It was nice to be present with the birds again. Nice to be unembarrassed in a bathing suit, nearly at her target weight. How nice it would have been to spend the whole day in Pasadena, see Jimmy in the nursing home again, and let Antonio, who’d become quite a chef, make dinner. How unexpectedly unfortunate that she had to get into her rented car and navigate the freeways.

  She’d misplaced the urgency of seeing Bradley. For three months, consumed by the urgency, focused on losing weight and getting to Los Angeles, she’d given little concrete thought to what would happen when she got there. It had been enough to imagine a wordless locking of gazes, a delirious reblossoming of passion. When Bradley, in his second letter to her, had offered to come to her in Pasadena, she hadn’t foreseen the terrors of freeway driving. She’d insisted on going to his house, because Antonio’s apartment in Pasadena, with Judson underfoot, was obviously not a place for passion.