He went with Cody down Brattle, past the usual stores. Cody talked and Will answered but the conversation didn't settle in him. He thought about danger and permission, the swelling in his crotch. He thought about changing his mind. Charlotte would praise his good sense, Inez would tease him for cowardice. The world shimmered around him, its streetlights and the colors of traffic. Inez preached a life of risks. Charlotte advocated wisdom, the careful weighing of losses and rewards. He couldn't tell what he, Billy, believed. A dog barked. He didn't know what he would do in a situation like this, so he let Cody lead him down Story Street and up the brick walk of an oatmeal-colored apartment building.
Billy knew the building—he knew all the buildings in Harvard Square—and as Cody opened the lobby door with a key Billy felt a spasm of irritation. Cody was casting his strangeness onto the limitlessness of his streets. Now, forever, this building would emanate.
“A friend's place,” Cody said. “She's off on a mission, I'm here to keep the demons out.”
Billy laughed again, the high-pitched panicked sound. It wasn't the way he wanted to laugh. He wanted to be cool. He wanted to be brave and desired, free.
“Don't think there aren't demons,” Cody said. “Demons and angels, wrestling over our souls. The world is a more important place than the corporations want you to believe. Let people get too serious, let them start thinking too much about good and evil, and they lose their urge to be customers. Pow. The whole idea of shopping goes right out the window.”
“Well,” Billy said. He followed Cody up two flights of stairs, down a hallway featureless as a dream, and through a heavy brown door.
The apartment was covered in tapestries, aswarm with flowers and paisleys and the stolid, walleyed profiles of elephants. The tapestries hung taut on the walls and in fat billows from the ceilings. Wan evening light seeped in through the windows and was absorbed by the layers of fabric, so that the room appeared murky and deep, a grotto. It smelled faintly of frankincense. Cody lit a candle, and another, and a third.
“A lot of bedspreads,” Billy said. “This is someone who believes in bedspreads.”
“Sit down,” Cody said. “I'm going to make some tea.”
He went into what would have been the kitchen, and Billy sat on a pillow. Then he stood up again and walked to the window. Headlights shone in the street now. The neon was lit. In an apartment across the street Billy could see the blue-gray flicker of television, and he knew a sharp, sudden envy. Someone was living the most ordinary and unsurprising of lives. Someone was sitting on his own sofa, popping a beer and watching the seven o'clock news. Billy resolved that he would drink a little tea, tell Cody it had been fine to meet him, and leave. He'd return to the order of his days, the simplicity of his skin.
Cody brought out two mugs of tea and stood with them in the light of the candles. He let Billy come to him. “Long life,” Cody said, raising his mug. The tea smelled bitter. Billy let the steam wash over his face but did not drink.
“Burdock root,” Cody said.
“What?”
“It's burdock-root tea. At first you hate it because you've lived on sugar all your life. Drink it, it's good for calming all needless anxieties.”
Carefully, Billy tipped the mug to his lips. The tea did in fact have a foul taste, like water that had pooled on a forest floor. Cody laughed.
“You have to give it a chance,” he said. He opened a box that sat on a wooden table, took out a plastic bag full of dull green-brown dope, and rolled a joint quickly, with the skill and focus of a baker. The box was elaborately carved, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When Cody lit the joint, his face took the light of the match like a painting revealed on the wall of a cave. Cody's face was pocked, extravagantly lined. In repose, all his handsomeness fell away from him.
He gave the joint to Billy. Billy sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, felt with gratitude the familiar sweet burning. When he passed the joint back to Cody, Cody put his hand, gently, on Billy's chest.
“I can feel your heart,” he said. “Child, what are you so afraid of?”