I’m stupid. I teach and I teach and I test and I test, and yet I’m the one who never learns. I choose wrong every time. I see my mother in her Nirvana shirt, the one Beck is buried in, and somehow it is there, the way you can do that in a dream, in a nightmare. BAM. I hurl myself into the door and my mother is only betting five dollars at the five-dollar minimum blackjack table in Florida, New Jersey, does it matter where? She is laughing and she likes Forty and he is laughing and I did this. I came here. I told Love all of it and now I don’t get to have love and I don’t know how to stand. My feet don’t work. Bad feet. Bad Joe. Gently, Joseph. I jiggle the handle. I slap the handle. I can’t break the handle. I try. I pull. I push. I fall back and hit the toilet and I flush it and I listen to the water go away and come back and I am not like that. I am not coming back from this.

I breathe and I see Beck, in the ground, smiling, clawing her way out, the Mona Lisa, smiling, can a skeleton smile? Does it matter? She says to Amy omigod I need a drink, that was so crazy, I need to tweet that shit now. She is gone into the woods and I am here in the bathroom. The ceiling has a yellow stain. I can’t reach it. I tried.

I am not going to leave the bathroom. I am not going to be a dad. I am going to die in here because I was dumb. I believed her. Don’t date an actress, Mr. Mooney said, and Love is an actress. I wonder if she recorded me and I wonder how I sound and I wonder how long it takes to die and I liked it better when I was BAM going into the door but there is so much pain now and it’s hard to move. My skin is the sky in a storm, squalls of black and blue and white, and the red is hot and I know it’s the end of the world. I close my eyes. I bleed for Little Compton. I am nobody’s father. I am a killer and I’m going to jail and there is no love in my life, not anymore.

Will they let me watch The Third Twin and The Mess in prison? Will Mr. Mooney give me advice? Will they let me choose where I see my time? Will they put me in the electric chair and will the food be as bad as it looks in Locked Up on CNN? Will I work out or get scrawny? Will I be in Wikipedia? Will they give me a nickname in the media? JoeBro? TaxiDriver? Old Sport? The Professor? Loverboy?

Will there be a trial that drags on for months and will Dez bury his bricks under his bed and take his Dodgers cap off and shake his head and quiet Little D and tell Dateline that I was kind of shady, not a bro? Will Harvey be on IMDb if he’s on Deadline talking about how I was never late with rent? Will Calvin cry alone in his bed but laugh about it with other people and use his connection to me as way to seduce Tinder whores?

I cry out: “Help!” I punch the door. My hand bleeds.

Will the LAPD send someone on the inside to beat the life out of me? Will my Love Actually Revolutionary Road directorial debut on Funny or Die go viral now that my name will be out there? Will I be famous?

Will Officer Nico be on the local news in front of the bullshit coffee art house with his spandex crew in the background, telling them all about running into me here and our drive to the hospital in Fall River last winter? Will the doctor who treated me at the hospital last winter see it all on the news and shake his head in disgust? Or will he not even remember me because of how many patients he sees every day, because I was just some guy, it’s not like I was someone he knew, someone he cared about. I drive my body into the door again and again I get nowhere.

It goes without saying that Milo is, by now, on a jet headed out this way, wearing a Wianno T-shirt and watching an early cut of Boots and Puppies and speculating on how much time needs to pass before he puts the moves on Love. Is he drinking or is he so fucking happy to have me out of the picture and be the knight in fading pastels that he doesn’t even need to drink?

Will Dr. Nicky’s wife take him back when they let him out of prison? Will he disclose details of our therapy sessions? I charge the door, elbows and ribs. Nothing but pain.

Love. Will I ever be inside her again? Will Love ever love and trust again or will her open heart and her beating vagina be the worst casualties of my capture? The worst loss?

I bring my ear to the door. A new sound. I am still. A plastic keycard unlocking the door. The door closing. My heart is too loud. Fuck the question. Fuck the police. Fuck Love. I will plow. When this door opens, no other door will close on me ever again and I stand guard. I prepare. I have my hand on the doorknob. When the cops so much as even start to unlock, I will pull back. I will fight. I will go.

I hear them take away the bureau that Love used to keep the door closed and they are here. This is it. I feel the doorknob start to turn and I pray to God that he is with me—this is how that happens, how you find God in jail—and I roar and I yank the door and it’s . . . Love. I stop.

She covers her mouth. “No,” she says. “What happened to you?”

I swallow. “I fell.”

“You fell hard, huh?” She steps toward me and kisses my chest. She looks up at me and I was wrong.

I think I smile. I don’t know. My face hurts. My body pulsates in different places. “You locked me in.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I just knew you would try to stop me and I wanted to make sure you were safe. And, well . . .” She trails off.

And that’s when I notice how different she looks, like Halloween, with painted pink lips and Jennifer Lopez hair pulled back in a high bun. She wears her trench coat and beneath, a dress with every pastel color in the rainbow smushed together, overlapping in flowers. Then she reaches into her coat and she is a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It’s the mug from the Salinger house. It’s bluer than I remember and I would know it anywhere and it’s dry and it’s in my hands, my freedom, the traces of my urine grainy and visible in the interior.

50

I wanted to get the fuck out of Little Compton and I do have a morbid curiosity about Brown University because of Guinevere Beck and it’s so strange, to speak openly of these things. Love parks near campus and it looks like you’d think, like an Ivy League school, an idyllic setting with trees and old buildings. On Thayer Street, the main drag on this campus, there are a few bars, a University Bookstore, an Urban Outfitters, and a fucking Starbucks—America is America is America—and we duck into a Greek restaurant that is more New England charm than it is Orthodox baklava. Love orders chicken and salad and I’m starving. I feel like I just got out of prison. I order calamari and spanakopita and leg of lamb and moussaka and Love laughs. “Do you need to order some food with your food?”

I swat her hand. “Watch it, Mom.”

She does a happy dance and says her mind is blown and I tell her we have to talk about our baby but first she wants to tell me how she got the fucking mug.

“All right,” she says. Deep breath and she begins, so much more articulate than her brother. Her first order of business was to do a drive-by and stake out the Salingers to get their vibe. She then drove all the way to a boutique in Newport for new clothes. “I needed a Lilly Pulitzer dress,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“That pink-and-green thing I was wearing,” she explains.

Love then beat it back to Little Compton and parked at the Salinger house and put on big fat Chanel sunglasses and stormed past reporters, past cops. She burst in the Salinger house. She started sobbing.

“I mean, I guess I do kind of like acting,” she admits. “But I still don’t want to do it professionally.”