Moise and the World of Reason Read Online Free Page A

supercilious smile of Big Lot as if his face had never worn it. Hurt and anger flashed there.
    â€œOh, for Chrissake, Moise, it’s me that betrays himself to everybody, not anybody to me or by me, and whatever this fucking gig is I find it too unreal to believe it and personally not being into the theater of the ridiculous, I’m going to Phoebe’s for vodka and hot chili and no shit about betrayals.”
    â€œWatch out for the sudden subway,” Moise said softly as I’ve read that the
Titanic
first touched that submarine mountain of ice, so softly the dancers in the great ballroom didn’t feel it.
    (“The sudden subway” was Moise’s term for all such disastrous inadvertencies as Big Lot is inclined to provoke, less for himself than others, or it may be the opposite way: in either case, it’s a tightrope act to
    Yes, that sentence is finished in its fashion.)

    The image of ice recurs and whispers, too, and almost subliminally the wire announcing the death of the skater flashed into my mind, and then the night I slept with Moise for companionship’s comfort only, our hands touching until daybreak when she placed her fingertips on my temple and said, “Just say to yourself”
    Incomplete, there being nothing I could have said to myself except, “Overdosed on blackbirds, a super high, overdosed on a super high in Montreal, a spectacular leap and was dead still skating. ‘Didn’t come out of the glide. Wanted it so. Audience didn’t know I escorted him off the ice, tall smiling dead living.’”
    What on earth did she mean by “wire instructions and love”?

    A distinguished failed writer at thirty has suspended the climax as if it were a sentence that he had the audacity not to complete.

    The Actress Invicta had risen and put on her heroic black cloak as if an imperative such as
“À nous le jouer”
swept her away
    (Period omitted by intent since she stays on.)

    An outraged lady once said to me, “How dare you compare him to?”
    Each one has his love and comparisons exist in that fact only.
    Now back to
    Now at this instant the door down the corridor made a loud banging sound as if Moise’s announcement party were being raided by the police, it banged the wall that loud, but it wasn’t a police raid but something worse. It was the entrance of a certain distillation of venom in the form of a human (?) female called Miriam Skates. I knew it was she who had entered by that inimitable and indescribable shrillness of voice. I know it is a writer’s business to describe whatever he sees, hears, feels or imagines but the circumstances under which I’m now writing this thing have made it impossible for me to arrest its present motion by a description of the voice of Skates when she entered the lightless hall: at best I can only remark that probably nothing like it has been heard outside the spectators’ section of the old Roman Colosseum in the pre-Christian era when a fallen gladiator was about to be impaled by the victor’s trident.
    Moise had not moved but I caught hold of her as if she were running and shouted to her, “Moise, you didn’t invite her, surely you didn’t invite her?”
    â€œWho, who, not invited?”
    â€œSkates, to the announcement!”
    â€œOh, has she come, is she present? The lights so dim, I—”
    â€œShe has just entered with her little company of attendant bitches and there’s a dreadful commotion by the door.”
    â€œOh, just arrived. She must have missed my announcement, I’ll have to repeat it to her.”
    â€œDon’t!”
I cried out to Moise but she broke away from my grasp with amazing force and started moving toward Skates as Skates started moving toward her. I’m sure it was by intention that Skates arrived at the threshold of the room at the same moment as Moise, no one between them, close enough to have embraced