1.

Every evening it began—in gilt lamplit lounges, among a maze of velvet couches—clear jewels of young teeth glittering in laughter; a glass of champagne being raised; the DJ touching his headphones tenderly and lowering a tiny needle.

“Hi, gorgeous…” “Omigod, Magic! It’s so good to see you.” “This is fabulous—who is it, Margiela?” “I think you should do an invite with you in a fig leaf—wouldn’t that be hot?” “Magic, you remember Kimoko, Eri…” “They were amazing, amazing, I just, wow. Save me one for Friday night.” “Is that my phone?” “Of course I’ll hook you up. I always have enough X for my people at my party.” “Darling! I had such a great time at Paradise last week.”

Magic staring out the back of a train, subway tracks dissolving away. Magic losing a glove somewhere in Midtown. Magic in an elevator, trying to recall the apartment number, trying to recall the last name, holding a bottle of wine. Magic taking pressed pants out of starched gauze paper. Driving down Fifth Avenue in a taxi through the winter evening rain. Magic lifting up the collar on a camel-hair coat. At Battery Park, a green haze hovers. Magic copying down names from his voicemail, drawing up a seating chart. Magic buying a billfold at Costume National. Magic telling Jason to just sample the Doves for Friday night. “I only want the best quality.” Feeling a manhole cover under his feet. The reassuring rush of the sewer system, its veins purring, electric.

And the subway whine, far off, underground, crying away…Magic organizing his shoes into rows. The lights change, the taxis go. Magic at Viva, strutting past the line. “It’s Magic. And you are…?” Magic shooting through campus dragging on a smoke. “Is that my phone?” “Whose apartment is this anyway?” Magic brushing lint off his coat, hard. “I need a comp bottle of Cristal for the back table.” Magic with mother-of-pearl-tipped Cartier cigarettes. “Just tell the doorman the penthouse.” “Oh my God. Those Doves you tried were heroin? Are you sure? Ugh, Jason, I’m so sorry. I’ll absolutely talk to Jonathan about this.” “It’s gorgeous! And it’s crocodile?” “Of course, we met at the Ghost after-thing.” Magic raising an arm to hail a cab on West Broadway in the rain. “Hello? Sophie, I can’t hear you—the signal’s really bad in here—sorry, can I call you later?” Heels on sidewalk, heels on rubber halls, heels on the red carpet, no noise at all.

There were certain incontrovertible facts. 1) He was Matthew Acciaccatura, formerly of Teaneck, New Jersey, honors student, National Cum Laude Society, Mu Alpha Theta Society of Mathematics, Bergen Valley Junior Forensics Tournament medal-winner (j.v. and varsity), Edward J. Bloustein New Jersey Distinguished Scholar, Rutgers College High School Scholar, etc. 2) He was a college freshman. A freshman at New York University. He was an NYU student with one girlfriend, Sophie Yamamoto, and one best friend, Jason Kirsch. 3) He made .75 K base pay per week as one of five key promoters for Fridays at the nightclub of New York. 4) “Ecstasy is the spirit of a new generation of club kids”—Village Voice. 5) He possessed a Dolce & Gabbana suit with minimal lapels just like Johnny Depp’s. 6) He was profiled in Time Out. They printed a two-inch photo of him sitting at a Red Room banquette beneath the sweeping bosom of a painted angel, a cocktail in his hand. Caption: “The King of Club Kids.” 7) He constituted one of three most talked about members of the freshman class. (A Real English Lord and an ’80s sitcom child star—who was only half-time!—also got nods.) 8) Did he mention he was profiled in Time Out? 9) Did he mention they were going to print on the back page of the next Paper a photo of him by the dance floor, “Cinema’s new phenomenon”?

Eh, phenomenon—exactly right. A thing that appears, that seems to the senses to be opening out in disclosure…and seems: thank the good Lord for seems! For wasn’t it so much luck? or the lucky word of others? Yes, the image-work was his—conjuring the room into a garden of earthly pleasures, or slapping pics on the invites, jewel-toned medieval illuminations that smacked instantly different from your run of the mill slick article. But, besides: what? Merely he had fit into the system Jonathan had in situ—at his leisure after Paradise Jason sampled whatever Peace Sign–or Red Dot–marked cargo were handy, by Wednesday came approval of this fresh batch of X, then Friday Matt simply screened, brought the have-nots over to daddy—and if Ecstasy was the spirit of a new generation, so much the happier for all and sundry chez nous! Merely he had liked the sly, morose face of DJ Future and picked him to supplant Declan after a quick demo-tape listen, without having any notion that Future’s “mixture of jazzy breakbeat from San Francisco with a slowed-down London drum & bass” was a style of music “no one else was bringing over to the mainstream” as the gushing attendees and media people soon gave Matt to believe.

A handful of fortuitous accidents! And it was astonishing, even, for one who had passed hours copying listings from the magazines into his address book to impress other incoming freshmen, something in the way of disturbing, to discover just what a bogus rumor circus the whole thing was now that all sorts of enterprising reporters, having seen the Page Six mention of Bjork’s visit, came scrambling to cover Paradise.⁴⁹ Though Matt played the opportunity: if New York or Project X inquired into how the boy wonder had known this hybrid house music was what the club scene needed? He stifled a yawn, then regurgitated some of Vic’s lingo. “The vibe of New York…it’s always changing. A promoter simply has to take the pulse, feel which way the wind’s blowing. A single butterfly flapping its wings…meteorology…a tsunami…” And bingo: they slipped Filofaxes filled with sound bites into bags and asked for an invite, this Friday, please.

Setting aside questions of why, Lord; thank you but why me?: well, it could not be denied that he put his humble shoulder to the wheel. Daily he pored over fashion magazines and hip boîte listings even in foreign cities, just for ideas; nightly he preened and booted up and took himself out to the VIPs of bars or clubs where, like a diver chipping bits from some fantastic coral reef, he went up and down mining beautiful people. And he did not stint even in paying calls of politesse (which had the convenient benefit of extending his reach) by attending those parties he was being invited to reciprocally: a soirée for a new couture store in SoHo; an after-party for a screening in Tribeca; the birthday dinner for the model girlfriend of a Cinema promoter and all her model chums at a little French bistro in the East Village, where everyone drank kir royales until they got so affectionate and familiar that when a quivering butter-colored Lab puppy was passed round the table, there seemed no better, more sensible thing than to lavish this infant king with hugs and adoration, letting it lick your face, nestle its soft pawlets in your lap.

In the face of all this welter, a strange thing happened. Now, if Sophie would have consented to stay out a weeknight past ten, instead of claiming she got too tired, didn’t feel like dressing, and anyway couldn’t have more than a couple of drinks before her face went red and she began to feel sick: if Jason weren’t always stuck hanging out with Marco (platonic, Jason insisted; narcotic was more like it), like a penned animal, rooting among coke-filmed tinfoils in the perennially lightless, soiled limbo of his-or-his quarters, where he could not be parted from nappy sweatpants and melancholy records, or hanging out with Marco’s wastoid crew, Amber, Julian, who could bother to keep track—sure thing, they would have been his first-chosen companions.

But as it was, under these circumstances, whom else could Matt really bring?

To give her due props: Liza proved the perfect wing-girl. Yes, in uncountable ways. With her bod, she managed to look dressed up in so much as a wifebeater and jeans, and struck right in the bullseye each time with what you were supposed to wear, whereas Sophie could veer between genius (her futuristic Courrèges getup) and daft (let’s not even talk about the Victorian nightgown thing). Liza drank like an adventurer, like someone seeking the elusive white whale of happiness through the churning seas of liquor, and to see her drain a pint glass and plonk it on the bar—smoothing back her tawny waves about the rose-flushed face, where her topaz eyes were starting to go wonky, reel with sheer plucky derring-do—made you want to clap for this brave, dashing gallant, all fitted out and bound off on a voyage for parts unexplored. Therefore she did occasionally get into scrapes, but mostly of an eminently recountable variety, such as snogging madly with that fey, pillow-lipped excuse for a British Calvin Klein model shrouded by all the privacy of a security camera, so that at Cinema first the bouncers, and then the tech staff, and then even Miranda and the accounting folks had viewed Liza’s very own soft-core. With that male bimbo, such an air-head: how unseemly; come on, Liza, really!

Yet when confronted by this trenchant tale? She made a face, she raised a gazelle-graceful brow. Then she said: “Oh well.” So ironic and deadpan. So vulnerable and poignant?

For that was her best trick, her real genius, her only (besides her looks, of course) (well, besides her money too) true gift. She could wring enough meaning into a single syllable that it meant alpha and omega. You’d be shaking your head, musing on her excellent riposte to a discussion topic and realize—maybe—that the only word she’d uttered had been Ha. But what a Ha! Throaty, and touched by every note, like a harpist warming up on mellifluous strings of gold, so that you gave up trying to make sense of the profusion, just surrendered to the pleasure of such unearthly scales. And it was because of this talent that Liza was most valuable. For he could stroll in at a fete with Liza by his side and air-kiss someone, and when that person launched into a story of having been all the way uptown at Barneys when it started to absolutely pour, while Matt’s mind was racing toward possibilities of what on earth could be the point of all this blab?, Liza would dole out such inimitable ohs, ohs full of pity and at the same time awake to the absurdities of the world that he would actually soften into something like calm watching the satisfied interlocutor’s face soften too. Let’s face it: preferred girl or nay, Sophie would have fucked it up from the first faux kiss.

For these signal services rendered, Matt repaid Liza in kind. Besides whatever good she claimed about how wonderful-strange it was to have a guy friend who for once, ugh, wasn’t trying to get in her pants (with an Atlas effort of empathy, Matt could almost grasp the tragic nature of that fate: though…come on, really? was it so very ghastly, her irresistibility affliction?), there was the little matter of entrée he offered. You would have no idea how boring were the people that she’d known from childhood, she wanted him to understand. Narrow-minded, WASPy, Upper East Side; there were actual debutantes in this world who needed couture dresses for their coming-outs. Or didn’t he believe her? Well, didn’t he? Well, did he want to see?

“I’ll show you,” she declared one Tuesday evening. “Tonight there’s a party at Peter Kent’s I wasn’t going to go to, but if you want…”

At nine they were speeding in a taxi along monumental Madison Avenue. She was dressed down, in a shearling coat, white go-go boots worn over jeans tight as shrinkwrap, with a black tie-neck sweater, which surprised him till he realized: posturing, to show her old folk how far she’d traveled from prig world. Now he was wishing he had thrown in a mark of rebellion of his own, his leather punk-kid bracelet, perhaps, among the camel-hair coat, trademark scarf, and black silk button-down shirt. “So they have this stupid private ‘club,’” she gloated. “It’s every Tuesday. You should see Peter’s place.” She shook a disdainful head: “It’s unreal he lives there by himself.” Though a wire of excitement thrummed through her voice, and—suffering perhaps a case of nerves?—she cajoled the Rasta cabbie into letting her smoke.

Was it gauche to ask how Peter’s parents had their money? Oil? An invention? A sugar plantation in some impoverished Latin American republic? The taxi turned left at 83rd, then inched down Fifth Avenue until she recognized the number. Okay, now, come on. It wasn’t the awning or the liveried doormen. It wasn’t the marble floor. It was the urns, the ridiculous ginormous urns made of who-knows-what, malachite, alabaster, Mars. From behind, Liza appeared to be a tall prostitute, as she scissored forward among the astonished doormen and he—a glimpse in the gold-framed mirror before they hit the elevator—a small, meticulously dressed troll, vaguely green-complected.

“Should we have brought something?” he inquired in the chryselephantine elevator, trying to sound worldly, for he had recently learned this thing, apparently a rule of “common” etiquette. “Champagne?” Checking his nails.

She snorted. “No.” Gave him a glassy condescending glare, which seemed to say he should know better than to think that Peter Kent needed hooch from the likes of him.

PH: Penthouse. And out into the Oriental-carpeted hallway, whither the noises of cocktail talk swirled tepidly round. Now she put her hand on the gold doorknob and, bending slightly, pushed her way in.⁵⁰

So to stay aloof, not to gape about, he kept his eyes riveted to her back as he followed, which made it a little difficult to take in the scene, though he was aware of something like twenty people standing or sitting in groups of various sizes around a room that, given the opulence of downstairs, seemed maybe a touch small. It was done up, like the elevator, in white and gold, with gold sconces on the walls and lamps over white couches, and a few heavy tables with massive animal-faced legs and dark marble tops, outrageously ugly and burdensome like coffins. Right smack dab in the center, isolated on a white armchair like a polar bear marooned on a chunk of ice, sat a guy in a dark-green sweater, his black-panted legs crossed to showcase one sullen brown shoe. When he recognized Liza from afar, his expression underwent a change. A sly smile crept into his lost face while he tipped forward, pressing a hand down on the armrest as though about to get up, then fell back again inside his luxurious throne. Not drunk exactly, but clearly wrecked from hard use: his skin was grayish, and his close-set eyes were almost shutting, and did shut, to open again without much vibrancy. “Liza,” he said when she finally reached him, drawing her down into an avuncular hug. Looking past her now at Matt, he curved a hand around to pat her hip as she giggled and readjusted the shearling coat in her arms. “You know I’ve known this girl my whole life?”

And with that: not half bad, this Peter Kent. Ludicrous, yes, such a judgment, given that the whole point of this evening was to flesh out Liza’s scorn with tableaux vivants. But there was something so marvelously unsnobby about the way Peter Kent looked him in the eyes and talked as if he were already a friend, without fussing, just being genuine, that Matt whipped off his sniggering face, ashamed. “What’s your name?” Peter asked, without affectation, without even a dude or bro, and inclined his head, thoughtful as a real College Man. Even Liza looked delighted with him; standing behind his chair, she petted at one dark-green shoulder (only a delicate half closure of Peter’s eyelids registered he felt this) while fluently depicting some cofamily vacation. “I still have that catamaran,” Peter mused. “I haven’t used it in years. I just don’t get to Cape Cod.” He let the words drop slowly, like pieces of something, money, a letter, dropped onto a river just to see them wheel blithely away among the water’s burnished greaves. Now he shook his head as if at the gloomy paradox of what he’d just said and waved toward the far side of the room, beyond the entrance. “Go get yourselves something to drink.” But first he reached to shake Matt’s hand.

“I like him,” Matt announced, challenging her, as they stood by the bar table pouring Macallan’s into crystal tumblers.

She halted her breaking off bits of ice. “Who, Peter?” A frolicsome toss of her ponytail. “Peter’s a sweetheart.” She turned to angle her glass at the room. “It’s the other people you have to worry about.” She rolled her eyes, then deposited the glass on the bar and released a tubercular cough into her slender black-nailed hand: so La Bohème, so ruined heroine! Brava, encore.

Artificial though she might be: correct nonetheless. For nigh on half an hour he glided along the carpet among a species as strange, as startling, as a race of dwarves. They were kids: they went to NYU, or some of them did, at least: but they were enclosed in the costume and manners of forty-year-olds. Girls who could not be over twenty had their forearms weighed down by gold-locked frame bags more suitable to grandes dames as they traded wisdom about how to tie Hermès scarves into bandeau tops, the way they always wear them at Cannes. Guys murmuring about Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, private equity demurely maneuvered crystal tumblers into the same three or four established positions, as if those were the gentleman Ken doll’s few possible poses; they kept their free hand rigid in slacks pockets at a perfect forty-five-degree angle, in a way that made their navy blazer’s back vent peel open yet let the flap lie neatly firm against the body. They resembled the Caleb-and Taylor-preps; there was certainly overlap in the conventional clothing and general honky atmosphere; but these were so much more advanced: little replicas of jet-set socialites and Wall Street types, preternaturally joyless and formal beyond their years. Why? It didn’t even look fun, to wear pearl necklaces and flat Ferragamo shoes, to talk in low, stilted tones about the recruitment trends of investment banks on campus. While two girls, both in twinsets and plaid pants, gamely tried to sway along in a corner, softly in the background Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg extolled the virtues of rolling down a street sipping on gin and juice with their minds on their money and vice versa.

And, voilà, indeed: one short girl with dire blue eyes who had attached herself like an earwig to Liza looked interesting, dressed in sleek black and intriguingly nineteenth-century china-doll pretty with her white skin and jet hair, but when Matt caught up to the conversation on the parquet by the bar, he realized that she was, in all seriousness, recounting a nightmare in which her father had disclosed there were only ten million dollars coming to her at his death. “What did you do?” Matt interrupted rudely. Please: someone needed to stick a fork in this! Not like they’d ever see him again. “I mean, that must have been a shock.” He crossed his arms, cocked his head with a scrutinizing air, while Liza badly covered a smile with her scotch glass: and that’s what she’d wanted from him, wasn’t it, tonight. For a moment Dahlia, the short girl, rested her striking cobalt eyes impersonally on Matt, as if deciding whether to see him or merely gaze in his direction. Then her shoulders executed a slight and implacable shrug, queerly threatening, like a WASP version of Wanna start something? “Well,” she tossed her glossy raven hair, addressing Liza, “it’s kind of strange. I just looked him straight in the eyes,” now her terrifying eyes annihilated a foot of wall, “and said, ‘Well, then it’s a good thing you’re not dead yet!’” She barked a laugh, shot Liza an invitation to go smoke, then barreled toward the place where presumably the smokers were billeted.

Not just the smokers. In a child’s bedroom—a little girl’s, from the look of the elaborate dollhouse set up on its own wide pedestal—were another seven or so people, strewn about the bucolic grass-and-daffodil-printed window seat and the white brocaded bed. One guy on the window seat was focused outside and kept gesturing excitedly, It’s hailing, it’s hailing, you have to see this, in the park, it’s hailing, but everyone in the room was busy concentrating on snorting white powder up their nostrils, so that, still staring out the window like a dejected dog, he finally broke off. Snorting? Not just that but combing it, assorting it, re-sorting it into lines with something like the affection that the mistress of this room must have had when at work braiding her dolls’ hair.

In one fluid workmanlike motion, Dahlia dropped to her knees and swayed forward over the bed, where whatever she did was discreetly curtained by masses of black hair. Then Liza balanced herself sideways on the bed’s edge and leaned wide like a trick rider: a moment later she was fondly touching the coronas of her nostrils.

Well. Not as if he hadn’t seen coke happening before. But so far, really, only Marco and Jason over these last weeks, mostly in places so familiar as their dank dorm rooms. This scene was utterly different: the pederastic thrill of sprawling on a little girl’s bed to engage in blatant evildoing, for starters. And so many people at it—the difference between having sex and an orgy. What a bizarre combo! Sordidness, like greasy faces in a neon-lit Miami Vice drug den, mixed with its total opposite, the security of money, the freshness of youth, the endless future possibilities of all these scions—gathered in one place, soon to disperse maybe to every corner of the globe. The best doctors had slapped their asses into the bright world; the best tutors had leaned over them, coaxing; and with astounding negligence, in fact with a marvelous industry, they were blowing mind and body to Timbuktu. So how bad could it be for you, then? I mean, I’m sure these kids aren’t playing Russian roulette with ODing. Just watch how they do it and opt for a little line.

Liza turned a glazed face toward him and offered her cold hand, drawing him over. Kneeling, in the instant before he dipped his nose, outfitted with a dollar-bill straw, to a porcelain platter, he spotted on the far side of the bed, high on the wall, a Venetian mask with gouged-out eyes and lunar skin: like one of Sophie’s masks, but this one obviously real, an antique. Creepy—like some roving witness, part of an underground network of spies on humanity, with a clearly disfavoring cast to its crimson lips, to that unforgiving, adamant blot that was its black beauty mark…. He thought of sitting up,⁵¹ giving back the straw, collecting his coat, and walking out in the hailstorm down below…then he had shoveled starlight inside the mother-ship, was incalculably high.

For as long as it took to leave the sanctum and wait in line for the bathroom, and pee and wash his hands, he tried to put all thoughts of what it was like out of his mind and just whee! along with the exhilarating ride; Don’t Talk and Just Feel, Sophie and Jason had badgered him on Ecstasy. But when he was outside again in the corridor, wiping moist hands on his pants barely fifteen minutes later, the feeling suddenly dropped off, into crash. He went back into the room for another pull—ah, already Liza was patting her nose again: so obviously second helpings must not be risky now—and this time it lasted longer, maybe a good twenty minutes of euphoria, sliding his ass onto the bed, the window seat, remembering to look for that hail but the sky was absent. Then: crash. A terrible mania, his heart beating wild, fingers stiff with anxiety…

Calm, now: another scotch? Calm, now: what’s the matter with you? By the bar he was trembling trying to pinion out a couple of ice cubes with the tongs. Maybe just to be alone, for a few minutes, would help? Matt walked himself and his fresh glass into the hallway and tried a shut door: the kitchen. A man and a woman in gray-and-white uniforms were sitting at a table, eyes stuck on a television where two officers were crouching over the white outline of a vanished corpse. Without taking his eyes from the screen, the man stood, extricated a bottle of champagne from a giant silver refrigerator. “N-no,” Matt mumbled. Blasé, still looking at the screen where a lab-coated woman now examined a curl of hair beneath a microscope, the man dug in the fridge and replaced the champagne with a bottle of Chimay ale; this Matt accepted, so as not to disturb further. Then he passed back into the corridor, headed to deliver it at the bar.

Beside the counter, two blond girls were grilling a handsome, talkative guy in a beige suit with a jaunty black collarless shirt about some name. “I don’t know him,” said one of the girls, patting back a satisfied yawn. “Do you, Emma?” Emma sounded almost sad to admit she didn’t either. “They’re almost all freshmen this time,” the first girl went on, in tones of exquisite somnolence. “I don’t know freshmen.”

“Well, you’ll know them now, Megan,” the guy rapped out cheerily. “Right?”

“Maybe.” Megan let slip a sleepy ripple of laughter. “So—tell me again? Tell me all of them.”

Well, let him see. There was Taylor Harrison. There was Walker Jones. There were a whole host of unknowns—

And there was Dwight Smeethman.

“No,” came Megan’s groan. “See, it’s hopeless. I don’t know him either.”

Jesus! What about Dwight? Matt pretended to examine a bottle of Pimm’s.

“Hello, suitemate,” Ryan declared warmly, but so loud and sudden that Matt jumped. He did the downward-scoop move with his tumbler that Matt recognized from earlier, some sort of ritualized greeting gesture. “I didn’t realize,” Ryan coughed apologetically into his hand, “you were a member?” Looking pained, regretful he’d asked.

“N-no, just came with Liza,” Matt explained. His words were coming far too fast. “How’re you?” He chewed a cube of ice to steady his mouth.

A girl approached, woolen coats and scarves piled on one arm. There was something so monstrous about her, Matt needed instantly to take a sip to cover his fright; he tried to turn his step-back into a kind of friendly opening-up. Her face—like a Hapsburg portrait—so inbred, addled: the chin all jutting, the round mushy nose; it was a crime against humanity to go on breeding people this way…. “Hello,” she said pleasantly.

“Eleanor, this is my suitemate Matthew!” said Ryan, as if she were an old golfing partner he was proudly introducing to his college son.

“Weeell.” Eleanor took it in the same spirit. Her gray eyes twinkled as she studied him, a smile on her face that said, Every garden is beautiful, untroubled, trusting in the upward growth of life. She reached out a hand and pumped his merrily. “Nice to meet you!” she proclaimed in a sprightly, precise walking stick of a voice. “Finally! We certainly should have met before now!”

Yes, yes, they should have. Though he was always so busy with his work, and Ryan was busy too, and it was the first time he had come to Peter Kent’s, and really they rarely saw each other around the dorm because it’s very different when you don’t have a dining hall in your dorm, you know, I don’t know if you have a dining hall in your dorm but it’s certainly very different from where he used to live, Third North, though he was infinitely grateful to have shifted over and “wasn’t the building just an absolute gem?”

Oh. Now you’ve gone and done it. I knew it. This cocaine is not good for you at all, at all. Ryan and Eleanor were staring at him with gentle, faintly worried expressions. “Whew. I’m sorry. I’m feeling sort of strange. Would you excuse me?” And the noddings and pats and waves, and Eleanor beginning to bend over the pile of coatstuffs on her arm, her forehead creased with puzzlement: Matt whizzed past to the other side of the bar. Thank God at least he’d managed to quell a shout-out: Katharine Hepburn—that’s who your voice reminds me of!

He swallowed back the last fiery draught, filled his glass again, still hyperactive-manic, then examined along the wall a series of framed illustrations where red-jacketed gentlemen on beautiful horses sped forward among a horde of silken-haired dogs. At the end, when little plumes of smoke were rising into air from ancient guns, when he wound up beside the couch where a guy clearly recognizable from newspaper pics as student-body president Arthur Brody was explicating point by point in a stalwart, officious drone the storyline of Barbarians at the Gate to a guy who nodded, nodded his neck broken like a hung man’s, Matt wheeled on his heel over to where Peter Kent had just said goodbye to a pair of girls and was now propping his head with one hand, weary king.

“Matt,” Peter remarked, once again tipping forward as though to get up, but not managing to. “Sit down, have a seat.”

“Where’s your sister?” Matt asked, sounding nonsensically urgent as he pounced onto an armchair. “I saw her bedroom.”

While Matt assiduously drank tumblerfuls of scotch, Peter Kent generously explained his life, and just to keep the steady stream of it in motion, just to listen to something, a history in which everything was already inevitable and you didn’t have to think, act, worry, Matt leveled a series of questions about the smallest cog and flywheel in it: how competent Annabel’s French was for her grammar school in Paris, when exactly the opportunities for Russian oil had arisen for people like Peter’s father, what the order of the courses was like when Peter went to visit his parents (evidently first-class), how the slippers felt and the tilt of the seats, to which Peter seemed to cleave with particular fondness, leading him to declare finally in a reverential tone, Sleep, then examine Matt with a rueful, sympathetic look. Sleep: yes. Exactly. Like speaking of innocence or childhood, a country whose gate had closed on you forever, which other people, simple people, people outside the gold and the ivory of this living room, who had never been poisoned by this eternal drone of Arthur Brody’s syllables entering your ear one by one like a line of black ants, were still enjoying—wasn’t that incredible!

Whether Matt would ever be allowed back into that land was still in doubt at ten and then eleven that morning, shivering in the white eider-down, hands clasped around his knees, having thought I’m never going to try coke again almost continuously since taking the cab home at three. But finally Sleep, like an injured queen, forgave him, so a white door opened—he was falling upward into oblivion.