Images flashed through my mind of a wedding here, when the whole place was lit up by bottle-green votives and they’d sent brown-paper-bag luminarias off the end of the dock. According to the newspaper, the bride and groom, friends of Pine City, had climbed into an aluminum canoe bedecked with tiny silver bells and paddled off into the night while Yusuf Islam himself had played “If You Want to Sing Out.” I thought about the video of Tyler throwing Jack off the deck, of the prints I’d seen at Johnson Reuchtig of naked male models lined up in the Adirondack chairs, of that hilarious photo of Karl Rove doing a keg stand, over there, near the hedge. Jes standing on a floating dock—which wasn’t out there anymore—playing a theremin. Marlin and Carey laying thousands of rotten flowers along the beach.

Somehow it doesn’t matter how old you grow, or how sophisticated you become. The people who impress themselves upon your consciousness at nineteen will never shrink or fade from memory. They will always be just a few steps ahead, and you’ll both hate and worship them for it, because you cannot help but compare yourself.

The Mission had a big white metal sign done in enamel with a cartoon Jesus over the entryway. When I heaved open the wooden slab of a door, I don’t know what I expected—I think probably for there to be a party inside—but what I got was a dark and empty room.

Marlin wasn’t there, Tyler wasn’t there, nobody was there. It was deserted. The only sound came from the refrigerator’s compressor somewhere in the back of the kitchen.

The round tables were there, as were the bedraggled red velvet curtains. The walls were covered in hundreds of framed photographs arranged salon-style—but there were dozens of holes. I flipped on the light to see the pictures. They seemed to show every famous living artist in America, hanging out on the shores of the black lake, painting cabins in gym shorts and baking cakes in the kitchen and strapping sculptures to dollies, with the help of Tyler, Jes, Jack, and Marlin. Over and over, it was the four of them—Jes always standing closest to Tyler, Marlin and Jack their own pair—and there wasn’t a single photograph that included Carey. That was, I realized, what the holes were. Someone came through and took every photo of Carey from the wall. As though they couldn’t bear to be reminded. I put my palms in the empty squares, touching each star in the constellation left from bygone picture nails, and wondered what was supposed to replace her. Nothing, I thought, remembering the way she held the gallery at Grand Street in the palm of her hand. Nothing could replace her.