10 Read Online Free Page B

or neither, I couldn’t tell. In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.
    At some point I drifted off into strange dreams the radio penetrated and I woke with a start, convinced I’d heard shattering glass. It was 4:43 a.m. according to my phone, the menu screen of the DVD still on the wall, so we hadn’t lost power. I focused on what the voice in my ear was saying: Irene had been downgraded before it reached landfall, moderate flooding in the Rockaways and Red Hook, the phrase “dodged a bullet” was repeated, as was “better safe than sorry.” I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.
    I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, “Everything is fine, I’m going home now,” said it just so I could say I’d said it in case she was upset later that I’d left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.
    *   *   *
    When we uncoupled I thought I saw Alena’s condensed breath slowing in the air, but the apartment was too warm for that; regardless, her body returned to homeostasis, it seemed, much more rapidly than mine. She rose from the mattress and smoothed the dress she’d never taken off and I gathered myself and followed her onto the fire escape and took in the lights of the taller buildings that loomed around us, all of which were haloed now. She removed a cigarette from a pack that must have already been atop a sand-filled paint can and lit it by drawing a strike-anywhere match—whose provenance was obscure to me—across the building’s brick exterior. “Oh come on,” I said, referring to her cumulative, impossible cool, and she snorted a little when she laughed, then coughed smoke, becoming real.

    â€œThe storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.” —Walter Benjamin
    We chatted for the length of her cigarette about the show—the opening started in an hour or two—most of my consciousness still overwhelmed by her physical proximity, every atom belonging to her as well belonged to me, all senses fused into a general supersensitivity, crushed glass sparkling in the asphalt below. After she stubbed the cigarette out against the brick, a little shower of embers, I followed her back into the apartment, which was the gallery owner’s pied-à-terre. Alena went to a bathroom without turning on a light and I listened as she pissed; she didn’t flush, wash her hands, or, in that dark, consult the mirror.
    We left the apartment together, but, by the time we reached the street, Alena had explained that she’d prefer to arrive at the opening separately, as a jealous ex would be there, and she didn’t want to deal with the interrogation. I was a little stung, but, trying to mimic her nonchalance, said sure, that I’d planned to meet Sharon first at a café not far from the gallery anyway, then head over to the opening with her; we kissed