Performance Anomalies Read Online Free

perspective, the movement—the reach of his arm, the extension of his fingers, the grasping of the orange, the retraction of his arm—proceeded in minutely segmented stages. But others would see only the beginning of his movement, and the end, as if he had merely adjusted his stance; the rest of his motion was as imperceptible as a single missing frame in a film reel, or the flick of a frog’s tongue when it seizes a damselfly.
    During a private walk with his mother when he was seven, hand in hand beneath clacking palm trees, she had told him that his father was afraid of him, afraid of how quickly a child with almost no schooling could absorb languages, even those of passing foreigners; of how he could recite, syllable by syllable, long pieces of overheard conversation; of how casually he learned to write the Chinese characters his father laid before him; of how effortlessly he could catch a coffee cup falling from a table.
    Cono’s father, a math teacher who was occasionally forced during his itinerant career to also teach reading, had his own theory to explain the strangeness in Cono. He had encountered children who had great difficulty learning to read and who pushed his impatience into a rage of disgust. “Their brain clock is too slow!” he told his wife and son as they sat in plastic chairs around a rickety table. He was drinking cachaça heavily and pounding the table. “And your damn brain clock is too fast!” He leered at Cono, his eyes wet and bloodshot. He grabbed a pen and scribbled mathematical formulas on a paper napkin to explain, jabbing his finger into each line, saying, “This is the slow ones! This is us! This is you!” Cono’s eyes met his mother’s in the light of the hanging bulb surrounded by fluttering moths; he could see the insects’ swishing woolly wings as if they weren’t moving at all. And he saw his mother’s almond-shaped eyes lower themselves in segmented steps, each one a separate snapshot of her guarded pride.
       
    The flight attendant from Granada smiled at Cono as she passed by his seat; his eyes were closed, almost, and his breathing was slow and deep. He was sunk in meditation, hands loose in his lap, spine erect. Xiao Li was there with him, kicking with delight as he held her supple body, suspending her in the air beyond the railing of the balcony. He heard her giggling and could feel the weight of her in his outstretched arms, with eight stories of open air between her and the ground. She fluttered her legs with abandon toward the night sky. “See the moon? Do you see the moon, Cono?” Just as Xiao Li turned her body and reached toward the moon as if trying to cuddle it, Cono lifted her back to the safety of the balcony, where they spent the night—Xiao Li wanted to see the moon while they climaxed together.
    She was like him, trying to embrace the moon while making her way in the world through instinct and drive that came only from within, because she had only herself. Yes, she had spoken of a mother. A mother who, when Xiao Li was thirteen, had thrown her out of their home with the words: “My man looks at you too much. I’m saving you from him. Now get out and make some money, get your own life. I’m sure men will pay you plenty.” And yet Xiao Li always spoke of her mother as if her image were mounted in a red-and-gold picture frame resting on a shrine in the corner of a tidy house, to be venerated and pleased at all times, like a deceased ancestor ever-present and scrutinizing her progeny.
    Xiao Li’s rough life had made her prickly, an eye-catching rose with not a single thorn missing. Her goodness showed itself rarely, and usually by accident. But no matter how long the passage of time since they had last seen each other, Cono felt a pull toward her. He could call it duty, or honor, or affection; he preferred not to put a word on it. Worrying for her, setting out in this way to try to ensure that she saw this round of life a little longer, was strange