Amnesiascope: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

up there one or two things I’ve said. Starting at one end of his apartment and reading to the other, one comes away with a sum total of the Twentieth Century that’s rather different from what the century itself might have concluded. Ventura has been having a dispute with the Twentieth Century, and now that it’s over he just goes on disputing it, first the century and then the whole millennium. Ventura’s whole life is a dispute with the Twentieth Century and I’m the moderator, the referee. I watch for the low blows, the groin kicks, the cheap shots, while trying not to get belted myself in the process. I’m neutral not only on the century and the millennium but on God himself; let’s just say I’m reserving judgment. … Over the years Ventura and I each move from one apartment to the next in the Hamblin, trying to better situate ourselves, though for what I have no idea. He moves up the hall as I move down; he used to be in a larger apartment and moved to a smaller one, before I moved from my smaller apartment to the larger one. As he moves to smaller spaces he accumulates more and more pearls of wisdom on paper until there’s no more room on any more walls, at which point he begins to layer over: he never throws anything out, God forbid. Just once I’d like to see him throw something out, one of these little pearls of wisdom scribbled on paper, just so I could see which one it was; I wouldn’t even mind if it was mine. When the universe stops expanding and starts contracting, Ventura will start eliminating all these revelations until there’s only one left—and that’s the one I want to read. That’s the one I want to take with me to my grave.
    As for me, as I move to larger spaces I get rid of more things. I lose things as the universe expands; I’ll start accumulating when the universe contracts. There you have it in a cosmic nutshell, the difference between me and Ventura. Soon he’ll be living in a closet with more paper than the Library of Congress, and I’ll be living on the roof naked in my black leather chair. This morning when I go up the hall to see him he’s staring at his tarot, dealt out on the floor in the shape of a cross. He’s contemplating the meaning of the Queen of Cups, at the nexus of the cross. On the broken-down table that stands in the middle of his ever-shrinking apartment is the usual volume of mail he receives for the column he writes for the newspaper. Ventura’s sense of purpose is such that he will answer all these letters; he’s been writing the column since the first issue of the newspaper almost fifteen years ago. But now, between his fan letters and his empty typewriter, sitting in his fedora and his cowboy boots and the same shirt that’s always rolled up at the sleeves, he stares at the Queen of Cups. He almost always wears his fedora and cowboy boots, even in his own apartment; only very occasionally does he take off the hat, and every once in a while, if he’s feeling really familiar, he may even be seen in his socks. Staring at the Queen of Cups, he’s wondering who she is. He’s wondering if she’s his ex-wife or his current girlfriend or the woman who was his last girlfriend and may be his next. One of the most enduring and gratifying things about my friendship with Ventura is that when it comes to women, he’s even more screwed up than I am, the best and most compelling evidence of which is that he actually thinks I’m more screwed up than he is. “I’m not going to ask,” he says, “what it is they want. You haven’t heard me ask that.”
    “No.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of asking.”
    “Oh, go ahead,” I say.
    “No,” he shakes his head, “I wouldn’t think of it. It wouldn’t even occur to me.”
    “Actually, it’s easy.”
    “What?”
    “It’s easy. What they want. It’s the easiest question in the world.”
    “It is?” For a moment he’s alarmed. “All right, so … tell me.”
    “Everything.”
    “What?”
    “They want