Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  A noteworthy fact, possibly bearing on the question of the soul’s immutability, was that a person named Perry Hildebrandt had existed on earth for nine Christmases, his consciousness alive and functioning on five of them, before it occurred to him that the presents that appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve must have been in the house, not yet wrapped, for some days or even weeks before their appearance. His blindness had had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Of Santa the Hildebrandts had always said, Bah, humbug. And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute. His nine-year-old self seemed to him a total stranger, and not in a good way. It was a figure of vague menace to the older Perry, who couldn’t escape the suspicion that, although the cherubic face in photos from 1965 was identifiably his own, the two Perrys did not have the same soul. That somehow there had been a switcheroo. In which case, where had his current soul come from? And where had the other one gone?

  He opened the closet door and dropped to his knees. The nakedness of the presents on the floor was a sad premonition of their naked future, after the brief, false glory of being wrapped. A shirt, a velour pullover, socks. An argyle sweater, further socks. A ribboned box from Marshall Field’s—pretty tony! Gentle shaking indicated a lightweight garment within, doubtless for Becky. Reaching in deeper, he uncrimped the paper bags of books and records. Among the latter was the Yes album he’d mentioned to his mother in a sideways conversation of the sort that gave them pleasure. (Transmitting a Christmas list without referring to Christmas was a very elementary game, and yet the Reverend Father couldn’t have managed it without winking, and Becky would have spoiled it altogether: “Are you trying to tell me what you want for Christmas?” Only his mother and his little brother had proper ludic faculties.) In hindsight, it was a pity he’d hinted at the Yes record before he formed his new resolution. Yes paired outstandingly with reefer, but he feared that its music might forfeit a certain luster if listened to with head unaltered.

  At the back of the closet were heavier items, a small yellow Samsonite suitcase (for Becky, certainly), what appeared to be a secondhand microscope (had to be Clem), a portable cassette player/recorder (hinted at but by no means counted on!), and, oh dear, an electric NFL Football game. Poor Judson. He was still young enough that he needed to be given a game, but Perry had already played this particular game at Roder’s and nearly passed out laughing at its shittiness. The sheet-metal playing field vibrated electrically, with a sound like a Norelco shaver’s, beneath two teams of tiny plastic gridders with oblongs of plastic turf glued to their feet, the quarterbacks eternally frozen in he-man forward-passing posture, the halfbacks carrying a “ball” that was more like a pellet of pocket lint and frequently fumbling it, or becoming so disoriented in the buzzy scrum that they speeded toward their own end zone and scored a safety for their opponent. Nothing was more hilarious to the stupidly stoned than stupidly stoned-looking behavior; but Judson, of course, would not be playing it while stoned.

  On the plus side: no sign of a camera. Perry had been fairly sure that only he knew what his little brother most wanted, because Judson was a superior human being, to whom it wouldn’t occur to engage in avaricious hinting with their mother, and the paternal style was so anti-materialistic that Christmas lists were never solicited. Still, there was such a thing as bad luck, intuitive guesses, and so he had to ransack the closet—a small infraction, smaller yet in the context of a greater good.

  Because this was his new resolution: to be good.

  Or, failing that, at least less bad.

  Although his motives for so resolving suggested that the badness was underlying and perhaps intractable.

  For example: the reluctance he now felt, as he stood up and headed back down the drafty staircase, to liquidate the asset. The liquidation was a sentence he’d passed on himself, a punitive fine he’d levied at the peak of his resolution, but now he wondered if it was really necessary. He had in his billfold the twenty-dollar bill his mother had slipped him for Christmas shopping, plus eleven dollars he’d managed not to spend on poisoning his central nervous system. The camera that he and Judson had admired in the window of New Prospect Photo cost $24.99, not including sales tax and rolls of film. Even if he could find a cheap used frame for his gouache portrait of his mother and bought paperbacks for everyone else—and his irritation at having to buy anything for Becky or Clem or the Reverend was already an ominous violation of his resolution—he was facing a shortfall.

  And there was a cheaper way. Judson would also have liked to get the game of Risk, a new one of which cost less than half the camera, and to play it with Perry in their bedroom, which Perry would gladly have done as a further gift to Judson, being fond of the game himself. But along with every other game involving war or killing, any toy that shot projectiles or could be imagined to shoot them, any representations of soldiers, warplanes, tanks, etc.—in short, every thing a normal boy like Judson most wanted—Risk was forbidden in the house, owing to the Reverend’s violent pacifism. Perry did have an arsenal of rational arguments at his disposal: Wasn’t the object of all games a kind of warlike vanquishment? How come the virtual slaughter in chess and checkers didn’t run afoul of the ban? Was it truly obligatory to view the pleasing enameled lozenges of Risk as “armies,” rather than as abstract markers in a game of topological strategy and dice-rolling? If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man! A fine gift to Judson a fight would be on Christmas morning.

  Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.

  “Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you,” he said from the doorway. “But I need you to go somewhere else.”

  Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. “First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.”

  “Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.”

  Judson, not budging, said, “What do you feel like doing today?”

  A sideways question.

  “Right now,” Perry said, “I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.”

  “Later, though.”

  “I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.”

  “They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?”

  “Possibly until dinnertime.”

  “I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?”

  “I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.”

  A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.

  “I mean, yes,” he said. “But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?”

  Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. “Promise?”

  Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of S
tratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.

  But what did that even mean? If the soul was merely a psychic artifact created by the body, it was tautologically self-evident why Perry’s soul was in Perry and not in Judson. And yet it didn’t feel self-evident. The reason he wondered if the soul might be independent and immutable was his persistent sense of how odd it was, how seemingly random, that his soul had landed where it had. Try as he might, altered or sober, he could never quite solve—or even properly articulate—the mystery of his happening to be Perry. It wasn’t at all clear to him what Becky, for example, had done to deserve being Becky, or when exactly (in an earlier incarnation?) she’d earned that privilege. She just found herself being Becky, around whom the heavens revolved; and this, too, confounded him.

  A delicious faint skunk smell wafted off the asset when he opened the strongbox. The asset consisted of three ounces of weed, in double Baggies, and twenty-one Quaaludes, the remnant of a wholesale buy that, like every previous buy, had cost him nearly unendurable anxiety and shame. He stared at it in frank disbelief that he was going to part with it for nothing in return but the putative joy of Christmas giving. So very cruel, his resolution. He thought he might love being high a little less than he loved his brother, but he wasn’t sure that when his mind was racing and one night in bed felt like a month of nights he didn’t love two Quaaludes better. Aye, that was the question: whether to shove the whole fucking asset in the pocket of his parka and be done with it, or to sleep tonight. The weed alone would fetch him thirty dollars, more cash than he needed. Why not hold back a few ’ludes? For that matter, why not hold back all of them?

  Eleven days earlier, in an eerie correlative of the cosmic lottery in which his soul had drawn the name Perry, he’d plucked the name Becky H from a pile of folded slips on the linoleum floor of the function hall at First Reformed. (What were the chances? About one in fifty-five—a hundred million times greater than the chances of being Perry, but still rather low.) As soon as he’d seen his sister’s name, he’d sidled back toward the pile, hoping to trade in his slip for a different one, but a Crossroads adviser was standing there to guard against this sort of cheating. Ordinarily, when it came time to choose partners for a “dyad” exercise, Rick Ambrose directed everyone to pick a person they didn’t know well or hadn’t shared with recently. The previous Sunday, however, one of the inner-circle twelfth graders, Ike Isner, had stood up and complained to the group that people were choosing too many “safe” partners and avoiding risky ones. In good Stalinist show-trial fashion, with a display of strong emotion, Isner confessed that he was guilty of this himself. The group immediately drenched him with approval for his courageous honesty. Someone then proposed a lottery system, against which another inner-circler argued that they ought to take personal responsibility for their choices, rather than relying on a mechanical system, but the proposal carried a group vote by a wide margin—Perry, as was his habit, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before raising his hand in favor.

  Becky had been one of the few people voting against. Seeing her name on the slip now, he wondered if she’d foreseen this very eventuality; had been, in this rare instance, sharper than he was. All across the church function hall, people were running up to their partners. Becky was looking around innocently to see who hers would be. As Perry approached her, he saw the situation dawn on her. Her expression matched his own. It said Oh, shit.

  “All right, listen up,” Ambrose barked. “In this exercise, I want each of us to tell our partner something we really admire about them. First one of us, then the other. And then I want each of us to tell our partner something they’re doing that’s a barrier to getting to know them better. I’m talking about barriers, not character assassination. Everyone got it? Are we all clear on what comes first?”

  The group was big enough that Perry and Becky had easily avoided each other since the night, six weeks earlier, when she’d shocked the world by joining Crossroads. He personally had been shocked because Becky was rather too obviously the Reverend Father’s favorite child and she knew very well how much their father hated Rick Ambrose; Perry’s own defection to Crossroads had merely deepened an existing chill between him and the Reverend, whereas Becky’s was a brutal betrayal. More universally shocking was the sheer sight of her face on a Sunday night at First Reformed. Perry had been there. He’d seen the heads turning, he’d heard the murmurs of astonishment. It was as if a Cleopatra had shown up at one of Jesus’s rallies in Galilee, a diademed queen sitting down among the freaks and the lepers and trying to blend in; because Becky, too, came from a different world—the social royalty of New Prospect Township High.

  Perry as a boy hadn’t been a student of his sister’s doings. Along with Clem, with whom she was tight, she’d constituted a generic Older Siblings unit, notable mainly for always being more advanced than Perry, better with scissors, better at hopscotch, better (much better) at control of emotion and mood. Only when he started junior high did he become aware of Becky as a distinct individual, about whom the larger world had strong opinions. She was the captain of the Lifton Central cheerleading squad and could have won any other popularity contest she cared to enter. Whichever lunch table she sat down at filled up instantly with the prettiest girls, the cocksurest boys. Strangely, she herself was held to be very pretty. To Perry, the tall and bony girl with whom he impatiently shared a bathroom, and whose face twisted into something haglike when he corrected her on a point of fact or grammar, was more like vaguely disgusting, but the group of older Lifton Central boys he’d quickly fallen in with, Ansel Roder among them, assured him that he was mistaken. He was never able to agree with them, though he did eventually concede that his sister had something—an aura of singularity, a force at once attractive and unapproachable (no one had ever dared claim to be her boyfriend), a kind of expensiveness that had nothing to do with money (it was said that she wasn’t stuck up like the other cheerleaders, as if she didn’t even notice the attention she effortlessly commanded)—because he himself, Perry, the negligible sibling satellite, reflected a glow of his own from her preeminence.

  In New Prospect the words Becky Hildebrandt were magical in the strict sense, their mere utterance sufficing to ensure massive attendance at a party or to induce self-reported boners in shop class (Perry regrettably within earshot for that one). As the sharer of half of her name, he’d found himself immediately noticed at Lifton Central, at least by the set of eighth- and ninth-grade boys whose parents’ high incomes and large homes accorded them a certain elevated status. He started as their runty mascot but soon proved himself their equal or better. No one could hold a pipe hit longer in his lungs, no one could drink more shots without slurring his speech, no one knew more words in the English language. Even his hair, being flax-colored and having natural wave and body, looked better than his friends’ at shoulder length. Roder had gotten so tired of brushing his lank, dull hair from his eyes that he’d finally cut it off; he was the biggest freak of them all and looked like G.I. Joe now.

  It had seemed appropriate to Perry that his friends should all be older than he was. Becky might have provided the initial entrée to them, and they might never have forgotten whose brother he was, but in his own way he was singular, too. This became especially evident in ninth grade, when the last of his friends had gone on to high school. Surrounded by contemporaries of paltrier intelligence, and having no one to get him high at lunch hour, he felt like an astronaut who’d moonwalked too long and missed the flight home. This was when his slee
ping troubles started. During a period of weeks between January and March, now blessedly largely lost to memory, he experienced his first nights of being 100% awake until dawn, other dawns when he felt physically incapable of raising his eyelids, a number of mornings when he crept back into the Crappier Parsonage and up the third-floor stairs and slept under an old throw rug until dinnertime, many incidents of falling asleep in his uniformly profitless classes, an excruciating conference with his principal and his parents at which he also briefly fell asleep, intermittent intense phobia of his mother, and level-voiced lectures from his father. Was it not impressive that he’d nonetheless maintained straight As that quarter? He had his sleepless nights to thank for that. There was also the psychic respite of seeing his friends after school and on weekends, but these get-togethers were shadowed, during the dark months, by his sense of wanting—of needing—larger quantities of whatever was being smoked or swallowed than the others seemed to need. To a man, his friends all could have afforded to buy more drugs. Only he, whose craving for relief didn’t peak until he was alone at home and facing another night on the rack, had a churchmouse for a father.