The Son of Every Man

Chapter 7.6

Gabe would look back and remember, with a private smile, that the next few hours really had felt that way: like there was no one else in the world but them. He had offered it to Miguel as little more than a throwaway phrase, something he'd read in more than one romance novel. It wasn't that he didn't mean the words—just that he never imagined they could come true.

With each event that followed, they played sole inhabitants to the universe: finishing on one another, exiting the tent (sweating and shirtless), picking their way down a tiny, plummeting trail to the stream in the bottom of the ravine, building a small fire under an enclave in the cliff at the shore, frying pre-cooked hotdogs in a cheap pan with a plastic handle that warped in the flame. It was only Gabe, and it was only Miguel. It had always been that way, always would be, occupying the entirety of both past and future—because Gabe spared not a single thought to either. Only now.

That was how he knew it was time.

He sat cross-legged on the down tuft of his sleeping bag. The sloped tent wall brushed against the bare skin of his back. He watched Miguel move intently and with an odd stiffness, unzipping the smallest pocket of the backpack, drawing from it an opaque brown ziplock bag followed by a slim red and white drinking straw cut to half its length, sliding a polished stone cutting board from the larger pocket, black and smooth as glass...and finally, producing a razor blade from his wallet.

"Alice gave me a run-down."

"She's tried it?"

Miguel shook his head. "Coke. But what's one white powder from another?"

Gabe released a nervous laugh. His research foretold a vastly different experience from that of cocaine, including one detail which helped to ease his mind—that snow dox permits, even helps its user to sleep.

"There's more than two doses in here," said Miguel. "Almost four."

"What if we take too much?"

"Don't worry. I know what a single dose looks like, even loose like this." He lay the cutting board on the ground between them, opened the bag (which ejected a tiny white puff), tapped out a precise amount, obviously practiced, then reached for his razor blade. He shored up the powder into a single, tidy row. He held up the abbreviated plastic straw. "Put this in one nostril and plug the other. Run the end along the line. Inhale hard while you do it. I mean it—hard."

"What if I don't get it all?"

"I'll line it up and you can do it again."

"And you'll do it right after me?"

Miguel nodded. "I promise."

"You've really never done this before?"

"I wouldn't lie to you."

Gabe took the straw. He did everything exactly as he had been told. As he snorted, it bloomed into his sinuses like a small explosion. What followed was a white-hot, searing burn. His face felt like it would split in two; he dragged the back of his hand many times over his nose and beneath his right eye, rubbing, praying for the pain to subside. And soon, it did. He looked down at what remained: a faint white smudge on the sheer black where the drug had been.

Wordlessly, he observed Miguel laying out his own line, replicating his motions beginning to end, tearing mercilessly at his own face from the pain. "Holy fuck!" he bellowed. "That shit hurts."

"How long does it take?" wondered Gabe aloud. The question seemed to arrange itself right in front of his eyes, ink soaked into the pulpy page of a very old book. "Oh," he muttered, the round syllable hitting him after a delay, edges worn from slow vibration, arriving at his ears only after having journeyed back and forth through decades, perhaps hundreds of years.