“Where you running?”
“Nowhere. Just running. A pointless pastime I have bought into for reasons unknown to me.”
“Having fun?
“Eddy, are you having fun?”
“Medium.”
“Medium fun, huh?
“How you doing, Eddy?”
Edward stopped moving and bent over, put his hands on his knees and tried to breathe without sputtering. The humidity felt like some windowless waiting room, and the cardiovascular exertion seemed to have run him up some cliff rather than talking him down.
“Are you okay?”
“Paulie.” Edward snapped up from his curved position. “I need to be alone. I have thoughts to think, and they’re not perky or sparkly or good. I need you to not be here. Okay?”
Without gauging his effect, Edward turned and headed in the opposite direction, past a campsite where a large group of men, all clad in baseball hats, were eating hot dogs under an awning attached to their RV. They had looked up at the sound of his voice breaking, and they watched him pass as they chewed, at the patches of sweat that looked parenthetical on his shoulder blades, at his palms daubing at his eyes in jerky movements as he gained speed. There was nothing, he thought, more humiliating than weeping before an RV barbecue party.
Left behind, Paulie let the numb weight of his body carry him back to their site, and it may have appeared, to the few people sitting out in mesh chairs, that he was carried, the load of his head held by some invisible rope. When he reached his sister where she lay in her hammock, he clambered in, set it swinging. Claudia wrapped her arms around him, then wove her fingers through the cotton grid, securing the embrace, soothing him still, and they felt the diminishing rocking together.
“What is it, Paul?”
“Eddy didn’t want me around because he had thoughts he wanted to be with and he ran away crying.”
“Sweetie. Edward is, besides being entertaining and generous, an emotionally fucked-up individual. Imagine a broken radio that only plays one station, which is an asshole DJ who makes a greatest-hits playlist of your black days and worst mistakes.”
Paulie smiled slightly at this, as profanity had always felt to him like a seal of understanding, a shortcut to extreme feeling that people used when they needed it most.
“You know how his job used to be to make people laugh? That was because he wanted to make them laugh, but also, mostly, because he needed to make himself laugh, because it’s pretty dark and nasty inside his brain.”
“Dark like a tunnel or dark like the sky in the country?”
“Tunnel. Definitely, tunnel. As a for-instance, when he was a little boy, his parents used to keep him inside for days. And so he was sort of bad at being with other people. There was someone he loved very much, and he wasn’t able to hang on to her. And he is mostly good at keeping that to himself but sometimes not. It’s real quiet here, and there aren’t a bunch of competing noises to distract him. Have you noticed how quiet it is?”
“You could hear a bug cough.”
“Exactly. So maybe it is our job as friends to be extra nice to Edward, even when he is acting slightly like a monster.”
“Like a fucky monster made of gangrene who is rotting all over everyone.”
Laughing into her brother’s hair, Claudia brought one leg to touch the ground, guiding the hammock into a sway that was slow and even, and soon they found a sleep that seemed to promise something as they fell into it, a cleaning of the body or an adjusting of the mind.
IN THE TAXI Edith dismissed the congestion of cars with a fluttery hand.
“It’s always like this Christmas weekend.” The man behind the wheel narrowed his eyes in the rearview mirror, poised to correct her mistake, but saw something in the impotent way she poured her sight out the window, and stopped.
Adeleine kept her eyes closed and her right hand fixed on the door handle. The driver spoke in a sonorous voice into a Bluetooth earpiece, his syllables so attenuated they seemed coded. Outside the speeding taxi one borough rushed into another, Brooklyn finally replaced by the low plastic-sided houses and dim restaurants and suspect quiet of Queens.
“Declan says it’s important to dress to the nines when you’re flying. He says, if you can’t show your best self when defying man’s God-given abilities, then when? It’s a crime to cruise the heavens in anything but your finest suit, because what would St. Peter say about blue jeans? He might send you to hell to change!”