I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO CONTINUE. There was nothing left to follow, nothing I could see anyway. I didn’t know what to do. Frank had it figured right; there are forces at work in our lives we can’t control. Everybody gets caught in the end; everything ends in tragedy, one way or another. No one can avoid it. Maybe you can’t even avoid the guilt. That’s what weighed heaviest on me at times. I had gotten Frank into all of this. Maybe he would have beat the system if not for me, maybe he would have never wound up somewhere stuck in the arm for the last time. Frank could have had a good life if not for me. Frank could have outsmarted everyone; it was right there in front of him the whole time, every single day. It was my life that was the force Frank couldn’t overcome. But he did. He got out. That’s how you beat them. But how do you continue after that? What more is there to say?

—

It wasn’t as if half my life had been taken away; all of it was gone. Frank’s life and my life had become so intertwined that there was no way to separate them. If he was gone, I was gone too. I had lost everything and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to eat, sleep, wake, walk, read, think, move, anything. I couldn’t get into the bed. I could still smell him in the sheets, even after I washed them three or four times. I would put the sheets and pillow cases back on but I couldn’t lie down in them. If I had somewhere else to go, I would have gone, but I didn’t have the time to find a new place. So I stayed on the couch. It didn’t really matter anyway; I wasn’t sleeping. I sat on the couch with the TV on, the images flashing and the sound just above inaudible, all of it flickering and murmuring in the distance of the dark room. I did that for hours, for days. I did nothing, knowing I should be doing something, anything other than what I was doing, but I couldn’t. I wanted to go on; I wanted to find out what exactly had happened to Frank, but I was at a loss as to how to go forward. It was all that had kept me going for a short while, then that hit a dead end. I kept thinking about a line from The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade says “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” I kept thinking about it, but I didn’t know what to do.

—