Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Read Online Free Page B

laugh. My god, remember I’m supposed to think and feel and see for everyone—imagine!—that’s the true author’s business; and all the time Christ snoozes in his chair. There’s no patron for left-handed wretches. It’s bottoms up, buddy, for us. All right, snicker. You’ve never seen your face in Leonardo’s mirror. Laugh away. But poking about takes guts, all the same. Don’t pay for anything less.
    Some, of course I’ve never learned their names, anonymous Samoans maybe, saintly impersonal artisans who sit cross-legged braiding leaves to hang athwart their middles, take advantage of the natural terrain, incorporating, in the manner of collages, nails (around two such were drawn the feet of Christ, one nail for each, as though He had been hammered to the letter
H
, His hands represented in the same way except the fingers of the left were bent across a corner where a nail came through the wallboard from the other side, a shred of scarlet ribbon fluttering from the point like a trickle of blood, and I must say, though images don’t excite me very much, this one gave me a turn), andevery other accident and feature: bubbles in the paint, badly patterned plaster, the tracks of mounting tape, untanned squares where notices were hung, desperate old erasures and the paths of rags; flecks, picks, cracks, the heads of screws; stains, smudges, nicks, dents, pieces of paper; chips, smears, mars, knots, tears, condom and comb dispensers; scrapes, bumps, chinks, scars, furrows, burns, and the webs of spiders; clots of lifeless flies, mineral growths at the joints of pipes, even objects hung in space, dangling strings and naked bulbs and wires, for instance (in the toilet of a rural bar and billiard hall, incredibly forlorn, when I sat down to shit, the bulb blew me hugely on the wall, humped, rising out of the shadow of the stool like a giant out of granite, something by Rodin, brutish and primordial, and then I saw an outline on the wall, faint, in chalk, unsteady, often smeared, of someone else’s body, bent like mine, nearly the same, but with an arm outstretched and fingers fanned, though whether as a plea for aid or in salute or benediction it was impossible to say, and strangely compelled, I reached out cautiously, enclosing my shadow in the lines, and they fit like Cinderella’s slipper, they fit; that nameless idiot and myself, we fit; and when I examined the drawing more carefully I saw that the outline had been dotted in with something like the soft tip of a billiard cue, the points then joined with ordinary chalk; and so observing, I wiped myself and rose and spoke boldly to the giant as I stuffed my shirt into my trousers: but do you speak the language of the French,
mon frère
?), and, well, simply every imaginable matter: boards and pipes, hooks and other kinds of hardware, even previous compositions, whatever elements are given, just as the Aurignacian painters in their caves.
    Is there a groove where I may rest my sensitive arm? I know the joke: the grave. But what selection shall I play this three a.m. in honor of the snowing? There are twenty degrees of aged light and fat young snow. A gauge grins at me through a window whoseface frost is blearing. I shall play Ella Bend swaying in her shoe, a moronic look on her face. Silly fool. I hate her. I hate them all. That’s not a manner of speaking. I have only to write down their names and I hate them. They make my stomach turn …
    Except for Pister Welcome. There’s a possibility there. For something new. No need to hang another doodad of a moon in the morning sky. Do Greece? do Babylon?
Of Mice and Men
again? Pister Welcome was built like Gregory Peck, only he had the head of a chicken. The irony in his name was that Pister was a hermit. He lived in the woods beneath a huge pile of brush.
    Ah, thank the lord—Phil! It’s you. (Phil, a friend, is knocking at the gate of my heavenly study; doubtless he wishes to come in, to see me, visit a bit.) Come