By Blood We Live Read Online Free

say—
deal.
I decided long ago that the far from total recall is a coping mechanism. Who, after all, is built to carry twenty thousand years’ worth of recollections? Too much luggage for the hold. Therefore bags and cases must be continually jettisoned and replaced, jettisoned and replaced. Otherwise flight would be impossible. Otherwise we’d crash. Only yesterday I’d said to Justine: You know, Juss, I sometimes think that if I remembered everything that’s happened to me, I’d simply die. And she’d looked at me with disturbing gentle exhaustion and said: I know, Fluff. You’ve told me.
    Except of course it turns out that
wasn’t
only yesterday.
    Los Angeles Times. Monday, 27 August 2012.
There were the facts, in black and white. I’d slept for twenty-one months. The better part of two years—gone.
    Justine had made me sit down in one of the study’s two obese armchairs—cowhide Thomasvilles decadently left behind by Las Rosas’former owners—while she’d gone to the kitchen to fix herself a drink. (Eagle Rare seventeen-year-old single-barrel bourbon, my nose said. She’s come a long way from her days of Jack Daniel’s and Coke.) Now she perched on the edge of the desk facing me, tinkling tumbler in one hand, American Spirit in the other. I’d found the softpack stuffed down the side of the cushion and lit one up myself. Blood-drink your fill and nothing rewards like nicotine. I remembered seeing the first colour billboards go up: MORE DOCTORS SMOKE CAMELS THAN ANY OTHER CIGARETTE ! Which detonated—along with chrome and fins and Elvis and ferocious canned laughter and Budweiser neons and the lady-shaped Coke bottle—the memory of a buxom stenographer’s dewey nape smelling of Elnett hair-spray and Pond’s cold cream, her tough-bra’d breasts filling my hands. Her apartment had a fold-out bed and an Alba record-player. In the bathroom cabinet hidden behind cosmetics and Band-Aids a flesh-coloured diaphragm in a plastic case like a scallop shell. She’d thought it was going to be a seduction. She’d thought it was going to be sex.
    “What do you remember?” Justine said.
    I felt the room tilt, intimate its mountains, cliffs of fall, got an inkling of how sick all this might make me feel, while all the Lears I’d ever seen went
O, let me not be mad, not mad sweet heaven
 … So I said, out of my dry mouth: “Well, thanks for easing me in gently.”
    “This is what you told me to do if this happened. You told me … Jesus, I can’t fucking believe this.”
    I didn’t blame her. Every morning for twenty-one months she’d woken up hoping the coming night would restore me. Every night for twenty-one months been denied. The study’s book-surrounded atmosphere bristled with how tightly that had wound her.
    “Are you even
here
?” she said. “I can’t believe it. Fuck.”
    I was very aware of my face, hot and overfull. In spite of the shock of twenty-one months gone I was still being ravished by the in-creeping sense of things meaning things. This is the gift of the blood: Slake the thirst and the world gestures beyond itself to an underlying blueprint. The world is a series of vivid clues to the riddle beyond appearances. The world has a purpose, a pattern, a story, a plot. The world has Meaning. Even Justine, standing there with the chunky tumbler and smoulderingcigarette, backed by Tiffany lamplight and red drapes, her dark eyes and her mouth like a bruise, the schoolboy haircut …
    “For fuck’s
sake,
” she said. “Hello?”
    “I’m sorry. You look like a Vermeer. Girl with Drink and Cigarette.” Which winked its connection to the memory of the stenographer’s diaphragm. Vermeer, Dutch, Dutch cap, diaphragm. It wasn’t continuous, this blood-joke of design, but it was, once you were back on The Lash, continu
al.
    Justine shook her head. Feelings jammed. Too much, too fast. Meanwhile I blew the rich smoke bullishly through my nose. The thought of sitting still and letting