Bech Is Back Read Online Free Page B

magma heaved. Who was this Henry Bech? What had led him up, up from his seat in his row in Miss O’Dwyer’s class, to this impudent presumptive scrawl of fame? Her severe ghost mocked him every time an “e” collapsed or a “B” shrivelled at his touch.
    Norma inspected his work. “These are wild,” she said. “There’s only one thing to do: get some piña coladas and stay up all night. I’m game.”
    “That makes one of us.”
    “You bastard. I’ve ruined my life waiting for you to do
some
thing and you’re going to do
this
. Then that’s it. This is the last thing I’ll ever see you through.”
    “As Joan of Arc often said to the Dauphin,” Bech said.
    His dream-forgetting mechanism drew a merciful curtain over the events of that night. At one point, after the last trip to the bar had produced a bottle of rum and a six-pack of grape soda, his signature reached up from the page and tried to drag him down into it. Then he seemed to be pummelling Norma, but his fist sank in her slack belly as in muddy water. She plucked an arrow from an unsigned sheet and fended him off. The haggard dawn revealed one box still to be opened, and a tranquil sea dyed solid Day-Glo. They walked along the arc of beach holding inky hands. “Bech, Bech,” the little waves whispered, mispronouncing the “ch.” He and Norma fell asleep diagonally on the bed, amid sliced cardboard. The commotion at their louvered door woke them to a surge of parched nausea. Two black men were loading the boxes onto a trolley. The bundles of opened and resealed wrapping paper looked altogether strange, indecent, and perishable out in the air, among the stark morning verities of sky and sand and sea. Bathers gathered curiously about the pyramid, this monstrous accumulation hatched from their cement egg. To Bech’s exhaustion and hangover was added a sensation of shame, the same shame he felt in bookstores, seeing stacks of himself. One of the black men asked him, “This all dere is, mon?”
    “There’s one more box,” Bech admitted. For the first time in two weeks, a cloud covered the sun.
    “Big jet from de state of Delaware at de airport waiting for Sea Breeze Taxi deliber all dese boxes,” the other black man explained. Suddenly, rain, in gleaming globular drops each big enough to fill a shot glass, began to fall. The onlookers inbathing suits scattered. The cardboard darkened. The ink would blur, the paper would wrinkle and return to pulp. The black men trundled away the mountain of Bech’s signatures, promising to return for the last box.
    In the dank igloo, Norma had placed the final sheaf of five hundred sheets, trim and pure, in the center of the table. She seated herself on her side of the table, ready to pull. Groggily Bech sat down, under the dome drumming with the downpour. The arrows on the top sheet pointed inward. Clever female fingers slipped under a corner, alert to ease it away. The two San Poco taximen returned, their shirts sopping, and stood along one curved wall, silent with awe of the cultural ritual they were about to witness. Bech lifted a pen. All was poised, and the expectant blankness of the paper seemed an utter bliss to the author, as he gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name.
    * Not to be confused with
The Chosen
, by Chaim Potok (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967). Nor with
The Chosen
, by Edward J. Edwards (London: P. Davies, 1950);
The Chosen
, by Harold Uriel Ribalow (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959);
Chosen Country
, by John Dos Passos (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951);
A Chosen Few
, by Frank R. Stockton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895);
The Chosen Four
, by John Theodore Tussaud (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928);
The Chosen Highway
, by Lady Blomfield (London: The Bahá’i Publishing Trust, 1940);
Chôsen-koseki-kenkyû-kwai
(Seoul: Keijo, 1934);
The Chosen One
, by Rhys Davies (London: Heinemann, 1967);
The Chosen One
, by