For a while the kid was practically Edward’s least favorite thing about living, and he timed his entrances and exits to avoid him. But even if he made his ascent during the kid’s violent assault on his stand-up Casio, Paulie would hear him and be sure to pop his head out: “Hello, my friend! What does the weather say today?” Edward made eye contact when guilt tugged at him enough—who was he to crush such benevolence, he wondered—but mostly kept the shade of his hat on his face, and the line of his sight on the unclean carpet. He knew from his own nocturnal schedule that Paulie also kept late hours, though for the kid they were celebratory, active, while Edward just prayed for sleep. Music always: singing, sometimes words but just as often not, sounds like a gang of monkeys bickering. Edward stopped crossing the hall to ask that Paulie turn himself down in order to avoid his neighbor’s repeated reflection that Edward looked sad. He bought noise-canceling headphones and played recordings of rainstorms across the world. Austin. Bangkok. The Amazon. Paulie was crazy for offering people tea; Edward had overheard him selling it to the other tenants. Chamomile Lemon English Breakfast Green Ginger! Always in the same order. The kid’s brain was broken, but Edward couldn’t of course recommend the health of his own. Paulie, it was clear, chased and cornered happiness daily.
Edward was asleep when it happened, and the cry came into his dreams as the voice of his brother. His unconscious re-created the familiar childhood scene of Zachary asleep and whimpering in the next room, victim to the awful stories their parents fed them, nightmaring of kidnapping plots and elaborate suicides. (He, too, had called him Eddy.) Edward, then, had felt useful and important when he went to him, as well-appointed and comforting as a chair by an open window. He would scoop up Zachary, who was always a little too thin, and speak with measured softness about the silly inventions of our brains while we sleep, then get right up to his ear and begin with the noises. The finest impressions of farts anyone in their neighborhood had ever heard, high trilly toots and trembling wet ones, plus a bassoon-like moan for good measure. It had never failed. In his dream Edward was brilliant and electric as he cradled his brother, who giggled and shook and held his little penis to keep from peeing.
Edward, turning against his flannel sheets, couldn’t understand why the sounds continued, until finally the banging on his flimsy door wrestled him awake.
When he opened the door, Paulie was standing there gushing red, and it took a moment in the sudden and grainy light of the hallway to identify the source. The kid’s hand was bleeding, saturating the fold of shirt he’d hid it in.
“Well for fuck all,” said Edward. “Get in here already.” Between cries and yelps he gathered that Paulie had somehow managed to drop his keyboard on his foot, which had set off a chain of events including a brush with the sharp edge of the kitchen counter, the swing of a cabinet door, and a cascade of glass. His face was contorting repeatedly, as though on a loop.
“I knew you were up!” Paulie spouted while Edward led him to the bathroom, and Edward understood the bumbled apology in the statement. He sat the kid on the toilet and calmly opened drawers, surprised at how easily he could assume the role of caretaker. Then he kneeled before Paulie and got his closest look yet at the upturned eyes, the undersized teeth, the signs of aging present on his forehead and around his mouth and in the sag of his ears: the kid was much older than Edward had assumed, maybe halfway into his thirties. Edward asked him to take deep breaths then showed him how—in for one, two, three, four, five, then out—while he examined the wound, applied antiseptic, wrapped gauze around it. Afterward, Paulie remained shocked by the sight of his blood’s great escape, and Edward took the initiative.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s watch some bad TV.”
In the living room, Paulie revived and quickly grew curious as he moved from the couch to the stack of DVDs beneath the television. Edward held his breath while Paulie destroyed the alphabetization, formed leaning piles on the floor, ran his hands over every cover, mouthing titles with a blank face. Edward let his attention drift from Paulie back to the screen: a bus threatened by a ticking bomb couldn’t stop, and a brunette actress he’d once insulted in a bar grew progressively more anxious.
Paulie squealed and Edward panicked, but the source of the cry was not the wound on the kid’s palm. It was the thing, its DVD cover: the leading man in the Santa hat, the beauty struggling with her holiday accoutrements, the character actor with the busy eyebrows. Edward had been sure he’d hidden it.
“My favorite!” Paulie said, his whole face open with joy. Instead of taking the case from him, instead of suggesting another film, Edward admitted what he’d sworn never to again.
“Santarella?” he said. “I wrote that.”
The bubbly pleasure drained from Paulie’s face. He looked at Edward like tourists look at the Mona Lisa, searching and wary as they wait to be touched by glory.
“Eddy,” he said. “What?”
THERE WEREN’T WORDS for it like there are now, weren’t aisles in bookstores where people dog-eared pages that suggested the roots of their psychic pain, where they grubbily fingered titles offering recovery; there weren’t these cloying instructions that led a person directly from guilt to forgiveness, as though taking one left, then a right. Edith simply saw what she saw, shortly before evening in October of 1960, and never forgot.