It came to Theo that what he had been doing wasn’t real. One by one, as he woke, the things he had seen gave themselves away; in real life, Charles wasn’t nearly that light-skinned, for one thing, and for another, people didn’t laugh and joke like that at funerals.  And then, like a chunk of ice following water into a glass, the main point splashed into Theo’s consciousness: if that had been Charles’s funeral, then Charles would’ve been dead, instead of doing all that laughing and high-fiving. Theo was relieved, because the way things had been going in that dream was making him feel like five cents. On the other hand, since it was a dream, that meant Charles really was gone, and a smaller but more immediate problem was that Theo still had to stand up in front of all those people today and speak about his friend. On that Saturday morning in the spring of 2002, Theo Brown, as was his way, had neither lost nor gained.

            In his bare feet, worn, drooping, elastic-less boxer shorts, and sleeveless cotton undershirt, he sat on the toilet, head in his hands, and remembered the details of the dream, marveling at the kinds of things that can seem real when you’re asleep. Sitting in a pew in the back of the church, with hundreds of pews in front of him, he had waited in this dream for his turn to speak, barely able to hear or see the many people scheduled ahead of him as they went, one by one, to the lectern. Theo looked for his own name in the program, which had gotten thicker since he took his seat and now was like a small telephone book, except it was in no kind of order he could make out. He was still looking for his name in all the tiny print when a procession came up the aisle to his left. Four strong-looking, bearded men wearing suits and fezzes were carrying a wooden board the size of a mattress at shoulder-level; lying on it, wearing a robe and eating grapes, just like in Roman times, was Charles. He was lighter-skinned than Theo remembered, nearly white in fact, and smiling. Theo called his name, but Charles seemed not to hear. Theo was happy that Charles had come back but hurt that his friend had ignored him. The men in fezzes took him to the front of the church, where there was soon a lot of talking. Standing on tip-toe, Theo could make out Charles, laughing and slapping five with men and women around him. Finally Charles led twenty or twenty-five of them out a side door, while everyone else stayed behind -- except that everyone else, Theo now realized, had dwindled to about one person every ten or twenty pews, maybe a dozen people altogether. These pathetic-looking souls didn’t seem to have noticed anything, to have grasped that they were at a funeral for someone who had just left the church under his own power. And there, among those losers, was Theo.

            Awake now, he went downstairs to the kitchen. At the red Formica table, which was older than Theo, sat Granddad. He wore the brown cardigan this morning; he wore either the brown sweater or the navy blue every day of the year, and sometimes, in the winter, he wore both. Those sweaters had a smell -- not bad, just distinctly Granddad, a warm, homey smell like a place where food was cooked every day. Theo wasn’t sure when Granddad had last let them be washed, wasn’t even sure they would stand up to it; he sometimes thought the sweaters’ wool was long gone, that its shape had been taken by whatever produced the smell -- that in water the sweaters would simply dissolve. Granddad’s arms, strong, dark steel bands in Theo’s boyhood memories, were now lost inside the sweater, their bony, heavily veined wrists poking out of the sleeves. But Granddad still had a full head of hair, entirely white now, and his face still seemed like a young man’s, maybe because of the wide, wide eyes that fixed on his grandson.

            “Hey, old man.”

            “E-yup.”

            Granddad’s frailness made Theo sad and a little scared sometimes, but its upside was that Theo had risen to the challenge of caring for the old man. Right now Granddad was sipping from the mug of coffee Theo always set up for him at night, the coffee Granddad could make last a good three hours. Theo put the coffee and the water in the one-cup coffeemaker, because Granddad’s hands shook so badly that he couldn’t do these things himself. All Granddad had to do on his own, when he woke up between five and six a.m., was click the switch.

            “You thought up what you gonna say yet?”

            “Yeah, I got it covered.”

            “Be sure and tell his parents I’m sorry. ’S a shame, boy that talented.”

            “Boy? He was thirty-seven, Granddad. Just like me.”

            Granddad considered this as if it were a new idea. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

            Theo now flipped the switch on the big coffeemaker, which was next to Granddad’s. It had taken nearly a year of setting up Granddad’s coffee at night to realize that he might as well set up his own at the same time. This was the kind of lapse that made Theo wonder if everybody did such stupid stuff, or if he alone lacked common sense. ’S a shame, boy that talented. Theo thought, What if Charles hadn’t been so talented? Should he have died in that case? Should I die?

            Granddad said, “Tell ’em I’m sorry not to make it.” Theo would tell them, but only if the subject came up. Maybe Granddad couldn’t bear to sit on a hard church pew through the whole service, but it would sound like a weak excuse for not going to the funeral of a man he’d seen grow up from the age of nine.

            Theo began to make Granddad’s breakfast, the one he fixed for him every morning: one egg, sunny side up, on toast. “You’ll be all right while I’m gone?”

            “I’ll be all right.”

            *          *          *          *          *

            Summing up in five minutes of talk what Charles had meant to him had seemed impossible at first. Slowly, though, Theo had broken his theme down into its essential parts: how true a friend Charles had been, staying in regular touch even years after he had made a life for himself in New York; how they had still laughed and reminisced together year after year whenever Charles came to town; how Charles had brightened his life and been, simply, his best friend. Scrubbing himself in the shower, pulling a white shirt over his lanky frame in front of his bedroom mirror, Theo mentally rehearsed the words he would say later that morning, nodding at his reflection as he knotted the tie and arrived, in his mind, at the end of his speech.

            The church was five minutes away. Theo, who had lived in the same house his entire life, could make the drive with his eyes closed: up his street, past semi-detached red-brick houses like his own; a right turn; past more, equally modest but freestanding houses; past kids playing on the sidewalk — black kids, eight, nine, ten years old, shouting as they played a game of the kind Theo had tried his best to avoid thirty years earlier; a left turn, and there, on a low grassy mound, with its chalk-white walls, the church. Usually Theo could park across the street from it. This morning, though, there were more cars than he’d ever seen parked near Peace Lutheran, and he had to go around the corner to find a space. Leaving his car next to a large bush on a sidewalk-less street, he walked back toward the church, and others were walking there too, some of them white, none of them familiar-looking. When he’d thought about who would be at the funeral, he pictured a collection of Charles’s aging relatives, the women done up in hats with veils, the flesh on the backs of their arms jiggling as they wielded their canes, the men with belts hugging the bulging areas where their chests and stomachs merged. But that’s who would gather, he realized now, if Theo himself died. The people around him now were Theo’s own age or younger, and -- attractive, men and women both. Unlike him, they moved in pairs or groups. He threaded his way through them and up the church’s wide, shallow front steps.

            Clusters of people stood in the church’s wide vestibule, talking low. Mr. and Mrs. Maddox, Charles’s parents, were in one. Theo had recently looked at old pictures of himself and Charles; Charles’s mother and father were in some, and Theo been struck by how young they looked in those days -- young, and attractive. They were aging beautifully, both of them, as well-preserved as famous actors, though right now they seemed the worse for wear, not so much sad as deeply tired. They were surrounded by younger people, no doubt acquaintances of Charles’s Theo didn’t recognize. Theo approached the group, waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Maddox to notice him and bring him immediately into the center of the gathering, maybe introduce him around as Charles’s best friend. Instead, Mrs. Maddox made brief eye contact with him, nodded so subtly he wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it, and kept talking to the group. Only when the group began to disperse, along with the other clusters of people, did Mr. Maddox step around one of the younger people and say, “Theo, it’s so good to see you.”

            “Hello, Mr. Maddox.” They shook hands. Mr. Maddox’s grip was still firm. “Hi, Mrs. Maddox. I’m -- sorry.”

            “Yes, we all are,” Mr. Maddox said. “We’re so glad you could make it today.”

            Mrs. Maddox studied Theo, almost as if trying to place him in her mind, before saying, “Thank you for the lovely card you sent.” Theo had actually sent a small card reading simply “In Deepest Sympathy,” attached to a $45 bouquet of flowers.

            Mr. Maddox said to Theo, “I think Melanie” -- Charles’s sister -- “talked to you about the tributes.”

            So other people would be making remarks, too; Theo had wondered about that. “Yeah, we talked on the phone.”

            “Okay, good.” A moment of silence followed, and Theo, desperate to fill it, was on the point of saying something about Granddaddy’s being unable to come -- when Mr. Maddox said, “Well, thank you for coming.” Then he and his wife went inside the church proper. Theo gave them a chance to get ahead of them, then went in himself.

            Theo had attended this church his whole life, dragged every Sunday by his grandfather when he was a boy, going sporadically on his own as he grew older. Nothing had been more boring to him when he was a child, but as an adult he enjoyed it more and more. There was something comforting, restoring, about it. Occasionally one of the ministers would get it together to say something interesting, something Theo hadn’t thought of himself; maybe he would make a point with a good story, and Theo would find himself thinking a day or two later of one of the minister’s phrases or the turning point in one of the fables. And if nothing else, even if the sermon didn’t grab him, there was at least an hour to, well, do nothing—sit back, cross his legs, maybe put his arm on the back of the pew, as he thought about the past week, the past year, various things in his life.

Today, though, there would be no settling back, no arm on the back of the pew. In all his years of coming here, he had never seen the church so full, except on Easter. There were also more white people than he’d ever seen here; on an average Sunday, there were none. He found a space just big enough for him to sit up straight in, on the end of a pew halfway to the front of the church. And then, as the low-level vibration took over his stomach the way it did whenever he was nervous — like a refrigerator’s hum — the funeral began.

            From the lectern, in his resonant bass, Reverend Barker asked all assembled to remove the photocopied sheet music from their programs and sing along to “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” During the Scripture reading, Theo looked over the program to find his name, but it wasn’t there — all it said was “Remarks and Tributes.” After Reverend Barker’s prayer there was a solo, “God and God Alone,” sung in a wavering voice by a lone, elderly woman. Then Reverend Barker returned to the lectern and said, “We will now have remarks and tributes. Can the speakers please line up by the wall at my right.”

            This was it. Theo went to the wall and fell in line behind two other people. The first was a black man, about Theo’s age, the second a white woman who — well, it was hard to say how old she was, since Theo didn’t know many white women well enough to know their ages, and since he didn’t know many women, black or white, who were so . . . She turned around, her eyes meeting Theo’s for a second. She smiled at him before looking beyond him to see who else was in the line. Then she faced front again. Theo, meanwhile, was still trying to respond to her smile, as if her beautiful, dark eyes, framed in straight black hair, were still on him. He ended up smiling at the back of her head.

            The man who was first in line took a quick glance behind him and then walked to the lectern. “Hello, everybody, my name is Ronald Jackson.” The older people in the church responded, “Hello”; Theo thought, So that’s the Ronald who Charles used to mention. “I’m here today, as you all are, because I loved Charles Maddox. I met him in college, and he became like a brother to me. I guess because we got to know each other at a time in our lives when friends are able to spend the most time together, we got to know things about each other that I don’t think anyone else ever knew.” (Oh, is that so? Theo thought.) “It’s a cliché of romantic love to say that you love someone because you like who you are when you’re with them; and not that I loved Charles romantically” — here Ronald Jackson smiled broadly and boyishly in a nervous laugh, and the listeners laughed just as nervously — “but what I mean is, I think in many ways Charles inspired me to be my best self, and I like to think I inspired him just a little bit in the same way. I’ll never forget sitting in his dorm room late one night, talking half the night like you do at that age.” (I never did that, Theo thought.) “And we got on to the subject, one of our favorite subjects, really, of what we could do as young black men to make a difference for our brothers and sisters. At that time the system of apartheid was still going on in South Africa, and as we talked about it, I don’t know who inspired who, I guess we inspired each other — but by the next day we had organized a rally to protest our school’s investments in South African businesses. I’ll never forget the feeling of being side-by-side with Charles on that makeshift stage we put together outside the student union building — charging up the crowd, him and me. It was just magical, and it was a magic I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for Charles. And I’ll never forget the feeling of just being alive, that I was living to my potential, that feeling that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, that Charles helped me to have. Since then I’ve always tried to do things that allowed me to have that feeling, and if I’ve succeeded at all, I owe some of that to Charles. . . .”

            As Ronald Jackson was walking away from the lectern, and the woman ahead of Theo was going toward it, the two exchanged a curt nod; Theo thought, Do they know each other? Do all of Charles’s many friends know each other, except for me? The woman reached the lectern and faced the gathering, and if she looked pretty before, when she and Theo made brief eye contact at close range, she was downright gorgeous now. And, oddly, she looked familiar. It wasn’t just that she seemed to have stepped out of one of Theo’s fantasies — although she might have, with her black hair spilling onto a black dress that she wore like some sort of grieving runway model. He knew for a fact that Charles had never introduced him to her, because he would not have forgotten that meeting . . . where had he seen her, then? “Hello,” she said, and once more the listeners answered, “Hello.” The beautiful woman, who said her name was Holly, seemed agitated; she clutched the edges of the lectern as if she were riding it over a choppy sea, her red fingernails seeming about to either snap off or carve away bits of the wood. “I think the fact that I’m standing here now is proof that nothing is promised to us, and that this is something we should remember,” she said. “Charles and I should have remembered that. We—” Her voice broke, and she raised the back of her hand to her face as she blinked back tears. “We had a loving relationship, Charles and I did,” she continued, “one that was interrupted by periods when we weren’t speaking, which I guess can happen with people who are very passionate about each other — as paradoxical as that is.” Theo’s eyes scoured the room, looking for the reactions of the black women; some were staring at the speaker with sympathy, while others traded looks that said, “Uh-huh.” Then came Theo’s own, delayed reaction: gazing at the woman, who was as good-looking as anyone he’d ever seen in a movie or magazine, he thought, My God. Charles must have had sex with that woman. And then he realized that he didn’t remember Charles mentioning this woman, Holly. Over the years he had talked from time to time about an on-again, off-again relationship with a woman, but wasn’t her name Brenda? For a fraction of a second Theo wondered, really wondered, if he’d come to the wrong funeral; as with the dream he’d had that morning, he realized that was impossible. Which did nothing to clear up his confusion. It was Brenda Theo had always heard about, Brenda who would stay neither in nor out of Charles’s life, whom Charles hadn’t been able to keep or let go. Who was this Holly? Was she in Charles’s life when Brenda was out of it? Was she the reason their relationship was so unstable? Had Charles been ashamed to tell Theo the truth? Theo thought Charles had told him everything, but clearly that wasn’t true . . .

This was a mystery that cried out for Johnson Jones, Theo thought — before he made himself focus again on the funeral. Holly went on, “But deep down I always thought, and I’d venture to say that Charles always thought, that one day we would be together for good. And I think on some level I thought so when I first met him. At that time Charles had just begun publishing articles, and my modeling career hadn’t gotten off the ground yet.” Modeling career? Is that why she looks familiar? “But we were both serious about what we were doing, and that was part of the bond we shared. I . . .” Her features scrunched together suddenly, like dough kneaded by an invisible hand; she put her knuckles to her face again. “I’ll miss him very much,” she managed to get out — in a pretty steady voice, considering — before walking away from the lectern. And then it was Theo’s turn.

            For the next few minutes his body and voice seemed to do things without clearing them with his brain. He was stepping up to the lectern by the time he knew he had begun walking to the front of the church; he had started talking before it occurred to him that he hadn’t said “Hello” or “Good morning”; and only when he was walking back to his seat did he realize he’d left out parts of what he had planned to say — and that a lot of what he had said, as a result, probably hadn’t made much sense. His face became hot, he felt intensely embarrassed, he wanted to reach inside the heads of everyone in the room and yank out the memory of what he’d just done. It helped that as he sat down — avoiding the eyes of those around him — the next speaker began; that would dislodge Theo’s performance, at least for the time being, from people’s minds.

            But as that person spoke lovingly of Charles, followed by another, and still another, a different problem emerged. Theo knew he should be feeling joy at the quality of Charles’s life, and mourning Charles along with everyone else, and he did, he had, but that was not what he felt at the moment. The speakers painted a picture of a life filled with friendship, love, travel, excitement, accomplishment; Theo had known about those parts of his dead friend’s life, but presented all at once, they added up to an existence so foreign to Theo’s that he began to wonder whether, if this was a life, Theo’s could be called one too, whether his activities up to now could be called living. And why didn’t Theo recognize half the names or faces of the people who got up to speak? If they were calling themselves Charles’s close friends, and Theo was Charles’s close friend, could both he and they be real? Am I alive? Theo thought. Am I actually here, in this church? If I touched the people around me, would they feel it?

              This last thought wouldn’t leave his mind. During the low monotone of the eulogy, and during the closing prayer, Theo’s eyes went to the thigh of the woman sitting next to him, exposed just above the knee. Dark, darker still because of the black stockings she wore, spread wide on the pew, the thigh seemed to hold the proof of Theo’s connection to the world, and his hand nearly itched with the desire to touch it, grab it, knead it with his fingers, hold onto it for dear life, for proof that he really existed. When he realized he was staring at the thigh, he glanced at the face above it, to make sure the woman hadn’t noticed. The woman, deep in middle age, not only noticed—her eyes were silently screaming at him. Theo jerked his head forward. The casket was being borne down the aisle by Charles’s cousins. The funeral was over.

            Theo drove to the cemetery to see the body committed to the ground; then he drove to the Maddoxes’ house for the repast. The Maddoxes’ house. When he came here as a boy, it seemed like a palace, maybe because of the twin white columns at the top of the steps — columns supporting the overhang, which gave shade to the porch running the width of the house. Now the Maddoxes’ place looked like what it was, a modest, nicely kept up home. There were already people on the porch when he walked up to the house, men with loosened ties and women in stocking feet, eating potato salad or cake with paper plates and plastic forks. Theo squeezed past them and went inside. Then came that feeling he’d always assumed he would one day leave behind, along with childhood, but which had held on like a scar: his awkwardness on entering large groups alone. He had found that it helped to have a direction, and so he made a two-step plan — go tell the Maddoxes how nice the funeral had been, then head like a bullet toward the food.

            He found Mr. and Mrs. Maddox in the center of the living room, talking with two other people around their age. Beside them was their daughter, Charles’s older sister, Melanie.

            Melanie Maddox.  In recent years her name had come up from time to time in his talks with Charles, and Theo had talked to her over the telephone about the funeral, but it had been years, a decade, maybe, since he had seen her. Melanie Maddox: a figure in Theo’s boyhood it hadn’t even occurred to him to fantasize about, so out of reach did she seem — two years older than him and Charles, several inches taller, her face a masterwork of creamy brown skin and beautiful, large yet delicate features, walking past Theo in the Maddoxes’ house with her upright carriage, her air of unselfconscious importance, of heading somewhere unguessable but, by definition, cool. All these years later, in Theo’s thirty-seven-year-old mind, Melanie was taller than he was, and so he was a little surprised as she stood before him now, half a head shorter than his own five-feet-eleven-inches. And there was something else: her face was taking on subtle changes, faint creases and a slight puffiness, making her look like what she was — a very pretty woman just beginning to age — rather than the goddess she had appeared to be when Theo was a boy. The change made her less intimidating and, somehow, even more attractive.

            “It’s good to see you, Theo,” Melanie said. “It’s good to have one of Charles’s old friends here.” Her words made him feel so good they startled him; they were like a drink that revealed his thirst. He almost said, It’s good to be here, but that didn’t seem right. He finally managed, “It’s good to see you, too,” and added, “The funeral was nice.”

            “Yeah. I think Charles would’ve been happy. That was nice what you said about him.” This, on the other hand, was like someone trying to comfort him by patting his raw wound. Seeing the face he made, she said, “I mean it. It really was,” so sincerely that he began to believe her.

            “So what are you up to these days?” he said. “Still at the hospital?”

            “Still at the hospital.” She was, if Theo remembered right, a nurse in a maternity ward. “They’re sick of me, I’m sick of them, so we’re like a family.” She was still smiling. “What about you? Still at the bookstore? They made you assistant manager, right?”

            “Wow, you got a good memory.”

            “Well, Charles kept me up to date on what was happening with you.” Saying Charles’s name again made her face cloud over, her eyes shine. “I just don’t understand what happened to him.” Theo wanted badly to say something comforting. He had no idea what. For one thing, he didn’t understand what had happened, either. But Melanie came to her own (and Theo’s) rescue, brightening and saying, “So tell me what else is new.”

            And they fell into a real conversation. Theo enjoyed it so much that he forgot where he was; its pleasantness was pure, like unexpected sleep. He shut out everything else and so could not have said what made him glance to his right as they talked; when he did, his eyes met those of the woman whose thigh he had longed to grab. Her look was contempt itself. By the time he turned back to Melanie, he’d lost the thread of what he’d been saying, and Melanie was listening to her father. She then said to Theo, “Excuse me. I’ll be back,” and she and her father walked away — leaving Theo feeling as he did when he awoke from a good dream and tried in vain to recapture its details. He stood with his hands in his pockets a moment, then remembered his original plan, and went in search of food.

            His paper plate loaded to the point of bending with ham, green beans, potato salad, cornbread, Theo wandered out of the crowded kitchen for parts unknown. (Damn, he made eye contact with that woman again. I’m sorry, lady, he thought, I won’t look at your thigh ever, ever again, okay?) Standing together in the area straddling the living room and dining room were several others who had spoken at the funeral, including Ronald Jackson, who had led the anti-apartheid rally with Charles. They were having a lively discussion whose subject Theo could not make out from the other end of the dining room. He almost wondered if they were speaking actual words, if they weren’t using other means to exchange the ideas that were the currency of cool people, ideas whose ethereality could not be conveyed in such mundane vehicles of ordinary communication as if, when, but, how. Watching them, Theo thought he knew how a moth felt before a flame, attracted to what could kill it. What, after all, could Theo say to these people? What, besides embarrassment, would come from trying to talk to them? . . . . And how, other than talking to them, could he stop feeling they were real, he a figment of his own imagination?

            He went up to the group, standing at its edge, eating and watching, while they talked. Then, in a body, as if they shared thoughts but divided their expression, they turned toward Theo — silently, expectantly, wary but faintly amused. “Hi,” Theo said, glancing from one of them to the other. “I’m Charles’s friend Theo.”

Silence. No one said, “Oh, hi, nice to meet you,” or “So you’re Theo.” The group just stared at him, as if to say, Yes, and? “I’m an old, old friend of Charles’s from here in Washington,” Theo said. “I — um — liked what yall said at the funeral.”

            A pause. The group, blank-faced, continued to stare at him. Then Ronald Jackson said, “Yeah, you too. So you and Charles were friends growing up?”

            “Yeah.”

            “So what are you doing now?”

            As Theo answered, the skin between Ronald Jackson’s eyebrows puckered, as if from concern, or concentration; there was also the hint of a smile, like he was planning the witty way he would describe this conversation. Theo was looking ahead to something, too: the pain of thinking about how Charles didn’t seem to have mentioned Theo to his other, cooler friends.

            Then a man’s voice said, “Excuse me.” Theo felt a gentle hand on his upper arm. He turned to see two tall, fit, good-looking young men with close-cropped hair, who might have stepped out of a clothing ad and who looked enough alike to be brothers. “May we speak with you a moment?”

            “Uh — okay.” He turned back to Ronald Jackson and the others to say “Talk to you later,” but they had already gone back to their previous discussion. He followed the two men through the living room and outside. For what? It was a mystery. For a moment Theo imagined he was Johnson Jones.

In a deserted corner of the porch, the men turned to him, grave. The one who had spoken said, “Our mother says that you’ve been giving her some inappropriate looks. Would you say that’s true?”

            “Ah — no — I didn’t mean to —”

            “Listen.” The man pressed his fingertips together. “We’d appreciate it if you would stay away from our mother, including with your eyes. Or we’ll have to come talk with you again. Do you understand?”

            “I — yes.”

             The brothers eyed him a moment longer, then walked back in the house. Theo stood with his mouth open, holding his plate.

                                                *          *          *          *          *

            “How was the funeral?” Granddad asked from the living room sofa, where he sat watching TV.

            “Nice,” Theo said evenly, without breaking stride. He went straight upstairs to his room; he closed the door behind him and fell face-forward onto the bed, jacket still on. Pounding the mattress, he growled into his pillow, “Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck you, Charles Maddox . . .”