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W
ITH THE FADING OF THE NINETIES
, Edward had watched both himself and the crowds at the clubs changing. They were more tired and less willing to laugh, and he, equivalently, felt less and less like teasing their Coors-addled brains. His hair grew long from neglect, and he alienated most audiences, though he garnered a minuscule cult following of people who dubbed him “the lost comic” for the way he wandered across the stage, gaping at the spotlights as though they were cryptic signs in a foreign tongue. He couldn’t explain it except to say that
it
had simply ceased, burned off like an atmospheric layer—“it” being whatever had lived in him that had drawn punch lines from human behavior, that had identified the rhythm stitched between silence and speech, between precipitation and execution. The clubs eventually withdrew their offers, at least those he hadn’t severed ties with of his own profanity-strewn accord, and his friends took to rolling their eyes at his endless string of clichéd ontological concerns. They would come over and he would fix drinks and put on avant-garde albums—one favorite a meandering recording of airplane takeoffs and landings—and he would say absurd things like:
Do you feel that growing old is something we should all be doing a little more consciously?

And:
Have you considered that probably each day of your life has changed you? If there was a way to track that, would you?

And, of course:
Have you seen Helena? Has her hair grown out or has she kept it short? Does she still walk like that?

—

T
HE FIRST WI
NTER WITHOUT HER
, Edward read Kant and Wittgenstein with a sophomoric fervor and an oversized highlighter, dressed in grays and blacks like the rest of the city, and avoided a series of phone calls from Los Angeles. Thirteen months before, towards the beginning of the end, at the urging of his agent, he had written a screenplay during a five-day cocaine binge. It was an insipid script—write a Christmas movie, his agent had said, they want one from you, the “they” always changing, the interest always urgent—that concerned a down-on-his-luck mall Santa and a series of perfectly timed misunderstandings, plus a beauty far out of Santa’s league and a greasy Italian shoe-store owner as the antagonist.

“The thing,” as Edward called it, never referring to it by its ludicrous title, had now sprouted hideous blooms everywhere: billboards in subway stations, marquees downtown, print ads, echoes of punch lines in sports bars by men whose idea of humor was straight regurgitation. He would see a particularly beer-saturated group outside a pub, their breath visible in the fifteen-degree weather, their Neanderthal faces red and loosened, and sense it coming like an arthritic feels a storm.
Hey, Antonio, check out this North Pole!
And he would hurry around them, eaten with alarm.

He continued to accept payment for the thing, though even that filled him with pulsing dread: in every gourmet dinner he ate or cashmere sweater he purchased, he saw the look of panic in the main actor’s face as frozen in the poster, the jumble of gift boxes at his feet, the beauty next to him with a shopping bag, the evil shoe proprietor leaning in with a textbook smirk on the other side. He had gone to see it the very first week, if only to grasp at some understanding of the man who had been capable of such asinine pursuits in the name of too much money. He left waitresses and cab drivers, especially those who seemed unhappy, extraordinary tips drawn from a great well of guilt. He tried to forgive his mother, which he found much easier since her death, and let his father talk to him about the monstrosity of the world for as long as the old man deigned. He cleaned the dishes until they were gleaming, the brilliant red pots Helena had left behind in her hurry to transform, and spent slow hours imagining an inviolate place where he wouldn’t feel his past as if it were some punishing physical affliction.

Mostly, he thought of Helena, and sometimes his neural pathways brought her so close—her left index finger crooked from a childhood Ping-Pong accident; her long-limbed way of occupying and redefining physical space; the face she offered upon waking, both confused and grateful—that he felt like a magician.

E
DITH AND
D
ECLAN HAD LIVED
a life together. She needed to remember this, and she worried she could no longer do so effectively. At times, she explored the possibility that all their possessions, all this carbon proof, might have been placed strategically throughout her living space as some elaborate ruse. Of course this was not, could not, be true, but her brain stumbled blithely over the sentiment that this would be an easier truth to accept. Where
was
he, then? Why hadn’t they spoken? What had he forgotten to tell her?

At the funeral, dressed in an old black suit and pearls, she had kissed everyone’s cheek, had told the story of their first storm in the house. How they had run around placing pots under every leak, and how that evening they had sat on the floor with a blanket and felt like they’d been given, instead of a nuisance, a melody. How that had been what he’d given her all their fifty-six years together, songs where they weren’t expected. She had stood at that carnation-wreathed podium and looked out at the rest of her life blankly: there was a question, surely, but couldn’t someone please repeat it?

In the first months without him, Edith had marveled at how many different types of quiet there could be. What had been so different about the levels of noise with him sitting in the chair, reading for hours in his drugstore glasses? Why did every shower, now, feel like such an exercise in fallacy, preparation for an event never coming, though this had always been a lone ritual?

She had been a stunning woman, a pronounced presence; Declan had been there to remind her of this, and now he was gone. She needed it to be communicated permanently in some way, so she could take full ownership of this new body, covered in layers of sweaters, these feet in their padded shoes.

“Aging gracefully” was a model much talked about, though Edith doubted anyone ever felt elegant or nimble amid the nearly inescapable fatigue, the persistent mutations of once-simple tasks and the shame thereafter. When the time came to collate all the rent checks and utility bills, she put the task off for hours, then days, dreading what an ordeal adding and dividing had become, the way she would sometimes face off with a column of numbers and realize they meant as much to her as someone else’s mementos. She would wipe her face and begin again, reading each figure out loud, entreating it to stay in the room.

T
HE KID ALWAYS SA
ID HELLO
. Never just a cursory nod. Had insisted on learning Edward’s name when he moved in, not to mention his favorite flower and fruit. “Is there a nickname you like?” Paulie had asked. He preferred those ending in
y
. “Eddy?” he suggested. Edward’s head that day had been thick and jumbled: he couldn’t summon the energy to reject the suggestion, and from then on it was always “Hiya, Eddy!”

For a while the kid was practically Edward’s least favorite thing about living, and he timed his entrances and exits to avoid him. But even if he made his ascent during the kid’s violent assault on his stand-up Casio, Paulie would hear him and be sure to pop his head out: “Hello, my friend! What does the weather say today?” Edward made eye contact when guilt tugged at him enough—who was he to crush such benevolence, he wondered—but mostly kept the shade of his hat on his face, and the line of his sight on the unclean carpet. He knew from his own nocturnal schedule that Paulie also kept late hours, though for the kid they were celebratory, active, while Edward just prayed for sleep. Music always: singing, sometimes words but just as often not, sounds like a gang of monkeys bickering. Edward stopped crossing the hall to ask that Paulie turn himself down in order to avoid his neighbor’s repeated reflection that Edward looked sad. He bought noise-canceling headphones and played recordings of rainstorms across the world. Austin. Bangkok. The Amazon. Paulie was crazy for offering people tea; Edward had overheard him selling it to the other tenants. Chamomile Lemon English Breakfast Green Ginger! Always in the same order. The kid’s brain was broken, but Edward couldn’t of course recommend the health of his own. Paulie, it was clear, chased and cornered happiness daily.

Edward was asleep when it happened, and the cry came into his dreams as the voice of his brother. His unconscious re-created the familiar childhood scene of Zachary asleep and whimpering in the next room, victim to the awful stories their parents fed them, nightmaring of kidnapping plots and elaborate suicides. (He, too, had called him Eddy.) Edward, then, had felt useful and important when he went to him, as well-appointed and comforting as a chair by an open window. He would scoop up Zachary, who was always a little too thin, and speak with measured softness about the silly inventions of our brains while we sleep, then get right up to his ear and begin with the noises. The finest impressions of farts anyone in their neighborhood had ever heard, high trilly toots and trembling wet ones, plus a bassoon-like moan for good measure. It had never failed. In his dream Edward was brilliant and electric as he cradled his brother, who giggled and shook and held his little penis to keep from peeing.

Edward, turning against his flannel sheets, couldn’t understand why the sounds continued, until finally the banging on his flimsy door wrestled him awake.

When he opened the door, Paulie was standing there gushing red, and it took a moment in the sudden and grainy light of the hallway to identify the source. The kid’s hand was bleeding, saturating the fold of shirt he’d hid it in.

“Well for fuck all,” said Edward. “Get in here already.” Between cries and yelps he gathered that Paulie had somehow managed to drop his keyboard on his foot, which had set off a chain of events including a brush with the sharp edge of the kitchen counter, the swing of a cabinet door, and a cascade of glass. His face was contorting repeatedly, as though on a loop.

“I knew you were up!” Paulie spouted while Edward led him to the bathroom, and Edward understood the bumbled apology in the statement. He sat the kid on the toilet and calmly opened drawers, surprised at how easily he could assume the role of caretaker. Then he kneeled before Paulie and got his closest look yet at the upturned eyes, the undersized teeth, the signs of aging present on his forehead and around his mouth and in the sag of his ears: the kid was much older than Edward had assumed, maybe halfway into his thirties. Edward asked him to take deep breaths then showed him how—in for one, two, three, four, five, then out—while he examined the wound, applied antiseptic, wrapped gauze around it. Afterward, Paulie remained shocked by the sight of his blood’s great escape, and Edward took the initiative.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s watch some bad TV.”

In the living room, Paulie revived and quickly grew curious as he moved from the couch to the stack of DVDs beneath the television. Edward held his breath while Paulie destroyed the alphabetization, formed leaning piles on the floor, ran his hands over every cover, mouthing titles with a blank face. Edward let his attention drift from Paulie back to the screen: a bus threatened by a ticking bomb couldn’t stop, and a brunette actress he’d once insulted in a bar grew progressively more anxious.

Paulie squealed and Edward panicked, but the source of the cry was not the wound on the kid’s palm. It was
the thing
, its DVD cover: the leading man in the Santa hat, the beauty struggling with her holiday accoutrements, the character actor with the busy eyebrows. Edward had been sure he’d hidden it.

“My
favorite
!” Paulie said, his whole face open with joy. Instead of taking the case from him, instead of suggesting another film, Edward admitted what he’d sworn never to again.

“
Santarella
?” he said. “I wrote that.”

The bubbly pleasure drained from Paulie’s face. He looked at Edward like tourists look at the
Mona Lisa
, searching and wary as they wait to be touched by glory.

“Eddy,” he said. “
What
?”