A home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham Page A

the way Groucho Marx told jokes, piling one atop another in the hope that my simple endurance would throw a certain light of credibility onto the whole.
    Bobby listened with uncritical absorption. He did not insist on the difference between the believable and the absurd. Something in his manner suggested that all earthly manifestations—from the cafeteria peach halves floating in their individual pools of syrup to my story of a university that required its students to live for a week in New York City with no money at all—were equally bizarre and amusing. I did not at that time fully appreciate the effects of smoking more than four joints a day.
    All he did was listen, smile vaguely, and offer an occasional “Yeah” or “Wow.”
    Again, he sat and ate with us. Again, he walked us to our math class.
    When he had gone, Adam said, “I was wrong yesterday. You’re weird er than he is.”
    Adam and I took less than a month to realize that our friendship was already a childhood memory. We made certain attempts to haul it into the future with us, because we had, in our slightly peevish, mutually disapproving way, genuinely loved one another. We had told secrets; we had traded vows. Still, it was time for us to put one another aside. When I suggested one afternoon that we steal the new Neil Young album from the record store, he looked at me with a tax accountant’s contempt, based not so much on my immediate dishonesty as on the whole random, disorderly life I would make for myself. “You’ve never even listened to Neil Young,” he said. “Man,” I said, and left the sphere of his cautious, alphabetizing habits to stand near a group of long-haired high school students who were talking about Jimi Hendrix, of whom I had never heard. I stole Electric Ladyland after Adam, with a sigh of exhausted virtue, had walked out of the store.
    We did not accomplish the split without rancor or recriminations. I had an immediate new friend and he didn’t. Our final conversation took place at the bus stop before school on a warm October morning. Autumn light fell from a vaulted powder-blue sky that offered, here and there, a cloud so fat and dense-looking it might have been full of milk. I motioned Adam away from the knot of other kids waiting for the bus and showed him what I’d brought: two pale yellow pills stolen from my mother’s medicine cabinet.
    “What are they?” he asked.
    “The bottle said Valium.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “A tranquilizer, I guess. Here. Let’s take one and see what they do.”
    He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Take one of these pills?” he said. “Now?”
    “Hey, man,” I whispered. “Keep your voice down.”
    “Take one and go to school ?” he asked, in a louder voice.
    “Yep,” I said. “Come on.”
    “We don’t even know what they’ll do to us.”
    “This is one way to find out. Come on. My mom takes ’em, how bad can they be?”
    “Your mom is sick ,” he said.
    “She’s no sicker than most people,” I told him. The pills, yellow disks the size of nailheads, sat in my palm, reflecting the suburban light. To end the discussion, I snatched one up and swallowed it.
    “Weird,” Adam said sorrowfully. “ Weird .” He turned from me and went to stand with the others waiting for the bus. We had our next conversation twelve years later, when he appeared with his wife out of the red semidarkness of a hotel bar in New York and told me of his cleaning business, which specialized in the most difficult jobs: wedding gowns, ancient lace, rugs that had all but married themselves to the dust of ten decades. He seemed, in truth, to be quite content.
    I slipped the second pill back into my pocket, and spent the morning in a drowsy bliss that matched the weather. When I saw Bobby at lunch, we smiled and said, “Hey, man,” to one another. I gave Adam’s pill to him. He accepted it, slipping it into his mouth with simple gratitude and no questions. That