Arthur sat on the backyard deck staring into some infinite point in the distance, snow falling from bloated clouds like foam pellets. Had he chosen to sit out front, passersby would glom his globelike belly, rub it for good luck. But looking into his vast, gas stove flame eyes, they’d be forced to think again.

         Caressing the gun in his lap like a cat, he’d finally pierced through the veils of Maya, the layers of illusion. The only unanswered question was whether he’d shoot himself first, allowing his wife to discover that his head—“always full of schemes and dreams”—was now a jellied mess, a bone puzzle, a blobby sponge, or, shoot her first, then, facing the oversized and gaudy mirror in the living room she loved so much, shove the barrel into his own mouth. Either way, the “shit-for-brains” insults would finally be laid to rest.

         His wife Barbara would be wearing the leopard-skin stockings with matching earmuffs, gloves, and scarf, her recently dyed hair glimmering like the gold-leaf gilt frame of the mirror. Her flashing eyes would be ringed with black mascara, cracked lips muttering, “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

         He’d smile, inscrutably—further annoying Barb— but wouldn’t answer. He’d wait for her to place her shopping bags on the polished floor, her keys falling limp on the table. And when she looked up again, bam, game over, the sound shattering his eardrums, smoke rising from the gun’s hole like a snuffed out candle. But the ringing wouldn’t last long.

         There was a film here. Jim Jarmusch would direct. Black and white. Stark everything. Muted acting driven by gesture and suggestion. William H. Macy or Paul Giamatti would play the lead. Supporting actor? Julianne Moore, maybe? No, too young, too pretty, but someone with her callous bearing, her piercing frigidity. Handheld cameras would give it a documentary feel, a snuff film’s grainy matter-of-factness. It would take place in real time, unfolding within the length of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”: Seventeen-minutes and ten-seconds of pure rock-and-roll fury. Even now, the Hammond B3 organ swirls swelled in his mind—ethereal melodies reminiscent of a Christmas carol he couldn’t quite remember. But no, it was the Chambers Brothers’s “Time Has Come Today” that had the resonance, the gravity the film needed. Echo-chambered sound, cowbell slowing down to a clicking clock, fuzz-drenched guitar blitzkrieg melting into the “Little Drummer Boy”—everything devolving into a sonic maelstrom. It was only eleven minutes or so, so something would have to be cut.

         Sitting there, snowflakes powdering his head, Arthur scanned the weathered spines between the bookends of his life. A worn paperback copy of The Adventures of Arthur Arluck pressed against The World According to Art (dust jacket missing), followed by Portrait of an Electrician as a Young Man, and The Accidental Husband. The last pages of his life’s final volume, The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People, were almost complete. A posthumous work, Infinite Mess, might someday surface. He hacked up a laugh—a cat choking on a hairball.

         It was late March and it was snowing for the first time. Not that it was sticking. “Global fucking warming.” Growing up in Red Hook, Arthur waged snow wars against the neighbors. Sitting in Forest Hills now, his face impassive as the deck furniture—behind the house he had just finished making payments on—he recalled hiding behind massive snow dunes, digging deep trenches where he kept an arsenal of snowballs, his purpling hands blistered by the cold. Yeah, the world was getting hot. It’s going to hell alright. “And so am I.” A beatific grin spread across his face, a day’s worth of stubble pricking out over his jowls. The question now was whether he’d force his wife to join him in his descent.

         It wasn’t the affairs. After all, he’d known about them for many years now. He’d long since accepted her cheating as an integral component of their emotional grid, itself a complex network of indiscretions, deception, and silent betrayal. Her trysts began soon after their eldest died. So did his boredom. Barb needed someone emotionally available. He wasn’t. It was that simple.

         Arthur thought about his last words. He wavered between, “Fuck it,” and “Ohm.” A veil, gossamer-thin, separated the two.

         As the last electric strains of Time Has Come Today rang out in his mind, he heard the metallic click of the front door lock turning. Arthur echoed it with a snap of the revolver’s safety—a hoary frost covering the charcoal-gray handle—the answer finally clear in his mind.

         He stood up, flakes falling in a shower to the floor. “Fuck it,” Arthur said. It was time. Inhaling through his nostrils, he exhaled languorously, “Ohm,” and entered the living room.