Chapter 112 – The Empty Room and the New Nightmare
November arrived in New York with the particular cold that settles into a city when the last of the October color has blown off the trees and there's nothing left to do but accept that winter is coming. But the chill Chandler felt had less to do with the weather and more to do with an apartment that had somehow become enormous and completely, oppressively silent.
The novelty of Joey's "independence" had lasted about four days.
Chandler had spent years complaining about the food disappearing from the fridge, about Joey monopolizing the phone, about living with someone whose taste in home décor suggested he'd been raised in a carnival. Now every one of those complaints had curdled into something worse — the specific loneliness of a place that used to have another person in it. Nobody yelled "Run, Yasmine, run!" during Baywatch reruns. Nobody stared longingly at the prize in his cereal box over breakfast. The apartment had never felt so large, and large had never felt so bad.
"I need a roommate," Chandler announced to the empty living room. His voice came back to him with a faint echo, which he chose not to examine too closely. "Someone who pays half the rent and does not use my toothbrush to clean things that are not teeth."
He posted notices on community boards, tacked flyers to laundromat bulletin boards, put a listing in a free weekly. The requirements were reasonable. The response from the universe was not.
The new roommate's name was Eddie.
If Joey had occasionally operated on a slightly different frequency than the rest of humanity, Eddie had apparently arrived from a completely different planet and was still adjusting to Earth's atmosphere. Within seventy-two hours, Chandler understood that he had not found a roommate. He had found a situation.
At three in the morning, he woke up to find Eddie crouched silently beside the bed, staring at him with the focused tranquility of someone meditating. "Your breathing evens out when you sleep," Eddie said, by way of explanation. "It calms me down."
Chandler did not find this calming.
Eddie kept a goldfish for approximately one week, then announced that it had "passed on" after "witnessing too much human suffering." He held a brief memorial in the bathroom. The following morning, a goldfish-shaped cracker had appeared in the bowl. Eddie introduced it to Chandler with complete solemnity: "This is the next chapter. It came back stronger."
He had also, at some point, developed a relationship with Chandler's favorite armchair. He called it Rosie. Every evening before bed, he would stand in front of it for up to thirty minutes, delivering a quiet summary of the day's events and current weather conditions. When Chandler asked him to please stop talking to the chair, Eddie looked at him with genuine concern and said, "Chandler. She can hear you."
Personal boundaries were not a concept Eddie had been introduced to. He wore Chandler's bathrobe. He used Chandler's razor, then complained that the blade was getting dull. He helped himself to Chandler's leftovers and then expressed mild surprise that the fridge wasn't more fully stocked.
Chandler tried being direct. He tried being firm. He tried a conversation that began with reasonable, measured language and ended with him standing in the middle of the living room pointing at the front door and saying, at considerable volume, "Eddie. I need you to pack your things and leave this apartment right now."
Eddie's most impenetrable defense, it turned out, was an almost total inability to retain unpleasant information. Any confrontation seemed to pass through him like light through a window — present for a moment, then gone, leaving no trace. An hour later he would reappear from wherever he'd been, holding a zip-lock bag of some unidentifiable dried fruit and wearing the expression of a man who had never had a difficult conversation in his life.
"Hey, buddy! Look what I found at that little market on Amsterdam. We should do a whole thing with these tonight — dehydrated produce party, what do you say?"
Chandler would stare at him and feel something behind his left eye begin to throb.
There was one afternoon where it almost worked. Chandler watched Eddie haul a small duffel toward the door, and the relief that moved through him was so intense it was almost physical. He was mentally composing a toast to his own empty apartment when the lock turned forty minutes later and Eddie's head appeared around the door, bright and unbothered. "Hey! The squirrels in Central Park were absolutely wild today — you missed it." He looked around the room. "Did someone move Rosie?"
Chandler sat down very slowly on the couch and stared at the middle distance.
He was, he felt, approximately one more midnight staring incident away from needing professional help.
While Chandler was navigating his domestic horror show, Bruce's life had shifted into a different gear entirely — the gear where pre-production stops being theoretical and starts demanding your full attention every waking hour.
Brooklyn Fantasia was moving.
The structural rewrite was underway. Taking Quentin's advice and the Before the Rain model seriously, Bruce had dismantled the screenplay's linear architecture and was rebuilding it as a circular, non-linear triptych. His apartment walls had acquired a dense ecosystem of index cards, color-coded timelines, and plot fragments connected by string, which Grace had walked in on one afternoon and responded to with a long look and the words, "This is either genius or a cry for help."
On the crew front, Sam had tracked down Jack Morales — the fight coordinator Leon Cox had recommended — through the contact Leon provided. Morales had read the script, liked the tone of the street sequences, and was willing to come on board despite the budget constraints. The paperwork was being finalized. Sam was also close to locking a storyboard artist, with a target of having both contracts signed by mid-November.
Casting was taking shape. Owen Wilson had signaled strong interest through his representatives, pending Spotlight Pictures' formal offer. For Vinny, Bruce had Sam block out the relevant shooting dates around Joey's Our Days schedule, with Estelle standing by to make the official approach once the timing aligned.
The machinery was moving. Which was exactly when Joey decided to throw a wrench into it from an unexpected angle.
Soap Opera Digest ran an interview with Joey Tribbiani the second week of November.
It had been a perfectly good interview right up until Joey, flattered by the attention and constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, decided to discuss his creative contributions to Our Days.
"Look, Dr. Drake Ramoray is a layered guy," Joey explained to the reporter, legs crossed, settling into the interview with the confidence of a man who has been in this business long enough to have opinions. "And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the scripted lines don't quite land the way they should. So I'll adjust. Polish it up a little." He waved a hand. "Like that episode with the conjoined twin surgery. The original line was something like, 'If we don't get her to the hospital, she won't survive.' I changed it to, 'If she doesn't receive immediate medical attention, her chances are not good.' More weight, right? More urgency. It tells you something about the doctor's mindset."
The reporter wrote it down. Joey, encouraged by the attention, offered several more examples of his on-set "refinements," apparently forgetting that most of them had been awkward ad-libs that the editing room had done its best to work around.
What Joey had not considered, not even briefly, was that "I rewrite the scripts because they lack punch" is not a compliment to the people who wrote the scripts — particularly when one of those people was a senior writer with a long memory and a demonstrated talent for making actors' lives professionally difficult.
The issue hit newsstands on a Thursday.
By Friday morning it was sitting on the coffee table at Central Perk, open to the relevant page. Ross frowned at it over his coffee. "Joey — are you sure this was a good idea? The writing staff is going to—"
"Ross." Joey leaned back expansively. "I'm helping them. I'm taking their foundation and elevating it. If anything, they should be sending me a card."
Rachel looked at the article. Then at Joey. Then back at the article.
Bruce read it that afternoon, felt a slow, familiar unease settle in, and pulled Joey aside. "You need to be more careful about what you say publicly regarding the writing staff. That's not a small thing."
"I know, I know," Joey said, nodding with complete sincerity. "You're totally right. I'll watch it."
He had forgotten this conversation by the time he got home.
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