10.

Love: one could dredge it out by the magnum, yet still fresh quantities bubbled to the mouth.

As January wound down toward the petulance of February, a glowering snowless gray season, Matt absorbed himself in the lover’s rosary—for why was it one never came to the end of what was meant? why was it, even if patently obvious, saying this string of three words nonetheless did something, indeed each, every time mysteriously reordering the universe powerfully as a magic spell?⁴⁰ —and let the whole Cinema apparatus chauffeur itself along for a couple of weeks of his really quite sweeping salutary neglect. That Friday the twenty-sixth, post-Chinatown, through the haze of happiness he half-heard Lacey say ninety-six reduced and six comp had tallied on his sheet. Evidently, what with repeats, like an absentee grandee, here one may reap without having sown more than a handful of off-the-cuff invites and assorted air kisses. And as that weekend continued, it was almost like old times, those six or so autumn weeks when it had been just Jason-n-Sophie, the Three Musketeers. They went to galleries in SoHo, brunched at Le Gamin on crêpes, holed up with the Sunday New York Times crossword. Toward Sunday evening, out of sheer what-else, Matt even managed to crack his Greek Heroic Age textbook to do tomorrow’s reading—inspiring happy gasps from the couch, where Sophie was hand-sewing a pistachio-colored cap-sleeve sheath. “Studying? Are you feeling all right?” she teased.

“I love you,” he replied. Then dodged the cushion that she threw. And lunged to pin her down until she relented to echo I love you too.

But he was, actually. Feeling uncommonly all right. Until, after a teatime section that Friday on the Oresteia (during which, like some sort of eager beaver, he nearly committed the faux pas of speaking), he drifted back to Third North for a rare visit. Josh was present, tapping at his desktop in the common room; he answered Matt’s friendly Hello! with an abstracted grunt. There Matt puttered—making green tea, staring out the windows onto the courtyard below—before he passed into the bedroom, where he lay paging sleepily through next week’s reading.

“Sfryu.” Josh woke him, holding out at half arm’s length the cordless phone.

“Hello?”

A receiver snatched up on the other end. “Magic, baby, where the hell have you been, I’ve been trying you for hours!”

“Oh—sorry Vic, I didn’t get your message.”

“No, genius, I didn’t leave one, I didn’t get that far. Your phone’s been busy! Look—I don’t know if you realize this, but we’re a business concern, we can’t tolerate this kind of behavior. I know, you’re a college kid, mebbe you just can’t handle this kind of responsibilities, so my mistake, we’ll call it off, I just—frankly?—I just don’t have time to babysit.”

Call it off? My God! But how—call-waiting ought to make a ring-ring sound? “No, Vic, of course, of course I totally understand, I’m so sorry, I’m really really sorry—”

“Sorry?” Vic snarled. “That’s great. What can I do with sorry, huh? Am I, am I gonna pay my DJs with sorry? You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with you. Here, how’s this, Magic: Sorry. You’re fired.”

“Vic!” he shrieked. A joke, a jest? But no—Vic’s voice was as deadpan as that time yelling at the blond assistant-girl to fire whomever-from-Paris. “Listen, Vic, there was a malfunction with the phone! Of course I realize how serious Cinema is, and I take great pains to make everything run smoothly.” Vic was still on the line. Breathe. “I will go out and purchase a cell phone this weekend so that this never happens again.”

“Don’t ever let it happen again.”

“Of course. I will never let it happen again.” The Internet. Josh must have been on the scabrous Internet!

“You see, I had a very important mission for you, very important, and I was just about to give it to somebody else. Wasn’t I about to give it to someone else, Miranda?” Her voice chirped in the background. “Who was I about to give it to?” Two pert syllables. “You see, Magic? See how close you came? Don’t ever let this happen again.”

“Vic, I will never let this happen again.”

“All right, here’s the deal. Tonight we’re gonna have some very special guests in from London, and I want you to take care of them. Astral’s doing a show at Madison Square Garden; they’re gonna come by the club after.”

“Astral?!” Spin cover Astral? MTV award Astral?

“Oh yeah, they’re old friends of mine. I’ve known, whatsit, Keith Aldren, I’ve known Keith Aldren since he was a baby. Fact, I, I gave him his start. Oh yeah. Years ago. So you just, you know, get them seated, the Red Room, I think that’s really more their vibe, get them a bottle of champagne, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, just, you know, keep them happy. That’s your job. All right? All right? All right.”

Vic vanished into optic neverness.

Astral.

Josh.

Matt placed the phone down on the bed. He was shaking. “Like a leaf,” as they say; how true. He swallowed deeply. Try to keep the stopper on the test tube, sir. Why? That creature has nearly altered the course of our life. Oh, accident, schmaccident. Now that Dwighty has his own line, it doesn’t matter, does it? That we agreed not to use the Internet during daytime?

He threw open the door.

“Um, Josh”—Matt draped an elastic torso along the colossal top of Josh’s computer monitor, while Josh’s gaze remained riveted to its screen—“ah, that was my boss.”

“Mm,” noted Josh.

“And…and he said he had some trouble, ah, getting…getting in touch with me today.” Matt traced loose circles on the plastic, trying to calm. “Do you know why?”

Josh blinked.

“Jesus! You were on the Internet, weren’t you! Didn’t we agree not to use the Internet during the day?”

Josh sighed tiredly and stared at the screen.

“You know due to your wholly inconsiderate flouting of our rules I nearly missed a very, very critical assignment? Do you understand that, hmm? Do you get it? Hello, are you listening? Houston to spaceship, do you read us! Do you realize—do you realize that you nearly got me fired?”

Josh turned to Matt. That gray, moon-shaped maggoty face smirked back and mouthed, “I’m sure you can find another job scrubbing toilets.”

Ohhh, now that was a low blow. So he knew? Did Dwight? Did they talk about him? And so scornful! Matt had walked away, made one slow circle on the floor, hands clasped behind his back. Now he stopped: from the opposite side of the room he stared at Josh’s back. “Care to repeat that?”

Josh swiveled round, resting a dispassionate arm on the chair’s back. “I said, you can always find another job scrubbing toilets. I don’t think they’re too hard to come by.”

Matt opened the mini-refrigerator and took out one of those quart-size plastic containers filled with viscous gruel Josh was always bringing back from Brooklyn. He slowly headed for the window and raised it. “Would you say that again, please?”

“Scrubbing toilets.”

Matt dropped the container into the courtyard, checking first for pedestrians. Then he spun on his heel and strode back to the fridge. “Once more please—ah, dreadfully noisy day.”

“Scrubbing toilets.”

First of all, that wasn’t what his job had been, but then of course Josh probably knew that! He took two more containers to the window. “I almost heard you that time.”

“Scrubbing toilets.”

He gathered up an armful and threw them as a unit down. A revolting stain, like a patch of whale vomit, was growing there on the concrete. It was too bad some poor comrade of his would have to mop it up. “You know, it’s the damnedest thing—please, accommodate me. Once more.”

“Scrubbing toilets.”

And then Matt stopped listening; he moved into a frame of pure action. He took out a pair of scissors from Dwight’s pen jar and slit deliciously along the y-axis of Josh’s precious four-foot-long hanging calendar, whose two sides fell apart like broken wings. He took a small porcelain bell and a mug commemorating some social occasion from the top of Josh’s bookshelf and dashed them to the middle of the floor, then jumped on the smithereening pieces. Just when he thought he might perhaps have gone too far, he saw Josh’s sunglasses—or rather that clip-on thing that, ah, le pauvre, this sensitive-eyed mommy’s boy liked to fit over his regular glasses. Matt bent them till each dark circle met its brother; he took the scissors to the plastic lenses and tried to scratch, then finally he tossed it smack into the vomit spot down in the courtyard too. Finis.

He fell back against the wall, drunkenly laughed. Then he coughed coyly. “I may as well tell you,” he began, waving his hand over the room as if he were a magician. “I am Magic Matt, a key promoter at only the very hottest nightclub in New York City, Cinema. So the next time I have the mischance of speaking with you, you had better fucking look me in the eye like a human. Because this? This I shall no longer tolerate.”

Josh’s pale face was trained down at the mess of ceramic. Now the faintest of chair creaks, with the slightest of sighs, was his only response.

Matt had passed through a waterfall. The world shone brilliant and hard. Down the stairs and outside Third North, taxis, baby strollers, shoppers went jerking quickly through blinding winter sun. He pulled out a Dunhill and fired it up; why, his hands were shaking, just a bit. With these hands he had snatched, viciously, and dashed Josh’s precious things. Now they looked quiet, small. Unaccusable. The little hypocrites.

Don’t be ridic. Matt strolled across Second Avenue with hardly a thought to the traffic light blooming from yellow into red, to the cars that peevishly bleated by. Since day one there had been from Josh and Dwight a crime against humanity, namely upon that piece of humanity that was him. All he had done here was in the way of some just redress.

With a joyful foot, Matt stamped out the half-smoked cig, clambering into a cab. But by the time he slammed the door closed outside Sophie’s—blinking excessively, with a burr in his throat that simply would not cough off: the familiar diagnostics of guilt. God, if only there were a way to be certain…. Surely he was not base as a berserker Viking, but an avenging angel, sword burning with righteous fire? Listen, sir. Later we will go into all this quite satisfactorily, okay? Now is a matter of great professional urgency. In less than five hours, Astral. And you.

         

“Keith Aldren is in People’s Most Beautiful this year, you know?” pointed out Jason, casually drumming his fingers on the taxi armrest. At 10:15—insanely early—they were headed to Cinema in various states of unusual finery: Jason, a kelly-green silk button-down that actually was rather slimming; Sophie, a tiny Robin Hood hat with woodsman feather and short white lace dress that barely covered her privates; and Matt, his best Costume National black top and sleek wool pants (a tailored British look, he and Sophie had reasoned, futuristic with that edgy Vivienne Westwood sense of punk supplied by a spiked man-bracelet). A shortened version of the Josh affair at the traditional preclub dinner had elicited a few minutes of censure (That’s psychotic, said Sophie; Jason, You’re so dead), but then they’d successfully been diverted by the Astral news and began getting in the spirit of this new adventure.

Sophie bit her lip demurely, as if having learned her own boyfriend was in People. “He is? I wouldn’t have thought such a mainstream…”

“What are you talking about? They, like, won a Grammy,” countered Jason.

“Two,” added Matt. “Trust me. I’ve just spent about thirty bucks and three hours on magazines.” No fool, he had brushed up on his Brit stuff.

An arctic breeze was shearing off the river—Sophie screamed as she got out of the cab and ran headlong inside, leaving Matt to chortle with Lacey, pick up his drink tickets, and scan the somewhat thinned line (weather? season?) penned by the ropes. The next two hours—pointlessly in advance, but why not just check?—he spent mostly running along the path connecting the Red Room with the dais outside, where he would stand briefly with the bouncers to grumble at the frigid weather, occasionally spotting Vic.

“So this is where you hang!” joshed Matt in a conciliatory tone the first time Vic barreled out to draw Lacey aside for some instructional adjustment. “You’re certainly never in the Red Room.”

“Aww,” sang the bouncers, shifting uncomfortably. Now you gone and done it.

“I’m everywhere,” spat Vic, shooting Matt a manic Jack Nicholson glare. Pointing to his broad creased temple, then spinning the finger toward the crowd, Vic hissed, “You look but you don’t see, kid,” before vanishing inside.

“He don’t like you to say that,” declared Alex, the friendliest bouncer.

“It’s true, though,” said Roger, whose big, commanding face always had a mournful cast. “I’ve heard a lot of stories. That man gets around this club. Don’t know how he does it.”

And, as if to prove it, when, finally, sometime after midnight, Astral stepped black-sheathed and sleek from a limousine—in an instant Vic was there, crooning into the ear of one member of the party, who was listening with an absent air.

Keith Aldren, it had to be. Hatefully gorgeous, with cupid curls over his brow, a weary yet open, down-to-earth expression. And tall, an Adonis above stunted Vic. The man laughed gently at something Vic said, bending his head with a gesture of modest princeliness. So these other three must be Arthur Vigelow, James Nutley, Tom Cutter, leaving an extra man with voluminous hair and the anorexic blonde, clearly Keith Aldren’s “bird.”

—Suddenly the whole party moved up toward the steps…. Matt took an involuntary step back, brushed a bouncer, then pitched forward on quivery legs when Vic gestured to “my man Magic.”

Keith Aldren fixed his thoughtful blue eyes on Matt.

And then there came a pause. In this instant—as long as it took before Matt recalled he had a hand to extend for the customary slap, a mouth with which to pronounce What’s up—he fixated on one feature of the situation: namely, that a mistake had been made here, a real and deleterious error. It was precisely the same sort of gaffe as when, say, a well-meaning substitute gym teacher tried to get Matt in the game by asking that the volleyball be passed his way. What could Vic have been thinking to choose him for this errand—why couldn’t Vic have left him, in accordance with his humble powers, idle, by the sidelines, content to watch the traffic of fitter forms before him? Was it possible to run with dignity down the dais, hail a cab, and lickety-split be at Sophie’s? But finally: “What’s up?” he managed, holding out his hand until it was slapped.

“Well. Shall we go in?” said Keith Aldren, with a head jerk to his “blokes.”

All down the corridor, Matt kept darting around to make sure they were with him, which they were, untensed, absentminded. Loose. Done this a million times. They were hardly noticing. Maybe if he just kept his cool, did nothing too strange or intrusive?

In the main hall the situation was not such as to impress. A smattering of guido-y guys massed on the dance floor, muscle Ts, gold. “It’s a little early,” Matt chattered. “It really picks up after one or so.” Idiot. Like they’d never been to a nightclub before!

“Mm,” said Keith Aldren, nodding vaguely.

Matt led them through the back stairs. “I wish I could have caught your show,” he gushed. “I just love your music. But you know how it is, work…” He bunched his shoulders and sighed.

A shadow crossed Keith Aldren’s face. Shite! Gauche to refer to this as work. At last they reached Coco. “Here we are,” he chirped, a touch too peppily.

The bird murmured something in Keith Aldren’s ear; Keith pursed his lips. Was there a mote of suspicion in his eye? “This is…the VIP room, right?”

“Oh yes, of course. I mean, of course it’s one of them—there’s the Champagne Lounge and the Booty Den⁴¹ too—but this is the one Vic told me to take you to. I mean, this is more your vibe. Most your vibe. Of the ones we have. Here.”

Keith Aldren nodded. Coco opened the ropes, regally. And: what now? Why, what else but—the tables were all taken! He ran at the hostess.

“Well, are they here yet?” Sandi twirled her hair around an ear lazily.

“They’re right behind me! Now hop to it or Vic will have your head!” He sidled back to Astral. The bird was squished against a wall, mashed by a vulgar woman doffing her jacket. “Sooo sorry. They’re just clearing one now. Our staff…” He rolled his eyes.

“No problem,” muttered Keith Aldren. Downright quizzical this time. No doubt about it. Tremors of suspicion about our suitability.

Sandi appeared and led them to their table. They slid themselves down moodily, surveying the scene with dark glances. “What would you like?” she asked.

“Uh…” Keith Aldren raised his eyebrows. “…a bottle…”

“Champagne!” shot Matt.

“Ye-es, I think we’ll have champagne.”

He followed lockstep behind Sandi. “Why did you do that?” he hissed. “Don’t you know who they are? We’re always supposed to give celebs champagne!” But he was all glad hands again by the time, back at the table, she began easing the foam into six flutes.

“If you need anything else,” she smiled, “just ask me. My name’s Sandi.”

“Oh yes,” babbled Matt, hurriedly springing at the table (hello, my role here, I should think!), “if you need anything else, just ask me. Matt. Magic. Again.” He half-felt the urge to bow. “So I’ll be over there. Okay. Bye.”

He teetered over toward where he’d left Sophie and Jason half an hour ago by the bar, en route lighting a cigarette, sweaty and desperate as a man escaped from prison.

“Hi!” Through the crowd, Sophie squeezed his arm. “How did it go?”

“Hey,” said Jason, “are they here? Which are they?”

“Back left, see them? In the corner. Five guys, malnourished girl. See?”

“Wow, it really is them. Cool. C’you introduce me?”

“What was that? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that, I thought you said you were completely insane. Words to that effect.”

“Ouch!” Jason grinned. “Hold on to this one, Sophie, he’s a keeper.”

He flitted, too nervous to sit. Intermittently he visited to ensure Astral’s champers was flowing freely, which it always was, without his needing to intervene. In fact, a mild element of humor started to enter the surprised face Keith Aldren made each time Matt checked in, as he answered, “We’re fine,” or “Fine, thank you,” or “Still fine!” But around two-thirty Matt felt a tap on the shoulder: that unidentified fifth guy, with the hair. “Hey,” the man breathed in Matt’s face, “d’you know where we can get some X?”

“The drug?” Matt jerked a look over his shoulders.

The man laughed through his nostrils. “Yes—The Drug.”

He swallowed. So was it really so casual? Was that the way it was done? Like asking to bum a smoke. There, sickly and nasty as ever, stood Marshall’s dealer, Jonathan, with a Heineken against the back rim of the bar, where it was dark. All this would require was to say a few words. The illegality of that could hardly be very great…or what would they say to Vic? Your kid’s a fucking prude. And, after all, Vic had ordered him: Whatever it takes, just keep them happy. That’s your job.

“Sorry, just zoned for a sec. Hold on.” He dropped his drink and walked over.

Jonathan perked up instantly. “Where is he?” he demanded, darting his head around. Matt walked Jonathan over to the guy; then hands off, no evidence, he beelined away to the staff bathroom. Inside, Matt clinked shut the toilet cover and sat down. It was over. That simple. The hands, empty and light. He was grinning wide. He got Astral drugs. An intimate link, a fine yet indestructible thread. Astral. How far had he come from seeing them on the cover of Spin at CVS while killing time in the aimless autumn afternoons? These very fingers had touched those glossy faces posing in the studio with headphones, just four months ago.

Out of the bathroom, he found Sophie and Jason’s table. “Well, that was too odd.” He fell into a chair.

“Interesting,” concluded Jason when Matt finished the story. “Hey, you guys,” he bent toward them animatedly, “when are we going to X again?”

“Really?” Sophie murmured. A skittish laugh.

“Yes, really. It’s been like a month—more, since New Year’s.”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Matt. “Last time it took me nearly a whole week to get over that blues thing.” He shuddered. Just thinking about those gray days brought the ash taste back.

“It’s just the time. You have to stay up the whole night, and then the next day is wasted…I think you can only really do it when you have vacation,” reasoned Sophie.

“Well, I’d like to.” Jason crossly folded up his arms. “One of these days.”

“I’d be happy to ask Jonathan for you, if you…” Matt suggested.

“I’m not going to do it by myself,” Jason huffed.

“Maybe you should ask Stan and Jorge, or something,” said Sophie helpfully.

“Maybe I will.” Jason sulked. Then his face softened; he scratched his chin thoughtfully, drew out a Newport. “Shouldn’t you go, like, give them water?”

Though when Matt plowed with six freezing bottles straight to their table, there was only that guy and Tom Cutter, looking at their hands and laughing. “Hey.” Matt set down the bottles. “Where’re the others?” Let them be unhurt! Not on his beat!

“Oh.” The guy beamed at Tom Cutter. “They weren’t, uh, up to it. They jetted.” He sniffed, shrugging. “Back to the hotel.”

“Thank you,” said—or almost sang—Tom Cutter, in a lilting Scottish brogue. “You’ve been brilliant.”

Hmm. Still, it was something; twenty-five percent of Astral. “My pleasure. Well, here’s a load of water. Should last you all night. Try to drink it all, okay? And have fun!” he added, washing his hands of the night’s task at last.

“Heavens,” Matt sighed when he was back by Sophie’s side. “I need a beverage. A real one.”

“Now? Isn’t it time to go?” she exclaimed, exasperated.

“Oh please,” he kissed her hand, “just one,” he kissed it again, “fair lady,” again, “I’ve been so crazed all night.”

She clucked her tongue but smiled. “Fine. But just one.”

He ran to the bar and ordered a, well, double; one. In that sense.

“Hey…” Liza Andrewes, leaning there against the counter. Splendor in the garden. She was half angel, half leopard. The topaz eyes drooped prettily under the weight of all that loveliness. Liza flashed up on her Ionian neck. “We’re about to cut.” Behind her stood a good-looking kid, jet-black hair, an ironic slouch, perfectly reedy like Keith Aldren in dark denim; how are some people just born with it? And a stumpy guy who was bent over lighting a cigarette, surreptitiously, like a flasher. “Jeremy, Marco, this is Magic! So, Magic,” slow, serious, “do you wanna come hang? My place. Mercer and Fourth.”

Want to come. Hang. An invitation, a palpable invitation—Liza with crew! To hang. Utterly different from just using him for entrée! “Huh; right by where I live,” he mused. Or Sophie lived. Not to appear eager: one one thousand, two two thousand…“Maybe. Let me check with my people.”

“Yay, good, ready?” Sophie reached for her purse when she saw him.

“Do you wanna go hang with these kids?” he fired off in a quiet undertone.

“Who?” she moaned.

“Liza…you know.” He looked at Jason, jerking his shoulder back toward them.

Jason raised his eyebrows. “Sure…whatever.” He shrugged to Sophie.

She paused, purse aloft in her hands. “Whatever.” Shot Jason a glance. “Okay.”

Down the corridor they barreled, ducking between bodies curled in shadows. By now, the main dance floor was mostly empty. A queen in a white pantsuit was roiling a balloon slowly through the air—air that stank, felt sticky, as if something viscous had exploded hours ago and was dripping down the walls.

Outdoors the night was full of February, ice.

“Let’s go three and three,” Liza declared. “Marco, you know the way, you should go with them.” She pointed at Sophie and Jason.

Jeremy opened a cab door, and Liza trailed. Then him. The taxi bucked forward from the curb and he realized—forgot to peck Sophie bye as they always did, or even wave, See you there. How’d that happen? He was, perhaps, sinking into a warm golden bath of the scotch which flushed from a tight spot in the middle of his chest. And that was the tincture one needed: not these kiddie cosmos Sophie and Jason persisted in favoring. Yes, the edge was off his nerves. The edge was off his tongue, his mind; scotch had rubbed them smooth. Unzipped two fingers’ width of his window as they sped past the Hudson—by this point of winter there must be ice floes out there, in the river that glowed inhuman blue under the moon. Inside the car was the same as outside, dark space, silent. You gave yourself up to this, the speed and space of it. Every second left behind, behind, behind, and he, whee, a kid letting go the handlebars of a bike, was merely transmitted like a signal between two ends of a wire.

The car purred to a stop at the corner of Mercer. He fumbled with his wallet but Jeremy paid, without even looking at him, while Liza strode on ahead; he followed into the lobby. “Hi, Rico,” she growled to the liveried doorman, who seemed tiny under the resplendent chandelier. “I’m expecting some guests.” Catapulting lazily ahead on her twin minaret legs. Behind Matt’s back the past universe tingled; the unreturnable world.

She unlocked her door⁴² and they floated into the space, a loft-style duplex with a half second floor. Jeremy wandered over to the stereo. “Portishead?” he called.

“Okay…” floated from the kitchen. They weren’t boy-and-girl, were they? She was acting too queenly, too independent of him, some Boudicca, an Amazonian chieftess. “Lester…where are you, kitty? There you are, there you are, you must be starving…”

The music oared in, liquid strokes. Not a word had they said since the club, and still there was nothing to say: what exactly was “chilling”? If only he could for once, say, plant a tape recorder, find out. He stiffly settled on the couch and lit a smoke. Truly, this place was immense. How rich is rich? Twenty feet at least stretched cathedrally above him. Languid scarlet drapes hung over what must be an incredible view. To think a freshman girl lives here alone. A pad like this must cost at least ten times his house.

Liza stalked from the kitchen, followed by a lean gray cat that walked like her, somehow—a wrenching torque of the hips that wrung out flashes of violence and elegance at once. She folded into a high leather chair, her legs tucked below the lithe ass and inscrutably smooth torso outlined by her clinging beige jersey. Head propped on the tall chair back’s corner, she gazed down at him, half shy, half ravishing.

The door buzzed. Her long legs scissored open and walked her over to it; Marco padded in, followed by Jason and a shell-shocked Sophie. Okay, he felt bad. But did she have to look so horribly deer-in-headlights? Though she knows Liza: or, at least, they’ve met. When Sophie’s eyes adjusted and lit on him, she beat it over to the couch and slid in, next Jason.

“Hey,” Matt said, exhaling, noncommittal, tapping her knee.

Jeremy was packing a bowl with slim fingers. He tamped it, drew, passed it on. Matt dragged, hard; when he lifted his eyes, Jason was staring at him with an odd look of concentrated search: as if there were a shell propped to his ear, and he was trying to hear the sea.

“Where’s your mirror, Liza?” whined Marco. Fetching it from the bathroom, he sat cross-legged on the floor to unpeel a square of tinfoil, dumping white powder. He massaged it with a credit card, coiled a bill into a tube, and snorted, threw back his head.

How sexy. Even on this midget, it was so Miami Vice. Nights of staying home those Fridays of fifth grade watching the show and combing his hair to look like Crockett flashed through his mind. For an instant the reflection of that ten-year-old lard in his mother’s Dippity-Do whom he had been glinted out of Marco’s mirror back at him. “God, you know Astral?” His head was spinning. He felt floaty and invincible as he stubbed out the smoke. “I had to, like, get them drugs tonight.”

“Astral was there?” Jeremy looked up from the bowl, animate for once. “Rad.”

“What kind of drugs?” Marco wanted to know, licking his finger and dabbing it into the tinfoil, licking and dabbing, like a lizard.

“Just Ecs—” Ahem, the cool word is X.

“Really?” chimed Liza, stroking Lester in her lap. Girlishly delighted yet not listening, her face just radiant with the gazing of him, golden. What in God’s green heaven could a girl like her want from him. “That’s cra-zy,” she drawled, molasses-slow. Lester stared directly into Matt’s eyes, that fine gray tail erect.

PHARMACEUTICAL GLOSS BY DR. HANS MANNHEIM

Now I intervene to douse what may be for some a question that flames. Do you scratch your head and say: what? How can persons purchase and sell ecstasy like one commercial item, and how can they “take” it? Once I considered such issues at a certain memorable cocktail party in the flat of one of Lisanne’s colleagues. “You tell him, Joan,” was the response of my wife, sighing as she reached for another date. And so the unfeelingly rude Joan⁴³ explained that Lisanne and she did not discuss some emotional or spiritual state of ecstasy but rather a recreational narcotic of the same name. However, Joan left so many gaps that I was forced to supplement her words with researches conducted on my own.

Ecstasy, rather 3,4 methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, is a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance, which is to say that, on your Federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s sliding scale, Ecstasy stands with heroin and cocaine as one of the most illegal drugs citizens can employ. In fact it was patented in Germany, in 1914, by the pharmaceutical firm Merck, as a dietetic medication, since Ecstasy (or let us call it MDMA) interferes with appetite; yet the drug was never manufactured by Merck. At this moment MDMA voyages from Germany to America, affixing itself in a new soil, as have I.

Important dates:

• 1953: U.S. Army makes trials of MDMA, as truth serum, reportedly.

• Mid-1970s to Mid-1980s: Psychiatrists give MDMA to patients, claiming users can communicate with others more intimately and unlock repressed memories.

• 1985: Drug Enforcement Agency forbids use; raises MDMA to a Schedule 1 status (ruling over the judge’s recommended Schedule 3).

Those psychiatrists in favour of the drug’s employment now complained that, unlike other Schedule 1 substances, Ecstasy was neither fatal nor addictive; the DEA countered by pointing to several young persons who perished on consuming it; the psychiatrists argued that such persons perished through secondary means (e.g., becoming “overheated” in a high-temperature dancing palace and failing to re-hydrate with plentiful water); but in the end the DEA, having no need of the psychiatrists’ authorization, did as it wished.

There is a reason that I did not join the faculty of natural sciences; if you are like me you may be saying, Hans, enough with the chemical history! Yet one moment more, please: take a deep breath, and let us journey together inside the human brain.

I now excerpt from a text received by return mail from a kindly secretary in the toxicological program at the University of New Keene: MDMA operates chiefly by manipulating levels of serotonin—the brain’s regulator of mood, appetite, and sleep—as well as other neurotransmitters such as dopamine, by stimulating their release and inhibiting their reuptake. So: in these respects, Ecstasy resembles Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, which attack the syndrome of depression. When the brain is flooded by the serotonin, the user experiences elation, loss of inhibition, great sensitivity to tactile sensations, increased enjoyment of musical stimuli, a universal mood of openness with others. However, I continue: Typically the on-drug experience is followed by periods of depression and negative emotions, with as many as 90% of users citing what they call midweek blues…. Experiments have linked serotonergic nerve damage in laboratory animals to single doses of MDMA, with additional doses resulting in widespread loss of distal axon terminals…and an increasing body of evidence supports corresponding neuro-psychobiological damage in humans. Regular Ecstasy users frequently demonstrate: memory loss, deficits in higher cognitive functioning, impaired attention, a range of psychiatric disorders, reduced immuno-competence, sleep disturbances, appetite loss, and sexual dysfunction.

But why then, if the studies are correct, do so many swallow Ecstasy? Who will wish to bring upon himself depression or rid himself of natural delights in food and sex? There is a youth in my Tuesday reading group (James, Aggravated Assault) who informs me that in the year before his arrest, he swallowed some two hundred pills of Ecstasy. He enjoyed Ecstasy every weekend, by habit twice each weekend, often swallowing more than one pill in a night (as serotonin levels decrease, more stimulant is needed). He describes for me feelings of sensory bliss, of emotional euphoria, of extreme togetherness, telling me of parties where psychedelic films are played in vast warehouses while total strangers approach and stroke and use electric massagers and mentholated ointments upon each other. I am reminded of those riotous gatherings among primitive peoples Emile Durkheim outlined in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: beating drums, brilliant body paint and fantastic costumes, wild dancings, that sensation of no longer being one, alone, solitary, but bound into a larger Soul with others of your nature, a sensation for which we humans are said to possess a fundamental hunger. Today, without shamans and human sacrifice, one pill promises such an experience to its taker. Promises, I say: I refrain from any claim about how well the drug fulfils this pledge.