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P
AULIE
REMEMBERED
it like this: He was the only one not mad at his mother for leaving. He was the only one who told any good stories about where she was and why the phones there didn’t work. He missed her too but it bothered him how his father and Claudia just sat around on the couch. It bored him terribly. Paulie didn’t hate many things but he could say he did not like laziness and they just lay there. He was no good at doing all the kinds of housey things his mother had always done in her apron colored like the Fourth of July, and for a month Seymour and Claudia didn’t bother. He had always liked the phrase “dust bunnies” until he started to see them around all the time. A trail of ants moved up a cupboard and became an angry parade on the counter.

They were too sad to clean the shower and Claudia’s hair stuck to the walls in shapes like countries on maps. In the kitchen the area by the coffeemaker radiated long-set spills and raised crusts of grinds. Most of his shirts had several kinds of dinners on them and there was a smell like milk left out that followed him up and down the stairs.

He had been everyone’s favorite at the hospital and the nurse said maybe he should work there and so had his mom grinning in the white gown in the white bed in the white room. He sang and sang. Seymour and Claudia asked him to please keep it quiet pal and so he went up to his mom and he sang soft but right into her mouth.
So that way it lives in there
he said. Her teeth didn’t smell right. He kept expecting his mom to cry like everyone else but her face hardly ever changed, so he surprised her with his best impression of a Christmas tree. Arms spread to make a triangle with his head as the tip and eyes blinking on and off like lights. She used to love it but she had said
Paulie, Paulie, please stop honey, you look like an epileptic
, and that was the first time Seymour and Claudia laughed and he left and did the thing where he took off his shoes and slid down the shining tile in socks but it wasn’t fun alone and the people in the rooms didn’t have real clothes just the paper kind and the rooms didn’t have any colored quilts and the whole vast hospital didn’t have one place not one where you could talk loudly about how the bottom of the ocean felt or how the neighbor’s baby with the starfish hands looked like he knew more than everyone not less or why some people needed their radios and TVs on while they slept. All that light and sound to protect them from what.

B
ECAUSE
E
DW
ARD
MISSED
the cramped spaces and the accumulated smell of hundreds of comics sweating onstage, and because Paulie had been begging him, and because Edward saw this look in Claudia’s eyes that was like searching for a missed turnoff in a rearview mirror, he began taking Paulie to the clubs where he used to perform. On the train the first time, Edward heard each breath he took, heard his heart’s percussion magnified by a mocking echo, and without looking up at him took Paulie’s freckled hand.

The first acute betrayal, a reminder of how far from his life he’d run, was the bouncer, a man he didn’t recognize and who took long seconds sneering at their IDs.

They sat in the back, past the spill of spotlights. Though he hoped they would be there, Edward didn’t want anyone from his old circle to see him, and he wore a slightly malformed baseball cap that spread shadows over his nose. Paulie took no hints, laughed at almost everything, ordered nachos from the waitresses that came around with sour looks and outdated hairdos, consumed them with such force Edward struggled to hear the punch lines over the crunching. He wasn’t eating so much as pitching them in the general direction of his mouth, then letting his tongue and incisors go crazy trying to harangue them. Following the catch came a great deal of slurping, which did nothing to keep their profile low, and at one point Edward returned from the urinal to find that Paulie had ordered him two pints of beer in a giant glass boot.

Edward, who painfully remembered the abuse that flowed off the stage to hang viciously over all the little tables, felt concerned that his companion might become the butt of one of the comics’ jokes, and attempted to hush him. But it was like Paulie floated in some bubble of munificence, or exuded chemicals that inspired goodwill. Everyone seemed happy to have him there: the tourists in line whose photos he took happily when they asked, the waitresses who winked at him. Those comics who noticed the insane cackle coming from the back of the room acknowledged it jovially, sometimes saluted him as they crossed the room to leave.

During a droopy-elbowed comic’s bit about boring marriage sex—“and I’m like one of those robot vacuums on toppa her, shoving into wherever I can
”—
Edward drifted off, towards memories of himself onstage during the pathetic denouement of his career, post-Helena, and imagined Paulie into the room, inserted him in the audience. He saw the kid right up front in the toxic orange shorts he loved, totally engaged by Edward’s infrequent and deeply morose sentence, even at the set in which the only words he uttered were “Time.
Death
.
Time.
Death. Time.
Death.
”

Edward was smiling broadly at this, at the ridiculous juxtaposition, when the act finished, and he didn’t even hear the moderate clapping, reemerging only when Paulie put his hand on his shoulder: “I knew it. I knew you still loved this!” Only then did Edward realize he’d been laughing, his eyes and nose wet from the lengthened pleasure.

B
EFORE
E
DWARD
and before the accident, Paulie had liked nothing more than going one floor up and watching Thomas in his world. Thomas had colors in small tubes and colors from thin pencils and colors from dusty jars. There were orangey reds and reddy blues and bluey greens. “Why go outside when I can see any color on the earth right here,” Paulie liked to joke, and Thomas always made a happy sound at that. Nubbly strips of cloth lay on every surface and their job was to clean up extra color or to keep a pink from bleeding out of its place. There were gleaming scissors and six rusty tins of paintbrushes and crumbling half pastels like the stumps of a forest in miniature and leaves of paper that floated around marked with unfinished sketches like secret messages. Tacked to the wall were glossy full-color photos of outer space and sepia maps and intricate inky drawings of ships and black-and-white photos of women and men in friendly hats and maps of trains from all over the world, all layered over each other so that the wall was hidden. Paulie liked to ask Thomas about the images and Thomas would say they were all possibilities. Paulie started saying that, sometimes just to himself:
everything is a possibility
.

Before the accident Paulie had gone up most afternoons and sometimes handed Thomas the things he needed and tried not to breathe very loud and watched the pieces get bigger slowly and sometimes poured tall cool glasses of water and carried them across the room as if in religious procession. In Paulie’s very favorite piece Thomas drew a whole life in figures that grew and then shrank. Every afternoon he watched. Egg zygote toddler kid teenager, all the way to a bent-over old man. It took four months and more kinds of whites and creams and blushing pinks than Paulie had ever seen in concert. The change from day to day was never obvious and that was what he liked so much about it. Even if he concentrated and stayed very quiet he couldn’t see everything, only the tuft of hair or the underside of a foot that Thomas was shading. It made him feel that waiting meant more than how it felt in the moment, that little seconds often combined and became something of weight and worth.

When Thomas took breaks from making his marks he would clear a space on the kitchen table as if cleaning a window to see out of and spread out a lunch of celery pieces and carrots and dried fruit, everything small enough to hold in their hands, and they would eat. Thomas asked Paulie questions about music and said things like “I could hear you playing last night, and it sounded a little bit like seaweed moving in the ocean” or “It made me feel like making a mess.” Paulie sometimes thought he loved Thomas more than anyone else, and it made him feel desperate and occasionally very quiet.

After the accident it was hard to know. Paulie saw him in the hall and Thomas explained that a stroke had done something to him. Paulie tried to hug him but Thomas felt like a dirty sponge slick with oil that wouldn’t take anything he tried to give it. His body was hanging wrong and it scared Paulie to look at it.

Paulie would go up to Thomas’s at the usual time but the door was always locked. He would do their usual knock that was just for them three little knocks plus scritchy-scratchy nails and then call out, “Tommy Tommy” but the sounds turned to ghosts in the hallway. Once or twice Thomas came to the door but didn’t open it and said, “I’m sorry, pal, not today.” Paulie wanted to say, “What about the seaweed, what about the music that feels like the right kind of mess, what about what you’re building and what about lunch with friends?” But Thomas wouldn’t even look through the milky peephole that changed the size of everyone outside.

In the afternoons when he missed Thomas he played music especially loud. He learned Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and he did that between four and six times a day. One night he got out the Christmas decorations Claudia had asked him to please leave in the closet for the rest of the year and he pulled out the string of white lights that pulsed. He brought them up to Thomas’s floor and bunched them into a knot and put them in a big glass jar and plugged them in right next to his door. He thought Thomas would like how he had put everything bright in one place and tangled all of it together.

But nothing happened and even his ribs and teeth hurt, and Paulie asked Claudia, who said, “Friendships are more like oceans than rivers
.
There are high tides and low tides but not a steady rush. You’re up against a lot of currents, not just one
.
” Paulie was wordless at that, so Claudia said, “Sometimes people have a hard time looking out of themselves and need to just be alone and listen to all the conversations in their head.”

He waited months. He felt proud and brave and thought: a number of currents, some unseen. Then one day he went up and knocked, and Thomas opened the door all the way and said,
Hey, pal,
and the crow’s foot by his right eye did the crinkle Paulie remembered, and he invited him in.

The tin cans with the brushes reaching out like strong arms were gone, and the layers of maybes on the walls were gone, and there were no slips of paper anywhere, and not even one color where it didn’t belong and not one idea growing. “Different, I know,” Thomas had said, and shrugged in a way Paulie didn’t recognize, and offered him tea. Paulie kept looking around the room for the easy way the two of them had been. He didn’t go up after that and had to make loud noises when he thought of Thomas surrounded by all that white and said hi in the hallway but not much else. In dreams he still balanced glasses on his long fingers and floated towards the wilderness of colors, eager to cure his friend’s thirst, to listen to the water slide down his fine throat.