There was a man my age, a retired painter of dioramas at the natural history museum in Gainesville, who walked his dog on the lake bed and would commiserate with me about the heat when he stopped to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief, and then proceed inevitably to talk about his dead wife. At first I was given to believe she’d died only a year ago, but one day he told me it had been three, and the next time five. Whatever the date, he could not refer to her without having to lower his head as if the blow was still fresh. The man’s sole companion was a beautiful husky with one blue and one brown eye. The dog was so well behaved that I was commenting on her deportment one day as we stood chatting on the lake bed when the widower interrupted me with an excited cry, and I looked down in the direction of his gaze and saw what seemed to be little ladybugs pushing miniature logs across the grass. “Dung beetles!” he said when I inquired.

  “But what are they dragging?” I said.

  “Dog shit!” he cried. “It’s pure energy! Pure energy!”

  That’s what dying is, I thought, unless you’re lucky enough to stop breathing while asleep: pushing a dog turd a hundred times your size across the grass. In reality, when I got to Earl’s house that day he was sitting in the den watching a movie in pressed slacks, striped polo shirt, and baseball cap, as if obeying that admonition of one’s mother that you wear clean underwear because you never know when you might be hit by a bus. But for whom was he dressing? What was the reason for the expensive polo shirt, the jeans and baseball cap? I didn’t ask—though wearing a cap in your own house really makes no sense, unless your head is cold—or you are waiting to be picked up by someone.

  That someone, I felt sure, was Death. But Death was taking so long to come that the more the handyman took over Earl’s life, the more I began to walk past his house on the lake bed without stopping by or even glancing up at it. Walking on the lake bed I was alive; sitting in Earl’s music room I was in a sick room. For years it was demoralizing to watch the lakes go down, but now the drought had gone on so long that something unexpected had happened: the dry lake bed had become more beautiful than the lake. The forest that had grown up near the peninsula on which I lived was full of trees that brought me to a stop as I was hiking through it—to admire a magnolia growing unencumbered in the middle of a meadow, gigantic pines whose grove filtered the light differently from hour to hour, a grove so dense that sometimes I lay down on the carpet of russet needles to stare up at the canopy. Of course, there was always the hope that I’d encounter someone on the path. I’d already met a corrections officer trying out a motorbike before he gave it to his son, a guard at a women’s prison near Ocala who worked out at the little gym in town. I’d met a park ranger searching for people who’d been firing guns, and a young man who looked like a young Donny Osmond dragging a portable platform he intended to install in a clearing in the forest so he could shoot deer with his crossbow. Then there was the man who photographed birds from his golf cart while his little Chihuahua barked hysterically at me.

  The birds were everywhere. Walking along the water’s edge I’d hear a noise, look up, and see a blue heron flapping its wings as it rose laboriously from its perch and flew out across the lake, like someone I’d ejected from a comfortable chair. There were egrets and hawks and bald eagles, blackbirds and wood ducks and sandhill cranes, a flock of turkeys, and shadows on the ground that made me look up in the sky to see buzzards circulating on currents of air. The lake bed was so full of life that when I went to visit Earl there was a sense of deflation, a diminution of spirit, the moment I turned up the slope to his house beside a pipe through which he’d once drawn water from the lake—now high, dry, and corroded, like old age itself. The minute I turned up the slope to Earl’s house I had to prepare myself for what I found when I entered, which is why sometimes I did not turn up the slope at all; I just walked to town and back on my errands—because, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, there is no difference so profound as that between the sick and the well.

  Still, it made me glad the morning Earl called and asked if I wanted to come over that evening and watch The Killers. It wasn’t a movie I particularly wanted to see, but then he had shown me many films I didn’t want to watch that turned out to be worthwhile. Half an hour before I was to leave, however, the phone rang. It was the handyman telling me that Earl had asked him to call me to say he was feeling too sick to show the movie.

  It wasn’t that Earl was in danger, he said; it was just the nausea he got from time to time that sent him to bed if he did not quash it in time by eating raw ginger. What bothered me about the phone call was the fact that the handyman had delivered the news. It was like getting a call from Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? So, I thought, the handyman is now the go-between in matters related to Earl’s health. He thinks he’s going to usher Earl into the next life—he’s waiting for him to die too.

  The next day when I called Earl his enunciation was so slurred I was certain that he’d had a stroke and was choosing to ignore it the way my father had by refusing to give me the name of his doctor. But you cannot ignore a stroke. Indeed, by the time my father was moved from the nursing home to the hospital just a week after his cerebral incident, gangrene had established itself on his right leg. Everyone said it was just as well that he was not “all there” after the amputation, since he could not have accepted the loss. It was just as well he was delirious the last time I saw him, helplessly trying to remove the catheter from his penis. He died without ever knowing that he had lost his leg, the way Mrs. McAfee never knew her husband had totaled her Oldsmobile.

  How fortunate we are that people die in hospitals, where we do not have to watch it happen, from which we can conveniently be away at the final moment. So why, I wondered while hiking across the prairie to see Earl, wasn’t the lake bed littered with corpses? Why did I not come upon dead rabbits, raccoons, mice, snakes, cats, and birds? The turkey buzzards circling overhead—“nature’s undertakers”—couldn’t alone explain the absence of bones. Occasionally I’d come upon a cluster of feathers on the ground, or a baby raccoon, its jaw open as if to bite whatever had killed it, and one day I found the skeleton of a water moccasin. But that was so rare that I could only marvel how remarkable it was that animals died so discreetly, out of sight, without the hospital rooms and funerals with which we treat the dead. A man I’d met at the boat ramp, a man I’d been having sex with for so many years I called him the Regular, had simply buried Earl’s dogs in Earl’s backyard, the way I’d buried a feral cat I’d found stiff as a board on my lawn one day. They’d died without hospitals, nursing or funeral homes, cemeteries or crematoria.

  My mother had provided me with a lesson in this matter that only confirmed all this. Her first year in the nursing home she’d come down with pneumonia—which nurses call “the old person’s friend,” I learned after I took her home and made sure she recovered, thereby giving her eight more years of life as a quadriplegic. Alas, these things become clear only in retrospect, like the evening I overheard the nurses talking about people who won’t let their family members go. If only our public schools provided eighth-graders a course in Death, along with Sex Education.

  This time, convinced that Earl’s slurred voice meant that he’d indeed had a stroke, I decided that I too would ignore it—simply to avoid “heroic” medicine with its technology and end-of-life interventions. By calling no one the handyman and I would be letting Earl die at home—the gift I’d refused my father; I would, in collusion with the handyman, allow Earl to expire in his own bed. And then, a few nights later, proud of correcting a wrong I’d done my parents, I was walking by Earl’s house and saw the light of his television through the front door, went down the slope, peered through the glass squares, and saw him watching a cooking show, and when I tapped on the window, he got up and let me in, and we sat down and watched a handsome chef in New Orleans make brisket of beef with black-eyed peas. Earl hadn’t had a stroke at all, I learned; he’d just taken too much of a new pain medicine. In fact, the handyman had driven him to Starke that day for a doctor’s appointment and after that he’d stopped by a friend’s.

  I’d not known Earl had a friend in Lake City, or that the handyman was driving him around to visit acquaintances of his in other towns, including the man I had been having sex with for twenty years, a man Earl had met before I did. But I was so relieved to see Earl his old self that I forgot about my recent concern that he’d had a cerebral accident. Instead, I told him how good-looking his new eyeglasses were. “Oh, they’re just an old pair I found in a drawer,” he said. “I think they make me look funny. But the new ones keep sliding down my nose, because the contours of your face change, you know, as you age.” And then he added, “But I no longer care how I look.”

  Whether or not Earl cared about his appearance, I had to admit, whenever I got there, that his house had never looked better. The handyman had made the whole place shipshape. The dead fronds on the sago palms were gone, the grove of camellias had been cleared of underbrush, the bed of hydrangeas was a deep blue because of the sulfate the handyman had added to the soil, the circular flower bed had been planted with blueberry bushes, the house itself had a new coat of paint, the patio was free of weeds, the unused porch was cleaned up, and the kitchen counter had been cleared of the tremendous pile of papers Earl had always complained of but had been unable to go through. The odd thing was that the clean, gleaming countertop seemed to me sad. A mess of papers means someone’s living there; a clean room means you’re ready to go.

  But I didn’t say this. Instead, I said, “You know, your house has never looked better,” and he replied, “Yes, John has done a wonderful job.” Then he paused on his way to the DVD player, turned to me with the disc in hand, like a man about to present an award, and said, “You know, without John I would never have been able to stay here,” which reminded me of my own mother’s request that I let her come home when she realized she was starting to die, a favor I could not grant at the time and therefore ignored. Like my parents, like everyone, I thought, Earl simply wants to die in his own bed.

  And then Earl pressed Play on the DVD player, which summoned up an English film about a prize-winning cow on one of the Channel Islands the Nazis had occupied, a movie we watched in such peace and quiet that when I looked over at Earl I saw that he was sound asleep. Then when the movie ended I continued sitting there in the strange silence—strange because it was as if Earl, merely asleep, had actually died—and looked around at all the records and books he loved. Sitting there while Earl dozed in his chair I could examine everything in the room; I could leap forward in time to the moment when all this would be dispersed—the contents of this room that had brought me so much pleasure, the pleasure of being asked down for a movie. Nothing could have better illustrated the old adage that when a man dies a library dies with him than Earl’s music room. Yet everything in there would be of no interest to anyone once Earl expired. And then, when I’d had enough of that, for such reflections can only go on so long, I got up and took my usual walk through town; and the next morning I left for Washington in a hired car whose driver, listening to the conservative radio station, told me that President Obama was too soft on foreign affairs and that we should drop a nuclear bomb on countries like Iran because that had always worked in the past, though I told him we had done it in only one country, Japan.

  The men I knew in Washington who were facing old age had taken measures more extreme than Earl’s accelerating acquisition of DVDs. One friend, a curator who’d worked for the National Gallery, had met a security guard from Bratislava, a handsome weight lifter for whom he’d moved to Slovakia, and made him the sole beneficiary of his estate. Another—a theater director who had retired to Fort Lauderdale—had left his penthouse apartment on the beach for a town south of Lake Okeechobee because his young boyfriend wanted to raise horses there; so now, like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, this veteran of Broadway was singing Sondheim to the colts he was feeding in the middle of the Florida scrub. At least Earl was not trying to mitigate the prospect of death with one last love affair. There was certainly nothing erotic in his relationship with the handyman—that overweight carpenter with a big butt and ponytail—though I continued to think there were elements of Rebecca, if not Gaslight, in the relationship, if only because the moment the handyman came into the music room with the dinner tray Earl’s demeanor always changed. Sometimes he sounded like the chatelaine of a manor house in one of those shows the BBC produced with the ease of a popcorn-maker, planning a dinner party with the head cook, other times like Joan Crawford asking her sister for a favor in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

  But there was nothing I could object to; the handyman was allowing Earl to keep the life he’d led—and he could drive me to the Gainesville airport, where I’d rent a car to drive to Jacksonville, and get on a nonstop flight on JetBlue that took me to Washington, where I could take the Metro to Dupont Circle and arrive at the baths in time for Nude Yoga. In Washington I was doing research for a man who’d written several books about the architectural history of the nation’s capital. His most famous volume was simply called Vanished Mansions. The historian was confined to bed at the age of eighty-eight, writing what we both assumed would be his last book. I’d go around town taking photographs for him, or look for letters and diaries in the Library of Congress that he needed, and then I’d bicycle up Connecticut Avenue to one of those big old historic apartment buildings that were not only his main subject but the place in which he lived, among bullet mirrors and Colonial furniture. He was far worse off than Earl; by that time he was using supplemental oxygen as he collated text and photographs on a pile of pillows.

  There was one mansion in particular with which he was obsessed: the Hay-Adams house, a Romanesque masterpiece designed by H. H. Richardson. It was there that the historian Henry Adams had lived. The house had been torn down in the 1920s to make way for what is now the Hay-Adams Hotel. Henry Adams had had a stroke one day, but unlike my father he’d recovered and lived several more years, during which time he’d been taken care of by a young woman named Aileen Tone, who would play medieval chansons for him on the piano. My employer, the bed-bound historian of Washington’s vanished mansions, was himself facing an imminent departure, but the only reference he made to that final deadline came one day when he looked up at me from the pile of Xeroxes I’d brought in my knapsack and said, “You know, there’s a wonderful line in one of Adams’s letters that goes, ‘All I want to do at this point is leave this earth without any fuss.’”

  “And did he?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “He died in his bed—Aileen Tone went upstairs to get him when he didn’t come down for breakfast and discovered the body.”

  “I don’t really like the idea of my body being discovered,” I said after a moment’s attempt to imagine that scene.

  “But you won’t be conscious,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, “but the thought still bothers me.”

  “Because you’re worried how you’ll look?”

  “Because I’ll be so defenseless,” I said. “And yes, I suppose because I’m worried how I’ll look.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you’re too vain to die.”

  “Lots of luck with that,” Patrick replied when I repeated the remark.

  I never made any attempt to get together with Patrick even when we happened to be in DC at the same time. Nor did I call Earl or anyone else in Florida. It was as if I didn’t live there, as if Florida did not exist, though sometimes when the weather in DC was especially beautiful—a soft, mellow autumn day when the leaves were fluttering down onto the parked cars, and the whole city seemed to be crumbling in the golden sunshine—I would look in the newspaper and see that North Florida was having much the same weather and imagine the house sitting empty at the end of the driveway on a late October afternoon. I could see the leaves and branches broken off by storms scattered across the cracked asphalt, and the plants in the yard that bloom only in autumn (cassia, goldenrod), the leaves of the grapevines turning yellow, the pine cone lilies going to seed. And I would pick up the phone and call my number just to make the phone ring in the empty house.

  The idea, I think, was that if I left the house alone long enough, it would die; its meaning would leak out through those jalousie windows that never closed properly, and when I finally returned the house would be devoid of meaning. Time, after all, is the only cure for grief. On those autumn afternoons in DC, sitting at the window above the gingko trees whose yellow leaves had covered the hoods of the parked cars down in the street, I would think of the house in Florida slowly dying while I was up north. But that didn’t happen.

  So I continued to go back to Washington. On one trip I went to the National Gallery to see the reconstruction of an ancient tomb that had just been discovered on the Upper Nile; the exhibit was accompanied by a film running continuously in a little theater adjacent to the display. The subject of the film was Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. The most perilous thing after the death of a pharaoh, according to the film, were the first six hours, in which the pharaoh had to pass a series of tests in order to reach the afterlife, where he could enjoy all those possessions that had been buried with him in the tomb; and the fourth hour was the most crucial because that was when the scorpion-god Anubis tried to stop him from reaching the Underworld. How wonderfully the Egyptians had dealt with death, I thought as I was flying back, and how little attention we give it in this culture. Earl did not have to worry about Anubis—indeed, I’d not seen a scorpion in my garage in years, much less a scorpion-god—but it was still a relief to drop in on him a few days after getting back and see him reading in his chair when I walked in.