‘Tough love?’ Homer was losing the thread.
‘It’s a way of dealing with negative types. Suppose you’re aggressive or antisocial. Okay, so they tell your mother to apply tough love therapy. It means she cuts off all your supplies. Food, money, help, affection. Everything. It’s supposed to make you change your attitude.’
‘Does it work?’
‘It works with the people it works with. You don’t sleep, right?’
Homer nodded.
‘It wouldn’t work with you, then.’
Homer wasn’t sure he had quite understood. ‘Yeah, but what about the system?’
‘I told you. Punk. The bridge, the poisonous fish, the night. What system could help against that? Curl up in a fucking corner and die. That’s the only system.’
‘I meant for sleeping,’ Homer hazarded.
‘Oh yeah. Sleeping.’ Kurt seemed to have forgotten the point from which their conversation had begun.
‘You mentioned a system.’
‘I did?’
Kurt shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t his fault if that’s what he had understood.
‘So you want to sleep?’
Homer didn’t reply, but it was easy to see what a state he was in. Kurt felt sorry for him. If ever he might have met a kid from another world, that kid was Homer. He cracked his knuckles. Then he stood up, put his hand in the pocket of his faded jeans and pulled out a little glassine pouch containing something that looked like powder. He dangled it in the darkness between thumb and index finger.
‘The system.’
He set off for home at daybreak. The sky in the east was the color of steel, and the silence itself was a thinking presence that had momentarily brought the whole world to a standstill.
The silence seems deeper now than at any time of night, thought Homer. Maybe that’s because silence is invisible when it’s dark. This was one of those rare moments when the present was absolutely pure, stripped of any sense of before or after. For as long as that steel light lasted, time would simply float, a cork on the viscous calm of the river.
He walked homeward feeling sick at heart, as if he had just said a tearful goodbye - something he had never actually done in his life - as if he were abandoning everything that surrounded him. The agitation aroused in him by his meeting with Kurt formed a stark contrast to the stillness of the dawn. As he walked along with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, the fingertips of his right hand caressed the plastic pouch. The system. He tried to retrace the course of those sleepless years in his mind, but couldn’t. They were a continuum, and a continuum is difficult for the memory to get a hold on. Especially when you’re still caught up in it. He tried to remember if there had been other dawns like this one. He sought them among the dawns when he had returned home after nights spent walking in the woods or screaming from the riverbank. The dawn after a sleepless night is the worst time for someone who has to stay awake. He had always hated it - hated the silence, the false innocence of all the differents savoring their last minutes of sleep. He would return home feeling tense, with nausea and stomach cramps. Often he’d kneel down with his head over the toilet, his arms braced against the wall, ready to vomit out the whole wide world. But nothing ever came up. For how can you vomit out a thing like wakefulness?
But now his hatred of the dawn had suddenly vanished, to be replaced by guilt at having hated it so much. Guilt at having found the system. Yet despite the thrill of caressing the system in his pocket, he felt uneasy, and for some reason unworthy. He wondered whether that feeling of guilt might actually be an alarm bell. A warning against taking the system for granted. After all, why should he trust a guy he had never met before, who loafed around under the North Aberdeen Bridge like the hobos and ate poisonous fish?
He had no reason to trust him. But he wanted to trust him, nonetheless. He had made up his mind to trust him, from the outset. He had never met anyone like Kurt. Anyone so sad and so… He stopped to think. Then - though it wasn’t easy for him to formulate such a concept - he finished his imaginary sentence. So beautiful.
Besides, he couldn’t take any more, he just wanted to sleep. And he’d decided to trust Kurt because he was too tired to go on resisting. Fuck the change and fuck the differents. Do what the hell you like, but let me sleep. This, too, was an ambivalent feeling, however. Now that he finally had the system, the imminent prospect of sleep made him almost nostalgic about the continuum that he was about to break. It was almost painful to bid farewell to the dimension of heroic voluntary insomnia in which he had lived all those years.
When he got home he slumped on the couch and stared at his own thoughts, mirrored in the void before him. He was trembling. He stood up and took the bag of system out of his pocket. He laid it on the coffee table where he usually rested his feet, boots and all. He slumped back onto the couch. He let out a long, slow breath. Then he sat up straight, the way people do in dentists’ waiting rooms. He was trembling a little less now. Again he stared at his thoughts, now mirrored in the little pouch on the table.
There was little to see, in truth. The questions to trust or not to trust, to try or not to try, were merely token scruples of his conscience. Not that everything was crystal clear, of course. On the contrary. The reflections he saw in the glassine bag were only too opaque, morally speaking. Homer was well aware that the system must have side-effects. Any remedy does. And often, the more effective the remedy, the more dangerous the side-effects. Even the first amendment was subject to this greater, universal law. It was not unusual for some unlucky citizen to get a bullet in the forehead because this was a free country.
But Homer had decided to put off considering the side-effects until a more appropriate moment, though he sensed that by the time that moment came it would already be too late. He found himself in the condition described by a Russian writer of the previous century: that of a person who has reached the final frontier. In practice, he was delaying the time when he would take his decision; he was like someone who gazes across the final frontier and glimpses on the other side, far away on the horizon, the unknown consequences of that decision. Moments of aesthetic uncertainty. Anyone who comes to the final frontier always oversteps the limit. In every sense.
Perhaps the only one of his mirrored thoughts over which he lingered was his memory of what Kurt had told him about Boddah. Eventually Boddah had disappeared. This had happened when Uncle Clark had asked Kurt if he could take Boddah with him on his next trip to Vietnam, where he was being sent on military service because of some war that was going on out there. Boddah could keep him company, Uncle Clark said.
‘So he went out there and never came back,’ Homer had surmised.
Kurt had gazed at him quizzically. Then he’d explained: ‘Boddah didn’t exist. That’s why they wanted to send him to Vietnam.’
‘Huh?’ Homer didn’t get it.
‘To force me out into the open, don’t you see? My mother was tired of laying the table for someone who didn’t exist. So Uncle Clark made up the Vietnam story to force me to admit that Boddah didn’t exist, that he was a figment of my imagination.’
Now at last it was clear. We all have imaginary friends when we’re small. But there was something else in all this that defied logic, something Kurt hadn’t explained to him. Something that cast a sinister shadow over the whole situation. But what the hell? Sinister shadows were always being cast over all kinds of situation, Homer mused. Life was too short to worry about them all.
He slouched further down in the cushions and stared at the glassine pouch, which no longer mirrored any thoughts. His life was going to change. Man, was it going to change.
He cracked his knuckles and sighed.