Escape Velocity

I was lying in bed in my hotel room in Billings, staring up at the blinking red light on the smoke detector, when my phone rang. It was my stepsister, Jill. A call at this hour could only mean that one of two things had happened; either she had recently ingested a high-dose edible, or someone we knew had died. Jill prided herself on being the first to deliver bad news. I thought about letting it go to voicemail. I’d been trying to get a couple hours of sleep before I had to head out to Comanche, and I didn’t need the distraction. But I picked up on the fourth or fifth ring anyway, just to get it over with.

I should mention here that Jill and I aren’t particularly close. She lives alone in a double-wide out in the backwoods of Maine and does customer service for PetSmart twelve hours a day. She works from home, with a little headset and a big ergonomic video game chair. She’s got no husband, no kids, and no close friends. She spends all her free time on chatrooms and message boards, diagnosing herself with rare, pseudoscientific illnesses. At the time of this phone call, she’d become convinced that some type of parasitic bacteria was multiplying below the surface of her skin, causing her to break out in terrible, disfiguring lesions. It sounded bad, but I was pretty sure it was all in her head.

“My skin is exploding, Rob,” she said when I picked up. “I can’t even go out in public without people staring. Children have begun to view me as some type of local witch. It’s only a matter of time before they come up with some sort of cruel nickname for me, if they haven’t already.”

Jill had a habit of beginning telephone conversations mid-ramble, without so much as a greeting. The edibles only made it worse. It could be difficult, under these conditions, to have a productive or even coherent dialogue.

“I’m gonna text you some close-up pictures,” she said. “See what you make of it. I want your honest opinion. Don’t sugarcoat it.”

“Start over,” I told her. “Why are you calling?”

I heard Jill’s thumb strike the flint wheel of her Bic.

“Don’t rush me, man,” she said. “You’re always rushing people. Did you know that? It makes people feel like your time is more valuable than theirs. Besides, I’m calling as a courtesy.

Did you hear about Jack Newton?”

The name took me by surprise. “What about him?”

“He died, apparently. At least that’s what it says here in the paper.”

I sat up in bed and turned on the light. The hotel room was dark and silent except for the liquid sound of the cars on the freeway.

“Newt died? What happened?”

“It doesn’t say.” She made a series of ominous tongue-clicks. “That’s never good, is it? Funeral’s this Sunday, in case you’re interested.”

I tried to do the math in my head. I’d flown into Billings on the red-eye that morning, and I had to be in Joliet on Monday for another site visit. The window was tighter than I would have liked. The itinerary was ironclad, unbreakable.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could be tricky.”

The flint wheel struck again, and Jill started coughing.

“Sheila was asking about you yesterday,” she said, once the fit subsided.

Sheila was Jill’s mom, my stepmother. We’d recently checked her into an assisted living facility. She’d been losing her mind to some unclassifiable strain of dementia for the last five years, gradually at first, then all of a sudden, like a pipe bursting. I hadn’t gone to see her yet. I was bankrolling the whole thing, though. I’d lost my shirt on the deal, but I was glad to do it. I had the money. I had more than I knew what to do with.

“How’s she doing?”

“Oh, you know. She has good days and bad days. The bad ones are pretty bad. The good ones aren’t so hot either. You should come see for yourself, if you can squeeze us into your busy schedule.”

I told her I’d think it over, and we hung up. Then I got back under the covers and tried to get some sleep. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Newt. Around four o’clock, I went out for a run. The streets were quiet; there was nobody out there but me and the Department of Sanitation. They called Billings the Magic City, but I hadn’t found it to be that exactly. Then again, I’d only been there a day. Maybe the magic was coming later. I watched the sun come up and cast its alpenglow on the rimrocks and massifs that hovered above and beyond the city. You can tell a lot about a town by watching the sunrise. There was a shade of orange in this part of the country you didn’t see anywhere else in America, like smelted ingots.

When I got back to the hotel, I showered and dressed and headed out to the site. It wasn’t anything too interesting, just some unincorporated land out in Comanche, a hundred acres of prairie grass. I work for a company that builds solar farms, and it’s my job to scout out locations. We’re based in San Jose, but I fly around the country most of the year. I like what I do. I’ve never been married, and I don’t ever intend to be. I don’t have many long-term friendships, either. I’m used to being alone. Once you make the adjustment, it isn’t something you think about every day. Plus, I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in the baseline importance of it, is what I mean.

After the site visit, I went back to the room and tried to sleep again. But I kept thinking about Newt. I couldn’t believe it. My mind kept racing backward to when we were kids. After an hour or so, I gave up. I got up and put a call into the office about the Comanche land, recommending a follow-up visit and some soil tests. Then I bought a plane ticket home.

I hadn’t seen Newt in over twenty years, but a part of me still thought of him as my best and, in some ways, my only friend. We’d grown up together in a place called Odessa—a small, landlocked township in Maine, evaporating in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a place that existed in a state of impending weather, the sky waterlogged and grey, the salt-dusted roads going nowhere. The whole town stood downwind of the local paper mill, and no matter where you were, you could smell the rancid, eggy byproduct of the pulping process. It was the kind of town people passed through on their way to the mountains, or the lakes, or to Canada, or wherever else they might be going.

I didn’t have many happy memories there. My mother died of a sarcoma when I was nine years old, and a few years later, my father married a woman named Sheila who did alterations for a local department store. When I was thirteen, Sheila and her daughter, Jill, moved in with us. Jill was a knockout back then, with enormous eyes popping out at you from under an explosion of wild, tangled hair. I was in love with her, even though I knew it was probably a crime and definitely a sin. But we were never a family, really. We were just a bunch of people who lived together. Sheila was not overly interested in mothering me, and my dad would just sit around shirtless on weekends with his fly unzipped, watching golf and drinking Scotch and Moxies, and every so often he would go out into the yard and chip Titleists into the flower pots. He’d been that way ever since Mom died.

Living in Odessa, especially in the doldrums of winter, there was not much to do for fun that did not involve almost killing yourself in some idiotic fashion. Around the time we were thirteen and fourteen years old, my friends and I began playing a game called Black Hole. The game was simple. We all stood around in someone’s garage and took turns knocking each other unconscious. We had it down to a science. All you had to do was bend over at the waist and take a series of fast, deep breaths until you began to hyperventilate. Then you would stand up straight and hold your breath while someone wrapped you up from behind, squeezing all the air out of your lungs. Moments later, you would wake up on the ground with the taste of alkaline in your mouth, engulfed in a warm amniotic glow, unsure of where you were or what was going on. We called it Black Hole because it made you feel like you’d been sucked into one and then spat back out on the other side, forever altered. Of course, the explanation behind these sensations was a sudden mass obliteration of brain cells, the result of acute oxygen deprivation. Technically speaking, we were bringing ourselves to the brink of death. But we weren’t so much interested in the science of it. We were bored, and it was a way to pass the time.

Of all the people who played Black Hole, no one was better at it than Newt. He was the smallest kid in our group. He and I shared a closeness that was unique among the others. Together and with great poise we rode the bench of the school basketball team, seditiously rooting for the other side. Newt had what our Scotts-Irish grandfathers referred to as the Gift of Gab. He would simply talk and talk until someone stopped him, usually with violence. He had an extremely high pain tolerance, and he would fight anyone. He was also the smartest person I’d ever met. In his spare time, he had invented a tabletop role-playing game called Intergalaxus which involved a complex interweaving of interplanetary conflicts and subplots, dictated by the rolling of two eight-sided die. Newt had worked out the mathematics of this game so well that it played tighter than anything you could purchase in a box.

When Newt played Back Hole, the whole thing turned into a kind of gladiatorial event. He would go out cold, then snap back into consciousness as if defibrillated and begin attacking people, snarling and lunging as we formed a circle of containment around him. He fought like a mongoose. His eyes went completely dead. Sometimes the other guys made a side-game out of it. They whipped him with pool noodles and fungo bats and pegged him with tennis balls, trying to keep him at bay. He claimed, afterward, to have seen visions. I was jealous. I wanted to see visions, too.

One day, near the end of the summer going into the ninth grade, we were out in Newt’s garage, playing Black Hole like we always did. It was Newt’s turn to get knocked out, and on this particular day, I was going to be his Copilot. This meant that it was my turn to be the one squeezing the air out of his lungs and assisting him gently to the ground when his body went limp. I was a good Copilot, possibly the best of us. There was some skill involved. You had to squeeze with just the right amount of pressure. Too much and you could crack a rib, too little and you wouldn’t achieve escape velocity—the term Newt had come up with to describe the level of strangulation necessary for a deep, enduring blackout.

On this particular day, everything went according to plan at first. Newt bent over and started to hyperventilate, then he stood up while I grabbed him and squeezed. I felt his muscles go slack. The next step was to ease him to the ground. But something went wrong. I backed away a little too fast, maybe. I didn’t get my arms under his arms, and I just sort of dropped him. I don’t know how it happened.

Newt’s body tipped sideways, stiff and lock-kneed, like a tree going over. Then his head smacked against the cold cement floor of the garage, hard. The sound it made was terrible. It seemed impossible that such a sound could originate from the human skull. Nobody said anything at first. We stood around and waited for him to get up. He had ended up on his back, and there was a funny expression on his face, a dreamy half-smile. Sensing that we would be punished, people began to scatter and run away. Soon, I was the only one left. I was scared, for the same reasons that everyone else was scared, so I ran out of there with the rest of them, leaving Newt on the cold concrete floor. I don’t know how much later it was that his mother came out and found him.

I assumed he would wake up eventually. I told myself that he would be fine. But he wasn’t fine. The doctors had to put him in an induced coma. His brain had swelled up and they had to wait for it to shrink back down again. They cut out a little piece of his skull so the brain could have some room to expand. I pictured a wad of bubble gum pressed out between cinched lips. He was in the coma for five days. The doctors said he might not wake up at all. Or he might wake up, but it was unclear how much of his brain would still work. Or he might wake up and be fine.

I was certain that he was going to die. I was a killer. I’d killed my best friend. The fact that I hadn’t meant to do it seemed small in comparison to the fact that it had happened. I pictured Newt lying there on the concrete, alone. But then, Newt did wake up. I went to see him at the hospital. The doctor said it was a miracle. He could still move all his arms and legs, and he had touched all his fingers together earlier that morning. I sat there next to Newt for a while, asking him questions, but he didn’t say much. Every once in a while, I’d catch him looking at me like he didn’t recognize me. We watched Star Trek on the little television set mounted to the wall. He didn’t even laugh when Data referred to his brain as his “cranial unit.” When it was time for me to leave, he didn’t even take his eyes off the TV.

After a week, they let him go back home. I thought things would go back to normal then. They didn’t. When we started high school the next week, Newt didn’t come with us. His mom said he wasn’t ready.

“Maybe next year,” she said.

Sometimes, I went over after school to hang out with him. He was different now. The biggest difference was how quiet he was. He just sort of sat there. We tried to play Intergalaxus a couple of times, but he couldn’t remember how. He got these major headaches. Sometimes, he said things that sounded crazy. One time he told me he saw Nazi gestapo trying to come in through the windows. When this sort of thing happened, Mrs. Newton would start smoking cigarettes and tell me to go on home.

I started coming by less and less. All Newt did now was watch TV all day anyway. He liked to watch these daytime soap operas with his mom. They’d just sit there on the couch like a couple of old ladies. You couldn’t have gotten his attention during these programs if you walked into the room with your hair on fire. Then there was the gerbil. His mom had bought him this gerbil for emotional support after the accident, and he was crazy about it. He loved watching that little guy run around in its little piss-scented gerbil world of colorful tubes and wheels. He let it sit in his lap while he watched his soaps, squeezing and petting it.

I had a hard time relating to these new interests. At school, I had started hanging around with these older guys—friends of my cousin Dale. These were the sorts of guys who liked to drink beer and drive around in cars and climb up water towers and light shit on fire just to see what would happen. They were Neanderthals, but I liked them. I especially liked their beer. I felt I’d graduated into some new form of myself. The change was geological; I felt it shift and lock into place. Eventually, I stopped going to see Newt altogether. That wasn’t Newt, anyway. It was someone else who had taken his place.

The next year, Newt went to a vocational school a couple towns over where he spent all day learning things like how to weld together two pieces of copper flashing. Then halfway through the year, he dropped out and started a lawn mowing company, him and this other redneck guy named Randy Beauchamp from the Vo-Tech. They would mow lawns in the summer and get rid of leaves in the fall. They even did some minor landscaping work, too. Often, in the later years of high school, I would drive by and see Newt blowing leaves around or trimming hedges with those big shears. Every time I saw him, I put my foot on the gas and drove away, fast.

By the time I was getting ready to leave for college—I’d applied only to schools in California, which was as far away from Odessa as I imagined one could get—Newt’s lawn business was booming. He had clients all over town, and he was making decent money. He drove this white van with the words Newton & Beauchamp Landscaping stenciled on the side. That summer, it seemed like everywhere you looked, there was that van, parked in someone’s driveway, and Newt pushing his little mower, or cleaning leaves out of somebody’s gutter. It made me angry to see that van. I was angry most of the time back then. I was drinking a lot and getting into fights and damaging property and getting into trouble. At home, Sheila and my dad didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t know what to do with myself, either. I wanted to get out of there. I thought that if I stayed any longer, I might end up going crazy.

And then one day, a week or so before I left for college, I was driving around with Dale and some others when I saw Newt’s landscaping van parked in the driveway of a large, white Cape. We’d been out at the lake all day, swimming and drinking beer, jumping off rocks and having chicken fights, showing off for the girls. I’d had a lot of whiskey, too, and I was feeling drunk and angry for no reason, just sitting there in the backseat of Dale’s Cutlass working my spleen like a chew toy. Then I looked out the window and saw Newt’s van.

“Slow down,” I said.

Dale did, and I rolled the window down and took one of the beers from the cooler and leaned my whole body out the window and pitched it at the van, cocking my arm sideways like The Big Unit. The bottle was full, and it cracked against the taillight, shattering both at once. At that very moment, Newt emerged from the other side of the van. I hadn’t seen him there. It was the first time we’d made eye contact in a couple years. There was no anger on his face, just a sort of good-natured confusion. Then, he did something I couldn’t understand. He smiled and waved. I couldn’t believe that. I wanted him to be mad, to come chasing after us like the maniac pugilist I knew him to be. But he just smiled like he thought he was Jesus or somebody, turning the other cheek. I wanted to jump out of the Cutlass and tear him apart. But before I could, Dale sped up, and I pulled my body back into the car.

That was a long time ago. I’m a whole different person now that I don’t live in Odessa. I don’t even recognize myself in my own memories sometimes. As for Newt, I have forgiven myself for wrecking his life. Still, it isn’t fair. He could have done anything he wanted. He could have flown F-14 Tomcats over the desert and shot government metal into orbit. Instead, he ended up cutting lawns in Odessa, living with his mother in that old house. He didn’t deserve that. A small part of me wanted to trade places with him. But the other part, the bigger part, was glad I had gotten far away from it all. I was free. To be honest, I don’t think about it all that much anymore.

I got into the Bangor airport early—another red-eye. I tended to prefer the overnighters. I had an easier time sleeping on planes. Something about the engine noise or the pressurized cabin. But this time, I sat up awake in my seat the whole time, just watching the sun sit on top of the clouds like an egg yolk. It was the third straight night I hadn’t gotten any sleep. I’d taken an Ativan around three in the morning, and as I walked through the Arrival gate, I felt like I was moving through some thick, viscous substance—not air, exactly, but something like oil.

I rented a car at the airport and started the long drive out to Jill’s place. I’d agreed to visit with her before the funeral, but I wasn’t staying over. I had another red-eye to Joliet. I wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible. I hadn’t told Jill that I wasn’t spending the night, because I knew she would take it badly. She was always trying to force some sort of connection between us. Still, she was the only family I had. Her and Sheila. My dad died a few years ago down in Florida, where he’d moved with his third and final wife. Jill reasoned that my orphaning should bring us closer together, but I didn’t think so.

It wasn’t that I disliked Jill. It was just that she could be overwhelming. She was always bogged down in some type of medical calamity. Lately, she’d become convinced that she had something called Morgellons disease. I had never heard of it before. She explained to me during one of our stoned late-night conversations that Morgellons was, as of yet, poorly understood by the medical community. It was either a mystery or a hoax, depending on who you asked.

“Basically, there are these little fibers called spirochetes,” she’d said. “No one knows what they are, really. The leading theory is they’re some type of parasitic bacteria. There’s a couple studies looking into it. Anyways, these fuckers burrow into your skin and make you wish you were dead.”

She said she was itching all the time, experiencing a symptom called “formication”—the sensation of insects crawling under your skin. She said it was getting worse. She was covering herself with Vaseline to mitigate skin breakage, blowing all her paychecks on acupuncturists and Reiki healers.

It sounded bad, but I thought she was probably exaggerating. After our conversation, I’d done some googling. It turned out that, according to medical consensus, Morgellons didn’t exist. And yet, many thousands considered themselves afflicted by it. These people really thought they had something wrong with them, but it was all in their heads. Those spirochetes, which the self-described “Morgies” took to be evidence of the realness of their affliction, were probably just cotton fibers that got into the sores and blisters. Still, Jill spent all day on the conspiratorial blogs of the Morgellons truthers, where people posted photographs of their lesions taken with microscopic lenses attached to their iPhone cameras. The pictures looked otherworldly, like space worms emerging from volcanic domes. But they weren’t. They were just strands of nylon caught in someone’s raw blister.

When I got to Jill’s house in Odessa, there was a sign taped to the door, written on a sheet of printer paper: Come around back. I walked around the side of the house and found her in the backyard, lying on a Snoopy beach towel in the uncut grass, wearing a Day-Glo sports bra and jogging shorts. She had those goggles on, the type they give you at the tanning salon.

The first thing I noticed were the blisters. They were worse than I expected. A lot worse. She was covered in them. There was a cluster of them along the left side of her rib cage, bright red and livid. It looked like she’d been half blown-up by mortar fire. I couldn’t believe how bad it was.

“The sun helps dry them out,” said Jill. “Or so they tell me.”

She removed the little goggles, sat up, and wrapped the towel around herself. “Damn,” she said, giving me the once-over. “You look almost as bad as I do.”

“I haven’t slept,” I admitted.

We went inside and Jill offered me a cup of what I assumed was coffee but was actually some type of lukewarm, chicory-based beverage that I did not care for. Then she started rummaging around in the pantry. I could see that, instead of food, it was stocked floor-to-ceiling with supplements and vitamins. Jill came back with a colorful assortment in the palm of her hand and listed them out for me. Magnesium. Garlic. Lavender. Glycine. Ginkgo Biloba. Apparently, they were for me.

“What’s this one?” I asked.

“THC gummy.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said. “It’s super mellow.”

I was too tired to argue, so I took the fistful all at once and washed it down with the awful chicory drink.

“Atta boy,” she said.

We had some time to kill before the funeral, so Jill took the opportunity to launch into a lengthy monologue about her correspondences on the Morgellons blogs. She shared competing theories about the origins of the disease, which ranged from chemtrails to extraterrestrial parasitic takeover. She talked about experimental treatments. One guy had had some luck bathing in a tub full of A&W Root Beer. Another recommended ingesting deworming medication for horses. Jill was considering trying the latter, had already attempted the former.

“Well, I didn’t splurge on a full bath,” she confessed. “I just kind of stood in the tub and poured the bottle over my head.”

I thought about the countless hours and thousands of dollars she’d sunk into this quackery. She told me she had bought something called a “miniscope” on Amazon, but that she was saving up for a higher-quality lens, something called a QX-3 Digital Blue.

“It’s the Rolls-Royce of portable microscopes,” she said.

I’d been experiencing a creeping sadness ever since my plane had landed, and sitting there in Jill’s double-wide, in the place where she lived alone in her unremitting pain, surrounded by the entropy of this collapsing town, made me want to get out as fast as I could. There was something about being here that felt like stepping in quicksand; the more you struggled, the worse it got.

“It’s been a real shit show up here lately,” she was saying. “Sheila’s losing it. The other day she put all her jewelry in the microwave. I guess she thought it was a safe. As if any of her stuff is safe-worthy. She almost started a fire. They had to revoke her kitchen privileges.”

As Jill talked, I tried not to stare at her blisters. They looked even worse in artificial light. I could see where some of them had scarred over already. She looked mutilated. I wanted to tell her that all she had to do was stop itching them, that they would just go away if she left them alone. I wanted to tell her that it was her own itching and picking and agitating that was the disease. But it was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Besides, I didn’t want to get involved.

“Sorry to hear about Newt,” Jill said. “He was a nice guy. Salt of the Earth.”

“Do you know what happened?”

She scratched at a cluster of sores under her chin. “I’m told he fell off a ladder. But that’s not what killed him. According to Randy Beauchamp, it was the back pills he was taking after the fall. Had to get surgery and everything. Randy says he was taking these pills like they were Skittles. I don’t know what they were. Percocet, I think. Anyway, he took too many.” She paused and scratched again. “That’s what Randy says anyway. Randy would know.”

I told Jill I wanted to lie down for a while before the funeral. I went into the guest room and lay on the bed. I was feeling low. Exhausted. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Newt falling off that ladder. I felt, somehow, that this was my fault. Not the fall, specifically, but all of it. I lay there listening to the sound of the shower hissing through the paper-thin walls, having black, unspooling thoughts. I was too tired to sleep. After a while, the gummy started kicking in, making everything worse. My heart was beating in what I imagined to be a complicated arrythmia, and there was a twitching in my carotid artery that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m not feeling particularly mellow,” I told Jill, when I came back into the living room, dressed in my shabby suit.

“Me either,” she said. “I might have goofed up the dosage. We’ll just have to ride it out. Stay positive. Think happy thoughts. It might be a good idea to repeat some type of mantra.”

She had on an ill-fitting purple dress, and her hair was up in all these complicated buckles and floral pins that made her look like some kind of flowering shrub.

“What do you think of my look?” she asked.

“It’s a lot,” I said.

“Good. That’s what I’m going for. I’m trying to draw the attention away from my face.”

We got in her car and started driving. I felt a little better once we were moving. I stuck my head out the window like a dog. In the distance, I saw the stacks from the paper mill excreting black smoke. We drove through the center of town, which, in the overcast light, looked especially demoralized. There were kids skateboarding outside the former Rexall. One of them was tagging a stop sign with a Sharpie. They stopped to glare at us as we drove past. I recognized their anger as my own.

Soon we pulled into a long driveway with little box elders lining the sides.

“What are we doing here?”

“We’re picking up Sheila,” she said.

It had not occurred to me that Sheila would be attending the funeral. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to see her now. But it was too late to argue. We were already inside, speaking to a woman in blue nursing scrubs, who signed us in and waved us back. Whatever good vibes I’d amassed during the car ride took a nosedive right through the tessellated flooring. The hallway had a bleachy, disinfectant odor. The paintings were sinister, metaphorical—plucked geese and empty, fallow pastures.

When we got to Sheila’s room, Jill entered without knocking. The room had a thick, vegetative smell, but it looked relatively clean. In fact, it was almost nice. I felt a little uptick of pride at having paid for it. The art in here was a little better—corporate knockoffs of Monet and Degas. We heard the toilet flush, and in another moment, Sheila emerged from the bedroom. It had been years since I’d seen her. She had a dewlap under her chin, and she was wearing a layer of mascara as thick as creosote, but otherwise she looked more or less the same.

“I’m ready,” she announced bitterly. Then she looked at Jill. “God almighty, kiddo. What happened to your face?”

“It’s the Morgellons, Ma. We’ve talked about this. Didn’t you even notice my hair?”

Sheila grunted, coughed, and shrugged all at once. Now she was looking at me. She scrunched her nose up, and her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Who’s your friend?”

It stunned me. I didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t crossed my mind that Sheila would not recognize me. I stood there with a dumb smile on my face.

"It’s Robert, Mom!” said Jill. “You remember Robert.”

“Well, of course I remember Robert,” said Sheila. “I’m just not wearing my cheaters is all. How are you, Robert, sweetheart?”

I could tell from the look she was giving me that she still did not know who I was. I knew it should not have hurt me, but it did. I’d expected some glimmer of recognition—something.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Sheila went to the coat tree and started wrestling herself into a windbreaker, and Jill mouthed, Sorry, at me, and soon we were out the door and promenading down the hall. But when we were almost at the front desk, Sheila stopped and threw her hands up in the air.

“We forgot David Snodgrass!” she said.

Jill and I looked at each other.

“Who is David Snodgrass, Mom?”

“He’s my friend,” she said. “I told him he could tag along.”

“People don’t tag along to funerals, Mom.”

“Here they do,” said Sheila.

Jill shrugged, and we marched back down the hallway to retrieve this Snodgrass person whom neither of us had ever heard of. We followed Sheila until she stopped in front of a doorway and knocked.

“David is a very sophisticated man,” she whispered. “Try not to embarrass yourselves.”

The door opened, and there stood an older man with a bristle moustache and a neatly combed hairpiece. He was dressed nattily in a linen suit with a pocket square. He really did look sophisticated. He took Sheila’s hand, and for a moment it looked as though he would kiss it, but he just sort of held it the way old people sometimes do. It was obvious that this was Sheila’s lover.

On the way to the church, I sat in the back seat next to David Snodgrass. He had a bland, lecherous face and smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol. I wondered if he, like Sheila, suffered from dementia. If so, he hid it well.

“I’ve been to six funerals this year,” he bragged.

“That’s a lot,” I said.

“That’s nothing!” said David Snodgrass.

I wished I was sitting up front with Jill. I realized that I was only getting higher and higher as time went on, when what I wanted was to be less high. Or better yet, I wanted to be unconscious. Throughout the drive, David Snodgrass talked continuously, mostly in praise of Sheila, while Jill glared at him in the rearview mirror.

“Your mother is a truly remarkable woman,” he said, in a semi-British accent. “A specimen of beauty in the highest degree!”

We arrived at the funeral home ten minutes late. There were two of them in Odessa—The J. Henry Slattery Funeral Home and Agnew, Peebles & Creel—and Jill had gone to the wrong one. Now at the correct location, we barged in as politely as we could through the heavy oak doors. We were a motley crew—stoned, demented, and badly-lesioned as we were. The only respectable one among us was David Snodgrass, who took charge and led us to the back of the receiving line.

I knew we were going to have to look at Newt’s body, but I didn’t want to. Looking at dead bodies was one of my least favorite things to do. The first time I ever saw a dead body, it was my mother’s. In her illness, she’d become wasted and thin—a skull with eyes. But in the casket, she appeared to have been inflated with some gaseous substance. Once I saw her like that, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.

When it was my turn to look at the body, I stared down into the casket, and there was Newt, looking much the same as he had always looked. On his face, he was wearing something like a grin. It was the same grin he’d worn when I’d busted his taillight with my Budweiser. The same grin he’d worn all his life. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

I stood so long looking at Newt that Jill had to elbow me to move along. Then we all went and took our seats. David Snodgrass had found us some room in the back, and he stood there filing us in like an usher and then sitting down last.

“I absolutely must have the aisle seat,” he said to me, with an inscrutable wink.

The service commenced. Mrs. Newton came up and said a few words, but it was obvious that she was no public speaker, and she kept her remarks brief. Eventually, Randy Beauchamp stood up and gave the eulogy.

“I’m gonna keep this short and sweet,” he said. “Like Newt.”

That got a chuckle. But it was all downhill from there. Randy couldn’t hold it together as he attempted a lighthearted story about Newt mixing up slow-drying and fast-drying concrete. His refusal to submit to his own emotion was painful, like watching a man arm wrestle himself. Discomfort settled in among the mourners. There was an awkward lull.

When Randy was finished, Mrs. Newton stood up and asked if anyone else wanted to say anything. The room was quiet. Someone coughed. I was worried no one would say anything. It seemed unfair for Newt’s life to end this way, on an anecdote about concrete, and a poorly-told one at that. I started thinking about Newt’s head hitting the floor of his garage when we were playing Black Hole. I thought about the sound it made. I could hear it in my own head.

I felt like I should say something. Someone had to. But I didn’t know what to say. We were strangers, after all. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years.

I was starting to sweat a lot by this point. My heart was beating through my shirt. I undid a button. I could barely breathe. Each time I tried, it was like taking a breath through one of those bendy straws they give to children at restaurants. So I kept sucking in harder and harder hoping to fill my lungs up, but the harder I sucked, the tighter the straw-hole became, until it was like the size of a medical syringe, barely a conduit at all. I saw a rectilinear waveform of blurry light undulating in my field of vision, and I shook my head to make it go away.

Snodgrass elbowed me in the arm. “Contain yourself,” he hissed.

But I couldn’t. There was something wrong with me. The wrongness was generalized. It was everywhere. It was my life. I thought of all the hotel rooms in all the midsized cities in America where, in my temporary residence, I had lain awake at night, feeling the slow approach of the blackness creeping in all around me. The nothingness of life. I was really sucking air now. I thought of Newt all alone in that coffin, and I felt like it was me in there, and he was sitting here in my seat. Those were the kinds of thoughts I was having, sitting there in that hot, airless room watching Mrs. Newton stand there while she waited for someone to say something kind about her dead son, and some invisible force made me stand up then, and I saw heads turning toward me, people shifting in their seats, and Mrs. Newton looking at me also, confusion manifesting as she tried to put a name to my face. And in the moment before I lost consciousness, I felt all the air get sucked out of the room in one rushing gasp, and the gravity zeroed out, and I was weightless.

I came to in the lobby. I was lying on my back, surrounded by onlookers.

“Give him room!” shouted David Snodgrass, taking charge of the situation. “For Christ’s sake, let the man breathe!”

There were tears in my eyes. My arms and legs felt like they were asleep. I felt something wet on my head and touched it. I held my fingers in front of my face, bloodied.

“You’ll need stitches, I’m afraid,” Snodgrass said. He seemed ferociously in his element.

“He’s fine,” said Sheila. “A little goose egg.”

“Low blood sugar,” mused Snodgrass. “Either that, or an acute triggering of the vasovagal reaction.”

“Whoever he is, we’d better keep an eye on him,” said Sheila.

I was coming back into myself now, and I could feel my head throbbing. But in general, I felt okay. Actually, I felt good—better than I had in a while. An usher approached us.

“You folks have to go,” he said. “As in, like, now.”

We piled back into the car and drove off through a town that I only half-recognized, a place as familiar as a dream. My skin was tingling. The smoke stacks in the distance looked like giants, advancing.

“Christ, I’ve got the munchies,” said Jill, as we drove.

“So do I,” said Sheila.

We all agreed; we were starving. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. My stomach made a sound like a utensil stuck in a garbage disposal. We pulled into the McDonald’s drive-thru and ordered some food. We got a lot, more than we needed, more than we could probably finish. Then we drove back to Sheila’s with the bags on our laps. The smell of fry oil and burger fat was wonderful. I had to shut my mouth to keep from drooling.

When we got to Sheila’s, we dug in. We were ravenous. It had been years since I’d eaten fast food. I couldn’t believe how delicious it all was. I’d never tasted anything so good in my whole life. I was shoveling it in, really going for it. We all were, even David Snodgrass.

“These fries are superlative,” he declared.

We polished off the whole spread, every last fry. When the bags were empty, we sat there in a peaceful, digestive silence. The sun was going down. There were spots of yellow light coming through the trees, dappling the wallpaper. Pretty soon they would be gone, swallowed up by the gloam. Someone turned the television on. We all sat there resting. Next to me on the couch, Sheila and David Snodgrass were holding hands. I watched them for a long time. I could feel them moving back and forth between each other, communicating without words. Then, David leaned in and whispered something into Sheila’s ear. She smiled and cleared her throat.

“I’m going to walk David home now.” Then she looked at me. I saw a flicker of recognition. “Goodbye, Robert,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

They stood up, slowly but in relative unison, and began shuffling toward the door. Anyone could tell they were in love. I was happy for them. David put on his linen jacket, which he’d removed for the eating of hamburgers, and Sheila put on her shawl, and together they vanished down the hall.

As soon as I looked at Jill, we both started laughing. Tears sprang to my eyes. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t catch my breath. Nothing came out. We kicked our legs and wheezed. I hadn’t laughed so hard maybe ever. When we were done laughing, I laid back and put my head against the cushion. I knew that if I closed my eyes, I would fall asleep instantly. It was the best thing in the world, the feeling of guaranteed rest. I knew that I would miss my red-eye, that I would sleep all the way through until morning, but I didn’t care.

On the other side of the room, Jill itched wildly at a cluster of sores on her shoulder. The sores looked worse than they had earlier. They had sort of bunched together into one big ulcerous mass. Her face was screwed into a grim determination of itching.

“That looks pretty bad,” I said.

“It’s always bad around this time of day,” she said. “It itches like a mother.”

She scratched some more, digging her nails in. She drew an in-suck of breath. I could see she was suffering. Her suffering was real, no matter what the experts said. I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how.

“Can I see them?” I asked.

She gave me a funny look. “Why? So you can tell me how crazy I am?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to lie to her. She reached into her purse and removed what appeared to be a jeweler’s loupe. She told me where to place it. I held the loupe to the cluster of lesions on her shoulder. But I couldn’t see anything. It just looked like a pink smudge.

“There’s nothing there.”

“Look closer.”

I held the loupe closer, then pulled it back, hovering over the mass of scoured flesh. And then, suddenly, there they were. I could see them. The spirochetes. They were clustered together, spiraling in complex helical patterns outward from the rosy surface, rising up out of pink crystalline structures. The colors were amazing, blues and shocking reds.

“Do you see anything?” she asked.

The colors bloomed in the dilating aperture. They expanded and contracted, swam upward like flames. Up close, they were beautiful. I was afraid that if I looked away, they might disappear. The image blurred, then came into focus in an explosion of color. I felt like I was looking beneath the surface of life, at something mysterious and hidden, a different world. I held the loupe closer.

“I see them,” I told her.