One Last Thing Before I Go

imagined that she’d invited over a crowd of friends, that there was a gang of teenagers sitting downstairs in the living room, singing along to the record. He was too young to realize that it was a recording, that the singing kids had English accents . . . The babysitter—he can’t remember her name—she had strawberry-blond hair, a smattering of freckles across her nose, and her calves never failed to generate what may have been his very first impure thoughts. . . . He can recall exactly what it felt like to lie in that bed, in his childhood home, the blue-and-red-striped comforter pulled up to his chin, the smell of his freshly vacuumed carpet filling the air with a warmly pleasant mustiness, the Morse code knocks of the radiator, the reassuring creaks of the downstairs hallway as his parents moved around, the soft, comforting hum of their voices, the whippoorwills that woke him in the morning with their plaintive cries of “Theodore,” over and over again, the white plastic globe-shaped light fixture that hung in the center of his bedroom, which he was always accidentally hitting with his spinning nunchucks during an extended Bruce Lee phase. . . . Victor Corolla, his next-door neighbor, had taught him how to use the nunchucks. He was three years older, with a speech impediment, a porn collection, and knotty, muscular arms that Silver would have given anything to possess. Vic spun a mean nunchuck, shoplifted baseball cards from the five and dime, and had the first VCR in the neighborhood. He only had two movies,
Star Wars
and
Grease,
and to this day, Silver still knows them both by heart. . . . And, speaking of hearts, he can feel his beating softly against the clasped hands on his chest. He taps out a series of jazz fills on the off beats, and imagines his frayed aorta, tearing microscopically with each beat, its swelled walls slowly expanding to their breaking point like a water balloon.
    He rolls out of bed with a new energy—not happy or sad, but attuned to the universe in a way he’s never been before.
    In the shower, he celebrates the spray of water against his scalp, the winding paths it takes down his chest. He gets lost in the scented lather of his shampoo, in the smoothness of his shoulders, in the logo carved into the Irish Spring soap bar. He watches fondly as his morning erection grudgingly deflates, then closes his eyes and concentrates, the steaming spray penetrating his pores until, after an indeterminate amount of time, the water goes cold.
    * * *
    “There’s something wrong with you,” Oliver tells him. “Just have the damn operation.”
    “Take it easy on him,” Jack says. “He just got out of the hospital.”
    “He had no business leaving that hospital.”
    “You drove him home, dipshit.”
    “I’d have never done that if you’d told me his condition.”
    “That was on a need-to-know basis.”
    “Asshole.”
    “Shithead.”
    And around they go. It’s a cloudless morning, and they’re sitting in their usual spot at the pool, just like always, just as if everything hasn’t been turned completely upside down. The inertia of this place has always been disconcerting. Time lurches to a halt, even as they continue to grow older at an alarming rate.
    A few chairs over, Ben Eisner, a laid-off investment banker, is rubbing suntan oil across his chest. He was briefly legendary for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend with a beer stein when they happened to end up in the same bar one night. But then her lawyers ran with it, and now he’s gone into debt trying to regain some measure of custody of his three children, and he’s not so legendary anymore. He spends his days either in court or looking for work in an industry that no longer has any, and it’s hard to say what gets him out of bed in the morning.
    “So,” Jack says. “What’s your plan?”
    “I’m going to go see Casey,” he says.
    “She mad at you?”
    Silver doesn’t actually know. He hasn’t heard from Casey, or Denise, since he snuck out of the hospital, but that’s not indicative of anything since they never call him anyway.
    “She’s got bigger problems,” he says.
    “Like what?”
    “She’s pregnant.”
    That gets Oliver’s attention. “Since when?” he says, sitting up in his chair, his belly fat folding in on itself, becoming a series of smaller, infinity-shaped bellies. We are meat, Silver thinks to himself, that no one wants to eat.
    “I don’t know. She told me a few days ago.”
    To