“Here,” she says. “You go first. Just do a little bit.”
He uses the straw to separate out a bit from the pile of tan powder, which looks like a tiny mesa on the plate.
“Not that little!” Agyness laughs. So he separates out more until Agyness nods her approval, then he nudges it into a jagged line.
“Don’t stop snorting until it’s all gone,” Agyness says.
He doesn’t. He’s repulsed by the dirty, bitter taste that stings his nasal passage, then the back of his throat. His vision goes cross-eyed and he thinks, I can’t believe I just did heroin. I’m a scumbag. This would kill the Parentals. But five seconds later, he’s exactly where he’s wanted to be his whole life but never knew it, back with her, before he was born, inside her; nothing’s begun yet, just this warmth and protection, this liquid blanket. There hasn’t been any separation or detachment or ache yet.
He snorts another messy line into his other nostril and burrows down deeper into the liquid blanket. Everyone else in the room sort of falls away like a movie camera rushing backward from a set. He locks eyes with Agyness, but it’s not Agyness, it’s her, 04/14/1984.
“I wanna know you so badly,” he says. “I wanna ask you so many things.”
“There’s so much I wanna tell you,” she says. “Most of all, honey, I’m so sorry.” Now she’s crying.
“Don’t cry,” he tells her. “You didn’t know.”
He curls up in her lap, his Airs up by his butt, his arms between his knees. He can hear himself purring; I’m a little baby kitten, he thinks. I just came out of her and I’m getting my sustenance from her. He loses any sense of the floor underneath him or the sounds around him; he and she are like a balloon they let go of. And she’s telling him the whole story of what happened, New York City before 1992 and him.
Four hours later, at 4:30 in the morning, he drifts back from a reverie to look up and see Agyness running her hands through his hair.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m itchy,” he says.
She smiles. “That’s just the H, it’s normal. It goes away.”
“I’m cold, too.”
She pulls a blanket from the bed, where Oscar’s curled up on his side with Tamara, his sometimes girlfriend the past two years, and arranges it over M-Dreem and herself. All has gone silent and dark in the other rooms; the party has ended.
“I should probably get home,” he murmurs, wiping drool from the side of his mouth.
She pulls him tighter. “Don’t go.”
“No, I have to go.” He rises and vomits slightly on the two of them.
“Oh God,” Agyness groans, in slow motion.
In the bathroom, where they clean up with mildewed towels, he feels itchy and cold, yet still velvety and delicious inside. For as long as his memory stretches back, to those patchy few recollections of the boys’ home in Brooklyn, he can’t remember a time — even the happy times with the Parentals and friends and fun and art and success in school, at the beach in the summer or those trips to Europe — where a sense of being lost and wrong didn’t hover at his right shoulder, and now, for the first time, it’s not there. I am coming back here, he thinks, meaning the H, kissing Agyness good-bye.
He walks home up Essex Street as church bells strike five, every streetlight an object of blurry, dancing beauty. He crosses Houston Street, absent the baseball cap he arrived at the party with, looks at all the stoops and gated storefronts with wonder, moves like liquid gold up Avenue B, feels a spasm of nausea and manages to bend over a garbage can just fast enough to avoid vomiting all over his T-shirt again. Long after the vomiting ends, he rests bent over the can, bracing himself above it with both hands, falling into another feel-good fugue, starring the funny-looking Sheila E. shorty, for seventeen more minutes before a vague voice far back in his head propels him home.
In the wee hours at the Christodora, Ardit, the Albanian doorman, tends to doze before the tiny TV in his room in the basement, so M-Dreem enters a sepulchral lobby, falls into a blissful nod once again with his right hand on the button of the elevator, and rouses himself from it a good two minutes after the elevator arrives, just long enough to hit the sixth-floor button. When the doors open on that floor, he feels a strong weight pulling him down toward the hallway carpet just outside the elevator, just another short, um, reverie, but he manages to shamble his way down the hall. Fumbling in his pocket for keys, he slowly registers he’s lost them — just when the apartment door swings open to reveal, in a nightgown, Millimom. That is what he most often calls his Female Parental, a smirking hybrid name.
She turns forty next year and betrays the first lines emerging on her forehead and in the corners of her eyes — the beautiful, dark, perpetually anxious, and beleaguered eyes of Millimom. And now those pained eyes are burning with five A.M., been-waiting-up-all-night pain. He sees her New Yorker and big ceramic tea mug on the dining-room table in the apartment’s dark recesses.
She steps back from the door, scrutinizing him head to toe. “Where have you been?” she asks in a half-whisper, trying not to wake Jared-dad in the room beyond.
Stepping inside, he makes his best effort to open his eyes wide, stand up straight, smile with a sort of no-big-deal, nonchalant air of apology. “Sorry I’m so late, Mom. There was a graduation party.”
“I’d think that if you’re going to party till dawn, you could at least give me a call.” She sounds not so much angry as baffled and hurt.
“I know, I meant to, I just got caught up in the excitement and the flow.”
“Couldn’t you have just texted?”
Now their eyes are in the mother-son deathlock. He resists the urge to scratch his upper body, which is crawling with itches. Then he caves and lightly scratches his rib cage, where the itching is the worst.
Milly’s nose wrinkles. “You smell like vomit,” she says. “You’ve been drinking.”
He exhales with relief. “I did drink a little,” he says. “It was graduation night.”
She crumples back, frowning. “I just wish you had called. Dad and I left you a message this afternoon congratulating you on your last day.”
“I know, I—” he begins. Then his stomach seizes and he brushes past her and into the bathroom, where he locks the door just in time to stick his head in the toilet and puke again.
“Mateo,” he hears Millimom call from the other side of the door, “are you all right?” But even the puking felt good, and now that it’s over, he feels especially good. Another hazy wave comes over him, just as he hears his name again, Mateo, on the other side of the door, but this time in Jared’s deeper, sharper tone. He’ll get up in a moment, he thinks. But for right now he curls up with his head on the ledge of the toilet, and before he knows it, he’s nodding on 04/14/1984 again, purring away.
Three. Directly Observed Therapy (1981)
What if they could ban smoking in all city restaurants and bars? Surely anyone would say it was a crazy idea — New York thrived on smoking, it was a city of smokers, in and out of the bars, in offices and walk-ups, the sidewalks alive with bobbing Marlboros and Virginia Slims and Newports in the neurotic, fearful hands of people in Armani and tracksuits — but what if, what if?
The thought kept nipping deliciously at the edge of Ava’s other thoughts—gotta make a dentist appointment; gotta stop at Balducci’s and buy coffee and brie; oh, shit, gotta make a dentist appointment for Emmy (her endearment of the abbreviation M.) — as she dressed for work that morning, with Sam off already for his run around the reservoir, and Emmy already being walked to school by Francelle. What if she became the health commissioner who banned smoking in restaurants and bars in the first big city in America? It could happen by ’86, ’87, she thought. First, nab the top spot, then start a public campaign, get Koch’s support — she could make her big mark by the time she was forty-three, forty-four. People would say she was crazy, but if you didn’t think big thoughts, how could you make anything happen? Isn’t that where big change began, with big, bold thoughts? Women, particularly, needed to have more big thoughts, she believed, recalling all the theory books about women and health she’d read in grad school, suddenly wanting to reread them all, just to reconnect, just to refresh.