Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) Read Online Free

them could have been dismissed, for instance. The Buddhist has locked himself inside his office with the gasoline, the dog, his ex-wife’s phone number, and the female board member tied to a chair with the minutes of a meeting in her mouth. He has locked himself in with his dream of a better world and a jerry can from the Statoil station around the corner. He has locked himself in with his goodness, and the rest is history.

THE WINTER GARDEN
    IT WAS THE NIGHT DIRCH PASSER THE COMEDIAN DIED. HE COLLAPSED onstage. His heart was sick and he was taken away by ambulance to the hospital, where they said he was dead on arrival. It was September 3, 1980, and the reason I remember it so well is that it was the night my mother and father decided to tell me they were getting divorced. This was announced during dinner and somewhere inside me I think I was relieved. It may sound harsh, but they didn’t match, so when Mom told me, all I did was put down my fork. By ten o’clock the news was out about Dirch Passer. Those two things, his death and me standing by the porch door looking out on the moss Dad always let grow between the paving stones, are inseparable to me.
    The first year and a half, I lived with my mother and visited Dad in his new row house every two weeks. He never really got moved in, my father. He slept on a daybed in the big bedroom and we ate chicken from the hamburger stand when I was there. Then what happened was that Mom found a boyfriend. His name was Henning, he was alone with two daughters, and we would sit in the living room playing cards in the evening. My father was sad when I visited him. He kept saying to me that it didn’t matter. What? I asked him. Nothing, he said, and then I talked to Mom and Henning about it maybe being fair, seeing how Henning’s two daughters lived with them, that I moved into the spare room at my father’s.
    It was June 6, 1982, and as we sat in the car outside Dad’s house my mother kept pulling down the sleeves of my jersey and saying that I should know there was a way back. She stepped inside with me, no more than that, and that was how I got the spare room at my father’s. He’d tried to make the place nice. The furniture was pushed back against the walls, and there was a coffee table with a large ashtray in the living room. He’d bought bookshelves, too, and in his bedroom there was a narrow bed the same as the one he had put in the spare room for me. My room was all cleaned and it was plenty big enough. I don’t know where he got the drapes from, but he pulled them together so I could see they worked.
    There were good and bad things that summer I lived with Dad. One good thing was the World Cup in Spain. Paolo Rossi was the top scorer with six goals, and the Northern Ireland striker Norman Whiteside was the youngest player ever in the finals at seventeen years and forty-one days. We watched the games together, Dad and me, and because the sun was beating down outside we had all the drapes closed. The dark living room, the smell of relish, and the warm television set were good things. But then when we went out together, like to the supermarket, Dad couldn’t help but put his arm round my neck to show that we belonged together, though nobody else could care less.
    Dad had been lucky to get the house, he said, and he was especially happy about the patio enclosure. It would be warm out there even in winter, so Dad filled it up with desert plants and called it the winter garden. Whereas the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom seemed big, the winter garden was soft and cozy. Sometimes in the evenings if there was nothing on television he would want us to sit out there in garden chairs and talk. He grew succulent plants and onions and fed them with plant food so they grew really big. He had a Crassula, as he called it, that was five feet tall. I was to have it one day, because I happened to say it was the most beautiful. Sometimes to make him happy I said that the warm