Wakefield Read Online Free Page A

way to the latrine every morning had to cover the red-bearded corpse again. After a couple of weeks, they ran out of things to cover him with, so they just scraped away the snow every few days, to keep him from disappearing. Perhaps to reduce his creepiness, the remaining scientists created a playful mythology around the dead meteorologist, who became, among other things, a kind of father confessor. It was not unusual to find one of them carrying on an intimate conversation with the corpse, but then, of course, there was no need to whisper because the wailing winds were loud enough to drown any human voice.
    â€œThe shit I told him I never told anyone!” Zamyatin nods. “My roommate in the mental hospital was just about as quiet as the Swede. I told him everything, too, but then the fucker came out his catatonia and ratted on me. No, I really liked the Swede.”
    Wakefield had also liked him. He’d had his moments with the body, addressing it with rambling monologues about his wife (now ex-wife), Marianna. The Arctic night does funny things. He hadn’t found it all that strange to sit there wrapped like a mummy in the swirling snow, telling all to a corpse. In fact, all his conversations during those surreal months had been huge, epic, unequaled since. He and Zamyatin had spent twenty-hour stretches discussing everything. For all that talking, though, what he remembered most was the profound solitude of the Arctic. All their millions of words fit in a thimble and vanished in the night.
    The memory of those days lifts Wakefield’s spirits. I swear by the dead Swede’s red beard that I’ll get the better of you, Beelzebub. The Devil’s weary face floats before his eyes and he knows, with a certainty born on the spot, that his Satanic Majesty shares with him an inclination to loneliness.
    By the time he leaves the bar, Wakefield is already feeling freer; the little nubs of vestigial wings are already itching under the skin over his shoulder blades. All he needs to beat the Devil is some imagination. Of course, imagination can be a problem in middle age. When he was a kid the Rimbaud faucet was on full blast; possibilities poured out of it decked in colors like a dragon at Chinese New Year. At fifteen, imagination slunk around like a mermaid in sequins with a sex of fire. But soon enough real bodies and sentiments got pasted onto his fantasies like labels, and imagining began to feel foolish.
    And now it’s as if he’s been given a sabbatical from the life he’d long believed he was living. He is free to consider alternative lives. He decides to make a list of possibilities to exercise his wings.
    1. What if …
    2. Whatever happened to …
    He tries to think more specifically.
    3. What if instead of her was her.
    4. What if instead of here was there.
    5. What if I wasn’t me.
    6. What the hell does the Devil mean by that starter pistol?
    His listing is interrupted by his cell phone, which, in this story, is never the starter pistol, though it is demonic. He lets the caller leave a message, then takes it out of his pocket and looks at the caller ID. Zelda, his best ex-girlfriend and travel agent. Zelda books the flights for his lecture tours. He calls her back but gets her machine. He’s supposed to leave for the Midwest the next afternoon.
    Once upon a time Zelda and Wakefield dated, as they say. Sometimes they actually went out, but mostly they stayed indoors because the relationship seemed cursed by unnaturally bad weather. Whenever they planned an outing, a sudden rainstorm or an unusual wind would mess up her hair, tear off his hat, collapse the umbrella. These events were so common that they called them WZ moments, after their initials. After the fiftieth WZ moment, the joke got old.
    Zelda was then an associate professor of anthropology, and about the time the joke got old, her studies took her to Siberia. There she met a young shaman, the youngest member of the