January 2011, late Saturday, and a heavy winter storm parks over New York City. Compact cars are white mounds against the curb; the subways, slick wet messes. I am twenty-eight years old, bundled in a parka, scarfed and gloved, dressed more for my home—the sweeping, hilly potato farms of southeastern Idaho—than for NYC. I pick my way through puddles and over ice patches and finally under a Williamsburg overpass and when I feel that I’ve found where I’m supposed to be, I text my cousin Nathan Bozung (known as “Boznuts” to the snowboarding industry, though I simply call him “Nate”) to let him know I’ve arrived. He appears on a stoop, sprints down the black-iced sidewalk, and embraces me full stride, nearly knocking me off my feet. Despite the cold, Nate has no coat. He wears a T-shirt that hangs to his knees, tight tapered black jeans, throwback Nikes, and a neon-lime lanyard that holds his keys and Blackberry. He is a jittery, skinny critter with bleach-gray hair to his shoulders and a scripty OOPS! tattooed above his left eyebrow. His bony arms are still strong; he holds me up and squeezes me. His timbre is as familiar as my mother’s, and he laughs with that same escalating giggle I haven’t heard in over a decade.

“Holy shit!” Nate yells. “I can’t believe this. My best cousin is here.”

I nod and grin. Even in the cold, his body stinks ripe and fetid.

We go up the flight of stairs to his second-story pad. We are alone; his three roommates are waiting for us somewhere across the bridge in Manhattan. The white walls of his apartment have been graffitied in every color imaginable, the mediums ranging from aerosol to Crayola.

“You got to sign the wall! Everyone signs the wall. We need to get to the city. Shit! My phone’s blowing up. I got twenty bucks till Monday, we can cab it to the city. Oh man, my super hates me. Fuck, I’m gonna treat you like a king!”

I scan the scrawled wall scripture. Above the door in hot pink: “Pride . . . never even crossed my mind.” Elsewhere: “Down with the ship.” “Don’t tell my girlfriend.” “Shit did I really take that pill?” “Weed savez life.” Beer cans and cookie sheets and empty handles of liquor litter the tiny kitchen; the sink is full of plates cemented with the rock-hard remnants of Hot Pocket innards. “I quit quitting” is written on the door of the fridge. I enter Nate’s bedroom. He’s shirtless, spraying cologne over his tattooed midriff, coating scent across his stained canvas. He yanks a hoodie out of a waist-high cardboard box—the room’s only furnishing but for the twin-size mattress on the floor—and pulls it over his head. He takes it off, finds a pair of scissors, and cuts off the sleeves before putting it back on.

“Nate, you getting enough to eat?” I ask.

“Duh. That’s my munchies pile over there.” With his toe, he motions to a pile of saltine crackers stacked on the floor near his mattress. He rummages around in the box and retrieves a button-up long-sleeved flannel—pink, yellow, orange, and green, emblazoned with his own snowboard apparel brand—and tells me to have it because, “Dude, you’re a farmer, right?”

This seems to be the extent of what he knows about my current life, that I’m a farmer, something he knew when he was fourteen and my aunt would bring him and his siblings to my house for the summer. Though we are first cousins (our mothers are sisters), Nate doesn’t know if I’m happy or where I served my two-year Mormon mission or what I studied in college or where I’m living now. There isn’t a chance to discuss my penchant for chemicals (of the prescription sort, mostly opiates, but also benzodiazepine, methylphenidate, carisopodrol, and the mandatory antidepressants), or my obsessive-compulsive disorder, or all of the unresolved anxiety from trauma brought on by accidents and surgeries and abuse.

“So you got any tattoos yet?” Nate asks. He’s back in the box, looking for different swag.

“No,” I say, though I think to add: “Just a lot of scars.”

“So you’re married, right?” Nate asks. He knows I am—he promised he’d make it to my reception, way back in 2003, and didn’t. He has dodged my calls until now.

<>

I last saw Nate in person in 1999. It was in weather not unlike this New York weekend but two thousand miles west in the foothills of Salt Lake City. Nate had turned eighteen and dropped out of high school to become a professional snowboarder. I was seventeen and in town with friends to see the Utah Jazz. Once everyone had gone back to the hotel, I took my mom’s Suburban and found Nate’s new place. I pounded on the door. Finally, he opened, fresh-faced, smiling, eyes glistering. We didn’t stay upstairs long. He wanted to show me his bedroom. In the downstairs living room, we passed two stunning Swedish girls—on tour with a ski apparel company—watched TV and ignored us.

In Nate’s bedroom, he explained everything: his rail board, his big air board, his pipe board, his trick stick. This was from his watch sponsor, a goggles sponsor, a sunglasses sponsor. Against the wall, he had skate decks leaned up one against another, and brand-new shoes in a spectrum of styles stacked three deep. He gave me a black T-shirt with his new snowboard team logo emblazoned across the front. His mattress was bare but for a small blanket and a pillow.

We talked about the future. In a year he’d be eligible to serve a Mormon mission. He told me he’d play out the snowboarding gig, save up some money, and turn in his church-required application after he turned nineteen. That was a good plan, I said, as his parents had recently divorced, and his older brother, who had also dropped out, worked as a cook at a golf course clubhouse and had started peddling weed. Nate’s younger brother and sister needed a role model.

“I got a story for you,” Nate said, “promise you won’t say nothing to the family?”

The family—always a concern. Our mothers came from a traditional Mormon family with twelve siblings, and our cousins were plentiful and ubiquitous and impressionable. Nate was my family’s purest athlete, idolized by all. In the morning, Nate could drop a fifty-foot cliff while spinning a 720, then shoot scratch golf that afternoon. Nate had chosen me as his protégé. After a visit from him in eighth grade, I convinced my mom to loan me money for a skateboard. I spent the summer skating outside the junior high but—in Rigby, Idaho—couldn’t go more than five feet without hitting a piece of gravel. That winter, I started riding snowboards.

Nate started in before I could promise one way or another. “So I go up to Canada, right, for a comp. The drinking age is eighteen. I got so wasted! All I remember was everyone chanting, ‘Drunken Mormon! Drunken Mormon!’”

Growing up in the Mormon Church, we both knew this was contrary to doctrine. Perhaps the only sin more stigmatizing than breaking the Church’s Word of Wisdom (a health law requiring that one abstain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, and other harmful drugs) was to breech the Law of Chastity (a moral code that forbade anything beyond hand-holding, group dating, and sweet simple kisses before marriage).

“You ever get drunk?” Nate asked me.

“No,” I lied. I’d gotten plastered for the first time a few months before at a party a friend had while his mother was out of town. She was a divorced Jack Mormon with a considerable liquor cabinet. I drank so much that I passed out on the living room couch. When I awoke, shirtless, I realized I’d pissed my pants. I had to drive to town in borrowed clothes to buy cleaning supplies and Febreze.

“Good, man, so good,” Nate said semi-solemnly. “It’s better that way.”

Nate then seemed antsy to have me gone and ushered me back to the entryway upstairs. He held me under the disco ball and examined me from head to toe, preparing to say something revelatory.

“Cuz,” he said, looking down at my five-foot-eight-inch frame from his six feet. I waited for him to impart something brotherly, perpetual. “You’re the perfect height. Man, if I was you, I could really spin.”

<>

The car Nate ordered from a private service arrives. We hurry downstairs, jump in, and shoot across the Williamsburg Bridge, suspended above the black East River, surrounded by mist and cold. Nate is on the phone the entire time. He asks me if I want to go to a Saturday Night Live after-party with his publicist. Of course. Nate tells the driver the after-party address, the driver reminds Nate he only paid twenty dollars. Nate bails on the SNL plan, saying he never really wanted to go there in the first place.

We end up at a club, and there’s a line like I have seen only in movies. Nate and I bypass everyone and walk up to the bouncer, a burly man wearing a T-shirt with Nate’s label. The bouncer marks Nate’s hand and lets him in. He eyes me and stalls.

“This kid!” Nate shouts up to the man. “He’s my best cousin! We rode so many horses!”

The bouncer nods, pulls me in for a one-armed hug, and marks my wrist.

Inside, every employee—the bartender, the DJ, the women serving drinks—wears iterations of Nate’s gear. We are ushered downstairs to the VIP lounge. This is sexiness like I have never seen: women in cocktail dresses and hot pants and halter tops, women with glassy eyes and wandering hands. I wear cheap jeans and Nate’s obnoxious multicolored flannel. The lounge walls are textured and colored like adobe. Cubbies and benches are carved into the walls. Candles are set on ledges and alcoves. It is an Ancient Egyptian den of iniquities. I feel as though I’m spelunking into lusciousness.

“What you drinking?” Nate asks.

An hour earlier, on the subway headed to Nate’s, I dry swallowed a hydrocodone to settle the nerves. The opiate’s gauzy filter is just now kicking in; I feel swimmy, smiley, whimsical. I don’t consider my wife in California, asleep after a late night of quilting (a family skill passed down by her grandmother), my father and mother resting before a long Sunday at the chapel. I give no thought to my church affiliation or its laws. Isn’t sin geographical anyway? When in Rome? What happens in Vegas? Promise not to say anything to the family?

“Whatever you’re having,” I answer. He brings me rum with Coke. I follow his neon through the crowd of pearls and pleats. He shows me off to packs of provocative people. With his cocktail in one hand and a beer in the other, Nate sweeps both arms and declares:

“This kid! He’s my best cousin! His dad’s like the biggest potato farmer in Idaho!”

“This kid! We sawed down a tree at Scout camp and had to dig an outhouse!”

“This kid! He’s like my brother! We shot so many fucking birds!”

Strangers raise glasses and slap my back; I smile and toast. We finally sit with a group of supermodels and trust-fund kids. I, polite as ever and feeling sociable, ask them all what they do. One by one, each person in the group ignores me. Nate pulls me aside.

“Everyone does something and they don’t want to talk about it. They’ll think you’re trying to angle them. Just shut up and have a good time.”

“Okay,” I say. “Yeah, sure.”

“Shit! Like that kid—his dad’s an MTV exec. I need to hit him up to see if he’d throw some money in for my brother’s rehab.”

Nate’s oldest brother is facing a prison stint on heroin charges unless he can raise $30,000 for a rehabilitation program. Because he’s been to rehab so often, all of the typical funding avenues—family, friends, the Church—have been exhausted. Nate should have the money, he tells me, but of course he doesn’t. The government caught up with him after seven years of tax evasion, froze his funds, and now garnishes his wages every month. Luckily, he paid a year’s rent on his flat and sells clothes and snowboard gear for petty cash.

An indiscriminate man comes up to Nate and they lean in and talk quietly. Nate asks me how much cash I have. Thirty-six dollars. He gets two key bumps of cocaine, which I watch him snort off the web of his hand. After, he laughs, and says, “You didn’t see that.”

Of course not. I see only 1993 Nate, that California kid in rural Idaho who introduced me to Rollerblades. He put his on and I borrowed his brother’s and we skated three miles from Grandma Edna’s all the way out to Rigby Lake, the road so rough my teeth chattered. I see Nate pulling down vines out of a cottonwood tree—monkey weed—and us sitting on a bench, breaking them into cigarette-sized pieces, lighting them up, and trying to inhale. Monkey weed is not hallucinatory or narcotic, it’s hardly different from smoking a tree branch, but when a police cruiser stalled in front of us we dashed out the smokes and acted like we were innocent. The cop drove on. We bladed back and called my mom. When she picked us up, we repented to her then and there, Nate actually leading the confession. We both wept, contrite. We’d committed a serious sin and, for that, we were grounded from skating for a week.

Nate heads for more drinks—this time a bottle of vodka for the group. I finish my second rum and Coke and get ready for shots, slumping on a bench against the wall. When was the last time I drank? 2008, when my wife went to Ecuador to volunteer in an orphanage for three months? Alone in Tucson, what was I supposed to do? 2009, after we moved back to Idaho and I felt trapped and lonely? I never told her about those times. Having married in the Mormon Temple, I was breaking covenants I’d made with her and God. After my mission, at the apex of my Mormon spirituality, our marriage made a lot of sense. Now, eight years later, my behavior would make her cry. She’d say that I was drifting away from her and the Church. She’d say I was choosing substances over her. She’d say I was acting like a stupid teenager.

A tall man with dreadlocks crashes next to me and asks if I’m really Boznuts’s family. Before I can answer, he pulls out his phone and shows me photos of a naked woman, facedown on a bed, and tells me of the rendezvous he had with her last night. She is a German with a group of other Germans at the bar, and she sees the man showing her off. She comes and covers both our eyes, hardly embarrassed. Her hands smell sweetly of Granny Smith apples.

Married since twenty-one—a virgin till then, my wife no more experienced than I—this is what I imagine Nate’s dream-life to be. Flirtation. Skin. Sex. Girls! Girls! Girls! Even as I sit with the man in dreads, a woman across the club blows me a kiss. She is a recently retired LA Lakers dancer. Her fiancé is here too, drunk and nodding out in a corner, wrinkling his tuxedo. The girl dances with such fluidity that I cannot stop myself from watching. We’d sat by each other earlier and I told her I was a writer and a teacher, that Nate wanted me to pen his biography. She started introducing me as The Professor. Perhaps she’s attracted to that—someone once told me that writers are the world’s best aphrodisiacs—and I wonder if she’s canted that same hip to Kobe Bryant.

This power with titles—even through the chemicals, I’m embarrassed when she calls me that—has always frightened me, a literalness instilled in me by my father. “If there is one thing I cannot tolerate, it’s a liar,” his measured voice has testified to me many times, often after catching me in a lie. For this reason, I have never felt comfortable titling myself in any real way. I am not a snowboarder, because snowboarders have sponsors and travel the world and compete in the X-Games; no, I ride snowboards. I am not a writer, because writers sell books and have agents and are interviewed on NPR; instead, I write stories. I am not a professor; I am the lottery-winning recipient of a Stanford University fellowship during which all recipients get to teach. I am not Mormon, because Mormons are cheerful and problem-free; no, I grew up in a Mormon family. And I am not an addict, because addicts melt down pills and inject the opiate syrup between their toes, and sift through their own vomit to find undigested pills, and steal pills from old ladies at nursing homes; no, I have a propensity to use.

Nate comes back having traded some hats for ecstasy. He asks me if I want one.

“Nah,” I say. “Want some pain pills?” Sober, I would never give away my pills. But tonight is special, and Nate is my best cousin. This, our ten year reunion.

“I don’t do that shit.” Nate swallows the E and bounces to the dance floor.

A pro skater named E-Z talks to me about his video shoot that morning. He looks a lot like Nate: skinny, tatted up, scrappy. But unlike Nate, he’s coherent and intelligent. His bravado seems like a façade. He’s built a half-pipe in his Manhattan loft. We pull up his videos on my phone. The kid is insane, board sliding three flights of stair rails and bailing into street traffic.

“Skating and shooting,” I say. “Seems like a good life.”

E-Z gets close to my face, not a whiff of booze on him. “Want to know the truth? The fucking truth is with all this shit—my sponsors, my videos, my girls—I’m fucking living by a shoestring. I’m barely alive. I’m flat fucking broke.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Wake up tomorrow and shoot. What else is there?”

I’ve got four more pills in my pocket, though I’m not sure I need to take another. But I crave a smoke. If I’m going to sin, might as well be bold. I excuse myself to the bathroom.

E-Z jumps to his feet. “You carrying?”

I shake my head. “Got to piss.”

“Hurry back,” E-Z says, sitting up now, talking loudly so others can hear. “I was enjoying our conversation.”

<>

I go out onto the snowy street and trudge half a block to a hole-in-the-wall bodega. When was the last time I smoked? About a year ago. My wife and I were living in Idaho. I had finished graduate school and was working on the farm. She was a juvenile probation officer. It was a spring Sunday and we had settled into one of those weeklong fights, the catalyst of which I no longer recall. We were cycling again, this Ouroboros of devouring and being devoured.

After church, we argued in the car, stomped through the kitchen, brooded in the bedroom, and screamed through closed doors. She started packing a bag. I beat her to the punch and left in my pickup, driving east to Wyoming. Forty miles later I stopped and bought a pack of Camels. I was ten minutes from the border when she finally called me, crying, apologizing.

I turned around. On the way back, I stopped at a ranch my family owned where once stood an old cabin. Nate and I would stay there in the summer. We thought it was haunted and cursed and loved it from serial-killer basement to bat-infested roof. But while I had been away at school, my parents had torn it down. All that remained were a few earthen mounds. I drove the muddy road as far as I could, then walked the rest of the way. I hunkered and smoked and tried to visualize that leaning structure. It seemed like everything I once loved had shifted out of my line of sight, or crumbled, or disintegrated into thin air.

I looked down at my left wrist, at my brand. A few months before my nineteenth birthday, I received word that the Church had assigned me to serve my mission in Indiana. I’d been repairing fence on this ranch. That night, at home in my basement bedroom, I fashioned a brand out of some leftover wire. 1-0-0, just as we marked our spring calves. I heated the metal over a lighter and scalded the digits into my wrist. To remind me where I came from, who I was, what I stood for. Something only for me, covered by my watch, hidden beneath a cuff.

But when I saw the brand now, it enraged me. Why was I this way? Because of how I was raised. Because of my family. Because of this farm, this culture. I inhaled deeply off the cigarette and set the cinder on my wrist in two different places, forever smudging that meaningless number that distinguished my family’s chattel. Then I drove home.

<>

I give away four cigarettes on the street before I’m even able to smoke my first. I finish two for good measure. For me, there is something spiritual about smoking in winter, eliciting remnant memories of the first times I smoked, working with grizzled cowboys while tending to the calving of heifers in snow and sub-zero temperatures. I blow out the smoke and trace it as it mingles into the New York fog. I was once a shepard of sorts. Better said: I used to assist in protecting new life. I high-five the bouncer and go back inside.

Nate is in the corner with two models, a blonde and a brunette, drinking and laughing.

“I’m Joseph Smithing these bitches,” he says in front of them. “I can’t help myself!”

I sit and am given another drink. The models are stunning; they are stunned. Their eyes roll in and out of focus, and the one closest to me sways like a pussy willow. I start to fill sick, all the substances mixing now, and cannot tell if the models are spinning or I am.

The women invite us to meet them at their Chelsea loft, mostly because Nate says he can score cocaine. Nate’s roommate Rex joins us as we leave.

I start vomiting at a stoplight. The cabbie yells at me not to get any in the car. I don’t. Nate holds the door open for me and wraps my shirt up in his fist to keep me from falling out. Rex cheers me. When I finish, he shakes me by the shoulders.

Nate proclaims: “Welcome to Duhlife.”

The models’ place is up a long flight of sapphire-blue stairs. They’ve both changed from their club getups to black leggings and white T-shirts. It is a sprawling place, open and beautiful, and, from my knees at the can, I find the bathroom well adorned and fashionable. I hear one of the women ask Nate if I will be okay.

“He’s my best cousin. What do you think?”

I wash my face, my equilibrium a tortuous mountain path, not unlike any one of the hikes Nate and I did as kids. It doesn’t take much to imagine the purling of Palisades Creek as Nate and I climbed the five miles to Lower Palisades Lake, a runoff pond in the mountains east of Swan Valley. We bushwhacked through tall grass to a sandbar. We took off our pants and waded out in our boxers and caught brook trout all afternoon. We hid in the willows and called to girls on the path, inviting them to come join us. Until one actually said, “Tell me where you’re at? I’ll come find you.” We were both so scared that we stayed silent until she and her friends left.

After the bathroom, the brunette leads me to the couch and gets me a blanket, instructing me to take a break. She is kind to me, aware that I’m neck-deep now, perhaps someplace she’s been before. Rather than chastising me for making a mess or teasing, she rubs me gently between my shoulder blades, as might one of my five sisters. The woman and I watch Nate and Rex have their way with the liquor cabinet.

I wake up at 4:00 am, confused. The blonde is demanding that everyone leave. A strange guy—who wasn’t with us before—is stretched out on the loveseat, his legs hanging off one arm. The blonde goes to the stranger and shakes him awake. The man throws a hand up, not hard, like shooing away some pesky gnat, and pops the woman in the nose. She screams. Nate and Rex collar the man, haul him to the door, and start him down the stairs.

Nate holds up both his arms, that universal sign of dominance and invitation for physical altercation. “That’s right, you better fucking move, reesty-ass nobody.”

“You ugly burnout,” the man yells from the stairs. “What you ever done?”

“I’ve fucking rode all over the globe. I’ve partied fucking everywhere. I own a billion-dollar company. So fuck you.”

The two models rematerialize, having retreated to check the blonde’s war wounds.

“Get out,” the brunette tells Nate. She doesn’t look my way. “We’re tired.”

The blonde stands a few feet away, mascara running down her face in gnarly streams. I place a hand on her shoulder and ask if she’s okay.

“No, no, no,” she says, each with increasing intensity. “Next week is fashion week. Everything is ruined. Everything is fucked.”

<>

An hour later—after stiffing the cabbie a tip for a ride to Brooklyn—we are back at Nate’s pad for the Sabbath. Rex DJs music on YouTube, flipping through music videos, saying something about Sunday Fun-day, and then nods off on the couch with his fly wide open. General arrives with a dime bag. Nate rolls a blunt and cracks open a can of PBR.

Nate punches his Blackberry, trying every contact to score.

“You okay, Nate?” I ask.

“Better than ever. Better than you.” He laughs. “Tito”—the last roommate I’ve yet to meet, a Colombian with whom Nate wants me to speak Spanish—“cooked us a feast on Christmas. Pork chops, mashed potatoes, turkey . . .”

“What do you think about your little brother’s baby?” Before I’d arrived in New York, I’d texted the youngest Bozung to let him know I’d be seeing Nate.

Nate lights the blunt. He hits it, holds it, expels. “He’s got a kid?”

“Three or four months old.”

“No shit.” Nate smokes again.

“Are you happy?” I ask. “I mean, like, are you good?”

“Fuck yeah. I got my taxes worked out. The company’s blowing up. I’m a fucking uncle! Tito and me are going to Colombia to open a bed-and-breakfast that only serves screwdrivers. What about you?”

My wife and I ask each other this often, usually after long weekends when I stay in reading and she works on quilts and catches up on her sleep. And, of course, after the fights. There is the issue of being my father’s only son and having abandoned him and the family farm twice in five years. Before I left for California, he had said to me in a moment of weakness, “I really thought you were staying for good this time.”

“I guess,” I lie. “I’m pretty okay.”

“You should be! You’re like Bukowski! You’re going to be a fucking famous dude!” Nate gets up to pin a bedsheet over the window to block out the sun.

“How do you know about Bukowski?”

Nate stops. “What, you think I’m a fucking retard?”

No. As my father would say, Nate is dumb like a fox. He’s got Hunter S. Thompson quotes all over Facebook, along with pictures of his crew titled: “Rude Bwoiiizzzzzz.”

Nate meanders around his apartment, shaking cans to find remaining booze and pouring the swigs into a fast-food cup. After the OOPS! tattoo, Nate bought his own gun and has been using his body as a practice canvass. Love curls beneath his left eye. I’m looking at his left hand: X-O-X-O across his knuckles. A mediocre NYC and LA on one of his wrists. A box that represents the state of Utah, its area code, 8-0-1, inside. His middle finger displays perhaps his most ingenious and paradoxical tat: the simple outline of a Valentine heart so he can simultaneously say “Love You” and “Fuck Off.”

On his forearm, Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”

“You believe that?” I ask, pointing to the scripture. Scriptures, with their promises, have begun to lose their force with me. I do not point out to Nate the following verses, how they have nothing to do with effortless absolution. No, forgiveness is contingent on behavior. If willing and obedient, the good things of the land are available. But resist and rebel, and the sword of judgment awaits.

“Let me tell you,” Nate says, sitting down next to me. “The first time I really got shitfaced, I woke up the next morning and had this shoot where we were dropping this eighty-foot cliff. I thought that God was gonna kill me. But he didn’t. So what’s that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.” Nate laughs. “But I’m still here. Living fucking large. I mean, look at me”—he leans back to display the tattoos on his arms, lifts his pant leg to show more, pulls down his T-shirt collar to point out names—“I’m like Joseph and this is my colored coat. I don’t hide nothing.” He mixes half a can of Four Loko with OJ and gulps it all down.

I envy my cousin for this philosophy, mostly because I bury my faults and failures. My pain is real. Here is the railroad track from my back surgery after my snowboarding accident, three compressed disks and shattered bone from dropping and spinning off a measly ten footer and slipping the landing and sitting squarely on an exposed rock; my foot where I ran it over with the lawn mower trying to finish Grandma Edna’s yard too hastily; the knuckles of my left hand where a farm auger almost chewed off my fingers because I was careless around the machine . . . on and on my body documents my mistakes. Here is my self-inflicted 1-0-0, illegible now. If I look deep inside, there are scars from the loneliness, deception, guilt, and shame. At least Nate medicates his problems publicly. I take my pills in locked bathrooms.

Nate hands me a marker. “Sign my wall.”

I go into his bedroom and try to think of something hip and fitting to write. Instead, I print beneath his doorknob “God Damned Our Land But Lifted Our People,” the title to an essay I’d written years before. Perhaps to say to Nate: Yes, we walk forsaken ground. Yes, our world is made of despair. And yet, perhaps, something special awaits. We must remember that.

Nate reads it and comes out shaking his head.

“You like it?” I ask.

Nate goes from ashtray to ashtray, searching for roach butts to resmoke in his pipe. “Like it? I don’t know what the fuck to make of it.”

Tito arrives, and we speak Spanish. We immediately like each other. He gives me a book of poetry that his uncle wrote while in Colombia during a time when everyone was dying or being killed. The title: Visitaciones (Visitations). The dedication: “Por Nadie” (To No One). This is fitting and right and incredibly sad. Tito tells me he once took six acid tabs and bumped too many lines of coke and drank until he went blind. The paramedics hit him with a defibrillator and saved his life. That happened at twenty-seven; he’s thirty-three now.

“Did it change you?” I ask.

“Hell yeah. I look at the world in a whole new way. Every day is a gift.”

“You stop using?”

“Oh, fuck no. That’s what I do.”

At 11:00 am, all the roommates awake and leave and return with beer and breakfast. Two new women—an NYU art history senior and a model from Arkansas—show up. The NYU student keeps ignoring the phone calls of her study group, waiting for her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With each unanswered call, she grows more agitated. But she lightens when she gets a text from her dealer. He’s only five minutes away, and all he requires is that he’s paid for the drugs and his cab fare and given a few beers. The student is elated and gathers cash from the others. She and the model take moist towelettes from their purses and blow their noses, then corkscrew the wet fabric up into their nostrils to clear the channels.

Everyone is uplifted. Rex DJs again. Nate skips about the apartment dancing outlandish hip-hop routines. Tito washes a plastic dish. Carlos the dealer arrives and out comes the rock. Nate preps and lines the drug. General rolls a dollar bill. The dusty white worms disappear. Everyone starts to chatter and perk. Rex pulses to the music, shaking his hair like Zeus.

This plate is not passed my way. I’m happy to not have to decline. No one notices when I grab a warm beer and down a pill.

An hour later, when it’s time for me to go, Nate calls a car, the number written in marker on the wall below the light switch. We stand by the window and wait. Across the street is a triangular park with a small but rideable ridge. The sun shines down and melts ice from tree branches.

“Man, look at this day! I should go set up a rail or some shit.”

“I would have gone out with you,” I say. Even though Nate got me to start snowboarding, we have never ridden together.

“Fuck that. I’m retired.”

After ten minutes, the cab hasn’t shown. Nate calls again. “Dude, I’ve got my best cousin here and you’re fucking holding him up.” The car arrives in less than two minutes.

I exchange goodbyes with my new friends. What else can I call these caretakers of my cousin? Nate gifts me with more of his only currency: multicolored beanies, a coat, stickers, a baseball cap. Things I will be proud to wear; items about which I will brag.

I am out in the clear day, free of smoke and sweat, and already I miss Nate. Before I jump the ice to climb into the waiting car, I glance to the second-story apartment. Nate is there, standing at the window. I throw a hand up to him. Not a peace sign or a love salute or a signal to rock on. Shit, it’s not even a wave. Just my open hand, my extended fingers, my scarred knuckles. Through the spiraling glare, I see Nate’s pink palm pressed against the glass; his tattooed mug watching over my departure.

How can I know the pinnacle of dysfunction the next eleven months of my life—and Nate’s—will reach, in that moment, on the Williamsburg sidewalk? My novel will fall in on me, as will my marriage. I will leave California divorced and jobless. My narcotics use will spiral out of control. I will hear from Nate three times over that span: once from Colombia, when I will negotiate with Colombian officials to allow him to leave the country, as he’ll have been jumped by some local skaters he’s pissed off and robbed of his wallet and passport. Again, from LA, when he’ll walk into his neighbor’s condo drunk and high, pick a fight, and get two molars kicked out. And finally from Salt Lake, where he’s staying at a buddy’s house, having fled rehab. I’ll join him there and he’ll be smoking a spliff and I’ll smoke with him, my divorce having finalized the day before, me on my way back home to the farm, broke and broken. Enveloped in his phone, he’ll ignore me when I suggest we visit his mother, telling his roommate how many likes the photo of him out cold and bleeding on his neighbor’s floor has on Instagram.

How can I even imagine that I will meet a new woman and we’ll hike to the Lower Palisades? I’ll wake hours before her and sneak out of the two-person tent and pick my way across the boulders to the lake’s edge and sit in the dawn’s stillness to take the day’s first pill. A moose will wade chest-deep in the water, moving lethargically, and pay no attention to me. I will step into the lake—so cold it makes me dizzy—and try to find the sandbar that years before Nate and I claimed as our own, now swallowed up and submerged. And I will think, Under this bright reflective surface, below this murk and moss, somewhere deep in this icy, foreboding pool, there is solid footing to be found.