Demons Read Online Free

run the country moved to these pristine little islands offshore, and the entire rest of the country works in waste dumps—either they work in them, burning and shoving stuff around with big machines, or they pick through them. Literally millions of people picking through a waste dump thousands of miles across . . .”
    “Oh, you must be exaggerating. Surely not the whole country. Bring me that blue teapot.”
    “I’m not exaggerating. That country is literally one giant dump—there is no farmland, there are no wetlands, there are no forests, and there are only a few towns left. It’s all dump. Barges come from North America, Mexico, Brazil . . . from the neighboring countries. And people will live and die in that dump. Can you imagine? It’s like a great festering sore on the epidermis of the planet—and it’s not alone. Why, in Asia—”—
    “Ira?” She touched my arm. Her fingernails alternated silver with black flecks and black with silver flecks. “The sick get better. The world will suffer, and this will make it see what it has done, and it will heal itself. It will.”
    I guess we both understood, she and I, that it was a sort of script we had together. The tacit script brought me to her, and I’d tell her that the world was in Hell for this reason or that, and she’d tell me there was hope, that it would someday be all right, and not to give up on life. I guess we both knew that I came to her for a sort of mothering—my own mother had died when I was fifteen, from the amphetamines her boyfriend shot into her. I guess we both knew that when Melissa said there was hope for the world that it really meant there was hope for me.
    Melissa always plays along. She is all generosity. She doesn’t seem to mind.
    I wonder if she wouldn’t mind if I made love to her.
    “There’ll be hard times,” she was saying, “but the world will heal.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe so.”
    She took her hand away. “Would you carry the toast plate? I’ll get the teapot and the cups.” Not an allocation of duty made at random: She took the most breakable stuff herself. I was notorious for my clumsiness.
    “Sure. I’ll get it.”
     
     
    We ate breakfast, Paymenz and his daughter and me, out on the molded balcony. Breakfast of a sort: We consumed a stack of margarine-slick toast and bloodred tea at the tilting glass-topped wrought-iron table on their concrete balcony, overlooking a mist-draped west San Francisco, under a lowering sky, listening to pigeons cooing from the roof and sirens sighing from the projects, and the thudding rise and fall, like armies passing, of hip-hop boxes booming in the asphalt plaza below.
    I watched the traffic on the boulevard visible betweenthe glassy buildings of the hospital complex. The traffic pulsed one way, then came to a stop; and the traffic from the cross street pulsed by; then the first artery would resume pumping. Cars and trucks and SUVs and vans; about 20 percent of them were electric now. Was the air cleaner with the electric cars? Not much—there were so many more people now, which meant many more cars of both kinds.
    The professor spoke of his wrangles with the university personnel board, his demands for back pay; and despite his promise he asked me to look at the bladders and the entrails he had cut open and kept in an ice chest with some of that perma-ice stuff, so that he could scry the patterns that would become the future. And I said no, I would be content if Melissa would bring out her Tarot cards, for Tarot cards have no appreciable smell, and he had just said, “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.” Just then, the mist that had been hanging in the air seemed to drift upward over the plaza, and the clouds overhead developed drippy places on their undersides, like the beginnings of tornadoes, but which expanded into thick globules of vitreous emulsion, like drops hanging from the ceiling of a steam bath, getting heavier and heavier. The birds had fallen