One More for the Road Read Online Free

heard us and lent us back our old loves to warm us and tell us to behave, we might never have another wish or another chance again, is that it?”
    â€œI don’t know. Do you?”
    â€œOr was it just our secret selves knowing the time was over, a new time had come, and time for us to both turn around and go, is that the real truth?”
    â€œAll I know is I heard you on the phone just now. When you’re gone, I’ll call Anne.”
    â€œWill you?”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œOh, Lord, I’m so happy for you, for me, for us!”
    â€œGet out of here. Go. Get. Run. Fly away home.”
    She jumped to her feet and banged at her hair with a comb and gave up, laughing. “I don’t care if I look funny—”
    â€œBeautiful,” he corrected.
    â€œBeautiful to you, maybe.”
    â€œAlways and forever.”
    She came and bent down and kissed him and wept.
    â€œIs this our last kiss?”
    â€œYes.” He thought about it. “The last.”
    â€œOne more, then.”
    â€œJust one.”
    She held his face in her hands and stared into it.
    â€œThanks for your wish,” she said.
    â€œThanks for yours .”
    â€œYou calling Anne right now?”
    â€œNow.”
    â€œBest to Anne.”
    â€œBest to Bob. God love you, dear lady. Goodbye.”
    She was out the door and in the next room and the outside door shut and the hotel suite was very quiet. He heard her footsteps fade a long way off in the hall toward the elevator.
    He sat looking at the phone but did not touch it. He looked in the mirror and saw the tears beginning to stream unendingly out of his eyes.
    â€œYou, there,” he said to his image. “You. Liar.” And again: “Liar!”
    And he turned and lay back down in the bed and put one hand out to touch that empty pillow there.

Q UID P RO Q UO
    Â 
    Y ou do not build a Time Machine unless you know where you are going. Destinations. Cairo after Christ? Macedonia before Methuselah? Hiroshima just before? Destinations, places, happenings.
    But I built my Time Machine, all unknowingly, with no destination in mind, no happening about to arrive or, just this second, depart.
    I built my Far Traveling Device with fragments of wired-together ganglion, the seat of invisible perception, of intuitive awareness.
    An accessory to this inner side of the medulla oblongata and the brain shelves behind the optic nerve.
    Between the hidden senses of the brain and the probing but invisible radar of the ganglion I ram-shackled together a perceptor of future beings or past behaviors far different than name-places and mind-shaking events.
    My Tin Lizzie watch, my dust invention, had microwave antennae with which to touch, find, and make moral judgments beyond my own intelligence.
    The Machine, in sum, would add up integers of human rise and fall and mail itself there to shape destinies, taking me along as blind baggage.
    Did I know this as I pasted and screwed and welded my seemingly hapless mechanical child? I did not. I simply tossed forth notions and needs, opinions and predictions based on successes and failures, and at the end stood back to stare at my useless creation.
    For there it stood in my attic, a bright object, all angles and elbows, purring, anxious for travel but going nowhere unless I begged “go” instead of “sit” or “stay.” I would not give it directions; I would simply at the right time shed my “ambiance,” my soul’s light, upon it.
    Then it would rear up and gallop off in all directions. Arriving where, only God knew.
    But we would know when we arrived.
    So there is the start of it all.
    A strange dream lurking in a dim attic, with two seats for Tourists, a bated breath and a bright hum of its spidery nerves.
    Why had I built it in my attic?
    After all, it wouldn’t sky-dive midair, but only hang-glide Time.
    The Machine. Attic. Waiting. For what?
    Santa Barbara. A small