A Home at the End of the World

“Sometimes a mouse gets in here,” I said. “We keep saying we should trap it, but we never do. I’m not sure if we’re really, you know, thorough enough to be country people.”

“The mice out here are probably cleaner,” he said. “They’re probably more like real animals.”

A silence passed. After a moment, we heard the mouse scrabbling inside the wall. We laughed.

“Do you have, like, people in New York to help take care of you?” I asked.

“Well, there are volunteers,” he said. “If I get really really sick I can call one of those agencies.”

“What about your family?”

“My family’s written me off.”

“They won’t help you?” I asked.

“They don’t speak to me. I’m gone. My sister calls, but she wouldn’t want to be in a room with me. She thinks her kids could catch it.”

“Do you still have your job?” I asked.

“No. No, they laid me off a few weeks ago, after I was in the hospital with pneumonia.”

“And your friends?”

“A few of them have died in the last year. They just went like that, three people in, like, six months. The guy I’ve always thought of as my best friend is sicker than I am, he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t recognize people unless he’s having a very very good day.”

“Are you scared?” I said.

“What do you think?”

“Yeah. Well, I would be, too.”

He sighed. “And then sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It sort of comes and goes. But every minute is different now. Even when I’m not afraid, things are different. I feel—oh, I can’t explain it. Just different. I used to lose track of myself, you know. Like I didn’t have a body, like I was just, I don’t know, like I was the street I was walking on. Now I never lose track of myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, you know,” he said. “If I ever really thought about it, I pictured myself as being old and having no regrets. You know? I pictured something like a famous old man in bed with people around him, and him saying ‘I have no regrets.’ That’s really pretty silly, isn’t it? It’s really very silly.”

“What do you regret, exactly?” I asked.

“Oh, well. Nothing really, I guess. I mean, I did think I’d do more with my life than this. I just thought I had more time. And like I said, I thought I’d be famous and retire to a place like this.”

“Uh-huh. Well, this wouldn’t be for everybody,” I said. “There’s only one movie theater. And no place to hear good music.”

He laughed, a low sound with a rasp to it, like scraping a potato. You could hear his illness in his laugh. “I never really did those things in New York,” he said. “I just, well, I guess you’d have to say I’ve been gambling with my life. I guess you’d have to call it that. I was thinking things would somehow work out. I thought I just needed to work hard and have faith.”

I walked over to the bed. I stood beside him, as the mouse went about its scratching inside the wall. “Um, hey, how about if I get in bed with you for a while?” I said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t seem right for you to be alone here,” I said. “How about if I just got in under the covers with you for a little while?”

“I don’t have any clothes on,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want to sleep with me because I’m sick?”

“No,” I said.

“Would you have wanted to if I wasn’t sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Will you get out of here, please? Will you just get out of here?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, offend you.”

“I know you didn’t. But go. Please.”

“Well. Okay,” I said.

I left the room, and closed the door behind me. I felt a weight in my arms and legs, a stodgy sense of disappointment and nameless, floating embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to intrude on his privacy. I’d only wanted to hold him for a while, to guide his head to my chest. I’d only wanted to hold on to him as his body went through the long work of giving itself up to the past.

JONATHAN

ERICH came back the next weekend. I’m not sure why the invitation was issued or why it was accepted—none of us, Erich included, had seemed to have an especially good time. All day Sunday he’d been sulky and withdrawn. Still, when we took him to the train station Bobby asked, “Do you want to come back next weekend?” Erich hesitated, and then said all right. He said it in a flat, determined voice, as if laying claim to that which was rightfully his.

As Bobby and I were driving home I asked, “Do you really want to have Erich back again so soon?”

“Jon,” he said, “that guy needs some time in the country. Really, did you look at him?”

For a moment it seemed Bobby did not yet understand the nature of Erich’s illness; he seemed to believe Erich was only stressed and overtired, in need of a good long rest. “He needs more than that, Bobby,” I said.

“Well, a little time in the country is about all we can give him. He’s, like, a member of the family now. Whether we like it or not.”

“The family,” I said. “You know, you’re going to drive me crazy with this shit.”

He shrugged, and smiled ruefully, as if I was being petulant about a condition that clearly lay beyond anyone’s control. Erich was attached to us now, however tenuously, and in Bobby’s private economy we were obliged to offer everything we had.

Erich returned the following Friday on the five o’clock train. By then he’d regained his polite, slightly squeaky enthusiasm, though now it was more prone to lapses. Bobby took the main responsibility for seeing to Erich’s comfort, and by the end of the second visit the two of them had embarked on a kind of courtship. Bobby was doggedly affectionate, and Erich accepted his ministrations with a wan and slightly irritable greed, like an indignant ghost come back to exact reparations from the living.

Late Sunday afternoon I was in the kitchen with Clare and Rebecca. Clare sliced an avocado. Rebecca sat on the counter top, sorting through a set of plastic animal-shaped cookie cutters, and I stood alongside, to keep her from falling. Outside the window we could see Bobby and Erich sitting in the unruly grass, talking earnestly. Bobby made sweeping motions with his hands, indicating enormity, and Erich nodded without much conviction.

“So, Bobby has a new love,” I said.

“Don’t be nasty, dear,” Clare said. “It isn’t becoming in you.” She laid avocado slices on a plate, began peeling a Bermuda onion.

“I just don’t feel like Erich needs to suddenly become our favorite charity,” I said. “He’s practically a stranger.”

“We have room here for a stranger, don’t you think? It’s not like we lack for anything ourselves.”

“So now you’re Mother Teresa?” I said. “This seems a little sudden.”

She looked at me with an even-tempered calm that was more cogently accusing than any censure could have been. Something had happened to Clare. I couldn’t read her anymore—she’d given up her cynicism and taken on an opaque motherliness. We were still friends and domestic partners but we were no longer intimate.

“I know,” I said. “I’m just a rotten person.”

She patted my shoulder. “Please don’t pat me,” I said. “You never used to pat me like this.”