“I’ll do the dishes, Ray,” Molly said to her. “Why don’t you go to bed?” My mom slipped away to their bedroom—like a ghost, I would later think. “I don’t believe it’s the beer,” Molly told me.

In Zim’s case, he fell asleep so quickly and slept so soundly, I believe it was the beer—he wasn’t normally a drinker. We’d helped Molly do the dishes. Zimmer was coherent in his questioning of our civilian and military leaders. He doubted those multidivisional operations that involved all branches of the military. “They’re calling ’67 the ‘era of big battles’; they’re targeting the ‘Iron Triangle,’ but I’m not buying the body counts,” Zim told Molly and me. He pointed out the casualties (to both sides) attached to Operation Junction City and Operation Cedar Falls. “Who cares that the casualties are ten to one in our favor? The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese aren’t keeping score—they’re in this for the long haul; they’re fighting the way they can win,” Zimmer said. I would look up the numbers later; about 3,500 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were killed, compared to a loss of 350 American lives. And Zim was right—we weren’t winning the war.

When we got settled and were stretched out on the futon, I could tell that Zim was drifting away. “We didn’t get to talk about your fiancée—you haven’t told me anything,” I said to him.

“I would prefer not to,” Zimmer said. It was the coldness that was uncharacteristic.

“Okay, Bartleby,” I said. We hadn’t talked about Melville, either; there were so many things we never talked about.

I thought Zim had passed out—he was so still, so deathly quiet. “Please don’t call me Bartleby—not you, Adam, of all people. Please don’t,” he begged me, his voice breaking.

“I’m sorry, Zim, I won’t ever do it again—I never will,” I assured him, but he was sound asleep; I felt the back of his hand fall against my shoulder, like a dead thing. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I vividly recalled the way my former teammate used to fall asleep on our wrestling team bus. We often sat beside each other; Zim preferred the window seat. But wrestling is a winter sport. The winters in New England are very cold; it was cold on the bus, next to the window. And Matthew Zimmermann always fell asleep with his face pressed against the window glass, which was as freezing cold as it was outdoors.

I asked him about it once. How could he sleep that way? “I love to sleep when my face is cold,” Zim said.