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shook his head, and then walked past Philip out of the room. Philip watched his measured steps down the hallway to the closet, where he retrieved his winter coat. He put the hood up over his ears and walked out into the snowstorm. Josh didn’t notice, didn’t hear anything but his own volume. How long was he going to scream?
    Josh wanted to be with Philip. That’s where the tantrum came from, and Philip was keenly aware of it in the moment. Josh wanted his parents gone. He wanted to sit next to Philip and feel his essence, his coolness, as though some osmosis couldhappen there in the apartment and Josh could become him, an instant solution to the problems of growing up. That’s what all twelve-year-old boys desire, right? To not be themselves and not be their parents; to instead be something mercifully in between? Philip could relate to the impulse. It was the way that Josh went about his desire that lurched past pitiable into repulsive. Desire is only desirable when muted, the way Philip had learned to look at women, restraining himself enough for them to notice the restraint and grow curious.
    Josh’s hand began to bleed.
    Maybe his knuckles had scraped his bed frame or the plaster of the wall. There were tear streaks on his Kiss sheets, snot stains across Gene Simmons’s scowling face. And now smeared drops of blood. Philip thought of Beth. He pictured her later that night, after he’d been blissfully relieved of his charge, cleaning her boy’s fluid like he was an infant, while my father high-stepped through the snowdrifts until the embarrassment was over. It was a triptych that Philip wouldn’t forget, that he would relay in detail to anybody who ever asked about Josh, the defining images: A boy writhing. His mother cleaning. His father ashamed.
    —
    Philip continues to try. For years. He continues to tell himself that it is the right thing to do to try.
    He watches movies with Josh when Dave is out with friends and the apartment feels too big.
    He reads the overwrought poems Josh writes and he doesn’t make fun of them. “There’s talent here,” he says. “And sensitivity. Girls love sensitivity.”
    He teaches Josh the drums, even though he’s never taught and never plans to teach again. Philip’s good, but there are plenty of real teachers out there. He even offers up the man who taught him years ago, but my father begs, tells him that a real teacherwill lose patience, tells him that it has to be Philip or nobody. So Philip tries. He sits on Josh’s bed and listens to him beat on the brand-new kit that my father bought him before he’d ever played. He tells him, “Good,” when he finally masters the easiest of Beatles songs. He smiles when Josh says, “I’m going to be a fucking rock star.” When Josh earns his way into the High School of Music and Art, Philip never mentions that hardly anyone tries out for drums.
    They settle into a rhythm, the two of them. Josh writes, Josh plays, Philip listens. He claps obligingly. He agrees with Beth that maturity is happening when it isn’t. He is patient. But the longer their relationship lasts, the more afternoons pile up, identical, the heavier his effort feels.
    The interviews are the last monument to his patience.
The Josh Show
—who else would be the guest?
    Philip sits in the kitchen. He shuffles his socked feet on white tile. He rests his elbows on the table and lets the weight of his body fall. He tries to let the questions wash over him, like a meditative kind of thing, an almost gentle buzzing. Give one-word answers every few seconds, fall into yet another rhythm, and then it will be over.
    Josh looks the way he always looks when everyone in the room has tired of him. He’s leaning forward at Philip, palms flat on the table. His eyes are wide, his face skin stretched tight, manic. Philip thinks of it like a dead sprint distilled into a facial expression.
    Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil
.
    Josh is bleating at him. He says something about tits,