God and Jetfire Read Online Free Page A

drawing, or thinking about, or building. He said that I had the most important thing to start with: sensitivity. But I didn’t have a river. A palm reader showed me the fine, intricate, and undifferentiated webbing of my hands, the absence of a single strong line. Mine was a spring that ran across an unarticulated landscape, spreading and dividing when it encountered the smallest obstruction. She said it meant there wasn’t a single direction for me; I could do anything, but I would never be sure about it.
    Not knowing where I was going was a frightening but familiar feeling, full of potential. But it was a violent event for Jevn’s river to change course. And yet, he’d done it; in one night, he’d devoted himself to a new direction. We would have a child. But now I was sending him coursing into the unknown, and I could no longer see into him. I saw only fear—the blank blindness of a panicked animal.
    Pacing around my apartment, he charged forth powerfully in a new direction. If we weren’t going to keep the baby together, he wanted to get rid of it. He didn’t want me to raise the child as a single mother, because then he’d become a father as absent as his own. I insisted there had to be another way, and I wasn’t ready to decide anything. Reduced to our reflexes, Jevn closed and concealed himself; I opened.
    We fought wildly, for days. Not getting anywhere. All we knew was something big was going to happen. We were bound together and flying off a cliff, fighting only over how to land. He slammed his hand on the phone every time I reached for it to call my mother, though I still didn’t think I could tell her. He thought we should figure things out for ourselves. He held the knob of the bathroom door so I couldn’t come out until I made a decision. In between and in shock, we went to class, and I would spend the time forgetting that there was a decision to be made.
    It was hard to believe I’d returned from my first trip to Europe just three months earlier. I was supposed to be asserting my independence, but I was so often calculating time zones, searching for pay phones and moments when Jevn and I could talk. I’d spent the summer in school in Copenhagen and then traveled all over by train. I’d brought very few things home with me, but one was a children’s book I found in Venice. The title was Oh! and there were no words within it. As the pages unfolded, a coffee cup printed across the leaves stretched into a cruise ship; a pipe became the tail of a cat brushing its teeth. None of the objects were what you thought at first. And I guessed you were supposed to say “oh!” every time you realized that. When I found it, I was sunburned and hungry and lonely, but I was also happy, and I thought: this is the story of wrong trains and kind strangers and surprise vistas where you weren’t supposed to be. There isn’t some big right way for things to happen; things just unfold weightlessly, and we’re left standing before the surprising story of our lives, little of it as we planned, every inch of it precious, with nothing much to say but “oh!” I was going to save that book for someday after all my travels were through, when I was too old to jog Mediterranean cliffsides and sleep in train stations, when I would get married and have children, at which point I would give it to them, and I would tell them all about life’s charming twists and turns.
    Memories like that would return to me sometimes when we were fighting, like a flash of light on the waves giving sudden orientation, and I’d feel sure that things were somehow going to be okay.
    â€œWhy does everything have to be sugarcoated for you?” Jevn demanded. This was not a wrong turn in Paris. He insisted that I make a decision, and so I did. I made a decision and then a phone call—but I waited for him to leave to do it.
    *   *   *
    He picked me