Giraffe Read Online Free

feel the weight of my skull pushed up, as if on a stick, from this soot-dusted embankment. If I could hold it in my hands, here beside the Libeň Bridge, I would be surprised at its heft — most of it blood. My intent is to model the flow of this blood through the brain. I wish to map out its sinks and eddies, its oxbows, and the estuarine channels of the wonder net. I use sound waves to determine the variable depth of arterial walls. (For a long time, arteries were not understood. The garroting of specimen animals for dissection engorged the right ventricle and so emptied the arteries of blood, so they came to be called arteria, or tubes, and were assigned a pneumatic purpose, of pumping air around the body.) Blood finds no sea. It courses through narrows and rapids of ligament, flows upward against gravity, and becomes momentarily weightless in the deep of the brain, where thoughts shoot like comets through a firmament of crimson stars that give oxygen but no light. Blood is not opened to the sky; its journey is a hidden flow, is without light, save in the dawntide, which works into the thin blood vessels woven across wrist- and anklebones.
     
    I leave the Vltava and walk now through the warehouses of Holešovice, under Czechoslovakian flags of red, white, and blue and Soviet flags of red slotted into the conical holders the State has decreed must be drilled into the masonry of every building. The flags hang limply. This is something else I notice about the Communist moment: how it celebrates itself in a windless land with a display of flags. I quicken my pace. I am drawn now, like a moth, toward an electric sign blinking on and off over the main gates of a brick-making factory. A space rocket bearing the initials ČSSR bursts moon-ward from the slogan
     
     
     
     
    GLORY TO THE EPOCH OF SOCIALIST
     
    AND COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTION!
     
     
    The initials ČSSR and the space rocket blink on and off. The slogan is ever lit. I look at the potholed street. I walk under the sign. I do not look up, but see fairground reflections in the puddles of an epoch blinking on, then off.
     
    I catch a tram and walk and come to a pub overlooking Stromovka Park. I step inside. It is yellow in here. The lights are yellow, the tablecloths are stained yellow, the walls and air are yellow with cigarette smoke; there is a jaundiced man propping up the bar, there are maple-yellow ice-hockey sticks lined up by the door. I take a beer and sit in a corner. I pull from my bag a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is a Czechoslovakian edition from before the war. This volume means something to me. It belonged to my uncle. Inside the front cover there is an admonition he scrawled in large letters as a child:
     
     
     
     
    Death is a confirmed habit into which we have fallen.
     
    Learn from Pip
     
     
     
    I flick through it at random, as the pious do with their Bibles. The paper is yellow. is scrawled on the margin of one page. A few phrases are underlined throughout:
     
     
     
     
    What larks!
     
     
     
    And the communication I have got to make is,
     
    that he has great expectations.
     
     
     
    I see an exclamation mark in the margin where Wemmick, the law clerk, carries a fishing rod on his shoulder through London, not with any intent of fishing in the River Thames, but simply because he likes to walk with one:
     
     
     
     
    I thought this odd; however, I said nothing,
     
    and we set off.
     
     
     
    I shut the book and open it once more and put a finger to a page.
    “That was a memorable day to me,” I read, “for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
    I know this passage well. The book often