Motion Sickness Read Online Free

not that long ago, either, he says, changed from shillings, half-pennies, and sixpences to its present decimal system, more or less making the pound like the dollar. Everything got more expensive “right off,” the woman remarks, everything changed overnight. She recalls a discussion on a bus, where complete strangers, dismayed, sought conversation about this radical move by the government. She doesn’t say radical. She says horrid. Life changed overnight, she repeats. Became less English, the man notes, and they both nod. Claudia smiles at me.

Chapter 4
     
Twisted Intentions
     
    On an unusually sunny day when it was remarked again that we were having an English summer, Jessica moved out. Moving from one street to another or one city or country to another requires about the same amount of energy, and I made plans to return to Amsterdam. It seemed easier to go somewhere I’d already been. I wanted to hold my London life in suspension, a bit of fluff caught in a solution, or hold my life in suspense, if suspenseful could be used to describe my life in London. Certainly life is filled with everyday mystery—we’re given answers to questions that answer nothing—and doubtless life goes on without me, and things don’t remain the same, but can “I” ever know that?
    This question, like so many other conundrums, puzzles and pleases and fills time, as does trying to imagine a mountainless valley. I eventually pack my bags and one rainy morning wander onto the street to get a taxi to the train station. In Victoria, I head for the ticket window and buy, in what strikes me as a fit of perversity, a ticket for Venice. I don’t want to go back to Amsterdam. I want to go somewhere I’ve never been. It’ll be my little secret. I like secrets. Secrets are sacred.
    The photobooths in the station do black-and-white and color pictures, four different shots on a strip, and I spend the rest of my English change catching myself in all sorts of poses, looking at the camera and thinking one thing or the other, waiting for the machine to whir and develop them, knowing that the camera cannot discern this inner life of mine. This secret life. And contrary to what Jessica thinks, one doesn’t necessarily leave a place to leave someone in particular. I’m reading Buber’s
The Legend of the Baal-Shem
, which Jessica recommended (she’s reading all of Jean Rhys), and on the train to Dover, landscape and brick houses passing by indifferently, it strikes an eerie blow: “An angel born of twisted intentions will have twisted limbs.”
    The white cliffs of Dover look like a quarry, and I’ve just had an argument with the concessionaire who sold me a cheese sandwich and gave me the wrong change, so that I can’t experience the cliffs the way I think I should. Several heads turn in my direction as I labor to make my point. From the expressions on their faces, mirrors behind which their opinions sit, I see myself as the ugly, that is, imperialistic American and, alternatively, the bossy New York woman. Or, less problematically, as just plain rude. Instantly I’m a set of conditions and positions, a reluctant but undeniable conduit, and Jessica’s epiphany resonates in this stuffy train car where I can conjure her enigmatic smile at will. If I were English, perhaps I wouldn’t have objected so vigorously, if I were more like my English friend who visits New York about once a year. He asked a counterman in a Greek diner for the time and was handed a cheese sandwich, which he ate. Then he asked for the check and was given a vanilla milk shake. John drank it down and paid without protest. To him that’s a New York story.
    On the ferry to Calais, on the top deck, I switch from Martin Buber to Patricia Highsmith and read
Edith’s Diary
. Nothing like a woman going mad for the right political reasons, as well as other more arcane ones, to reassure one of one’s necessary differences from others. A typically gray sky blows gustily over a sea