Heathern Read Online Free

took your
life for what it is. As would they. It's only karma."
    Our car inched eastward on Ninth Street. During the
night a cold front swept the clouds from the sky; morning
sun glinted off the tears of millions.
    "Karma?" I repeated. "Schmeggege. You're some Hindu."
He smiled, hearing a word from a language he chose to lose.
Avi's family were Lubavitcher Hasidim; he left his old world
while still in his teens. During his twenties he feasted from
faith's buffet, swallowing and passing Unitarianism, Catholicism, Reform Judaism, Buddhism, and more, at last
assembling a plate of scraps from which he might thereafter
nibble. His unshaken tenet was a belief in an afterlife so
redemptive of the life lived before that he saw no greater
purpose to his own existence than to relieve others of theirs.
    "Take it as a brand name," he said. "Like Kleenex or
Lasereo or God. A word you understand without knowing
the meaning." He cleaned his glasses with a silk handkerchief his fiancee had given him. "Even media agree," he
said, handing me his copy of Newsweek. "For the Six
Billion," the cover's blurb read, referring to those who'd left
our station on the 20th-Century train. I'd scanned the article earlier, finding simple words that presumed to
summon understanding from the years during which the
perfect Victorian world became our neopost one. Perhaps
the editors hoped that unexpected patterns might emerge
from what they threw across the pages, but the only pattern
these days was the one from which everyone's clothes were
cut. There were familiar scenes from the family album;
image upon image: Elvis beside Hitler, Joyce next to the
Beatles; the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square on V-J
Day side-by-side with the burning girl running down the
Vietnamese road; Gorbachev's face was shoved between
frame 313 of the Zapruder film and the first platoon
marching over the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge.

    "It seems to me that what we live through are only birth
pangs, that the deepest pain awaits after delivery," Avi said.
"Who knows? Because ours is a sick world doesn't mean we
shouldn't love it."
    At the street's far corner was an abandoned Benetton. On
its Ninth Street side was a mural limned by locals, showing
a line of ill-drawn skeletons wearing gray pinstripes resembling my own, raising metatarsals higher than their skulls in
synchronised kick. "Hell's Rockettes," he said. "Terrible
perspective."
    "They've painted over the numbers along here," our
driver said, slowing that we should neither miss the place
nor run anyone down.
    "It's a few doors west of Avenue A," I said. "That's it."
    Excepting the entrance, the building resembled its
six-story neighbors, one of a row of cadavers awaiting a new
day's lesson. The old tenement architects had often chiseled
names above their building's outer doorways, allowing
fresh-arrived immigrants a new world dream, that their
hovels were not so much less than the Dakota or the
Belnord. The steel door of Macaffrey's school was painted
chrome yellow; the name above-Hartman-gleamed with
smudged gilt. The worn faces of stone seraphim poked from twin circles that bookended the word; each circle was
formed from three pairs of wings. The angels' eyes poured
down their cheeks, as if without suspicion they'd glimpsed
this world's Trinity.

    "Don't bother them, Avi," I said, referring to those yet
unblinded, the ones on the curbs and steps and stoops.
Figures I had read claimed that Loisaida's population
density approached what it had been at the turn of the
previous century, but that didn't seem possible; too many of
the old buildings were gone, and the streets could not have
lodged so many.
    "If it's necessary I act, Joanna. You know that."
    The grace of Avi's that doomed and saved was that he
understood his own purpose so well. After we emerged the
driver locked the car from within; electrified its body for our
visit's duration. Dozens at once encircled and