I sat there in bed, listening to the sound. A singing rose up with it, words I didn’t understand. The guy kept trying to get me to pick up where we left off, and eventually it just seemed like less of a hassle to let him finish.

Outside the window, the music played until I drifted off into sleep.

Part Nine Jesse—January

PART NINE

JESSE—JANUARY

1 Brooklyn was the end goal, but first I had this idea. One of the things Lux and I used to talk about when we got drunk was where we would go if the world turned into a zombie movie. The place we always decided would be best was The Met. There were those replica rooms from the 1800s that you could sleep in, there was food and water from the cafes, there were weapons, there was the canoe in the Inuit art section that we could cut down from the ceiling and paddle into New Jersey. There were all those paintings, so you would never be bored.

And there were those paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Lux and I had gone to look at them one day, back before the storm. We had never seen them before, and the other paintings were nice, but those were the ones we really saw. We stopped in front of the two dead sunflowers, one looking up and one face down. Fucking van Gogh. I don’t know what it was. I started wiping my nose, which had suddenly started to run. It took me a few moments to realize that I was crying.

“What’s wrong?” Lux said. She put her arm around me.

“They’re so . . . like . . . dirtfucking dead,” I said. I knew about van Gogh. I knew about the lifelong sadness, the madness, the severed ear, how his art dealer brother Theo was his only friend and confidant, and even he couldn’t sell his paintings. I could see all that in there in those dead sunflowers. The shitty goddamn heaviness his life had been; that even that which he had once seen as bright, yellow, and full of life, ended up facedown, brown, shriveled, and dead.

“But look,” Lux said, pointing. “Look at how they’re still bright, how there is motion all around them. How much life he saw even there. He was filled with life. Maybe he just couldn’t take how much it filled him up, you know? How much he could see and feel of it.”

That was Lux. She was light.