Displacement Read Online Free

the sliver of light that strikes the ornately moulded closet door behind which she peers.
    The stimuli of the covers are Pavlovian as the glowing, gaunt-cheeked faces on magazine covers that beam next to article teaser-lines like “Pathogens in Your Handbag?” The books nurture a loving blend of envy and worry: envy for their comfortable settings and the lifestyles of their protagonists, and worry that those settings and lifestyles might be invaded. The delicious treat awaiting the buyer is the reassertion of normalcy after the Shadowy Men have accepted the adulterous invitation to trespass. The books are narcotics, as carefully marketed and tested as the soothing greens of the carpets between the bookstore shelves and the opiate greens on the logo of the coffee mugs sold in the adjoining cafe.
    The sight of the books, totems of what I would channel, crystallized a kind of armour around me. I felt safe—a walking vessel of potential. Where doubt had been, the dark angel of our times now entered, much in the way New Age charlatans are said to take their Atlantean and Alien “Walk-Ins.”
    I turned from the reliquary, and saw with a quiet laugh that a theatrically fine rain had begun to fall. The town I hated acknowledged my return in a way no former colleague on these streets could. I cloaked myself as a shadowy figure, a Dark Man backlit by halogen street lamps as I entered the walled campus. My shadow was long and looming on the beaded grass as I looked up and saw that the light was still on in Molino’s office.
    I used my old key to enter the department, and climbed the gorgeous oak staircase, leaving damp footprints with second-hand shoes bought that afternoon from a vintage store. Portraits of former department chairs looked at me with contempt. I was an excised tumour returning to their sacred body. I expected a rush of memories as I walked to Molino’s door. But I had tunnel vision, focused only on the task ahead.
    I knocked, unsure if the ache in my stomach was a last twitch of nerves or the cancer that nursed on my guts.
    “Come in.”
    The room had changed. Molino had changed.
    His new wife, a former student less than half his age, had made her loving Electra mark. I’d expected to walk towards Molino’s desk under the eyes of intellectual Patriarchs, not under eaves of ferns hanging rain forest-like from the ceiling. Gone were the oak-browns, blacks and greys. The colors of sand and deep-forest moss dominated the room. Through surgery or exercise or both, Molino had less of a paunch to sit into. His bottom-feeder face had become even less expressive. His moustache was trimmed. When his awful gaze focused on my face clumsily, the way an infant’s gaze finds the eyes of a stranger standing above its crib, it was as if it was a struggle for his face to express the disdain he wished it to.
    “Mr. Garrison,” he said, his voice accentuated by the gurgle of the tranquility fountain by his desk, “I think you should leave.”
    I don’t know why he said that. Perhaps others he’d screwed over had confronted him at night. Maybe scenes like this were something a crawling shit like him got used to.
    I dropped my shoulders, gave him the body language of submission, the posture of a whelp backing from a grey alpha wolf, in this, his forest-themed office.
    I reached in my overcoat, closed my fingers around the damp wood handle.
    I’ve no memory of bringing down the machete, only of the blow’s shuddering up my wrist and the twinge it cracked in my elbow. There was connection between us, a current passing through the blade that tingled in the brass rivets of the handle.
    His eyes still had their air of authority, though his right brow arched, as if some aspect of him were offended by the awful Truth that he was not a Prince, infallible in his reign, offended that he was nothing more than a fuck whose time had come. The death rattle seeping from his split mouth sounded like an objection, a refusal to accept the