The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free

grim correspondence of legal documents that eventually found their way into his life. He inherited his parents’ collective possessions, the house, and associated bonds and stocks.
    *
    Norman looked up. Beyond his window, snow fell. It was not yet seven in the morning. He had been writing for almost two hours, or trying to. He lived for this feeling of accomplishment, sifting through the silt of an awakening subconscious, unlocking life in a word or line. He believed mystery and understanding lay at liminal thresholds of awareness in the way ascetics prayed and believed there could be communion with a greater power.
    What mattered now was that he was at his desk again.
    In the interim since his parents’ passing, life had changed. Not least his jettisoning of his philandering partner, Kenneth, who had been carrying on a long-term relationship with an investment financier, Daniel Einhorn, whom Norman had introduced to Kenneth during discussions concerning Einhorn potentially financing an off-Broadway run of one of Norman’s plays that was eventually never financed. There had been, in the not-too-distant past, heady days of a potential breakthrough and rising fortunes, when the climate of investment largesse had funneled down into the Arts with gallery openings and a burgeoning interest in theater. That was over now.
    Much had changed. If the decision to dump Kenneth dovetailed with his parents’ death, which it had, it was coincidence, or so he believed. You moved through stages of existence. What you endured at one point, what sustained you, suddenly couldn’t. It was how he might have described his father’s life, his mother’s, his, too, and the life of the city.
    *
    Today, Norman was aware of a Chinese language CD playing in an indecipherable babble in his daughter, Grace’s room. He had adopted her three years previous from China, claiming her against the eventualities, that whatever happened in his life, she might be there to establish a normalcy and continuance in his own life. He had retained custody of her after the breakup with Kenneth.
    He felt that continuance, but so, too, the burden of her influence in hearing the Chinese CD. Yes, he could have tried to learn Chinese, but he had decided against it. The linguistic distance ensured his influence would be as unobtrusive as possible. What Grace brought of herself would remain intact. Principled ideas of autonomy, justice, and sovereign independence were important to Norman Price.
    Norman stared at the sliver of a hallway mirror, Grace, reflected in the image of another mirror, lost in a sort of repeating Escher effect. She was earnestly arranging her Barbies in a bleak tribunal outside a Victorian dollhouse guarded by a porcelain pair of salt-and-pepper shaker Scotty dogs. If Norman had one pressing regret, it was how Grace had changed since the adoption. He consciously connected a coldness settling over her to a latent survival instinct that she must have perfected in response to the way institutions, such as the one she had been rescued from, functioned, on the absolute uniformity and anonymity of those it housed.
    Or perhaps he was overthinking it. Maybe it was his sense of guilt, his aloneness and disconnectedness from life when he was writing. Or maybe all Chinese were like this, the billion faces so absolutely the same, or apparently so from Norman’s perspective, if he could submit to such an idea without racist intent – it was hard deciding.
    *
    In truth, losing Kenneth was a burden lifted, a feeling that eclipsed most everything else going on around him, a self-imposed austerity measure like how it felt to cut up your credit cards, as attested to by the honest folk who talked on the conservative radio stations about assumed personal responsibility as a quasi-religious atonement for wrongful purchases, and how there was nothing wrong with America or capitalism. It was the people who needed to atone and make amends.
    There was a new beginning. He