The Sundown Speech Read Online Free

been shampooed the week Saigon fell. Something moved sluggishly in an aquarium on a stand, glistening emerald green in the light from the window next to it. I wondered if there was a local length limit on pet boa constrictors.
    The stairs were bare and the banister wobbled. I left it alone and ascended freeform. The smell of fries cooked in day-old grease increased in direct ratio to the distance I put between myself and the kitchen on the ground floor. I wondered if they still made hot plates or if the tenants had built their own fires from the wooden rods missing from the banister.
    Mice had chewed abstract patterns in the rubber runner in the upstairs hallway. The window at the end was painted over. There were ceiling canisters with bulbs in them, but nothing happened when I flipped a switch on the wall. I groped my way down the tunnel, past a bathroom with its door open and fish swimming on a plastic shower curtain. On the evidence the toilet brush had been burned along with the stair rods.
    It was typical student housing. Dostoevsky would have recognized it from Minsk City College.
    Near the end I tested the invisible wall for breaks. When I ran out of plaster I brushed a wooden panel with a knuckle. The door squeaked open. I stepped inside, rapping on the frame to announce myself. No one called out. No footsteps came.
    â€œAw, hell.”
    I jumped at the sound of the voice, even though it was mine. I felt like I hadn’t spoken in days. It was just premonition; but I always test well above average on that subject.
    It was just the one room. He’d have to share the bathroom outside with his neighbors. A chipped ceramic skillet on a Coleman stove turned a rolling TV cart into a kitchen. Clothes and books scattered the carpet, green and rubbery and discolored from sun and stain. The fibers crunched underfoot. What I thought at first to be someone sleeping turned out to be a twisted heap of bedding on a twin mattress. Brass paint curled off the iron frame in paper-thin scraps. A poster of Das Boot clung to the wall above the bed, stuck to it with curls of tape leaving telltale bulges at the corners. The U-boat seemed to be streaming straight toward me, torpedo tubes wide open.
    A white CRT computer monitor glowed with a sullen hum on a student desk. The screensaver was a shifting montage of black-and-white images: Welles in Citizen Kane, Mastroanni in La Dolce Vita, Stallone in Rocky, others I didn’t recognize. Those I did were all the work of independent filmmakers. No surprises so far. The place could have been done by a set decorator with a clear understanding of the kind of character who would live there.
    Some no-shows stuck out: film cans, reels, a projector, all absent. I’d always thought auteurs slept with their equipment. A sleek ruby-red camera, probably digital, lay on the floor beside the bed. It was about the size of a deck of cards but less than half as thick. It seemed a careless way to treat an expensive item like that; but artists are supposed to be eccentric. I’d heard.
    The room smelled a lot worse than eccentric, as if no one had taken out the garbage in days.
    I broke another law and frisked the place. Sweatshirts, jeans, socks, and underwear in a cheap slap-together dresser, a pair of horn-rim glasses in the nonmatching nightstand. I picked them up without unfolding the bows and peered through the lenses. Window glass: a prop, maybe. I put them back. Someone had built shelves by laying planks across stacks of bricks and filled them with spavined books: Hitchcock/Truffaut, The Coen Brothers, Eisenstein, The Three Stooges.
    That last one had to be a clue. I slipped it out, riffled through the pages, held it upside down by the covers and shook it. A Borders bookmark fluttered to the floor. I picked it up. Nothing written on either side but advertising.
    Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
    I slipped it back into its place and stood in the middle of the room with my fists on my hips,