The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper Page A

that I could reach the outlet. It seems unbelievable to me that something the kid who would grow into me had done back then has remained intact until now, as if waiting for me to return. We are suddenly connected, he and I, as if by some cosmic warp in the time continuum, and I see him with perfect clarity, can feel his fears and thoughts suddenly running through my brain, his younger humors flowing through my veins, and for the briefest instant, through some act of molecular recall, I am him again. My thigh muscles falter and I sit down quickly on the bed. My bed. Through the speakers comes a scratchy rendition of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes,” and I have to smile.
    I use the hall bathroom, and my hand remembers that the flusher must be yanked up before being depressed, a plumbing quirk that has not been repaired since my childhood, because with my father living alone in the house, the hall toilet has basically gone unused. For a moment, I try to imagine a set of circumstances that might have led my father to use the hall toilet, but I cannot. Between the downstairs powder room and his own master bathroom, he'd have had no reason to come down this way, and Arthur Goffman is not the sort of man inclined toward whimsical changes of scenery when it comes to taking a dump.
    I return to my room and walk over to the double windows that overlook the front yard, absently fingering the white plastic grille. My father had installed the grille because the pigeons kept mistaking the large window for open air and crashing into it. I can vividly recall the nauseating sound of those bone-jarring collisions jolting me out of my sleep in the early-morning hours. I would creep hesitantly to the window and look down to see the bird on our front stairs, dazed and shivering from the sudden, inexplicable crash. Usually they recovered after a few minutes and took to the air again on an erratic flight path, shaken and none the wiser for their bruising experience, left only with the vague and uncomfortable notion that the air will occasionally coagulate without warning and knock them out of the sky. Every so often the crash was fatal, and I was forced to remove the dead pigeon with one of the red snow shovels from the garage and inter the bird in a shallow, unmarked grave behind the hedges. The second time I buried a pigeon with a crushed skull, I vomited profusely and was sick for hours afterward, prompting my father to grudgingly install the grille, muttering under his breath about my fragile constitution.
    The doorbell rings, and eager as I might be to continue my fond reverie of bad hair bands, pulverized birds, and my insensitive father, I clear my head and run downstairs to open the door.
    The pale, lingering shipwreck of a man standing on my father's front porch, in baggy jeans and an old Cougars jacket, turns out to be Wayne Hargrove, but it takes a few beats before I recognize him. His once-thick blond hair has thinned to a few colorless wisps that float disconnectedly around his scalp, and there are dark shadows under his eyes, which are gravely sunken in their sockets. He is terribly thin in an angular way, with the stooped shoulders and protruding elbows and overall sense of diminishment that belong to a much older man. Implanted on the pasty diaphanous flesh of his forehead and neck are the small merlot-colored clusters characteristic of Kaposi's sarcoma, as if further proof of his terrible condition were needed.
    â€œSo the rumors were true,” my old friend says, leaning against the door frame with familiar ease, as if it were yesterday and not seventeen years ago that he used to pop over whenever he felt the urge. “The prodigal son has returned.”
    â€œGood news travels fast,” I say with a grin, shaking his hand. I can feel his bones, brittle and loose, shifting under his clammy, paper-thin skin as they yield to the pressure of my grip.
    â€œNews of any kind travels fast in this town,”