Dear Mr. M Read Online Free Page B

the pilot looks over at his copilot. “Do you smell that?” he asks. Any number of little red lights blip on above their heads.
    The aircraft banks sharply and quickly loses altitude. The cabin fills with smoke. At home the cat stretches out on its rug by the fire and pricks up its ears: that must be the neighbor lady with the kitty chow! Sometimes the plane explodes at high altitude, at other times the pilots succeed in putting it down, with two stalled engines, on a military airstrip on some coral atoll. A landing strip that is actually far too short for aircraft that size. That evening the cat lies in the neighbor lady’s lap and purrs. If it’s a nice neighbor lady, she will adopt it. It doesn’t matter all that much to the cat, as long as someone keeps buying kitty chow and fish and heart.
    Last night I read
Liberation Year
and this morning I think about you as you take a shower. I have hesitations, as I’ve already mentioned, about the new material. They say that with most writers everything is already fixed in place, that after a certain age no new experiences are added. You’ve said that yourself, in more than one interview. I can hear and see you saying it, most recently on that Sunday-afternoon culture program.
    “After that age, there really aren’t any new experiences to have,” you said—and the interviewer was feeling kindly disposed, he pretended it was the first time he’d heard it.
    I don’t hear the shower above my head now. You’re drying yourself off, you’ll shave, then you’ll get dressed. With every air disaster, there’s always that one passenger who arrives too late and misses his flight. That passenger, too, put on his socks and shoes that morning.
I could have been on that plane,
he thinks. His life goes on—that evening, he’s able to simply put his socks in the wash.
    What if you had felt drawn to another apartment back then, and not this one? I don’t know, maybe you let your wife decide. It
is
a lovely street, after all: old trees, lots of shade, barely any traffic, almost no children playing outside. That last point is a bit of a shame for your daughter, you probably should have thought about that a bit more. But it’s certainly the ideal street for a writer who believes that no new experiences are going to come along.
    When you moved in, you didn’t bother to introduce yourself personally to your new neighbors. No need to do that. That’s what your wife is for.
    “We’re the new neighbors,” she said, and put out her hand.
    A small, warm hand.
    “Welcome,” I said.
    On that occasion, your profession remained unstated. That came later, the time I had my music on too loud.
    On
Seconds from Disaster,
there was an older couple who had never flown before. The plane tickets were a present from their children. Like all the other passengers, the older couple was played by actors. In the reconstruction of the final minutes of Flight 1622, they turned to each other for support. The children, too, were interviewed. The children were not played by actors. The children were real.
    I’m not sure, in other words, whether the new material would be of any use to you. So I’ll just give it to you in its most unpolished form. You’re completely free to do whatever you like with it. If you have any questions, just come downstairs.
    There are books in which the writer appears as well. As a character. Or there’s a character in the book who enters into a discussion with the writer. I’m sure you know the books I’m talking about. You wrote some of them yourself.
    That’s what makes this different. I’m not a character. I’m real.
    In high school, something happened that changed the rest of my life. In high school, children spread their wings. They no longer test their boundaries to the point where they’ve been drawn, they go beyond them. They no longer see their parents and teachers as adults who lead them by the hand, but as obstacles on the road to self-fulfillment. They