It seemed to me that the pure hurt surrounding Barry’s life was overwhelming, that it was partially contagious. A sizable portion of his teen years were spent in hospitals and day treatment facilities, and then he headed home and listened to his mother rant about messages from the implanted FM receiver in her left fibula.   Jesus, I felt the thick, suffocating inertia and angst that hovered around both of us when we got together. It was as if someone wiped their hand across a dusty window in an old house and found the evidence, the residue. That sensation, like volcanic ash, was thick and inescapable. It hung on and stuck to our clammy skin.

After Barry said his prayers, we left the cemetery and came to his father’s house a few miles away. Barry had a key, and so we walked through the mildewed ranch with the fading, pea-green wallpaper, and the multiple strips of flypaper dangling like tacky, cheap lanterns. An old buddy of his dad was the caretaker. He’d received a call that some suspicious dudes in a green Chevy Blazer were trespassing. Barry and I had headed into the attic and found old love letters and Playboys from the early 1970’s and flipped through them. We laughed quietly, sadly, shook our heads trying to figure out how time can zip past with wars, divorces, recessions, twisters, breakdowns, and deaths, and yet a simple little attic space outside Providence, Rhode Island sits unmoving, petrified forever. A museum of lost love and tame pornography. 

The singular feeling in the attic was fungus-like, diseased, and so amazingly still. A little later, the caretaker pulled into the driveway in his Mercury Grand Marquis, not sure what to say to the two enormous men in front of him, who by then were reading Playboy on the hood of an SUV.