PART ONE

When Harry died, the one news story gave it the headline: Body of Bodybuilder Found on Beach. It was hardly big news at the time. And Harry wasn’t really a bodybuilder. He only entered the one competition as a favor to a neurotic weightlifting buddy. But that was the only sensible result a search engine would deliver for Harry Injurides at the time of his death.

The headline was a smart-ass riff on the tabloid high-water mark Headless Body in Topless Bar. It was probably the only reason there even was an article. The story was a hasty cut-and-paste job—four internet paragraphs. I try to remember it, but the things I learned later creep in: the early riser with a metal detector who found the body; the unfashionable stretch of Rockaway Beach between the Medicaid assisted living facilities; Harry’s waterlogged and pale-yellow body; the skin loose and soft from the sea; his boxers, a sweater, and one boot, and the way Harry’s face was embedded in the sand.

The maroon sweater, bunched up to his armpits, exposed his back. The sweater. It was just starting to get cold outside—Halloween in the stores if not in our hearts.

Like me and all his friends, Harry was on a trajectory well bent from the main thrust. We called that bent by different names: artists, writers, saboteurs, mystics, addicts, beggars, goners. At the time, I was on my back foot, playing nice as a copywriter at an advertising-slash-marketing agency.

Drowned with no signs of foul play, the coroner said. It sounded right. We all felt like we were drowning with no one to blame in those days, which we’d call the best of our lives. Our friend Maud sent me the link and called a minute after. We didn’t talk very long, more a shock wave than a conversation.

What was Harry doing in the ocean in October? The question twisted the jolt of his death into something else.

Dead at thirty-six, Harry was in some ways the best of us, we’d say, drunk, before he came back from the dead.

I left my desk and found an unoccupied phone closet or focus pod (it was that kind of office) near my desk to call people with the news. Word rippled fast through buzzing phones and email chains, vague social-media posts, and a half-assed DIY memorial WordPress webpage set up by Harry’s ex-girlfriend. But there was never a proper funeral. His only living family, his mother, possessed only enough wherewithal to identify the body, sign the forms authorizing the city to dispose of it, and fly back to Florida.

The website listed a memorial service in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not far from Harry’s last address. I knew the place, an old bakery with a gorgeous curving glass window, which had flamed out as an art gallery, a boutique, a real estate office, a phone shop, and a vape store before turning into a nonprofit bookstore with unpredictable hours.

+

When I arrived for the memorial service, the roll-down gate blocked the storefront, and there were no signs of activity within. I was, I told myself, a little early. And soon, my friends arrived. Roy was first, in a black T-shirt and black raincoat. He was all sharp edges back then—jutting elbows, knees, cheekbones, and temples—as if he was built to bump into things. Even his blue eyes seemed like they could draw blood.

My name is Tommy, by the way. I was only dressed slightly more appropriately, in my last clean dress shirt, dark trousers, and a navy-blue sport coat. Back then, I was trying to climb out of my nine-to-five by writing screenplays, and this is how I recollected our night of mourning back at the time.

ROY SUDDEN

Sorry I’m late, man. I overslept

TOMMY PHARONI

It’s six at night

ROY SUDDEN

I also had to get some things—shoes and socks, and the trains were crowded

ANDREW HUFGLER comes from around the corner. He’s African American, tall, and handsome, but awkward in an absentminded-professor way, with round glasses. He’s wearing an ill-fitting blue blazer over a button-down shirt with a checker pattern and still has his work ID on a lanyard around his neck. He overhears Roy.

ANDREW HUFGLER

Jesus, Roy, how did you drink your way out of shoes?

ROY SUDDEN

What? You want to apologize to my shoes? You’re too late. Anyway, apologize to your own shoes for being such a fucking deadass. You bailed at like 9:30, left me with those monsters. Life is for the living, in case you didn’t get the email. Is Maud coming to this solemn occasion?

ANDREW HUFGLER

Yeah, she’s coming from work, probably later. I told her this was more like a wake or a viewing than a funeral, but without the body

ROY SUDDEN

Without much at all from the looks of it

TOMMY PHARONI

I was wondering about that. You think that they would have opened up by now or turned on some lights

ANDREW checks his phone.

ANDREW HUFGLER

So today is Wednesday? And it’s the eighteenth?

TOMMY PHARONI

Affirmative on both

ANDREW HUFGLER

Okay, let me check again. The website says the memorial is Wednesday the seventeenth. And there is no such day, not this year

ROY SUDDEN

No shit. Maybe we shouldn’t have left it to Harry’s space-cadet ex-girlfriend to plan something. Maybe one of you pants-wearing, job-having, suit-owning, shoe-concerned grown-ups could have put your manly empire-building shoulders to the wheel and looked at a proper Gregorian calendar, and gotten a simple funeral together, no?

ANDREW HUFGLER

Says the guy who puked in his shoes

ROY SUDDEN

You’re so worried about my fucking shoes. Maybe you should have worried about reading the fucking calendar

TOMMY PHARONI

Fuck it. This isn’t happening

MAUD HUFGLER arrives, dressed right on the invisible seam that joins the worlds of mourning and management.

Maud was Andrew’s fraternal twin. Their mother was a serious black activist, and their father was a white insurance executive. How they met, I only understood much later. Maud was the most practical of us. She also worked in insurance—at least that’s what she said. She was unflappable and impeccable. The only exception to Maud’s omnicompetence was her on-and-off thing with Roy, which was a badly kept secret or just something we all agreed not to talk about.

After Maud arrived, I noticed a few clusters of people lingering on the sidewalk, similarly bereaved and misinformed, unsure whether to be angry at the scheduling mistake or relieved to skip out on the loose piety that the memorial might have demanded.

Andrew and Maud made a quick round of the clusters, inviting half-recognized faces from Harry’s other lives to join us at a nearby bar. The response was universally noncommittal. Few of Harry’s friends could afford to drink in a bar. And those few weren’t joiners.

The bar we chose was one of the last still in business from the old days. It had survived the boom times and the realtors and the banker-lawyers from Murray Hill, then the pandemic and mini booms and busts that came after it. On the inside, it wasn’t much to look at—a long wooden bar and a room in the back with a pool table, jukebox, and a few booths.

Walt, the bartender, was a familiar face. He still wore a surgical mask. Some people still did then, out of lingering fear, as a show of consideration for the immuno-compromised, or out of disdain.

BARTENDER WALT

Hey, Roy. I didn’t think I was going to see you again

ROY SUDDEN

I may wander, but I always find my way back

BARTENDER WALT

No, I mean Friday’s our last night, ever. So, heads-up—we’re down to the wire in terms of stock. All we have is red Polish beer and the Cornwallis

ANDREW HUFGLER

Cornwallis? They still make that stuff?

BARTENDER WALT

Why would they stop? It’s the most cost-effective scotch, gin, vodka, and peppermint schnapps distributed in the tri-state area

TOMMY PHARONI

Beer

MAUD HUFGLER

Vodka soda

ROY SUDDEN

Scotch—that Cornwallis grandpa toe jam stuff—five shots of it in a neat goddamned row—one for you. Our friend Harry is dead. They dredged him out of the harbor. The least we can do is throw the fuck up

Walt said Sorry for your loss and started pouring.

A short history: Roy knew Harry from back in high school in Orlando, and they moved up to New York at the same time. I met Harry in college when I was nineteen, and he introduced me to Roy, who met Andrew in art school a little while after that. We’d all come to the city as young semi-refugees from the things we were supposed to be a part of: sports, school, family, and a career.

Puckering and wincing through our Cornwallis, we recited the strange jokes from Harry’s one-act play about the alligators who’d become addicted to the amphetamines flushed down Florida toilets and the rehab where counselors help the addled reptiles get back to productive lives in the swamp. We tried to recall why it had been canceled right before opening night. The exact reason eluded us. But even in the supposedly nonjudgmental havens of creative expression, Harry was always out of place—too big, too strident, too much of an individual. He could also be outright hostile, especially in the later years.

That night it felt good to remember even the bad times, like the Super Bowl party I hosted with my then-wife. Harry showed up on a head-full of Ambien and chanted, you can only pay a man in touchdowns for so long while banging on my ottoman, ate two bags of corn chips, and then slept behind our sofa for a day and a half. Harry and I didn’t talk for almost a year after that.

Each story we told each other started out funny. Each promised a clue to how Harry ended up in the water. But each failed.

The questions that you ask after a suicide aren’t entirely selfless. Friends and acquaintances are an early warning system. They’re like you, but not exactly—some smarter and some dumber, some braver and some more careful. You watch what happens and adjust accordingly.

MAUD HUFGLER

To Harry, wherever he is!

ROY SUDDEN

Wherever he is? Harry’s in a fucking potter’s field. That’s where he is

BARTENDER WALT

Yeah, I heard about your friend from some people in here the other night. I knew the guy, but not well. I had to ask him to leave a couple times, and he was usually decent about it. Usually. Anyway, I’m sorry

ANDREW HUFGLER

If he left this world like how he left this bar, then he’s probably trying to enlighten the guys who are dragging him out

TOMMY PHARONI

I remember that night

BARTENDER WALT

Yeah, well, condolences

MAUD HUFGLER

Thanks. I try to think he’s in a better place

ROY SUDDEN

Come on! He’s at fucking Hart Island, the municipal trash heap for unwanted humans! He’s packed up in plastic and packing tape like a broken dildo mailed back to Amazon for a refund under a cabbage pile of dead fentanyl babies and Rikers Island shank jobs

ANDREW HUFGLER

Come on, man

MAUD HUFGLER

Seriously. Come on

ROY SUDDEN

Come on, what? Serious about what? You mean to say he’s somewhere else? Or do you mean that we, his friends, tried to help the guy at the end? Because I don’t remember any of us being so full of goodwill when he was alive and stinking with his homeless friends. Everybody’s a fucking saint—as long as they’re too dead to borrow money. Just fucking spare me. Our buddy’s in the dump, so don’t give me that better-place bullshit. We know where he is. So let’s go to the dump right now and try to figure out exactly what it’s better than

MAUD HUFGLER

Really?

TOMMY PHARONI

(to Bartender Walt)

Don’t sweat it. This is their foreplay

ANDREW HUFGLER

What?

TOMMY PHARONI

Nothing.

   (raises glass)

To Harry!

ROY SUDDEN

Yeah, sure. Slainte. But I wonder, for the Rikers bodies, do they just leave the shanks in? I mean, seems like a waste of effort to pull them out. Just welfare babies and sharpened toothbrushes in the ground for ten thousand years, so the archaeologists can dig it up and say what the fuck? Right?

ANDREW punches ROY in the mouth. ROY bends and staggers back, but ANDREW doesn’t pursue.

ROY SUDDEN

Really? That’s what gets you mad? You’re gonna be buried in some glossy credenza with velveteen upholstery? You think that’s gonna make you not dead? What? You gonna have some lame party in a Catholic-school waiting room funeral parlor, and it’s gonna make your life not wasted? What’s wrong with you, man?

ANDREW HUFGLER

(to Tommy, who’s blocking his path)

I’m going to kill this asshole

Walt gave us the unmistakable look. I said okay and dropped some bills on the bar, then Maud and I shepherded Andrew and Roy outside. This wasn’t a regular thing, but it was nothing new.

Out on the sidewalk, with blood in his teeth, Roy kept on baiting Andrew about the finality of death and the unlikelihood of making satisfactory sense of anyone’s life, never mind Harry’s.

Maud played peacemaker, ineffectually. I was content to wait it out. Andrew charged, and Roy crumpled. Then Andrew was pressing Roy’s pretty face into the chilly sidewalk while Roy taunted him. Some banker bros, seeing white Roy under black Andrew, made a noisy show of considering starting to possibly get involved. But Roy barked them off from the sidewalk: Go get fucked! We’re friends! We’re better friends than you’ll ever fucking have! Go fuck off, you dickless robot clowns, and so on until Andrew was apologizing to them for his skinny, already-subdued friend.