He watched Stephanie anxiously: a big, ailing man with one bold idea left, aflame with hope that she would like it. There was a long pause while Stephanie tried to assemble her thoughts.
   Jules spoke first: “It’s genius.”
   Bosco eyed him tenderly, moved by his own speech and moved to find that Jules was also moved.
   “Look, guys,” Stephanie said. She was aware of a perverse flicker of thought in herself: If this idea did, somehow, have legs (which it almost certainly did not — it was crazy, maybe illegal, unsavory to the point of grotesqueness), then she’d want to get a real writer on it.
   “Uh nuh nuh nuh,” Bosco told her, wagging a finger as if she’d spoken this rogue qualm aloud. With sighs and groans and refusals of their offers of help, he heaved himself from his chair, which made small whimpering noises of release, and staggered across the room. He reached a cluttered desk and leaned against it, panting audibly. Then he rummaged for paper and pen.
   “What’s your name again?” he called.
   “Jules. Jules Jones.”
   Bosco wrote for several minutes.
   “Okay,” he said, then made his laborious return and handed the paper to Jules. Jules read it aloud: “I, Bosco, of sound mind and body, hereby grant to you, Jules Jones, sole and exclusive media rights to cover the story of my decline and Suicide Tour.”
   Bosco’s exertions had left him spent. He sagged against his chair, reeling in breath, his eyes closed. Bosco the demented scarecrow performer appeared spectrally, naughtily in Stephanie’s mind, disowning the morose behemoth before them. A wave of sadness felled her.
   Bosco opened his eyes and looked at Jules. “There,” he said. “It’s yours.”


At lunch in MoMA’s sculpture garden, Jules was a man reborn: jazzed, juiced, riffing his thoughts on the newly renovated museum. He’d gone straight to the gift shop and bought a datebook and pen (both covered with Magritte clouds) to record his appointment with Bosco at ten the next morning.
   Stephanie ate her turkey wrap and gazed at Picasso’s “She-Goat,” wishing she could share her brother’s elation. It felt impossible, as if Jules’s excitement were being siphoned from inside her, leaving Stephanie drained to the exact degree that he was invigorated. She found herself wishing, inanely, that she hadn’t missed her tennis game.
   “What’s the matter?” Jules finally asked, chugging his third cranberry-and-soda. “You seem down.”
   “I don’t know,” Stephanie said.
   He leaned toward her, her big brother, and Stephanie had a flash of how they’d been as kids, an almost-physical sense of Jules as her protector, her watchdog, coming to her tennis matches and massaging her calves when they cramped. That feeling had been buried under Jules’s chaotic intervening years, but now it pushed back up, warm and vital, sending tears into Stephanie’s eyes.
   Her brother looked stunned. “Steph,” he said, taking her hand, “what’s wrong?”
   “I feel like everything is ending,” she said.
   She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them — not just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, premoney, prehard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasipublic, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong— what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like the result they could go back and start again. And now Bosco was sick,hardly able to move, feverishly planning his death. Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal — a thing they should have seen coming? Had they somehow brought it on?
   Jules put his arm around her. “If you’d asked me this morning, I would have said we were finished,” he said. “All of us, the whole country — the fucking world. But now I feel the opposite.”
   Stephanie knew. She could practically hear the hope sluicing through her brother. “So what’s the answer?” she asked.
   “Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”

8

  

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