Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Read Online Free

seemed to be that even though people had an obligation to report domestic disputes, they had no business trying to intervene in them. That was irresponsible and inflammatory, that was pouring gas on a conflagration. These days even the cops tiptoed onto the family battlefield with extreme caution, wary of getting blown off some wife-beater’s doorstep. So after considerable mental hemming and hawing, Brewster finally slunk back to bed, only to pass the rest of the night wide awake, alert for sounds of trouble.
    Locking his door the next morning, he spotted the young couple entering the elevator. They were holding hands like honeymooners, a sight that lightened Brewster’s good-citizen’s conscience, but his relief was almost instantly replaced by a surge of annoyance at the loss of a good night’s sleep. “Hey,” he called out, “hold that elevator!” But just two steps short of the elevator, the doors slid shut on the smirking face of Mr. Muscles. The fucker had deliberately punched the button on him. Brewster was convinced of it. What was the message there?
    Waiting for the elevator to clank back up to the fourth floor, Brewster wondered if Eva, who during the year he’d been seeing her had increasingly claimed the right to directthe improvement of his character, behaviour, and demeanour, wasn’t right when she claimed that his face was an open book, that whatever he was thinking was written all over it. One glance at his mug might have been enough to alert the button-puncher he was about to catch some blowback for creating all that racket the night before.
    Down in the lobby he ran his eyes over the bank of mailboxes. The super loved his label gun and had already replaced Mrs. Carpenter’s name with the names of the new occupants: Dina and Melvyn Janacek. At least if there was any more uproar
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Janacek, he wouldn’t have to risk challenging steroid-charged Melvyn face to face. He would be able to get his number from information, call him up, and read him the riot act. That is, if the Janaceks were listed. Maybe they didn’t even have a landline. A lot of people their age didn’t.
    Bleary-eyed, he spent the morning plowing through first-year English essays. After several hours of scrawling extensive suggestions to his students on how to improve their essay-writing skills, tips that would be inevitably and blithely ignored, Brewster began to experience something akin to writer’s cramp, twinges of discomfort that went scurrying up and down the tendons of his right hand. Soon he was feeling discomfort in his left hand too, as if some instrument like a darning hook was plucking at the nerves. This defied explanation since he was not using that hand at all; it simply lay quietly at rest on his desktop.
    His first class was at eleven o’clock. As he lectured, the joints of his fingers grew noticeably more painful, began to involuntarily, spasmodically clench and unclench. The students had spotted this bizarre tic and were obviously fascinated by it in a way they had never been fascinated by anything he had had to say about American literature.
    At noon, the weight of the lunch on his cafeteria tray made him wince when he lifted it. By early afternoon, a dull, unremitting background ache had lodged in the bones of his hand, broken by sudden bursts of acute, electric pain, as if a file was sawing on them. The intensity of these symptoms worried Brewster; he began to wonder if maybe some sort of esoteric virus wasn’t running amok in his body. Deciding that he needed to see a doctor, he rang up the university hospital’s clinic. Somebody had cancelled an appointment and there was an opening at three o’clock.
    After manipulating and probing his hands, the doctor asked a few impatient questions, wrote out an order for X-rays and a prescription for Tylenol 3, and told him to book another appointment. The receptionist was able to squeeze him in on the upcoming Friday. Brewster had the X-rays taken and the