Farewell Navigator Read Online Free

his apartment and stay an hour or two, coughing on his smoke, listening to crackly records whose brilliance he says I don’t appreciate.
    There is often a pile of dishes crusting next to the sink. Not in the sink, because Horace needs the sink for watering and draining his large pots of decorative nightshade. You don’t have to, he might say feebly, as I turn the taps, to which I reply, It’s not a big deal, because it isn’t, after all, a big deal to soap and rinse a few cups. So why doesn’t he wash them himself? I accuse my mother of raising a boy who can’t do his own dishes and of raising a girl who feels obliged to do them. Don’t give me that, she says, did you check the bathroom? and I nod and say, Just mouthwash! because it would not ease her mind to tell her what is in my brother’s medicine cabinet.
    What are you writing about for your class? I ask when theplates are dripping on the rack, September wind pushing the panes, night ready to fall.
    Some bullshit, he says.
    Story or poem?
    You could call it a story, he says, if you were feeling generous.
    About what?
    You’re asking the wrong question, he says, pressing his finger down on a little spider inching across the stacked guitar cases that serve as a coffee table. Die, die, my darling, he whispers before announcing, A salt-worthy story isn’t about something—it is that something itself.
    Then what is the something that your story is?
    Bullshit, my brother replies.
    If he happens to be in a good mood, he will ask me a question or two. How is my sell-out job? Have I found a boyfriend yet or is there no man alive under the age of fifty willing to go to bed with me at ten P.M. ? Do I derive satisfaction from my sellout job? Do I remember that I used to be creative, back in childhood when I made dolls out of pebbles and felt? Can I lend him eighty dollars? Does Mom consider him pathetic? Would Dad have considered him pathetic? If eighty’s too steep, how about sixty?
    When his mood is not good, he goes on choked tirades about the other students in his writing class. Do I understand the ridiculousness of these people? They have experienced nothing of life. They are naive, dull-witted, they are sheep blinking in the glint of the blade—which is to say, he explains, they can’t think for themselves and have no idea the government’s hand hangs poised to slit their chubby throats.
    Is that a metaphor? I ask.
    No, Horace says.
    And the students’ writing is so bad—so appallingly, devastatingly bad—the word wretched springs to mind and their puny efforts to sound deep fail so miserably the word failure is actually charitable and my brother can’t figure out why a single one of these people chose to pick up a pen in the first damn place. It’s not as if they have talent. It’s not as if they have anything, and Horace means anything , to say.
    Maybe they just like to write, I suggest.
    My brother wants to know how you can possibly enjoy doing something at which you suck.
    We are nothing for Halloween. In sweatpants, I mix a batch of cookie dough and set the bowl on the couch with two spoons. In sweatpants, Horace comes over with beer, his skull ashtray, and horror movies from Slick Flix where Duke, his sometimes friend, works. He and Duke are speaking at the moment, which means free videos. But the first movie, Cuddle of Death , has to be turned off after five minutes because its soundtrack includes a song by a band whose singer used to sing, years ago, in Horace’s band. Not only is the song horrendous, my brother says, but can I imagine the agony of listening to caca from the anus of a talentless hack who was once just like Horace (poor and unknown) but now never has to work a day in his life?
    Instead of putting in another movie, he opens another beer and starts complaining about his writing teacher. She is too loose with her praise. She says stories are interesting when they’re not. It makes these people think they have potential , he says. She