“All you have to do is look at it, Steve.”

Steve remains silent.

“As a favor to me,” says Zack. Your bunkmate. Your first, your oldest friend. He leaves it all unsaid but knows it arcs between them.

“When? Where?” Steve’s eyes are still narrowed.

“If you want to, now.”

“Where’s this mysterious phone?”

“It’s with him.”

“And where is he?”

Zack takes a breath. “Right outside. Waiting for my call. For your permission to come in.”

Steve freezes. His eyes go wide. He looks at the door. “I don’t think I can do it, Zack.”

“I think you can. I’m right here with you.”

Steve looks around instinctively, anxiously. Wanting to grab the gun that isn’t here anymore, Zack realizes. “Zack, he knows I tried to kill him.”

“Obviously he’s looking past that. Can you do the same?”

“No,” says Steve. “How can I?” And he looks for another minute at the door. And then at Zack.

“I’m right here,” says Zack, quietly again, a calming mantra.

He looks at Steve, who is looking at the door again.

Confronting demons? Weighing a face-to-face encounter as either a resurgence of all his terror or a liberation from it?

“Let him in,” says Steve.

Joey Richter stands in Steve Furman’s apartment.

Again.

He nods but stays silent.

As does Steve.

They are not openly angry; they are not openly fearful, either one. Mostly, they seem mystified by being in this same room together, again. There is something otherworldly about it for Zack and, he imagines, for them too. It’s another universe, in a way. And yet this weird other universe is one they all instantly share.

Silently, Joey holds out his phone.

Silently, Steve takes it.

Gradually, his interest is absorbed by the phone. He’s no longer looking at Zack or Joey. He seems to grow more interested, more curious about the phone, seems to disappear into its problems, imagining its circuitry.

He looks closely at it. He goes into his desk, brings out a penlight, and shines the beam at it. He feels along the seams carefully.

In a few minutes, he looks up at Zack. He looks up at Joey. Directly. As he has never done before.

Zack can’t quite read Steve’s expression. But Steve seems to have come to some conclusion about the phone. Some final inference that, Zack suddenly senses, is reverberating more widely with Steve’s past few weeks.

As if Steve sees this encounter with Joey Richter as the logical end point for what Steve has suffered, from life-threatening bullet wounds to unrelenting fear, and letting Joey Richter back into his apartment can provide some long-sought-after release.

Steve smiles a little. A crumpled, unreadable, noncommittal smile.

And blithely, almost peacefully, he pulls the back cover off the phone.

61.

61.