Tim Murphy: Christodora

“Look at the children about to graduate,” Oscar says, sitting down with the crew. “The future of New York City.”

“M-Dreem, show him the future,” Horatio says. “Show him your spiders.”

He pulls out his big spider illo. “You like this, Oscar?” he asks.

Oscar’s eyes pop out; he jerks back from the image. “Fucking spiders, damn! You one mad sick nigga, M-Dreem. But you got skills, I’ll say that.”

M-Dreem beams; he doesn’t know exactly why Oscar’s opinion means so much to him, but it does. “Thanks, my nigga,” he says. Zoya looks at him and smirks, sensing his self-consciousness with that word; he smirks back at her. What? he wants to ask Zoya. Are you my fucking conscience? But he knows the Parentals hate that word, too. Maybe partly because when he uses it, he reminds them that, not being white, he can sort of use it, but they can’t.

“You niggas coming tonight?” Oscar asks. Hell, yeah, they chorus. “That’s good,” he says. “I gotta go get this party ready.” And then Oscar’s gone.

It’s hours till the party, but M-Dreem doesn’t go home. Home always makes him feel vaguely uncomfortable, even though he doesn’t know quite why. Ever since that flare-up with the Parentals last year, that incident with him punching the wall and calling her the B-word, it’s never been quite the same with them, even if therapy and time have softened the impact. So today, he and Zoya and Alexa go to Alexa’s place a few blocks away and smoke herb and listen to the new Mos Def. They end up in a cuddle puddle, Zoya and Alexa spooning him on either side, him wondering if Zoya can feel his boner as he falls asleep, knocked out from the weed. They all wake up at ten o’clock, Zoya and Alexa taking an hour to dress and fix their hair while he smokes more herb and watches stupid reality TV, and then they head over to Boots again for dinner, two slices between the three of them because they’re all mad broke, then over to Oscar’s, where his friend Nanyelis, the shy bi girl, is DJ’ing: Ghostface Killah, Back Like That . A bunch of kids from school are there plus Oscar’s crowd of slightly older, scarier, intriguing who-are-theys. M-Dreem’s drinking Negras from the fridge, and Oscar comes over. He always hooks people up. He offers M-Dreem and the girls X, and the girls decline but M-Dreem does a whole one, and in about an hour, and a little more herb, he’s dancing, having the best time. Someone’s got a rainbow-patch clown wig on, clothes are coming off, he’s graduating from high school, he’s going to Pratt, he’s got mad skills, Madvillainy sounds sooo sick coming out of the speakers right now.

At some point the girls are like, “We’re leaving, you coming?” and he’s like, “No, I’m gonna stay,” and Zoya gives him a long hug and she’s like, “Be careful, baby,” and they’re gone. The kids from school thin out; he feels like he’s going into a deeper, darker zone, dancing now mostly with this older white girl with a cute tooth gap and short bleached hair like that English model Agyness Whatever’s Her Name, reaching out, holding hands, eventually with his hands slipped into the back of her jean shorts, and finally she grabs his hands again and says, “Come on, let’s find Oscar.” And she winds him back through the apartment.

They find Oscar in a back bedroom, behind a door only cracked open, with some of his friends. They all look half asleep and happy, passing around a plate and inhaling something off of it with a straw. Oscar looks up and smiles when M-Dreem comes in. M-Dreem whispers to the Agyness girl, “What’s that?” and she goes, “It’s heroin.”

“Ah, shit, man,” he says. He hasn’t tried that one. That one’s a no-no.

Agyness girl kind of frowns at him and tugs at his arm. “Snorting a little isn’t very strong,” she says. “You’re done with school, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Sooo?”

Artists must have these experiences, M-Dreem thinks. Out of pure experience comes pure expressions of form; he needs to have new visions, see new forms. He sits down on the floor with Agyness, hand in hand, his heart pounding. The plate comes around to Agyness, who passes it to him.

“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.