Nod Read Online Free Page B

attached to the other end of their leashes were mere dragged baggage.
    What else? I looked around.
    All eyes were directed inward; everyone had their introspecs on. As we passed silent bakeries and cafes we could see money changing hands; we could hear the clink of coins being counted then splatting onto marble counters. People hunched across tables, reading one another’s lips.
    ‘As if what they’re whispering about isn’t exactly what everyone else is whispering about,’ Tanya said loudly, causing a few heads to turn, first toward us—then quickly away.
    Reaching the restaurant, we sat down at a table by the open front window and ordered from the waitress. She was a tank-faced woman of Slavic descent who looked like she’d spent her youth being fed steroids in some old Soviet bloc waitress training facility. Then we settled into silence, scrutinizing our cutlery. Some mornings there’d be dried egg yolk on the tines of one of our forks, and we’d call the waitress over. She’d replace the utensil without apology, indeed, with something verging on contempt for our bourgeois, our
kulak
squeamishness.
    I turned my knife in the sun, and as it flashed I remembered my dream. Two nights in a row. I was just going to tell Tanya about it when I saw, heading straight toward us, Charles.
    How to introduce Charles into this narrative?
    While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm’s length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it’s the fact that we misanthropes don’t discriminate—the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow.
    Charles smelled bad. What more do I really need to say? He was an outsider always looking for a way in. But no one would let him in. Instead, we relegated him to the status of dumpster diving ‘local character’. As though he were fictional.
    I can say of myself that I have no time for people until I understand them, and then I whiplash all the way from contempt to pity. A shitty way to live: the worst of everything. Contempt is bad, but pity’s worse. Pity’s sticky: it clings to the poor fool who presumes to be in a safe enough place from whence to do the commiserating.
    ‘Oh shit.’ Tanya had seen him.
    ‘Hey, Paul.’ Charles spoke to me but looked down at the empty chair beside her.
    ‘Hi Charles.’
    I’d never learned his last name; we’d never been introduced. I only knew his
first
name because people spoke about him behind his back when he left the table. Always Charles. Never Chuck, never Charlie. The formality a shuffling away.
    ‘How’s the new book coming, Paul?’
    Involuntarily, I glanced down at my manuscript on the chair beside me and prayed he wouldn’t notice it. Charles knew I wrote. Had checked my books out from the Joe Fortes library where he and dozens of other floaters spent their days. Checked them out and, oddly enough, read them.
    ‘Slow.’ He probably thought the whole world spoke in Tarzan-like monosyllables. But you couldn’t shut him down with curt replies—brevity just opened up more space for
his
words.
    ‘Okay if I sit?’ he asked, preemptively folding himself into an empty chair.
    Charles had the red plastic face of someone who lived rough. His expression was friendly, but fixed that way, as though with bobby pins or staples. He was fairly tall but came across short, with all the awkwardness and crumpledness that entails—like a hinged skeleton you pull out of a cardboard box each Halloween and half-heartedly thumbtack to your front door.
    ‘How’s Miss Soviet Union 1962 this morning?’
    As he said this, Charles glanced around to make sure the waitress wasn’t near. He was invoking a triangle of intimacy:
we
three were talking about
her
. She was the outsider, not him.
    ‘She’s okay.’
    ‘You’re too