The Book of Joe

just walked past his room and there he was, sitting up in his bed, looking slightly perplexed but no worse for wear.
    And when the respirator came out, he asked in a raspy voice for his sons, the plural form, meaning both of them. There will be recovery and awkwardness, occupational therapy, and halting discussions of our damaged past, recriminations and veiled apologies, but through it all a sense of renewal, a second chance. I will not shy away from it; I will let go my bitterness and my strong proclivity toward sarcasm and embrace this opportunity to be whole again.
    Cindy holds my glance for a moment and then directs her gaze over my shoulder. “Your father’s dead,” she says.
    Memories surface in a montage: my father teaching me to ride my new two-wheeler, then chasing me frantically when I suddenly get the hang of it and take off down our street, my mother and Brad laughing hysterically on the front lawn. My fourth-grade diorama project on Mount Saint Helens, when he stays up half the night with me trying to concoct the right mixture of baking powder and vinegar to simulate eruption from the crude papier mâché volcano I’d built. Helping me reel in a fifteen-pound striped bass on a chartered fishing boat on the Long Island Sound, cursing and shouting encouragement, then pounding my back in triumph when we finally land the sucker. Washing his car in the driveway and then turning the hose on Brad and me, chasing us around the yard and then tackling us so we all go down in a wet, muddy tangle of arms and legs ...
    But here’s the thing. None of this ever happened. Or maybe it did. I can’t tell anymore. I’ve spent so much time reliving and rewriting those years that I can no longer discern which vignettes are the result of which process. In my reckless anger, I’ve managed to fuck up a vital area of memory to the point where I will never again be able to isolate reality, and so whatever good there might have been has now been lost to rambling fiction. And the worst part of it is this: I think I did it on purpose.

B ook Two
    One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith beneath our teeth sleeping in that old abandoned beach house getting wasted in the heat
    and hiding on the backstreets ...
    With a love so hard and filled with defeat running for our lives at night on them backstreets.
    - “Backstreets,” Bruce Springsteen

Twenty-Three
    The caskets all have names like Wilton, Exeter, Balmoral, and Buckingham, suggesting that the dearly departed will enter the afterworld as British nobility. Features include brass tone accents, hand-cast bronze handles, and tailored champagne crepe with matching pillows and throws. The higher-end caskets come with the patented Eternarest adjustable bedding system, and a number of caskets have artwork on their interiors, illuminated grottos with renderings of the Madonna or reproductions of The Last Supper. Only the acutely pervasive attendance of death prevents the whole business from crossing the line into comedy.
    Brad is home, glumly working the phones, entangled in the myriad details involved in putting a body underground, so I’ve volunteered to pick out a casket, which turns out to be more complicated than I anticipated. I am now expected to choose between wood finishes and decorative trims for something that will be buried in the dirt almost immediately.
    And by the way, which features are most vital to a corpse?
    The casket showroom, located in the basement of the funeral home, has the unreal feel of a sitcom set, with gleaming, lacquered caskets mounted on discreet black pedestals, all meticulously buffed to a showroom shine; a car dealership for the freshly deceased. In the air is the light smell of varnish and lemon Pledge. I make my way dazedly between the caskets, thinking it really doesn’t matter which one I pick but still terrified of picking the wrong one. You can’t go through life making as many wrong choices as I have without developing a certain wanton fearlessness toward decision making, but we are talking about eternity here, and it has me spooked.
    My salesman, Richard, is obese and high-strung, with a frown of profound sympathy etched permanently into his features. I remember him from the neighborhood, a sad, chubby kid who could only ever manage to keep one side of his shirt tucked into his pants at any given time. He chases me nervously