The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free Page B

dissolute eternity as adjunct faculty, had finally gained a tenure track position at a small community college in Oklahoma. At the time of his departure, he was already dating a former student. He took the girlfriend with him, not her. Joanne described Coffey as a second-rate poet, and, truth be told, a poet with a small penis, but then wasn’t that what was behind most bad poetry?
    Under the influence of liberally poured wine and pot, Norman learned that Joanne could become truculent. She had a way of scrunching her nose when she got mad, absentmindedly rimming her wine glass in a circular motion, her eyes glossing with a deepening hurt.
    *
    Norman turned to his computer again. He pulled up the website for the realty agency he had contracted to offload his parents’ house. He had not gone out to the house. He simply wanted it gone. He stared at the low-res feed of his childhood home on the realty’s Virtual Walk-Thru. A grainy fisheye sweep of a wavering feed stalled in the hallway. To go any further required an email address. It said so in a pop-up window. Then another pop-up offered financing options – three- and five-year arms, balloons, variable and fixed rates, a flashing banner indicating Bad Credit Isn’t a Problem , a legacy banner, pre-financial meltdown. There were, of course, no such loans anymore.
    Another flashing pop-up offered a trial membership in FreeCreditScore.com, the pop-ups reminiscent of garish billboard signs he had seen on a trip taken in his early adolescence with his parents along Route 66. At the time, the roadside motels were already diminished in the way Hitchcock had prophetically anticipated, so that, much later, Norman, in looking back on it, would understand that Psycho ’s deceptive genius was not the shock of Janet Leigh’s shower scene murder, but something further reaching, more innominate – the death of the American love affair with the car and the open road, and, with it, a certain aimless, transient freedom that had allowed snake oil salesmen to pitch their wares town-to-town in the shadowy in-between of promise and despair.
    There were, among the greats, many ways to tell a story. Truth had to be played like a good poker hand, concealed until the end, though what he feared most was that freedom and understanding had been eclipsed, so there was only sensationalism and no substance anymore. Maybe that was just the lament of the pedantic, the contrarian, the literalist, the fate of the Chicken Littles of the world.
    In staring at the jittery images, in inhabiting what had been his former life, Norman was reminded of the opening scenes of Titanic , the modern submersible sending back a grey feed of pictures from beneath the Atlantic to the aged heroine. That was the genius of Art, its power to encapsulate, in the case of Titanic , to apprehend the great folly of human hubris that had so defined the age – the push across the Atlantic at breakneck speed for the record, icebergs-be-damned, along with all on board – the film’s essential allure, everyone on board living the last days of their lives and not realizing it, while everybody watching did.
    On this morning, Norman felt the inherent stirring of a re-energizing intellect. He was wandering into a creative and searching space, the unmoored flotsam of events washing up in the scud of the subconscious. He was building, from what remained, some kind of raft, something that would sustain and carry him forward, liberate and connect him again to his craft. He liked the double meaning of the word craft , how the right words could be carried in a riptide of understanding, a process that required not so much strength as patience to assess and reconfigure life, so one could stare back toward the coastline of the inhabited world, then make for shore once more.
    Norman stared at the images of his former life. Neither Helen nor Walter existed anymore. They had been incinerated. Tightness gripped his chest, a register of emotion he was