The rug had aged, faded, and started to fray on three sides. Anyone else would have thrown it out. But not his old man. He had never paid attention to things like rugs. Or manners. Or his son. No, the only thing Jacob Coleridge had ever given a shit about was color. The rug was purple, only his father would have called it Pantone 269. The flowers were once white—blue-white, son. Purchased by his mother in a tourist shop in Montauk before she died and his father’s drinking got out of control and started crawling around in his skull like a poisonous spider, turning whatever kindness was left to pyrotechnic meanness.

Fuck it, Jake thought. “It’s purple and white,” and wiped his feet on it. He unlocked the big deadbolt and pushed the door open—his fingers splayed out on the dark teak—then stepped inside.

Without his father here he felt like he was invading the old man’s kingdom; besides being an extremely private man, Jacob Coleridge Sr. was a control freak extraordinaire. But Jake wasn’t an interloper; he had been summoned—beckoned, if you wanted to be exact—to make decisions for a man who was no longer capable of making them for himself. According to the doctor Jake had spoken to at the hospital, his father had set himself ablaze during an Alzheimer’s-fueled fit of confusion, coming as close to killing himself as anyone would want to get. And the hardcore hermit and workaholic had finally run out of time. He would never paint again. At that his son thought they might as well take him out behind the hospital, perch him on the edge of the dumpster, and blow his head off because without his painting, Jacob Coleridge wasn’t even there.

With perfect muscle memory, Jake’s fingers reached into the dark and found the heavy Bakelite switches just inside the door. Flip, flip, flip. The three Verner Panton Plexiglas globes that lit up the main foyer cracked to life. Jake stood in the doorway for a minute, the big aluminum Halliburton forgotten in his hand, and gazed around the room. In twenty-eight years it hadn’t changed—and not in the nomenclature of a real-estate agent telling you that it needed updating, although that was part of it; no, the stasis of the space was more visceral than that. The room was a stage set out of Dickens.

Jake walked past the Nakashima console in the entry—a big undressed slab of walnut—and dropped his keys on the dusty surface beside the wire-frame model of a sphere that had been there as long as he could remember. Dust and spiderwebs stuck to the polished metal surface in a fuzzy skin, and when Jake dropped the keys, the flesh of the sculpture moved, almost flinched, an optical illusion in the late-afternoon light. He moved into the body of the home.

The house had been one of the first all-glass dwellings built on the point. A marvel of modern design, with a heavily canted roof, California redwood beams, and a kitchen straight out of a Scandinavian design lab. His father’s reference library was there, swallowing up the wall around the slate fireplace. The surfboard coffee table was littered with dusty coffee mugs, scotch bottles, and unopened elastic-bundled copies of the New York Times. A forest of stubbed cigarettes filled a big ceramic ashtray with a bite-sized chunk sloppily glued back in place that sat on the floor. The sofas were in the same positions, the leather polished to a fine sheen, the arm of one chair hastily—and probably drunkenly—repaired with duct tape. His mother’s Steinway, unused since the summer of 1978, sat in one corner, one of Warhol’s Shot Marilyns—a gift that Andy and that six-foot-three blonde he used to travel with had dropped off one weekend—hung lopsided over the dusty top.

Jake walked slowly through his father’s life, examining the last quarter-century. Obviously, Jacob had been riding the dementia train for some time; this didn’t just happen overnight. It took some doing. Some serious doing. And the closing number had been one for the family album—a human torch dancing around the living room, punctuated by a crash through a plate-glass window topped off with a dive into the pool. Sure. All systems go. Houston, we have no problems.

The general mess that used to lie on top of the order had burrowed down, into the bones of the place, so that disorganization was now the rule. Like a wrecking yard, entropy seemed to be the governing law of mechanics. The bottles, always a must in any room inhabited by the great Jacob Coleridge, were strewn about like empty shell casings. Jake bent over and picked one up. His old man’s taste had gone from Laphroaig to Royal Lochnagar—at least he hadn’t gotten cheap in his later years.

The weird part was the knives—yellow utility knives scattered throughout the space, always within reach. Jake picked one up, spun the wheel, and slid the blade out of the handle. It was rusty. They must have been on sale, Jake thought, and put it back down.

One of the twelve floor-to-ceiling panes that opened onto the ocean had been replaced with a sheet of exterior-grade plywood, the edges painted a bright green. This was where his father had gone through the glass on his way to the pool—clothes burning, fingers melting like candles. The pool sat in the middle of the weathered gray deck, a now green rectangular pond, the inside painted by Pablo Picasso and his father one drunken weekend in 1967.

Leaning against the back of the sofa was a Chuck Close portrait that someone had slashed the eyes out of—no doubt with one of the utility knives—the secret graffiti of one Jacob Gansevoort Coleridge Sr. Why would his old man do that?

Jake paused to examine a note taped to one of the remaining big front windows. Across a chunk of sketch paper, in the bold draftsman’s block letters of his father’s hand, it said, YOUR NAME IS JACOB COLERIDGE. KEEP PAINTING.

Jake froze, his eyes crawling over the rough surface of the sketch paper, trying to decide if he was ready for this. The answer wasn’t long in coming. Not really. But this wasn’t one of those choice things, this was one of those do things. There was a difference. He went into the kitchen.

He checked the fridge. Three cans of light beer, steaks that had passed being fit for consumption—human or otherwise—some time ago, a dozen Styrofoam soup containers half-filled with sludge well on its way to being petroleum, a lone wrinkled lemon that looked like an ancient abandoned breast, one shoe, a ring of keys, a dried-out chunk of sod, a couple of paperbacks, and a pair of utility knives—one in the vegetable drawer, one in the butter compartment. Jake closed the fridge and scanned the rest of the kitchen.

There were no dirty dishes to speak of, just a mottled layer of crumbs, dust bunnies, and paint-crusted fingerprints that looked like they had been there since before the Internet existed.

He opened a random drawer and found some paintings stuffed inside, small canvases stacked like books, dreary irregularly shaped blobs of black and gray that grimaced up at him, daring him to keep looking.

His father’s work had always been dark—in composition and theme—an early trademark among the proto-flower children of his generation who painted in beautiful colors and optimistic brushstrokes. But these little pictures were lifeless fields of gray and black with a red striation running through them, like veins just under the surface. They weren’t classic. They weren’t modern. When he thought about it, he realized that they probably weren’t even sane. Then again, what else could you expect from a man who kept chunks of lawn in the fridge and torched himself on a Thursday evening?

He looked around and wondered what had happened to the man he had left. The brilliant Jacob Coleridge had been reduced to leaving himself notes and painting mindless blobs of madness. Of all the things he had expected of his father, meaninglessness had never even been considered. Jake dropped the canvas back into the drawer and pushed it shut with his knee.