PART FIVE – The End

Ed woke feeling hot and sticky, sprawled on the couch with the morning sun flowing through the window and pooling on his face. His mouth tasted awful, like a mouse nest. Apart from that image, his mind was a blank, and he struggled to sit upright, dislodging Vanessa from his chest in the process. She skittered away on stiff legs and hid behind a stack of books.

Toby sat at the breakfast bar, once more indulging in beer and cornflakes. “Welcome back to the Land of the Living, Brother.”

Part Four definitely contains some NSFW content.  Enter at your own peril.

PART FOUR

Ed entered the apartment like a sleepwalker. He might have been roused had Toby been there, crowing over Ed’s shame, but Toby was out and Ed was almost certainly all out of rage.

Instead, he shivered a little and looked around the drab main room of the apartment. And he seemed to be peering down the dim corridor of years stretched ahead of him, at an endless parade of inebriate evenings on a succession of already ruined couches across from a stream of steadily degenerating sitcoms. Part of his mind was panicked by this vision; but another part countered, advocating the scenario as a reasonable approximation of peace, if not precisely the same sort of peace he sought in Catania’s apartment. Ed stopped short at this latter thought and threw himself onto the couch, and he told himself not to mistake peace for passivity.

And this thought stunned him; for a long moment he simply sat motionless, savoring it.

PART THREE

After three straight days of ten hour shifts, Ed was more than ready to try anything to create a peaceful retreat from the world – even a date with a scary lady cop. Seven o’clock saw him standing on a cracked sidewalk in Revere, staring at a little diner wedged between two huge, windowless warehouses. He was indeed wearing a flaming-red shirt with red dragons embroidered across the front, a lightweight black jacket, and his only pair of black jeans, which his mother had once called indecently tight.

“This must be it,” he said, trying to get a hint at the interior through the grimy windows. His second thoughts had serious problems with both what he saw, and his actual motivations, but his first and third thoughts were unanimous.