The Book of Joe

the wall and sits down beside me, pulling her knees up to her chest and looking out into the rain, her expression inscrutable. I reach for her hand and cradle it in both of mine. We sit in silence for a little while, listening to the sounds of each other’s breathing. “Joe,” she says, “this is insane. I mean, are we really going to try to do this?”
    “I want to,” I say, realizing as I do how true that is. “I’m still in love with you.”
    She gives me a sharp look. “I’m not ready to hear that from you right now. I don’t know that I’ll ever be.”
    “It’s the truth.”
    “That doesn’t matter. I’m not the same person I was. I’m fucked up.” I give her a sideways glance. “I am,” she says. “You haven’t even scratched the surface.”
    “I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another. Take me, for example.”
    She smiles sadly and touches my face tenderly. “It’s never going to work.”
    “Come on,” I say. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
    At the curb directly in front of the house, my Mercedes bursts loudly into flames.
    The concussive force of the blast knocks us both backward, flipping us onto our backs as the chairs collapse. Upstairs, my bedroom window shatters, never again to knock unsuspecting pigeons out of the sky. We crawl onto our knees to see that the car has been transformed into a bright fireball, the flames reaching a good twenty feet into the sky.
    Car alarms go off and lights go on up and down the block.
    The heat from the fire licks savagely at our faces, and our arms go up in matching defensive postures as we watch in stunned silence while the car burns. On the lawn, a number of copies of Bush Falls have been ignited and burn in isolated little fires all their own.
    “What the hell?” Carly says, raising her voice significantly to be heard above the roaring flames.
    “Sean,” I say incredulously. “He actually went and blew up my car.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “Well, this isn’t the book club’s style.”
    A moment later the door opens behind us and Jared emerges, much to our surprise, pulling up his jeans as he goes, his hair in a tangled mess over his face. “What the fuck?” he asks.
    “What the hell are you doing here?” I say. I had no idea he was in the house.
    “I’m always here. What happened to your car?”
    “What does it look like?”
    “Looks like it blew up.”
    “Then you know as much as I do.”
    The door swings open again, and a cute blond girl steps out wearing Jared’s T-shirt and, as far as I can see, nothing else. “This is Kate,” Jared says. I recognize her from the night Jared pointed her out through the window. “No way,” I say.
    Jared just smiles and shrugs at me.
    The flames have subsided somewhat by then, and the four of us sit down on the stairs to watch the car disintegrate. “You know what?” I say. “I really hated that car.”
    “It didn’t suit you,” Carly agrees, leaning against me.
    “It would have suited me just fine,” Jared says morosely.
    Carly suddenly jumps to her feet so fast that I worry a stray ember has burned her. “Look!” She extends her hands, and we now see that the air all around us is saturated with a million small particles drifting down from the sky like a dusting of snow. “It’s Wayne,” she says.
    “What?”
    “Wayne’s ashes. They were in the car.”
    We step down into the front yard, arms extended, palms upward, to allow as much surface area as possible for Wayne’s ashes to land. A moment later Jared joins us, looking up to the sky in wonder. Kate remains on the porch, watching us with only partially concealed disgust. The three of us stand, spinning slowly with our arms outstretched as all around us Wayne descends in slow motion, coloring the air white.
    Awakened neighbors stand on their porches, watching us with varying degrees of alarm. Carly sticks out her tongue and catches an ash on it, then smiles at me. “He’s everywhere.” She waves her arms up at the sky. “He’s the air itself.”
    Some ash lands on my own outstretched tongue and I swallow it, then turn to face Carly, whose hair is now white with the falling ashes. “You look like an angel,” I say.
    “I feel like one.”
    “Listen. It looks like I’m going to need a lift back to Manhattan.”
    She stops spinning. “Yes, you are.”
    “Come spend some time in New York with me.”
    Carly looks at me for a long while.