Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

It is the ocean he is painting tonight, stroke by stroke, like Harold and his purple crayon, drawing a balloon as he falls.

He told her he was working on the great American novel or maybe just a paperweight made entirely out of paper.

“The day I sobered up, I stopped talking,” he says. “What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes—I don’t know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?”

It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.

Through the car’s speakers he can hear hurried activity as they prepare to review the tape. It is a record of another time, like a jar that holds the last breath of a dying man.