Oracle Night Read Online Free

Not wanting to disturb her, I had crept out as quietly as I could, leaving a note for her on the kitchen table. Now I saw that a few sentences had been added to the note. Sidney: Hope you had fun on your walk. I’m going out to do some errands. Shouldn’t be long. See you back at the ranch. Love, G .
    I went into my workroom at the end of the hall and unpacked my new supplies. It was hardly bigger than a closet in there – just enough space for a desk, a chair, and a miniature bookcase with four narrow shelves – but I found it sufficient for my needs, which had never been more elaborate than to sit in the chair and put words on pieces of paper. I had gone into the room several times since my discharge from the hospital, but until that Saturday morning in September – what I prefer to call the morning in question – I don’t think I had sat down once in the chair. Now, as I lowered my sorry, debilitated ass onto the hard wooden seat, I felt like someone who had come home from a long and difficult journey, an unfortunate traveler who had returned to claim his rightful place in the world. It felt good to be there again, good to want to be there again, and in the wake of the happiness that washed over me as I settled in at my old desk, I decided to mark the occasion by writing something in the blue notebook.
    I put a fresh ink cartridge in my fountain pen, opened the notebook to the first page, and looked at the top line. I had no idea how to begin. The purpose of the exercise was not to write anything specific so much as to prove to myself that I still had it in me to write – which meant that it didn’t matter what I wrote, just so long as I wrote something. Anything would have served, any sentence would have been as valid as any other, but still, I didn’t want to break in that notebook with something stupid, so I bided my time by looking at the little squares on the page, the rows of faint blue lines that crisscrossed the whiteness and turned it into a field of tiny identical boxes, and as I let my thoughts wander in and out of those lightly traced enclosures, I found myself remembering a conversation I’d had with my friend John Trause a couple of weeks earlier. The two of us rarely talked about books when we were together, but that day John had mentioned that he was rereading some of the novelists he had admired when he was young – curious to know if their work held up or not, curious to know if the judgments he’d made at twenty were the same ones he would make today, more than thirty years down the road. He ran through ten writers, through twenty writers, touching on everyone from Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, but the comment that stuck most vividly in my mind – and which came back to me now as I sat at my desk with the blue notebook open in front of me – was a small digression he’d made concerning an anecdote in one of Dashiell Hammett’s books. ‘There’s a novel in this somewhere,’ John had said. ‘I’m too old to want to think about it myself, but a young punk like you could really fly with it, turn it into something good. It’s a terrific premise. All you need is a story to go with it.’ 2

    He was referring to the Flitcraft episode in the seventh chapter of The Maltese Falcon , the curious parable that Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about the man who walks away from his life and disappears. Flitcraft is a thoroughly conventional fellow – a husband, a father, a successful businessman, a person without a thing to complain about. One afternoon as he’s walking to lunch, a beam falls from a construction site on the tenth floor of a building and nearly lands on his head. Another inch or two, and Flitcraft would have been crushed, but the beam misses him, and except for a little chip of sidewalk that flies up and hits him in the face, he walks away unhurt. Still, the close call rattles him, and he can’t push the incident from his mind. As Hammett puts it: