The Book of Joe

but it seems to me that our common past precludes such radical violence as throwing me off a cliff, to certain injury and possible death. All my instincts tell me he isn’t planning on actually throwing me over the falls. It’s incumbent upon me to say something submissively conciliatory, something that will acknowledge his upper hand and give him the wiggle room to back away without a loss of face. “Sean,” I begin. He shakes his head and casually pushes me off the cliff.
    The speed with which I am suddenly airborne is blinding.
    One moment I’m standing there, breathing in his stale cigarette breath, and the next I’m flying over the falls. I hit the icy waters on my side, and for a few seconds everything is silent as the pressure from the waterfalls sucks me down into the depths of the river. Time loses all meaning, and then meaning loses all meaning and all that exists is the low, soothing throb of the waterfalls fifteen feet beneath the surface. Everything appears to me in varying shades of the same muted green, the rocks, the muddy floor of the river, the backs of my eyelids when I blink. There is no sense of panic, although on some level I know that will come when the shock wears off, but for now there’s just the powerful sense of an elemental peace, and in this frozen instant I understand the desire to stay beneath the surface forever, to em brace the dark, undu lating peace that seems to so easily and completely shut out all other considerations. I think I even briefly consider it.
    And then, with the same force with which they have sucked me down, the churning waters spit me out of their throat and up to the surface, where I gasp desperately for air, the freezing temperature of the water belatedly jolting me into paralysis as the current sweeps me along, numbing my legs and back as they scrape against the rocks and branches that lie just beneath the surface of the roiling water. The river widens as it curves and then empties into a second, shallow pool, where the current briefly slows, and I am able to get to my feet and stagger over to the water’s edge, shivering uncontrollably but feeling ridiculously elated at being alive. Cold water drips down my body, and it’s Sammy’s greeting, my mother’s embrace, and I’m overwhelmed by a euphoria so intense it’s almost blinding. I am baptized and renewed, and it’s as if all the purpose and balance, missing for so long from my life, have been divinely restored. Cheating death is a milestone, I think, a springboard for untold possibilities. Then the thick, brackish waters I’ve swallowed rise in the back of my throat and I vomit copiously, my body racked by spasms that continue unabated even after the last liquids have been purged from inside me. I fall to my knees in the dead, browning grass at the water’s edge and then over onto my side, where I summarily succumb to a shivering state of semiconsciousness, my earlier euphoria gone.
    An indeterminate amount of time later, a pair of hands rolls me onto my back and I look up to find one of Jared’s friends peering down at me curiously. “Mr. Goffman?” he says.
    “Mikey, right?” I grunt.
    “That’s right.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    There is a hissing sound and then a soft pop and Mikey staggers back a step, a flash of red paint splattering across his sweatshirt. “Ah, fuck,” Mikey says.
    I’m alive, I think, and smile as I pass out.

Thirty-Five
    Wayne is studying his fingers again. He holds them up in front of his face, flexing and extending, opening and closing, pressing their dry tips against each other. He’s become infatuated with the various parts of his body, fascinated with their unhindered functionality, which seems to fly in the face of his imminent death. “It just seems like such a waste,” he says to me without looking away from his hands as I enter my father’s den, which Carly and I have converted into a bedroom for Wayne. “They’re still so ... capable.”
    I rub the last bit of sleep out of my eyes and sit down at the edge of his hospital bed, the one that arrived in a large moving truck along with all the other equipment Owen sent. In typical Owen fashion, my agent had gone overboard, sending up enough equipment to outfit a small hospital.
    “Look at this,” Wayne says, lifting up his covers and peering beneath them. “I have a hard-on, for god’s sake.”
    “Hmm. An erection and a perfectly good hand with nothing to do. Maybe I should leave you