It is only after the most profound reflection that I have decided that Andrew Dryden—whom I and everybody else called Dry—was not my friend. He and I associated innumerable times—in cafeterias, on the playing fields [though not for sport], in smoke-filled dormitory rooms, in between kegs and wine tables at parties, in the classroom, in bars, and, if only once, alone out on Promontory Point. Nevertheless, his withdrawal from the world of the living was enough to convince me not only that I never really knew him, but that what I had deemed a friendship infused with bracing intellectual rivalry was nothing more than a foil for his ill will toward people like me—people, that is, comfortable in their skins, unencumbered by unattainable love, and content to coast along with a bare minimum of effort.

Port looked at the paper. ROOM ASSIGNMENTS ARE FINAL, it said. He looked around at his room: a sullen, stony square, the windows tall and thin like those in the lower floors of a castle. He was not altogether sure he could open them.

Through the doorway strolled a tall, thin man, his coat training out behind him in the air. He looked at Port as though confused.

"Who are you?" he said, with audible angularity.

"Who are you?" Port asked.

"I’m Andrew Dryden, known throughout the world as Dry." He extended his hand. Port took it and pumped once.

"I’m Port," he said.

Dry laughed. "Port? Like fortified wine? Where did that come from?"

Port smirked and Dry continued to laugh for a few moments. He grew abruptly serious and held up his index finger.

"I hope you don’t think this is your room," he said.

Port frowned. "This is my room. It says so here." He held out the paper. "Look." In tiny carbon-copy print, the paper read, PORTER YAKOVLEV—ROOM 105—VINCENT HOUSE."

"No, no…" Dry mumbled. "There’s been a mistake. This is my room."

"Well, where’s your paper?" Port asked.

Dry rolled his eyes. "I left it in Houston, if you must know. But I know this is my room—Andrew Dryden, room 105, Vincent House. Ta-da."

Port was about to tell this Texan something unpleasant when a shortish, balding man poked his head around the corner of the door.

"Hellohello, men," he prattled. "How’s everything?" He straightened himself and entered. "I’m Buck Sweeney. I’ll be your RH."

"Hi," Port said, annoyed that he hadn’t been able to insult Dry. "I’m Port Yakovlev."

"Ahhh…" Sweeney consulted a clipboard of frayed papers. "Yakovlev, yes." Then, in a thick, almost choked voice, Sweeney said, "Yanipahnimyooparooski."

Port, bewildered, said, "What?"

Sweeney said, "I just told you in Russian that I don’t understand Russian." He chuckled to himself. "Yakovlev is a Russian name, am I right?"

"Yeah," Port replied. "My father was Russian."

"Well, then…" Sweeney turned to Dry. "And you are—"

"Andrew Dryden, sir: a pleasure to make your acquaintance." He reached out and shook Sweeney’s hand overenergetically with both of his. "And let me tell you, sir, how pleased I am that I shall be working with you this year."

"Thank you," Sweeney said, unsure of how to respond to this fervency.

"Could you tell me where I’m supposed to be, Mr. Sweeney?" Port said.

"Oh, Buck, please," Sweeney said. "Mr. Sweeney’s my father." He gazed down at the clipboard again. "You…are…in…this room."

"You see?" Port said triumphantly to Dry, whose brow knitted sharply.

"What about me?" Dry asked Sweeney as he craned his neck around Sweeney’s shoulder to regard the clipboarded pages.

Sweeney seemed to draw back a little, perhaps that Dry might not see his pen-scratched comments about each student in Vincent House—"green hair," "guy with high voice," "looks like Cher."

"You…are in room 205, just above this one." Sweeney smiled broadly. "How lovely: you’re neighbors of a sort!"

"Oh," Dry said. He looked at Sweeney. He looked at Port. Then he said, "Sorry to interrupt." As grandly as he had entered, Dry exited, and his feet made slapping noises going up the stairs.

Later, while Port was arranging some CDs in a rack by the window—it did open, as it turned out—someone knocked on his door; and, when Port opened it, Dry, dressed in long johns and a robe, stood with his back to the doorway. He turned as the door swung wide.

Dry said, without preamble, "Are you a smoker?"

"Yeah," Port said. "You need a cigarette?"

"Sure," Dry chirped. "Could I come in?"

"O.K.," Port said, uncertainly and not very graciously.

Dry stepped through the doorway and looked around. "Hm!" he said. "Looks like my place!"

"Imagine that," Port said as he rummaged in his coat pocket for his pack of cigarettes. He found them presently and tossed them to Dry. "Pull me out one, too." Dry did. He handed the second cigarette to Port with a broad flourish from across his chest.

"So," Dry said imperiously, "what d’you do for fun around here?"

"Nothing yet," Port replied, his face illumined by the lighter’s flame. He tossed the lighter to Dry, who lit up, too. "Did you transfer here?"

"No, I was a first-year here, but I took a year off to gather my thoughts."

"Where’d you live?"

"In Woodward."

"They’re gonna knock it down, y’know," Port said with a cigarette-stab. "They’re expanding the business school…"

"I’m aware of all that," Dry said. He waved his hand dismissively. "A good thing, I’d say."

"Why?" Port said, surprised.

"That goddamn place is a center of all evil. You know, I went pretty nuts when I was there. Scared the shit out of my roommate—that’s why I left."

"They made you leave?"

"No, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Imagine living in a twelve-by-twelve concrete cell with a stank, cold-hearted Chinaman who skips all his classes and sits around playing computer games for hours at a time—you try it for six months and see if you can do it." Dry shook his head. "I was afraid of what I would have done to that poor fucker, so I decided to go back to Houston for a year to work."

Port nodded and thought to himself: I wonder if he is still crazy. Then he asked, "So…how are you now?"

Dry laughed, lashed his hands out in front of him. "On the edge!" he exclaimed. "No, I feel good. I was getting bored at home. I needed to get back into this place."

"What are you studying?" Port asked absently.

"French and French literature. Or economics, I’m not sure. They’re both pretty good, but one’s close to my heart and the other—with the other, I can shunt myself into money." Dry stubbed out his cigarette: Port noted that he had smoked it to the quick, perhaps a nanometer away from the filter. "That’d be nice; and yet, there’s all that Montaigne and Moliere and Stendahl and Flaubert…I can’t ignore them…" He shook his head. None of these names meant anything to Port, but he could see they did to Dry, for Dry’s face had abruptly become creased and furrowed in unusual places. He looked as though he were experiencing real pain of loss. The moment went away when Dry turned his eyes to Port and said, "Could I have another smoke?"

"Sure." Port threw him one. Once Dry lit his cigarette, he looked away from Port and out the window. Port noticed that Dry drew smoke in little puffs into his lungs and let it back out again in irregular curls, not in a stream. Some came out his nose, some out his mouth—he looked like he was short-circuiting inside. Port wondered if this smoking method hurt: when he tried it, he found that it burned the back of his throat.

Port was eating in the dining hall: no friends, no talk; no talk, no food lost from an open, loquacious mouth; and for this, he was thankful.

In through the door, like leaves blowing whimsically across a street, strolled Port’s girlfriend, Lillian. She said, "Why did you leave me with that asshole last night?" Her voice was raw and worn, as if had been incessantly screaming.

"Dry isn’t an asshole…" Port began, pointing at Lillian with his spoon.

"How do you know? You haven’t known him that long. He talked for like a half an hour about—" Lillian drew a sharp breath. "Point is, I’m alone with him and ‘Little Dry’ for longer than I care to remember."

"He’s crass sometimes, but I don’t think he really means it." Port slurped goulash.

"How ’bout this, Port? I think he did mean it. I think he’s a pig. How ’bout that?"

"I’d say you were wrong," Port said. He was hooding his eyelids as he grew steadily more annoyed.

"Where did you go, anyway?" Lillian asked. "I thought you were the one who wanted to go to the party in the first place."

"I…" Port took a breath. "I did, Lil. I just went out to smoke a little grass with Elias, and when I went back inside you were gone. Dry said he thought maybe you got tired and went home…"

"I did. I got tired of Dry." Lillian spoke flatly.

"Well, I’m sorry," Port said, not at all apologetically. He looked back into his goulash. Lillian stood in front of him for a moment, tapping her knuckles together as if she expected more, then turned around and walked over to the dessert table. Several minutes later, she returned with a piece of lemon meringue pie and a fork and a napkin, sat down heavily, and began to eat. She did not look at Port’s face, but only at his hands, which looked carved out of alabaster, especially around his fingernails, where the curved pink plumpness of the flesh disappeared under nails minutely ridged and crescent-mooned at their very tips. Even when she was angry with him, Lillian adored watching Port’s hands: there was nothing more graceful in her immediately-available life.

"It’s just that he was so…gross," Lillian said quietly, as she looked down into the brown, spongy meringue peaks.

Port banged his fist on the table—his coffee cup and saucer performed a clangorous crockery duet—and said forcefully, "He was trying to offend you." Lillian regarded Port with something approaching shock or disgust. Port put a limp hand on the side of his head.

Lillian, her face taut, stuffed pie into her mouth and exclaimed, "What’d I ever do to him?"

"Nothing, you did nothing." Port held out his hand with the palm to the side as if he were going to karate-chop his bowl. His lips were pursed and his eyes stood open wide. He spoke carefully, dangerously, enunciating every word evenly: "That’s just what he does. If he doesn’t like you, then he doesn’t make any bones about it." Port paused. "Isn’t that better than pretending?"

"No, Port. No, it strikes me as pretty fucked up. And that wasn’t what he did anyway. He was acting like a twelve-year-old." Lillian’s eyes were now wide, too; she and Port glared at each other like a pair of feuding sea lions. This impasse reached, Port sighed and turned his head down to regard his goulash.

Lillian finished her pie just as Dry came into the dining hall.

Dry put a hand on Port’s shoulder and said, "Hi-ho." He glanced at Lillian. "Perhaps you two want to be alone."

"I was just about to leave," Lillian said; and she stood up as if she had a broom up her ass.

"You don’t need to go on my account." Dry dryly addressed the floor. "I was just going to get a sandwich."

Lillian picked up her plate and packed up her bag. She looked at Port through the entire operation, scanning him for any trace of apology or remorse or understanding—some feeling that would show her that Port felt Dry was in the wrong somehow. She saw nothing but banality: when she left, she uttered not a word to Port.

"Jee-zus," Dry said. He dropped his coat and bag onto a chair adjacent to Port. "She’s bent out of shape, man."

"Did you make a pass at her at the party?" Port asked. He looked at Dry with fatigued eyes.

"No," Dry said. "Why would I do that?"

"So what happened?"

"I was talking to her, and we had nothing to talk about. I didn’t know what to say, so I started talking about the herpes I got from this girl in Amarillo."

Port stared at Dry.

"I didn’t know what else to say," Dry chuckled. "It was uncomfortable. We have zero in common, I’m tellin’ you—I have never been so out of touch with somebody. But I knew you were coming back, so I thought I’d stick around." Dry stood up. "I gotta get a sandwich—je me crêve…" He walked up to the deli bar. Port pushed away his half-done goulash and tried very hard not to think about how urinating for Dry must be like pissing barbed wire.

Miles Altdorf, the bastard, had taken the last vegetable samosa from the bin at the coffeeshop counter. Dry was nearly livid.

"That’s the only thing I ever eat, Miles," he said forcefully. "Why don’t you get some Thai food?"

"I’ve never had a samosa before," Miles answered. "Gimme a fucking break."

"I’ll give you twice what you paid for it." Dry held out his hand. "If I don’t have one, it’ll throw off my whole day."

Miles, who had taken a tiny bite from the samosa, shrugged and handed it to Dry with a plate of green sauce. Dry made short work of the samosa, finishing it in just about ten seconds.

"Ugh…you’re a pig," Miles said, his lip curling.

"From you, I take that as a very great compliment." Dry smiled after a chug of Coca-Cola and stiffly saluted Miles. "Thanks."

"And?" said Miles, his head cocked, his hand outstretched.

"Oh," Dry said. He dipped into his pocket and produced fifty cents and dropped it on the table in front of Miles as he rose and pulled out a cigarette.

"I paid two bucks for it!" Miles said.

"Oh," Dry said as he put a hand on his chin. "Hm! They must have raised the price." He snapped up his bag before hightailing it out of the canteen to meet Port for a cigarette.

Across the central hall of Cobb and, he supposed, through about a hundred students in their natty coats, sweaters, and shoes, Dry saw Port hallooing him. He hallooed back with the words, "A SMOKE, MY GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT!"

They swooped outside.

"You O.K.?" Port said.

"Yeah," Dry said behind a hand that rubbed his eyes. "I had the weirdest dream last night. You know the Time sculpture?"

"Yeah." Something in Port’s voice seemed to say: that piece of shit.

"I was walking down there. It was night, I think—it was dark, anyway—and there were cats all over the place."

"Cats?" Port said. Someone on the half-moon stone bench behind him coughed violently and bubblingly, and Port coughed in sympathy, feeling his throat cringe.

"There were cats crawling around the pillars and down into the fountain—there was no water in it—and on the edge of the park. They were like—remember the seventeen-year cicadas?"

"Yeah."

"It was like that—they were crawling all over everything, everywhere. And in the middle of all these cats, I saw this girl Esther Barrish, who I used to go out with in high school, lying on the side of the fountain, taking a nap I guess? Or maybe she just liked cats?"

"Were you actually there, or was it like watching a movie."

"A little of both, I think. I think I was Esther for a while, too."

"What were the cats doing?"

"Oh, nothing, they were just hangin’ around, I guess." Dry shook his head. "It didn’t have a point. It was clear as day, though, like I’d been there."

Port rose languidly, stretched his body, and said, "Let’s go get a cup of tea."

The canteen was full of Asians—Port noticed it, but said nothing; it took Dry to remark on this fact. He also said, pointing at the canteen annex, where people sat to eat their food and drink their drink, "I bet we’re the only people speaking English in there." And so they were. Port adjudged it a jarring experience; Dry seemed amused by it.

"I don’t understand these people who say that Asians come here, take our jobs, and make the country worse. They’re technically skilled and well-educated—well, at least the ones who have kids at this place—and they make our country stronger. And most of these people have ancestors who came over and got the same poor reception they’re giving these Asians. Fucked up, isn’t it?"

"I guess." Port spoke without conviction. Dry saw this immediately.

"You wouldn’t happen to be one of the people I was talking about, wouldjya, Port?" Dry asked, squinting at his companion.

"No," Port said. "No, it just seems like you can come at this argument from one way or the other with good reason."

"Well, what’s the good reason of the other side of it?"

Port waved his hand. "I don’t know, Dry."

"There isn’t one, then?" Dry said.

Port said, "I…let’s see…" He was not prepared to do battle, and yet he didn’t want to let himself flag in Dry’s eyes. "They’re completely overcome with a need to specialize in their fields. There’s no sense of universality anymore—nobody’s interested in anything outside their own little track."

"I can’t see where that would be their fault. That’s just a problem of numbers, it seems to me—where there are more people, where there’s more opportunities available, people specialize. When fewer people were educated, say, fifty or a hundred years ago, people took on many hats to compensate." Dry sipped at his coffee.

"The Asian doctors I’ve seen have no bedside manner—it’s all about getting somebody in and out. People aren’t treated with the same kindness anymore."

"That’s a problem of numbers, too, Port." Dry appeared to be losing interest in the conversation just as Port was warming to it. "In the years when people lived in small towns or didn’t go much beyond their neighborhoods in big cities, a doctor knew all his patients well. That lends itself to a good bedside manner. Now people are in HMOs and all this bullshit and nobody knows who’s who anymore and there’s anger on all sides."

Port said, "So…what—you see the problems of the modern world—this numbers problem, say—as just something that happens? Isn’t it something that can be fought?"

Dry was aghast. "Fought?" Then he began to laugh. "What’re you gonna fight, Port? How do you fight the way things turn out? People make up a great organism called the world, which is as alive as every individual piece of it. If part of it rises up to combat the natural process of things, that part gets beaten down, cut off, rubbed out—whatever." Dry shook his head. "The world’s birth, growth, decay, and death are all plotted out pretty surely, I think; nothing can change that, no matter what you say about ‘the modern world’."

"You sound resigned to it," Port said irritably, "which doesn’t sound like you at all."

Dry said, "No, not resigned, but convinced of the placement of everything. ‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’." Dry nodded. "Bishop Butler." Dry leaned in. "Now the subtext here is that I don’t believe this is the best of all possible worlds." Dry held up a finger. "That follows the death of the physical body."

Port uttered a snort. He was not convinced in the least. "That’s not comforting."

Dry threw up his hands. "There’s always fear; I don’t know how you’d avoid that. If you didn’t fear at all, then you’d be something beyond human already."

This sentiment frightened Port and he tried to finish his coffee quickly so that it would sear his throat and make him feel something else.

"What’s more important to you, friends or family?" Dry asked. With electric clippers, he had just given himself a mohawk and Port a buzz-cut. Port was feeling a little hung over from a weekend-long bourbon bender with Dry, a little depressed about having scant hair, and a little sick at the thought of writing a five-page paper about Kantian categories in the next three hours before class. Now they sat in the house’s common room, resting and sipping Gatorade in the buttery light of six o’clock in the morning.

"What?" Port said irritably.

Babytalkishly, Dry said, "Por-ter have too much to drink-um, not feel so good."

"Shut up," Port said.

"Just answer me, then, and I’ll leave you alone." Dry scowled. "Come on, don’t be rude."

Port glanced sharply over at Dry. "Why does it matter to you?" He put his palms over his eyes and rubbed great circles—the sudden movement of his head had redoubled the pounding in his temples.

Dry crept silently forward from his couch, leaned very close to Port’s head, and yelled, "COME ON!" In an automatic response, Port swung his open hand at Dry’s face, striking a glancing blow on the end of Dry’s nose. Dry jerked backward and touched his nose with his fingers. Feeling the slow, wet seep of salty blood, he looked up and leered at Port.

"Aw, shit…" he said in a low voice.

He lunged forward, knocking Port off the end table on which he’d been sitting. Port yelled, "Jesus!" and pushed upward against Dry’s bleeding face.

"Friends or family, Porter? Friends or family?" Dry panted.

"Fuck off, asshole!" Port yelled. Dry grabbed Port by the neck and squeezed. Port’s hands wheeled and popped in vain attempts to free themselves from under Dry’s arms, and his legs cycled wild kicks at Dry’s shins.

"FRIENDS OR FAMILY, PORTER?" roared Dry, gazing down crazily into Port’s eyes. "THAT’S ALL I WANT TO KNOW!"

"FAMILY!" Port yelled. He saw several people gathered at a safe distance, watching the hurly-burly with eyes wide and mouths agape. Suddenly, he felt Dry relax and threw Dry with all his might into the wall behind them.

Dry climbed up on the uncomfortable Swedish-style sofa. He huffed and puffed. His forehead gleamed with sweat. He lit a cigarette and said, "Family? No, that can’t be. You gotta rely on your friends, I think, if anything."

Port raised himself to look incredulously at Dry, then collapsed on the floor again.

In Ciral’s House of Tiki, Dry poured a beer from the plain, minutely cracked plastic pitcher and knocked it back while he waited for Port to respond.

"You’re talking about something that you suppose I have, but which I don’t," Port said. "I don’t have a shred of faith. I never did. I felt bad about that for a long time, because I thought it might have been my parents’ responsibility for bringing me up that way and they ignored that part of my development. I wanted to join a church."

"A church isn’t faith…" began Dry.

Port’s fingers arpeggiated on the table. "Just—just let me finish," he said, annoyed. "I wanted to join a church because I thought that it would give me faith. When I looked into joining, I noticed something really weird, which was that every church I went to made no promises about faith. They only talked about the church functions and potluck dinners and meetings there and all. It was like a club, like the Mooses or—whatever they are…"

"Elks, boy, Elks," Dry laughed. "We got ’em in Houston."

"Right. So I became disenchanted and decided I’d look for the faith on my own. And after a while of thinking about it, whether in my sleep or during the day or whatever, I decided that I couldn’t make it grow up in me, so I quit trying and just lived."

"That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard," Dry yelled, much to the amusement of the little bearded man at the end of the bar, who hung onto his martini and Dry and Port’s conversation as if those stimuli were the only forces keeping him alive. "You just lived. What does that mean? I just live, too. ‘Just living’ means that I question my faith every day. God is willing and acting all at once; we’re one and the other. God is purely intellectual; we’re sensual and intellectual." Dry slopped beer out of the pitcher into his glass and onto the bar—mostly the bar. "I wake up every day in a spirit of absolute wonder. I can’t help myself, I don’t know why I’m alive! I’m a shit-ass motherfucker. Look at me! I’ve got every vice there is! And yet—" (Dry lit up a cigarette with Port’s lighter) "—and yet every time I question my own faith, I come back again to the same point—it is unshakeable. You ever read Augustine?"

"Of course not," Port said. He screwed up his brow: this made him look grotesque and Dry told him to stop. Port apologized.

"He said that he believed because it was absurd. That’s not quite why I believe, but it’s close. I believe because I have no other explanation for the way things are. I believe because of the spider webs I see in the windowpanes. I believe because of the curve of an ear or because the veins in leaves are so well-formed that they look man-made—like a work of art." Dry gestured wildly, as if he were preparing a canvas of immeasurable size. "You want a reasonable or rational answer for why people with faith should accept certain truths; and I’m telling you that it’s got to be on faith alone." 

"And that’s fine, but it doesn’t work for me," Port insisted. He flattened his hand on the table, almost embarrassed by this line of talk. "Look, I’m not doubting you—"

"You are," Dry said sourly. "You are if you doubt this. Explanations come to an end somewhere and sometimes reason won’t help you the way you’d like it to. You know, Montaigne said that the agitations of the keenest intellect are akin to madness. You should read him: you’d really like the skepticism of Apology for Raymond Sebond."

"Dry, just let me—" Port was beginning to despair of ever uttering another word.

"I’m just saying," Dry said, turning his eyes away. "I gotta piss."

"You’re breaking my heart, really," Port said, holding his chest. Dry stood up and stalked away. Port sat quite immobile on the bench, under the fake marlin mounted on a scrolled piece of mahogany-patterned Formica. He poured himself a beer and began to think more clearly. Why was it impossible that the world simply existed and had existed since time immemorial—had existed, he mused, forever into the past and would exist forever into the future? Where did this need for faith arise? From despair? From weakness? Why was it such a strong habit in the world? From upbringing? From continued weakness?

From behind him, Port heard the piano playing. He turned to see Dry crashing his fingers down upon the keys. He was playing one of his off-the-cuff compositions. And then there’s him, Port thought, content to believe for no reason other than he can’t think of another explanation for the way things are.

Port got up and strolled over to the piano. Dry’s head, Glenn Gould-like, hung down several inches from the keys—he hadn’t any idea Port stood by him. When he caught a glimpse of Port’s shoe, Dry looked up, startled.

"How long were you there?" he asked, continuing to play, though more stiltedly.

"A couple of minutes." Port smirked. "Play ‘Nobody’s Home.’"

"Jesus…" Dry looked disgusted.

"Come on, man," Port said, clasping Dry about the shoulders.

"You always ask me to play that, goddammit. It gets old." But he was smiling, and Port knew that one more thrust would have him, so he told him that he played it very well. Dry pretended to polish his fingernails on his sweater, and, looking puffed up and pleased with himself, said, "Well, O.K.," and began to play ‘Nobody’s Home.’ Port sang. Dry put on a pair of sunglasses after he was through and did a passable Stevie Wonder impression, much to the amusement of Port and the nearest patrons of the bar. He sang ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ in a queer falsetto rife with vibrato and trilling—Port was doubled over in laughter.

After they had finished their drinking, Dry and Port flew out of the bar into the cold, cloud-ridden night. The sky overhead shone an unnatural orange light down upon them and their city.

"In west Philadelphia born and raised/On the playground is where I spent most of my days," said Dry. Then, with a dramatic snort from his cigarette, and letting the smoke ooze from his nose, he said, "Pure poetry."

"No," breathed Alwyn Conigliardo, who sat across from Dry and Port in an overstuffed chair, pulling tubes. He shook his head, wafting thick yellowish smoke in every direction in the hazy room. But by then it was Dry’s turn at the bong, and Dry no longer cared what Alwyn considered ‘pure poetry’. Dry’s outburst had been as meaningless as a conspiratorial wink given to the turned back of a co-conspirator, which is to say he intended nothing to arise from such remarks, except for occasional, unreasoned hilarity.

"Tomorrow, we should go up to the city," Port said, turning his web-veined eyes to Dry. Dry put a hand upon Port’s nearest shoulder.

"My friend, we are in the city, though this part of it qualifies more as backwater. Also, tomorrow I go to my aunt’s house in SKOKIE—" (Dry bellowed the word, making Port jump but not Alwyn, who had nerves of steel.) "—for dinner and drinks. She’s a biiiiiiiiiiiig drinker, man."

"Alwyn, you game, my brutha?" Port said. Dry looked hurt that Port would so readily dismiss him. Dry was accustomed to being the center of attention. He reasoned to himself that Port’s quick brain, unfazed by great volumes of grass, had suddenly moved itself away from him, Dry, without purpose. It was thus not a conscious act of dismissal, but rather a chemical process out of Port’s control that had directed his attentions elsewhere.

Alwyn’s face took on the sheen of one overcome with nausea.

"I don’t feel good," Alwyn said mushily, and he leaned over and barfed in the trashcan by his chair.

"THE BAR IS CLOSED!" Dry yelled, as he rose unceremoniously and bolted for the door to the kitchen. "TAKE YOUR WHORE AND HIT THE DOOR! THE BAR IS CLOSED! TAKE YOUR TRAMP AND HIT THE RAMP! THE BAR IS CLOSED!"

"You okay, man?" Port said. His face, too, was frozen in a mask of nausea, but only from the queasiness that arises from watching a vomiter lose control and spew God-knows-what God-knows-where.

"Yeah," Alwyn said, spitting, his voice muffled by the rim of the trashcan.

From the kitchen came the muffled voice of Dry: "YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO HOME BUT YOU CAN’T STAY HERE! THE BAR IS CLOOOOOOOOOOSED!" Then from the kitchen arose such a clatter that Port sprang from his seat to see what was the matter. As he poked his head through the kitchen doorway, he saw Dry lying supine between equally jumbled piles of cooking pots, frying pans, and spoons. A wine bottle had broken on the floor; Cabernet Sauvignon had fanned across the linoleum like an awry bedspread. Dry’s wrist was covered in blood, but the ubiquity of Cabernet made it difficult for Port to distinguish wine from blood.

"Jesus, Dry!" yelled Port. "What happened?"

"I just wanted some wine," Dry muttered. Then he yelled belligerently: "Can’t you put things in their proper fucking place, Alwyn? For the love of God!"

"Shut up, Dry," Port said. He knelt with a dishtowel to stanch the flow of Dry’s blood.

"It hurts…God, it hurts," Dry grumbled.

"Don’t be a baby," Port said quietly. "It’s not that bad." He paused to watch the dishtowel soak up red. Then he smirked at Dry, whose face had gone quite pale, and asked, "What were you thinking?"

Dry squeaked in an effort to speak, but could not form the words properly. He began to cry, first lightly, his eyes foggy, a paunch growing about his lower lids; then his mouth opened, a ragged hole stalactited with spit, and Port could feel heat coming from Dry’s face. The tears, when they began, were large and flowed without surcease between the wails Dry began to make. Port said nothing. Dry put his head on Port’s chest, drooled on Port’s immaculately ironed shirt. Dry raised his head and moved slightly and kissed Port’s bottom lip. Port pushed Dry away.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Port said, half-angry. He kept his hand on Dry’s clavicle, guarding himself from further imposition. Dry’s face became red, but Port did not know whether Dry was blushing or crying because Dry began to keen anew and put his head, jerking with sobs, back down against Port’s chest.

They walked in silence until Dry piped up.

"Let’s go out on the Point," he said. "I have this blackberry brandy I stole from Pierre—it could keep us warm enough."

"OK," Port said. "Just don’t mug me out there."

"I promise nothing," Dry promised solemnly.

On two rocks on the southern side of the windy Point, Port and Dry faced one another and slugged at blackberry brandy.

Matter-of-factly, Dry said, "I bought some coke to sell and it’s shit."

"What, it’s bad?" Port croaked, his voice quavering.

"No, I mean I don’t think it’s coke," Dry snapped. "I got it through the mail, wrapped up in bubble wrap and tape inside a bulk vat of peanut butter. And it doesn’t smell like coke, it doesn’t taste like coke, it doesn’t toot my whistle like coke—it’s something else, like crushed-up Epsom salt or something. It hurts my nose, but doesn’t numb it." Dry clapped a hand on his forehead. "I called the guy I got it from—this guy in Houston—and his phone’s not on. I asked a friend of mine at U of H to go down there and check his place out, and it turns out he moved away—" (Dry lowered his voice, which was very near a shriek.) "—and nobody knows—where—he—is."

Port murmured, "Jesus."

"Yeah, you’re not kidding Jesus," Dry said. He tried unsuccessfully to light a cigarette and became so incensed by the ineffectualness of the lighter in the wind that he winged cigarettes and lighter over the rocks through the air into the lake.

"What’re you going to do?" Port said. He consciously pushed his voice down in his throat, that he might not sound too glib or falsely concerned.

"I don’t know," Dry sighed. He sat motionless for several minutes. Port hummed a little tune of his own devise.

Dry began to speak in a slow, low voice like one overcome with sleep. "We should go over the Groundwork. We’ve got that paper—"

"Don’t remind me, don’t remind me," Port said, holding his hand out at arm’s length.

"I’m serious, now, Port," Dry said in a voice that whipcracked through the cold and brittle air. "We’re going through with this whether you like it or not—we don’t have much time. Kant says that it’s not the outcome of actions that makes a difference, but the motive behind such actions. Fair enough?"

"Dry, for the love of Christ—" Port whined.

"IT’S TOO LATE TO PROFESS YOUR FAITH," Dry bellowed. "YOUR SOUL IS DAMNED."

"Shut up," Port hissed. "Do you want the cops over here? Look, there’s a cop car on South Shore Drive right now."

Dry glanced over at the street. "He’s not even in his car," he said, and took a heavy slug of brandy. "Let’s continue. On the basis of what I just said, do you believe that there are certain things people must do even though they might hurt other people?"

Port frowned. "Of course. It sucks, I suppose, but yeah—that constitutes duty to oneself."

"Is that what you really think?" Dry said, looking as though his heart would break.

"Yeah," Port said. "Kant’s pretty smart, but he’s like a robot. He talks about duty a lot, but he misses the point—what about free will? What about our own pursuits of happiness? He gets it wrong because he ignores individual will. Duty to oneself can only work if one is allowed free reign over one’s life—laissez-faire, you know?"

"No!" Dry exclaimed. "That’s not it at all! Duty to oneself and to the rest of humanity is one and the same. ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether yourself or others, always as an end never a means only.’ That’s the kingdom of ends. It’s the same thing as acting on the maxim that you would make into a universal law. Human beings are never means: if you treat duty to oneself as being able to do whatever the fuck you want, there’s always the possibility of overlooking the worth of a human being."

"It sounds to me," Port said—grandly, for he had drunk a lot of brandy—"that Kant does an awful lot of dictating and not a whole lot of living. What did he do? He taught class and sat around his house the rest of the time and wrote some books and took a walk every afternoon. Never traveled, never got married, never let his guard down. What’s the point of being a human being if you don’t act like a human being sometimes?"

"The point isn’t that he doesn’t act like a human being, but that everybody else acts like animals," Dry said in a voice edged with cold trembles.

"I see, so we should all act like robots?"

"It’s not robots, Port," Dry growled. "It’s acting as if you weren’t the only person in the world."

In silence once again, they sat, freezing, on the edge of Lake Michigan, wondering what would happen next.

Dry’s tremulous voice said quietly, "Let’s put it another way: are there things I must do, even though they might hurt you?"

Port’s face wriggled. "Why is that different from what you said before—in the general sense?"

Dry said no more, looked askance at a nearby tree, regretted he had thrown his cigarettes into the water.

Lillian lay half-naked in Port’s bed, flipping through an old copy of Fangoria. She heard a noise outside the window: a short-of-breath, high-pitched laugh breaking the quiet night. She craned her neck to peer through the window, only to draw back in shock as a face pressed itself against the glass. Its pasty cheek flushed red with the pressure and its lips, like asymmetrical stripes of pink jelly, moved slowly apart to expose a phalanx of yellowed teeth.

"WIIIIIIIIIII-WIANNNNNNN!" the face drawled. "COME OUT AND PWAAAAAAAYYYYYY!"

The face removed itself just then to accommodate the intrusion of another face, this one not pressed against the glass, but rather smirking and dark-haired—it was Port.

"Throw out my keys, Lil," Port called through the glass.

Lillian wrapped her nude torso in a sheet, opened the window, and asked, "Where are they?"

"Right where I left ’em."

"Where’s that?" Lillian said.

"On the floor by the door," Port barked, pointing emphatically. He jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and proffered one to Dry, who thrust his head forward to bite the cigarette out of Port’s hand.

Lillian tossed the keys through the small opening in the bottom of the window. The outsiders vanished and reappeared five minutes later at the door to Port’s room.

"We brought gin," Port said. He reeked of liquor.

Dry entered the room. As he fell heavily into the green easychair Port had bought for ten dollars at a yard sale, Dry ripped the air with a great belch.

"Jesus," Lillian breathed.

"What?" Dry said in an overloud voice. "What do you want from me?"

"Shhhhhh…" Port said, holding his index finger to his lips. "It’s past midnight."

"I’m sorry," Dry continued, a little less stridently, "that I can’t be dainty and demure. They don’t make men like that in Texas."

"Shut up, Dry," Lillian said irritably. "You know what your problem is? You can’t just move on. You always gotta make something outta something."

"Oh, O.K., the gloves come off." Dry leaned forward. "Let me tell you what your problem is. You talk too goddamn much. You never say what you mean. You’re always talking about how women are oppressed, all that bullshit—and yet, I see how you use your body to get what you want. You think that’s all right? What kind of hypocrite are you?"

"Dry, come on—" Port made a not-very-valiant effort to stop Dry’s polemic, but it was Lillian who stopped it when she lobbed a coffee cup at Dry and hit him in the shoulder. The cup ricocheted upward, but had not the velocity to go far: it dropped, only to bounce off Dry’s knee and hit the floor and burst into pieces.

"What the fuck’s wrong with you?" Dry yelled as he lunged from the chair, hand outstretched. He grabbed Lillian’s arm, pulled her out of the bed—the sheet she’d wound around her nude torso sprang off—and tossed her brutally down on the floor. Lillian let out a cry as she fell.

"What are you doing?" Port yelled. He slapped Dry hard across the face: Dry was so taken aback that Port moved forth and shoved Dry back down into the green chair. "What are you doing? What the fuck’s wrong with you?"

Dry held a hand to the cheek. He sat for a moment, wide-eyed, staring at Port as Port knelt to cover Lillian. Lillian’s face was streaked with tears: she did not look at Dry. Port did not look at Dry either. The room was quiet but for the scrunching and flopping of the sheet as Port re-wrapped Lillian in it.

Port looked back at Dry and muttered, "Get out of here."

Dry, his hand still held to his face, stood up like an animatronic robot and walked stiffly to the door. He stood with his hand on the knob for few seconds—Port rose, thinking Dry might retaliate—then turned the knob and shambled through the open door, leaving it open behind him.

Port was quite certain Dry had not gone anywhere, so he stood before the door to Dry’s dormitory room and knocked on it for the third time.

"Dry?" he called through the side-crack. He could feel cold air and see bright light coming out from underneath. It was ten o’clock in the morning. He knocked again. "Dry!"

Downstairs, Port knocked on Buck Sweeney’s door. Sweeney, the resident head of the house, was known to sleep late on Monday mornings because he didn’t have to teach class until two-thirty; however, this morning he bounded up to the door and said, "Hello, Porter. How goes it?"

"Fine, Buck." His face twitched in anticipation of the thing he was going to ask Sweeney to do. "I was trying to go see Dry."

"Andrew?" Sweeney said.

"Yeah, he wasn’t there." Port’s face twitched again. "And I haven’t seen him since Friday and he wasn’t in our class this morning."

"Well, I’m sure he’s just sleeping or went out elsewhere."

"I don’t…" Port did not know the words to say. He felt hot and nauseated. "I don’t think he would—"

"You’re worried," Sweeney said.

"Yeah," Port said, almost at the end of patience with himself. "Would you be able to—"

"Hold on a moment," Sweeney sighed. "I have to get my master keys."

Sweeney was away from the door for ten heartbeats—Port counted them slowly. Then they mounted the stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was all stone—flagstone steps, cobbled walls, Gothic-arched stone ceiling dripping with calcification—except for the wrought-iron railing up one side. On the stairs, they passed a girl whom Port found so virginally and angelically beautiful that the breath disappeared from his throat. When he got it back, he was at the second floor landing and wondering whether it was the climb or the girl that had sapped him of respiration.

Sweeney counted out loud. "201…203…205." He stopped and fumbled with the keys, whispering, "Which one…which one…Here we are." He inserted the key into the lock and turned. The lock sprang open, but the door immediately struck something and refused to move.

"Hmm…" Sweeney said, his lips pursed. "He’s lodged—a chair—or something—" He shouldered his considerable bulk into the door as he said this. "Here, Porter, give me—a—" But he did not need the help: with one more great push, the door flung itself open; the chair lodged under the doorknob flew across the room with a clattery clacking; and Sweeney fell into the room on his knees and looked up. Port looked up. They looked up for a long time at the body hanging naked from a looped belt.

At the ceremony in Bond Chapel a week later, Alwyn played ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ on a boom box. Most people nodded and smiled, knowing it was appropriate, but some, shocked, stormed headlong through the exit.

On his throat and chin, the coroner found scratches, skin gone or nearly flayed—what he called the signs of Dry’s wish to abort what he had begun. But apparently these kinds of wounds appear on many victims of hanging suicide, so I take comfort in doubting the certainty of the coroner’s assumptions.

For a year—or perhaps two—I found myself musing on whether what Dry did was a rational act. I had people tell me that a suicide’s wishes are irretrievably far gone, that no amount of what I or anyone else could have done would have been sufficient to pull him back from the brink, that the resolve incumbent in the suicide’s mind is unwaveringly strong.

But no one ever told me they thought it was a rational act. I know it was now, if only because his faith was unshakeable, and it was this faith that allowed him to believe that, no matter what he did, he had a place at the right hand of God—perhaps helping to direct His decisions. I hate those people who murmur that he did it because of the failed drug deal or our fight—as if these events would push him to the edge! As if he were so weak! We who really knew him know better.

He was not my friend because I believe it was perfectly reasonable of him to off himself. It made sense. To me, it stands to reason. Why is it that every move I make to explain my beliefs is always questioned? It becomes the rock of Sisyphus when I try to defend another's actions. It is as if I had inherent falseness etched on my face.

I had to push the tears from my eyes when he died. They would not come of their own accord.