The Book of Joe

isn’t screwing around. I lie motionless, flitting seamlessly between sleep and wakefulness until they become all but indistinguishable. More than once, I dream I’m crying, and wake up with swollen eyes and a damp pillow.
    My thoughts assemble before me in a ragged stream of semiconsciousness. I hate my life, and up until a few days ago I didn’t even know it, and how can such a seemingly important fact have escaped my attention? Why has my father’s death left me feeling so alone, when he hasn’t been a part of my life in seventeen years? I’m an orphan. I repeat the word out loud, over and over again, listening to it bounce off the walls of my childhood bedroom until it makes no sense.
    Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations. I’ve lived more than a third of my life, and am more alone now than I’ve ever been. You’re supposed to make your way through life becoming more substantial as you go, the nucleus of your own little universe, your orbit overlapping the orbits of others. Instead, I’ve shed all those who cared about me like snakeskin, slithering angrily into my small solitary hole.
    On the second afternoon of my self-pity fest, Jared comes by to see me.
    “What are you doing?” he says.
    Moping, sulking, crying, feeling sorry for myself. “Nothing,” I say.
    “You look awful.”
    “I’m having a bad life.”
    He nods, undeterred by my sarcasm, and tosses my clothing off the desk chair to make himself a seat. “Whatever. My father said to invite you for dinner tomorrow night, if you’ll still be around.”
    “Why didn’t he call me himself?”
    “He did. I guess the wack job downstairs didn’t give you the message.”
    I look at him. “What wack job?”
    “Your agent, I guess. He’s acting like he owns the place.”
    “Owen is downstairs?”
    “I thought you knew.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “He acts as if you know.” Jared shrugs. “So that was some show you put on at the cemetery.”
    “I slipped,” I say.
    He stares at me intently for a minute and then frowns.
    “Just tell me: did you love him or not?”
    I look up at my nephew. “He was my father.”
    “I wasn’t questioning your genealogy.”
    “Listen,” I say, but he waves me down.
    “A simple yes or no will do.”
    “It’s not a simple question.”
    He scowls at my equivocation, the uncompromising scowl of youthful conviction. “Make it simple,” he says. “Boil it down to the basics.”
    I’m quiet for a long moment, but Jared seems prepared to wait indefinitely. “I can’t,” I say.
    “Why not?”
    “I just - I don’t know.”
    He stands up and sighs. “How did you get so fucked up?” he asks me, not unkindly.
    “It takes a high level of discipline,” I tell him as he heads for the door. “And absolute commitment. It’s like my own special super power.”
    He stops at the door. “So I’ll see you tomorrow night?”
    “What’s tomorrow night?”
    “Um, dinner, remember?”
    “Oh, yeah. Sure.”
    He shakes his head and offers a sad little grin. “That is, if you can fit us into your busy schedule here.”
    A little while later I pull myself out of bed and crawl downstairs to find Owen sprawled out on the living room couch in a pair of my father’s sweatpants and an undershirt, looking at Asian porno sites on his laptop. “Hey,” he says by way of greeting. He sits up a little, and his white, hairless belly fat peeks out from between his undershirt and waistband like rising dough in a bake pan. Concentric circles of soiled paper plates, soda cans, crumpled junk food packages, and Chinese take-out boxes surround him like Stonehenge. Sitting there like that, a dough ball in the midst of his own refuse, he looks somewhat pitiful, and I have a sudden intuitive flash that the real Owen, the soft, unaffected one who hides behind the sharp wit and silly suits, is really just a sad and lonely little man. The spirited verbiage and outlandishness are the threads with which he constantly, desperately spins his protective cocoon, the only thing standing between him and the abyss. Or maybe that’s just me projecting. “What are you doing here?” I say.
    “Just holding down the fort,” Owen says.
    “You’re doing a great job.” I conspicuously eye the piles of litter.
    “A man’s got to eat.”
    I sit at the foot of the stairs, rubbing my face wearily.
    “Owen. Why are you still here?”
    He smiles and folds his laptop. “I have a better