The police turned up and shouted at me to open the door. I was expecting to get arrested, but they didn’t want to get involved. One actually told me that I had more rights than I thought. My landlord needed a court order to get me out. He told me to phone a lawyer. The cops and the movers talked for a while. The movers agreed to leave.
Finally, I was alone again. Almost everything was gone from the apartment. Furniture, kitchen equipment. I now occupied an empty brick box, with dusty boot prints all over the hardwood floor. A well-proportioned bunker. My room had been mostly emptied. Cardboard boxes were piled in a corner which seemed to contain books and not much else. My bed was gone, so were most of my clothes. Only Carter’s room was untouched. I made his bed and generally straightened things up. His treasure chest of 78’s was still sitting in its place by the record deck. I phoned a locksmith and gave him Carter’s credit card number. While he worked, I looked at the small things that had been left behind on the floor. Restaurant flyers, paperclips, pennies. It would be hard to reconstruct our life from such fragments, to know what had been said and done in that space. I kept trying to reach Cornelius. After the third time, the assistant told me not to call again. She would be in touch if and when Mr. Wallace was available to speak to me. She suggested I send an email detailing “my concerns” and “sit tight” to await a response.
The movers came back a couple of hours later. They banged on the locked door and cursed at me in their language. After a while they went away. Only then did it occur to me to think about the studio. I ran down the stairs and cycled over, arriving drenched in sweat. I fumbled with the key in the lock. As I had feared, it didn’t work. I banged on the door with my fists, calling out to Carter, as if it was all a terrible misunderstanding and he would shamble to the door and open it up and let me in and everything would be the same again, just like before.
—CORNELIUS? I’M LOCKED OUT. Yes, that’s right. What? What do you mean? That’s ridiculous. We have projects, contracts. Yes, I’ve got proof. Of course I’ve got proof. I don’t understand why you would do this. Cornelius? Hello?
Please take notice that a judgment has been made in the above proceeding giving Wallace Magnolia Properties LLC possession of the premises now occupied by you.
—Surely I have some rights in this situation. That’s not fair. He’s my friend. I would never. Well, it was a verbal contract. No. Of course not. That’s completely unreasonable. If I want a what? What? Of course I don’t want to make a claim against your family. This is my life we’re talking about. I need to get into that studio.
An order of eviction has been issued empowering the marshal to remove you and your belongings
—I have nowhere to go. I’m your brother’s best friend. That’s not true. How can you even say that? I am not. I resent that. No way.
Your problems are not my problems, Cornelius says in his impermeable voice. The family has been advised that it is unlikely that Carter will wake from his coma. They see no reason to wait to put his affairs in order. It’s not the family’s fault that I didn’t respond to earlier attempts to contact me. If you wish to bring suit, you should feel free to have your lawyer call mine.
I am unable to separate one thing from another. It all comes at me in a swirl, a storm. The casual way he says that Carter will never wake up. The knowledge that I have nothing, that at a stroke he has taken it all from me. The way he can tell me all this in his unreachable, impermeable voice.
as provided by law the undersigned will execute such order of eviction
—Goodbye. Please don’t use this number again.
WITHOUT ACCESS TO THE STUDIO, only two threads connected me to Carter: his records and a copy of the picture Leonie had taken in the ICU, the selfie with her bandaged intubated brother. I’d got hold of her phone one evening while she was in the bathroom and sent it to myself. Beautiful Carter smashed and punctured, his mouth open for the ventilator. Back at the empty loft, I pushed his bed against the door of his room and spent long periods, sometimes hours at a time, staring at it as I listened to his records. It had a terrible beauty. Brother and sister in extremis. Carter wired to drips and monitors, Leonie staring into the lens as if it were the barrel of a gun.