foam, lay McQueen. Jude slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and left his father alone with the furnace.
In the park, a boom box was blasting Warzone:
Don’t forget the struggle
Don’t forget the streets
He did not intend or wish to put the pistol to use as he coasted across St. Mark’s, along the lightless Avenues A, B, C, but he was glad for its leaden company. The shadowed figures he passed did not disturb him. No light showed at the bottom of Johnny’s door. Jude knocked anyway. No answer. He unlocked the padlock with the key Johnny had given him, hauled the door open, and turned on the light.
Blinking at the brightness, the three cats—Montezuma, Genghis, Tarzan—inspected him from their various perches. Jude smelled curry and the carbon whiff of cat litter. On a dish towel on the kitchenette counter, a single bowl and spoon lay drying. On the card table was a plastic laundry basket, and inside it, a block of bleached white T-shirts, crisp as a stack of paper.
Johnny’s skateboard was not by the door. He had told Jude he was going to bed early, that he had a headache, but Jude should not have been surprised that Johnny, too, had been unable to sleep. He was probably skating the city, trying to exhaust himself. “Well, that’s interesting,” he’d said on the train on the way downtown that afternoon.
Jude had said nothing.
“You didn’t know? About the two of them?”
Jude sat down on the couch. He propped a foot on each of the upturned record crates. Beside him, on top of a sketch pad, lay a well-thumbed paperback. The Laws of Manu. On the cover was a painting of a bejeweled god, not Krishna, four-armed, two-faced, like a conjoined pair of one-eyed jacks. Jude opened it to the place where a blank envelope marked a page.
79. A twice-born man who (daily) repeats those three one thousand times outside (the village), will be freed after a month even from great guilt, as a snake from its slough.
“Those three what?” Jude asked Tarzan, who was polishing his whiskered cheek on Jude’s knee. He would like to find those three things so he could repeat them. He flipped through the book. In another chapter, several passages were underlined in blue ink:
59. . . . let him restrain his senses, if they are attracted by sensual objects.
60. By the restraint of his senses . . . by the abstention from injuring the creatures, he becomes fit for immortality. . . .
62. On the separation from their dear ones, on their union with hated men. . . .
63. On the departure of the individual soul from this body and its new birth in (another) womb, and on its wanderings through ten thousand millions of existences . . .
Jude closed the book and closed his eyes. It was the longest string of words he had read in a while, and their shapes swam behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, he looked down at his mummied arm, the mitt of his hand, the blue sling busy with signatures. ELIZA. He slipped off the sling and unwound the bandage. It had been a nightly ritual for the last three weeks, and he decided he was finished. Healed. A sickle-shaped scab sliced across his forearm, and his palm was rough with scar tissue. He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. He was supposed to see an occupational therapist twice a week, but fuck it: the doctor said he’d play the guitar again.
Johnny had been surprised the following Sunday when Jude wanted to return to the temple, but they had accepted him back without question; most of the devotees hadn’t even noticed the fire that night. During the Vedic lecture, he believed he saw the priest nod at him. Devotion to Krishna—renouncing worldly possessions, abstaining from alcohol and drugs and meat, chanting the names of god, working only for him—was the way to end the cycle of death and birth, to cast off the guilt (this, like The Laws of Manu, was the word he’d used) of the material world. Jude wanted to be devoted. He had never been this clean before, and he only wanted to be cleaner.
Teddy’s body had been cremated; Jude didn’t even know where Johnny had scattered the ashes. But there was still something left of him. Eliza was pregnant, and Teddy was being reincarnated in this life.
He picked up Tarzan and settled him into his lap. Tarzan’s family jewels were the