Time's Arrow Read Online Free

relief.
    The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul.
     

2
     
    You have to be cruel to be kind
     
    These developments all came one
    after the other. A new home. A
    career. The use of an automobile.
     
    And a love life. What with all the activity and everything, I've hardly had a moment to myself.
    The house move was a perfectly symmetrical operation: lucid, elegant. Big men came, and loaded all my stuff onto their pickup. I rode with them in the cab (we tossed the one-liners back and forth)—to our destination. Which was the city. Down Route 6, south of the river, over the tracks, beyond the stockyards and their rusty corsetry, their spinal supports, their arthritic suspenders. The new property is smaller than what we're used to: terraced, two up two down, with a modest backyard. I'm delighted with the place, because what I'm after, I suppose, is human variety, and America's pretty pluralism, and there's even more of that here. But Tod is in two minds about it. He's confused. I can tell. For instance, on the day we moved, while the men were still lurching around with their crates and cardboard boxes, Tod slipped out into the garden—the garden on which he had worked for so many years. He lowered himself to his knees, and, sniffing hungrily, richly ... It was beautiful, in its way. Dewlike drops of moisture formed on the dry grass, and rose upward through the air as if powered by the jolts in our chest. The moisture bathed our cheeks, deliciously, until with our tickling eyes we drew it in. Such distress. Why? I assumed at the time that he was crying for the garden and what he'd done to it. The garden was heaven when we started out, but over the years, well, don't blame me is all I'm saying. It wasn't my decision. It never is. So Tod's tears were tears of remorse, or propitiation. For what he'd done. Look at it. A nightmare of wilt and mildew, of fungus and black spot. All the tulips and roses he patiently drained and crushed, then sealed their exhumed corpses and took them in the paper bag to the store for money. All the weeds and nettles he screwed into the soil—and the earth took this ugliness, snatched at it with a sudden grip. Such, then, are the fruits of Tod's meticulous vandalism. Greenfly, whitefly, sawfly are his familiars. And horsefly. He seems to summon them to his face with a slow flick of the wrist. The muscle-bound horseflies retreat and return; they rest, rubbing their hands together in anticipation and spite. Destruction—is difficult. Destruction is slow.
    Creation, as I said, is no trouble at all. Like with the car. One of the first things we do, after settling in—we show up at this little garage or car cemetery a few blocks south. I'd call this place a hole-in-the-wall operation. But there's no wall to hack a hole in. The buildings around here are right down on their knees. That's evidently the thing with the contemporary city. You might want to work in it. But no one is seriously expected to live in it. Content, meaning and content, are all stored uptown, in the notched pillars of the skyscrapers. Well, the car seemed okay. It seemed like any other car. But Tod looked at it with real feeling, with the dull heat of—I don't know—thwarted love. The garage guy soon joined him, wiping an oily rag with his oily fingers. Next, Tod goes and gives him eight hundred bucks. The man counts the money and they argue for a while, Tod saying nine hundred, the man saying seven, then the man saying six while Tod holds out for a thou, and so on. Left alone with the car, Tod ran his fingers along the bodywork. Searching for what? Scar tissue. Trauma . . . Tod was blue that morning anyway, as I recall. In the afternoon he'd attended a funeral, or just accidentally witnessed one, hanging back, rather, in the mournerless churchyard, where the graves were flush with the earth. He crossed himself and slipped