Our friend Carlton was a friend until he wasn’t—though even at the end, he was still sort of a friend. What I mean is that we liked him and were sorry we had to kill him. We didn’t want him to suffer, or even know anything about it. We simply wanted to shoot him, bury him, and feel bad about it afterward. One second, he’d be there, and the next, he’d be gone. We guessed it would probably hurt a little, or even a lot, but not for very long. That was some consolation.
It wasn’t our friend Carlton’s fault that we had to kill him, not really. He hadn’t done anything wrong, or not to us. The details aren’t important, but it came down to money: money that had previously belonged to someone else and subsequently found its way to us, when maybe some people might have taken the view that it shouldn’t have. A woman was also involved, because a woman often is. This woman was a prosecutor who, along with the police, began putting pressure on Carlton to talk about the money in a way that wouldn’t be appreciated by its new possessors. Our friend Carlton seemed likely to buckle under this pressure, and once he cracked, who knew what might pour out? This wasn’t the first time we’d been involved in the redistribution of wealth, and we doubted it would be the last. In addition, we had to answer to others, and those others didn’t regard Carlton as a friend. To them, he was just a guy, and the world wasn’t about to run out of guys who were just guys anytime soon.
So we told our friend Carlton that the men who weren’t his friends, or ours, wanted us to retrieve something for them, and this would require a certain amount of digging in the dead of night. We’d performed similar duties before, because the unfriendly men were in the habit of burying things that occasionally had to be dug up again or, more often, had to be buried and stay that way. Our friend Carlton was about to fall into the second category.
I didn’t fire the fatal shot. I offered to, but Stanhope said he’d take care of it. I think he was worried I might hesitate at the last. Carlton was a friend to both of us, but he was more Stanhope’s friend than mine, or so Stanhope claimed—perversely, I suppose, seeing as how he was so willing to shoot Carlton. I disagreed but kept this to myself because I didn’t suppose it mattered. We had reached the point in our relationship with Carlton where gradations of friendship were largely inconsequential.
I don’t recall much about the shot. Stanhope didn’t give us any warning. We were walking in the woods by Tabernacle Township, Carlton and I, with Stanhope behind, when next thing I heard the gun go off, and Carlton went down halfway through a sentence. There wasn’t much blood because Stanhope used a .22 hollow point, which meant all the bullet’s energy was absorbed by Carlton’s brain tissue. It’s the exit wound that usually creates a mess. A mess leaves evidence, which can lead to arrest and a significant loss of liberty. The hollow point made a small hole entering our friend Carlton’s head, and then stayed in there, going about its business. Carlton twitched some after he fell, but it was all electrochemical. It wasn’t like he was trying to get up or anything. By then, he was already deceased.
We buried him not far from where he’d died. Stanhope told me later that he’d scouted Tabernacle a few days before to pick the best spot. He’d shot our friend Carlton where he did because nearby were building materials that had been dumped by a contractor, including stone waste. The way Stanhope figured it, we could drop Carlton in a hole and put stones on top of and around the body. If we did it right, we’d avoid subsidence, as nothing says BODY BURIED HERE like subsidence.
So that was what we did: we dug a hole, dropped our friend Carlton into it, added the stones, refilled the hole, and scattered leaves and branches over the dirt so it looked like any other area of ground. We didn’t bother offering a prayer, because Carlton wasn’t religious, but we wished him well and told him we were sorry it had come to this. Then we checked the surrounding area to ensure none of us had dropped anything that might later prove embarrassing and retraced our steps to the car. We were quiet on the ride home. Like I said, we liked Carlton.
It’s important to note where we interred Carlton, by which I mean it was a regular patch of forest. Our friend Carlton wasn’t even the first guy buried out there. People in our line of work had been burying bodies in parts of Wharton State Forest and the Pinelands for so long it was a wonder there was any space left for new arrivals. During the seventies and eighties, so many holes were being made that it started to resemble a gravediggers’ convention, and someone could have performed a valuable act of public service by keeping a discreet note of the resting places so nobody would be in danger of selecting a spot that was already occupied.
At least, we thought, Carlton wouldn’t be lonely.
Stanhope and I picked up some Chinese food and ate it at the kitchen table. When we were done, Stanhope went to his room while I stayed up to think about Carlton. I decided that Stanhope was definately wrong, and Carlton had been more my friend than his. I was really going to miss Carlton, while Stanhope would just find a new friend to replace him. People were interchangeable to Stanhope. They were his friends until they weren’t, and he liked them until he didn’t. I sat there, not watching TV, and realized that someday, if the need arose, Stanhope would put a bullet in my head, and then he’d have a vacancy for a new friend. This caused me to wonder if Stanhope and I were really friends at all. Stanhope, I decided, lacked depth of feeling.
I don’t recall when I went to bed, only that it was later than usual. Stanhope was sleeping silently, or I supposed he was asleep. He might have been lying awake, listening, just in case I was nursing some resentment about the manner in which he’d killed our friend Carlton. I was glad Carlton hadn’t died scared or in too much pain, but I was starting to wish that I’d had a little longer with him—you know, to say goodbye. I also didn’t like how Stanhope hadn’t given Carlton time to complete his final sentence. It struck me as rude, like whatever our friend Carlton might have had to say wasn’t important enough to allow him the couple of seconds required to finish it. Maybe Stanhope had always considered Carlton’s conversation unsatisfactory at best. It was true that Carlton could be poor company, and I would sometimes find excuses to do something other than listen to him, even if that something else was a chore, like laundry. But it wasn’t as though Carlton would be boring anyone for much longer, not with Stanhope walking behind him in those woods. Would it have hurt Stanhope so much to let our friend Carlton conclude what he was saying?
I wished I could recall what it was that Carlton had been talking about, but I wasn’t paying attention. Had I known Stanhope would choose that moment to kill him, I’d have listened more closely. I might even have been able to finish Carlton’s sentence for him. After all, his thoughts weren’t so original that I couldn’t have figured out the ending for myself. Maybe that was why I was annoyed with Stanhope: because it was easier than being annoyed with myself.
I woke to the sound of Stanhope calling my name. I made a point of putting on my robe before I went down because the robe had two pockets, in one of which I placed my gun. Stanhope was still playing on my mind, and I kept my hands in my pockets as I headed down, with my right clutching the little pistol. The kitchen light was on, and Stanhope was standing in the doorway. He was wearing shorts and didn’t have a gun, only a glass of milk.
“What is it?” I asked.
Stanhope pointed to his right, at something I couldn’t see. He tried to speak, but no words came out, so instead he shrugged and went on pointing.
Our friend Carlton was seated at the kitchen table. He had dirt on his cheek, in his ears, and clogging his nostrils. Dirt was smeared on his face and clothes, lodged under his fingernails, and stuck between his teeth. There was even dirt jammed in the bullet hole in his head. I could see it from where I stood, because Stanhope hadn’t shot Carlton in the back of his balding skull but on the left side.
“Carlton?”
I didn’t know what else to do other than call his name, and once I’d done that, I wasn’t sure what to say next. I couldn’t see any point in asking if he was okay because clearly he wasn’t, and apologizing for what had happened out in the forest might have come across as insincere. But Carlton didn’t react. He just stared at the kitchen table, his hands lying flat on the wood.
“How did he get here?” I asked Stanhope.
“Walked, I guess.”
“It’s thirty miles. That’s, like, ten hours, minimum.”
“Faster, if you’re in good health,” said Stanhope.
We both looked at Carlton.
“Okay,” said Stanhope. “Ten hours, but it could be more.”
I checked the clock on the wall.
“It’s only been eight since we buried him.”
Stanhope went to the window, giving our friend Carlton a wide berth along the way, and peered through the drapes.
“I don’t see a car,” he said.
“You think he drove himself?”
“Or someone else did. They could have picked him up on the side of the road and dropped him off outside.”
I told him that didn’t seem likely. Anyone seeing our friend Carlton on the side of the road, looking like he did, would either have put their foot down hard or called the cops. Also, Carlton didn’t appear to be in any state to tell someone where he lived, and we’d removed his wallet before burying him.
“Could be they knew him,” said Stanhope. “If they knew him, they also knew us, and decided the best thing was to bring him back here, where we could deal with whatever had happened.”
I admitted this was more plausible than picturing Carlton behind the wheel of a car, but not by much.
“I have another question,” I said. “How did he get in?”
I’d noticed that the back door was bolted from the inside. I glanced at the front door and saw the necked door bolts were in place, so Carlton hadn’t come in that way either. Meanwhile, the kitchen window was closed, and I couldn’t feel a breeze from anywhere else.
Stanhope went into the living room, after which I heard him go upstairs. I stayed with our friend Carlton. It was awkward, and I was glad when Stanhope returned.
“They’re all closed, every window,” he said.
I nodded at Carlton.
“Excuse us,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”
Stanhope and I stepped outside, but we kept the kitchen door open so we could watch Carlton through the gap between the door and the frame.
“That bullet must have rattled around in there without killing him,” I whispered to Stanhope. “It should have put his lights out completely, but instead, a couple stayed on—though it still doesn’t explain how he got here.”
“I don’t care how he got here,” said Stanhope.
“What matters is that he leaves again. We need to put him back in the ground while it’s still dark.”
I went to get dressed while Stanhope remained with Carlton, and then Stanhope and I swapped places. Throughout, Carlton didn’t move much, or not beyond slow, irregular blinks. I didn’t even notice him breathing, though he must have been getting air in somehow because I detected a soft whistling sound from either his nose or mouth.
Stanhope reappeared, carrying a black sports bag.
“Any change?” he asked.
“None. Let’s get him up.”
Stanhope coughed awkwardly.
“Carlton,” he said, “we’re going to take you to the emergency room, okay?”
I glared at him.
“What?”
“Seriously?”
It was wrong, lying to our friend Carlton like that, especially after what we’d done to him. Carlton might have been dull, but he wasn’t an idiot.
“Sorry,” said Stanhope.
We each took an arm, placed a hand under an armpit, and lifted Carlton. He came up easily, so we didn’t have to take a lot of his weight, and he allowed us to guide him to the back door. I used my free hand to open it because Stanhope had the sports bag. I checked that the street was empty before leading Carlton to Stanhope’s Chevy. Stanhope hit the remote to open the trunk.
“We can’t put him in there,” I said.
“Why?”
“Look at him. He’s our friend. He’s Carlton.”
Stanhope seemed inclined to differ—maybe on both counts, since there wasn’t much of Carlton left, not after what the hollow point had done. However, we didn’t have time to argue. We had to get on the road. We put our friend Carlton in the back seat, and after a short discussion, I agreed to sit with Carlton because Stanhope didn’t want to drive with him behind and the two of us in front, just in case Carlton panicked or began to foam at the mouth and we all ended up wrapped around a tree.
Stanhope was of the view that we should put Carlton in the same hole because it would save a lot of unnecessary digging, but I convinced him otherwise. Initially, we assumed Carlton had managed to crawl from the hole unaided. Still, the more I considered it, the more it seemed that someone must have helped him. It’s one thing to dig yourself out from under dirt, and another to do it from under dirt and heavy stones. If Carlton had received help, it meant that at least one other person knew where we’d buried him the first time. When Carlton disappeared again, that would be the first place they’d look.
“If you’re right,” said Stanhope, “they could be watching us now. They may have been watching us from the moment they delivered Carlton to the house.”
But I didn’t think so. I’d been checking for signs we were being followed—which was unsettling because it meant I had to lean against Carlton—and hadn’t spotted a tail, though I admit that the darkness meant I was judging solely by the absence of headlights. We were on a side road, and I hadn’t seen a car behind us for some time. I’d even made Stanhope pull over so I could get out and listen for a drone hovering above, but I’d heard nothing, felt nothing. I had a sixth sense for surveillance. I don’t know how I’d come by it, but it had served me well, which was why I’d never spent a day in jail. That instinct was one of the reasons Stanhope liked to work with me, and it was how we ended up sharing a house—me, Stanhope, and our friend Carlton. Sometimes, people laughed at us or passed comments, but they didn’t laugh for long, and never repeated those comments.
This time, we didn’t drive as far as Tabernacle, but picked a spot west of Shamong, in Pinelands National Reserve. We knew the area because the three of us used to like eating at Christine’s House of Kingfish Barbecue, which wouldn’t be the same anymore now that Carlton was no longer with us—or should not have been with us and was destined not to be with us again, if you see what I mean.
We parked under some trees, out of sight of Atsion Road, and walked Carlton into the woods. I guided Carlton by the arm, with Stanhope walking behind us. We’d put blue plastic covers over our shoes, held in place with rubber bands, but Carlton gave no indication that he noticed. We hadn’t done it the first time because that Carlton, the old Carlton, would have begun to wonder why we might have wanted to avoid getting dirt caught in the soles of our shoes while he didn’t have to worry about it. But this Carlton, the new Carlton, wasn’t worried about anything, or not that I could see, and the covers would save us having to scrub our shoes when we got home, like last time.
I’d asked Stanhope to cough when he was ready, as I didn’t want to be deafened or injured. When I heard him cough, I let go of Carlton’s arm and stepped smartly to the left so Stanhope would have a clear aim. Stanhope had loaded the sawed-off with 00 buckshot, so one second, our friend Carlton had a whole head, and the next, he had part of one, since the top half had vanished from the bridge of his nose up. Carlton pitched forward and lay on the ground but didn’t twitch this time. Stanhope took two carbon steel folding shovels from his sports bag, and together we dug a fresh grave for Carlton before rolling him in. The sawed-off had made a mess, so we cleaned that up as best we could. We didn’t have any discarded construction materials to hand this time, so we made do with thick branches, forming a mound of wood and dirt over Carlton. When we were finished, Stanhope produced a bottle of bleach from his bag and emptied it over the shovels. We got back to the car, where we took the covers from our feet, folded the shovels, and put the covers and shovels in a black garbage bag that we threw into Atsion Lake as we neared the 206.
Afterward, we went home directly and retired to our respective bedrooms. Within minutes, I heard Stanhope snoring, but I couldn’t sleep. I’d thought about sharing with Stanhope what I’d noticed about our friend Carlton while sitting next to him in the car, but in the end, I’d opted against it. I told myself I might have been mistaken. Even if I wasn’t in error, I doubted Stanhope would have believed me.
The pumping of blood by the carotid arteries produces pulses in a person’s neck. You can feel the carotid throbbing if you put your finger in the groove alongside your windpipe. If you look closely, you can see it too. But the action of our friend Carlton’s left carotid pulse wasn’t visible, even with the light on in the car. When I helped him out, I made a point of taking him by the wrist, where I couldn’t feel a pulse. I could only conclude that Carlton was dead, but the message hadn’t made it to his brain. I didn’t know how or why. I wasn’t a doctor. It might have been an intriguing avenue for medical science if I’d been able to tell anyone about it without going to jail. But the only person I could have told was Stanhope, a negativist, so I kept it to myself.
Our friend Carlton returned the following night. I don’t know what time, only that when I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee at around 8 AM, there he was, sitting at the kitchen table, just as he had been the previous night. His head was more or less intact, apart from the original hole made by the .22. Even the dirt on his face and in his nose and ears looked the same.
I called Stanhope, and once he’d gotten over the shock, which took a while, the two of us ended up sitting with Carlton, trying to figure out what we should do.
“I ought to tell you,” I said to Stanhope, “that I think our friend Carlton is dead.”
I watched Carlton as I spoke, to see if he might react to the news, but he didn’t.
“He ought to be, but he isn’t,” replied Stanhope. “He ought not even to have much of a head, but he does.”
“What I mean,” I continued, “is that he was dead the first time as well. I checked when I was getting him out of the car, and I couldn’t find a pulse.”
“And you didn’t think to inform me of this?”
“I was worried about being mistaken, or called crazy.”
Tentatively, Stanhope touched two fingers to Carlton’s left wrist.
“Nothing,” he said.
He brushed his fingers against his shirtfront before figuring that might be an insufficient precaution to take. He went to the sink to scrub his hands clean with soap.
“We can’t keep him here,” said Stanhope.
“I never suggested we should.”
But Stanhope just kept talking, as though I had, in fact, done just that, and only by steamrolling me would he get his way.
“The whole point was to make him disappear before he could be arrested or subpoenaed. The police could show up anytime, not to mention some of our associates.”
By “associates,” Stanhope meant the men to whom we answered. They wouldn’t understand about our friend Carlton, no matter how hard we tried to explain. They’d think we were screwups who couldn’t even put a guy in the ground right. Most probably, they’d do what we had done, which is try to kill Carlton again, except this time they might kill us too. That was the kind of men they were. If they’d been reasonable, they’d have found a different line of work. And it wasn’t as if we could call anyone else—like, I don’t know, the American Medical Association, or Ripley’s—because then we’d have been forced to explain how our friend Carlton had come by the hole in his head.
“So what do you want to do?” I asked.
“We go again.”
Stanhope went down to the basement, leaving me with Carlton. I spent a while looking into Carlton’s eyes, but I couldn’t figure out whether there was life in them, not then. If anything was going on in his head, it wasn’t showing.
Stanhope kept a roll of plastic sheeting in the basement, for emergencies. By the time he told me to bring Carlton down, he’d spread the sheeting on the floor, and we positioned Carlton in the middle, facing away from the stairs. Stanhope, who had stripped to his underwear, then hit Carlton on the head with a sledgehammer, hard enough to break his skull. Carlton dropped, but Stanhope kept hitting him until his arms got tired and Carlton didn’t have any head at all. Stanhope took a few minutes to catch his breath before going to work with his power tools. I left him to it. I’d only have been in the way.
By the time Stanhope was done, our friend Carlton had been cut up into fourteen or fifteen pieces, each of which Stanhope placed in its own garbage bag. He wrapped the pile of garbage bags in the plastic sheeting, added some old dumbbells for weight, sealed the package with T-Rex Brute Force tape, and took a shower. That night, we drove to Oswego Lake, where a buddy of Stanhope’s kept a boat. We put the package in the boat, rowed out to the middle of the lake, dumped our friend Carlton, and were home by midnight. Stanhope admitted to being cautiously optimistic that this might mean the end of it, but I wasn’t so sure. We both tried to sleep, but I wasn’t too surprised to wake up just before 4 AM to hear Stanhope’s bedroom door opening, followed by footsteps on the landing. I went to join him.
“I just thought,” he said, “you know…”
We went downstairs. The kitchen door stood open. Stanhope sagged with relief. He turned to me.
“Let’s never speak of this again,” he said.
We shook hands on it, and when we looked again at the table, our friend Carlton was back.
You might have expected our sanity to have taken a hit, or for one or both of us to have fled, but we didn’t. First of all, our associates would have found us in the end, which wouldn’t have gone well. Had they not found us, the police would have, and that wouldn’t have gone well either.
But for Stanhope, our friend Carlton also represented a problem to be solved. Carlton was an affront to Stanhope’s professionalism and sense of order. If he’d left Carlton for someone else to deal with, he’d never have slept well again. It would have bothered him forever. Stanhope didn’t even like leaving dishes unwashed after a meal.
That afternoon, Stanhope went on a buying expedition. It took him a while, because he couldn’t purchase everything he needed in one store for fear of attracting attention. He spent the evening getting the mix right before instructing me, once again, to bring Carlton down to the basement. He handed me a mask as soon as I arrived—he was already wearing his—and again hit Carlton on the head with the sledgehammer, but not so hard this time, just enough to knock him out. Then Stanhope and I carried our friend Carlton to the big, new metal tub and carefully lowered him into the acid. Stanhope asked me to stay and help him stir. I could hardly refuse, as he’d done all the heavy lifting up to then.
Dissolving a body in acid is a time-consuming process. If the acid solution is too strong, it’ll burn through the container; too weak, and you’d better clear your schedule for the week. Thankfully, Stanhope was an expert, and within twenty-four hours, our friend Carlton had been reduced to soup. We drained the acid and poured what used to be Carlton into a barrel, which we then buried near the Costco Wholesale up by Manahawkin. By then, it was after midnight, and only as we were nearly home did I realize we’d buried the barrel about three or four miles from Lazarus Preserve, as the crow flies. This I took to be a bad omen, but again, I elected not to share it with Stanhope, on account of how he’d tried so hard to solve our problem.
Our friend Carlton didn’t appear that night, but he did appear the following night. What I took from this was that it had something to do with when he was put in the ground, disposed of, or however you want to phrase it. If it happened before midnight, he’d be back by the morning of the next day; after midnight, and it would be sometime the following day. To be fair, hindsight may be at work here, as we were given ample opportunity to test the theory.
Over the next week, Stanhope and I tried dismembering Carlton a second time and burying the body parts in different spots; burning him in a crematorium oven; tying weights to him and dropping him in the water from the Hudson River Palisades; putting him, limb by limb, through an industrial meat grinder; sticking him in a car crusher; and interring him deep in wet concrete before watching from an Airbnb as the construction workers arrived and started work above him. On that last occasion, Stanhope remained at the Airbnb while I returned to the house to check the kitchen and call Stanhope after.
“He’s here,” I told Stanhope, who was so annoyed that he left a bad rating for the Airbnb owners, even though the place was perfectly nice.
Someone once told me that you can apply Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief to any difficult situation. If so, Stanhope never got beyond depression, which is stage four, though he also remained angry, which is stage two. He couldn’t understand why our friend Carlton wouldn’t, or couldn’t, accept that he was dead and do what dead people did, which was stay that way. Stanhope became obsessed, and it got so that even his personal hygiene, about which he’d previously been very mindful, grew to be neglected. I started leaving the Carlton problem to him because I had other things to do, like trying to keep a roof over our heads while explaining to our associates why Stanhope couldn’t make it to work that day.
I should add that we stopped disposing of Carlton on a regular basis, as nobody has that kind of time on their hands. Sometimes, we’d leave him in the basement for days and days, though we kept him chained to a galvanized steel ring as a precaution. We also left the TV on, for company. We were lucky that, on the two occasions the police came by, Carlton was absent by reason of attempted destruction, and we claimed to have no knowledge of where he might be. The police had their suspicions, though, and we were both questioned. A few of the neighbors told the police that they often heard us coming and going late at night, but it happened so often that it wasn’t as though the police could look at one instance and say, “Ha! That must have been the night you killed your friend Carlton”—not unless we were doing it every night, which for a while we pretty much were. Even if they had somehow tracked us to one of those disposal spots, they wouldn’t have found anything. Out of curiosity, Stanhope and I dug up that first grave in Tabernacle Township, only to find it empty. We weren’t completely shocked. In fact, had we discovered our friend Carlton’s rotting corpse down there, it would have raised more questions than it answered.
After a while, the police gave up calling, but not before they obtained a final warrant to search the house. They brought in a forensics team, and Stanhope and I had to stay at a motel for a couple of nights under police guard. The forensics team came up with nothing. There was no trace of Carlton, even though I’d lost count of the number of times Stanhope and I had butchered him in the basement, or periodically the bathroom for a change of scenery. I think it might have been for the same reason that his grave was empty. Each time we eliminated our friend Carlton, he dispersed, every atom of him, only to be reconstituted as recently deceased Carlton, complete with bullet hole.
The funny thing was that I had started to come to terms with Carlton’s continued presence in our lives. I suppose I’d reached Kübler-Ross’s fifth stage, or some version of it, the one Stanhope couldn’t quite get to. In fact, so frustrated and unhappy was Stanhope becoming that, unbeknownst to me, he stopped drugging, shooting, or stunning Carlton before attempting to get rid of him. Only when he admitted to feeding our friend Carlton to hogs while he was still conscious, or what passed for it, did I begin to experience serious reservations about Stanhope. His disclosure also explained something I’d noticed lately about Carlton: his eyes had changed. I might have been wrong, but I thought I saw pain in them. Somewhere in there, our friend Carlton was remembering, and with remembrance came suffering.
Meanwhile, Stanhope was proposing ever more inventive ways to liquidate Carlton, many of them completely impractical. I remember something about jet engines, or maybe it was rockets, and another to do with a volcano in Iceland. Finally, Stanhope produced a design for a contraption based on a work of conceptual art that he’d read about in the New York Times. It involved putting our friend Carlton in a tank filled with maggots, which would consume his flesh. Those maggots would then grow into flies, which, upon taking their first flight, would zoom straight into a bug zapper, whereupon they would fall back into the tank, providing sustenance for more maggots, which would become more flies, which—
You get the picture. It was undoubtedly ingenious, our friend Carlton undergoing perpetual destruction in a closed-loop system, but I couldn’t countenance it and told Stanhope so. I’d had enough. I told him he ought to leave Carlton be, but Stanhope couldn’t. It simply wasn’t in his nature.
I buried Stanhope down at Swan Bay, not far from Lower Bank Cemetery, where his parents were interred. He didn’t suffer. He didn’t even know anything about it. That night, I sat in the kitchen until long after sunrise, but Stanhope didn’t return, not that day or any other, which was a relief.
Now it’s just Carlton and me. He stays in the basement during the day, with the TV. At night, I take him outside to the back porch, where we sit in companionable silence. Some might regard it as a mundane existence, but I don’t mind. I don’t think Carlton does either. He always was more my friend than Stanhope’s anyway.