Time Keeps on Slipping, etc.

His babysitter Penny told him he had the most beautiful eyes. She would come over and watch Love Boat and Fantasy Island and she’d make him brownies and let him curl up with his head in her lap. She always wore blue jeans, and he’d rest a hand on her knee and feel the jeans against his cheek, that smell, Tide, or maybe Cheer, and that particular coarseness, faded sky blue—

When he was in middle school his mother told him Penny had been sent away, to rehab. “What a tragedy,” his mother said. “To have ruined her life, so young.”

Nicky felt a rush of lust and sadness, a wash of longing for brownies and blue jeans and Penny’s favorite song, the one by the Steve Miller Band.

“Jesus, Lillian,” his father called from the basement, “you’re being so melodramatic. She’ll be fine.”

How Nicky remembered his father: playing Atari in the basement and smoking. Or rather, playing Atari and then smoking, Atari-then-smoking, because the game took two hands. He remembered his father saying, a couple weeks before he left: “I wish they’d invent some sort of device so you could smoke without your hands. It would have an arm that pivots, maybe. Might look like one of those braces they put on people with broken necks.”

In high school Nicky kept a bottle of vodka under the bed. He’d mix it with chocolate milk, get drunk every night, read the Nation and Foreign Policy and cheap science fiction paperbacks until four in the morning. Then he’d doze during his classes, and spend his lunch money by noon on candy bars, then come home and sleep all afternoon. In study hall, an hour before deadline, he’d type up articles for the student paper.

“You’re going to be a great reporter,” his teacher told him.

“My God, that a man should have such eyes,” his teacher told him.

He liked to interview immigrants, newcomers to the school: Did the bombings reach your home town? What was the plane ride to America like? He landed his first weekend feature in the Post at the age of sixteen.

One day his mother died in her cubicle, some time after lunch but before the janitor found her in the evening. The serious man in the suit said, some old women collect cats, your mother collected insurance policies, and Nicky felt at least two distinct and unweddable feelings surge up inside—

Other people said to him: Like Bruce Wayne!

Other people said: Welcome to the party. Try this.

Some drugs, like inhalants, are just raw experience. A wave of feeling tears through you. It takes place in your brain but is wordless, overpowering, not really mental; it may even be the actual physical sensation of brain cells dying en masse, screaming like lemmings as they pour over the cliff together.

One night at a party he met a Palestinian named Bilal who ran import/export for gangs in India. Bilal said: If you’re such a good writer, you come back with me and write this crazy shit we see, you make me a star. This required that Nicky drop out of high school, but there was nobody left in his life to remark on this. He bought his first plane ticket.

The woman next to him on the plane found out he was a journalist.

“It must be great for you, to know your calling in life so young,” she said.

“I really envy people like you, who don’t have to worry about life,” she said.

“My God, your eyes,” she said.

Hookahs. Guns. Fifteen-year-old Bangladeshis driving Mercedes.

Nicky, stoned, cross-legged on a worn orange settee, watching Bilal upbraid a supplicant police captain, wrote: I’m stoned, cross-legged on a worn orange settee, watching my friend the gangleader upbraid—

Once a week Nicky went down to the little international phone closet and faxed his stories to the Voice. Bilal did not become a star, but he did become increasingly paranoid.

Bilal started asking the boy...