Penny had a lot of books. It was going to take a while to get them all off the shelves. But that was okay, he had all night, and he had all the energy in the world. Wasn’t even sleepy. It was like he was on speed. Except that after a while it got harder to pull the books off the shelves because Josh and Richard were holding his arms. Quentin thrashed insanely, like a toddler having a tantrum. They dragged him out into the hall.
It was so stupid, really. So obvious. Certainly you couldn’t call it clever. He fucked Janet; she fucks Penny. They should be even now. But he’d been drunk! How did that make them even? He barely knew what he was doing! How did that make them even? And Penny—Jesus. He wished it
They confined him to the den, gave him the bottle of grappa and a stack of DVDs and figured he’d knock himself out. Josh stayed there to make sure Quentin didn’t try any magic, as worked up as he was, but he nodded off right away, his round cheek on the hard arm of the couch, like a sleepy apostle.
As for Quentin, sleep didn’t interest him right now. The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building.
Quentin didn’t bother with the DVDs, just flipped channels on the huge TV and slugged straight from the bottle until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt—not that anybody cared—like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.
He never did fall asleep. The idea came over him around dawn, and he waited as long as he could, but it was just too damn good to keep to himself. He was like a kid on Christmas morning who couldn’t wait for the grown-ups to waken. Santa was here, and he was going to fix everything. At seven thirty, still half drunk, he busted out of the den and went down the hallways banging on doors. What the hell, he even climbed the stairs and kicked open Alice’s door, caught a glimpse of Penny’s bare white plump rump, which he didn’t really need to see. It made him wince and turn away. But it didn’t shut him up.
“Okay!” he was shouting. “People! Get up, get up, get up! It’s time! Today’s the day! People, people, people!”
He sang a verse of James’s stupid middle school song:
He was a cheerleader now, waving his pom-poms, jumping up and down, doing splits on the parquet, shouting as loud as he could.
“We! Are! Going! To!
They held hands in a circle in the living room, packs on their backs. It felt like a dorm stunt, like they were all about to drop acid or sing an a cappella show tune or set some kind of wacky campus record. Anaïs’s face a blazed with excitement. She hopped up and down despite the load on her back. None of last night’s drama had registered on her at all. She was the only person in the room who looked happy to be there.
The funny thing was that it had worked. Quentin wouldn’t let it alone, he kept hounding them, and eventually, with surprisingly little resistance, they gave in. Today would be the day. Partly they were afraid of him, with his scary glittering pain-eyes, but partly it was because they had to admit he was right: it was time to go, and they’d just been waiting for somebody, even somebody as obviously drunk and demented as Quentin was, to stand up and call it.
Looking back, in a philosophical frame of mind, it occurred to Quentin that he’d always thought this would be a happy day, the happiest day of his life. Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate.
If he wasn’t happy, he did feel unexpectedly liberated. At least he wasn’t hunched over with shame anymore. This was pure emotion, unalloyed with any misgivings or caveats or qualifications. Alice was no longer the alabaster saint here. It was not so hard to meet her eyes across the circle. And was that a flicker of embarrassment he saw in hers? Maybe she was learning a little something about remorse, what that felt like. They were down in the muck together now.
