A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Read Online Free PDF

pouting berry of lips, the jaunty cock of hips, the sinuous stretch and spread and coiling whip of ecstatic release, song of the demonic, protrusion of nipple, juice and sweat, blossom and blossom and ache.
    Oh God. And now, for the first time in all of these dreams, the girl had acquired a name: Clarissa Nash.
    Clarissa Nash. Henry had no idea where this name had come from, who the girl might be. She was not one of his former high-school students, thank God, at least not one he could remember. And why— and how? —would he remember someone he didn’t remember? He tried to persuade himself that she must be simply a character from a book, but he knew that this too could not be true. She was far too real, far too—absurd as it might sound— detailed. How old was she? Nineteen or twenty, Henry guessed, maybe a bit older. Not a child. At least not that. Even so, he was forty-one. His desire was unyielding, sublime, pathetic, absurd. Whether or not she actually existed seemed, in a way, the least of his concerns. He just wanted her, wanted these dreams, to leave him alone.
    The girl, unnamed then, had begun to appear in his dreams three months ago—in May, when Amy had finally given up on him and left New Orleans. She hadn’t cried when she told him she was leaving; she’d been resolute, abrupt, unflinching. He’d asked her to stay, to give him time; he’d explained that he was doing better, that he was figuring things out.
    “You’re living in a grocery store, Henry,” she’d told him. “What is it exactly you think you’re figuring out?”
    It was true. Nine months earlier he’d moved out. He’d taken everything he owned to the empty grocery store, which he’d bought with his share of the money from his mother’s estate. It was a vast, fluorescent-lit aluminum-and-glass building on Magazine Street a few blocks from their house on Prytania—Amy’s house, actually, a beautifully renovated shotgun he’d simply moved into when they got married. Everything about the grocery store was tired and sad and downtrodden, the front windows smeared with grease and dotted with the taped corners of old advertisements, the aluminum shelves sagging and bent, the red-tiled floors cracked. Fresh and Friendly had been the grocery’s name when it was still operating, though Amy had dubbed it the Stale and Surly. She’d refused to shop there, pointing out that the canned goods were always covered with dust, that the floor was always sticky, that the one shelf reserved for international foods included, as if they were exotic delicacies, anchovies and Vienna sausages. She’d said that Melvin the butcher, in his white shirt and thin black tie and bloody apron, constantly complained about the weather and about foreigners and about children’s grimy fingers on the glass of the meat case.
    Amy had nearly killed Henry, of course, when he told her he’d used his mother’s money, his only inheritance, to buy the building.
    She’d shaken her head, disgusted. “You’ve fucking lost it, Henry,” she’d said. “This time you’ve really fucking lost it.”
    He’d tried to explain it to her, had begged her to understand. Now, though, to be honest, he couldn’t really remember what he’d been thinking or what he’d said to Amy in his defense. He had just felt—he had known —that he couldn’t keep the money from his mother’s estate, that he didn’t want it. And when the store had been put up for sale, he’d bought it. It was crazy. He’d known it was crazy. But it had been necessary. That was one of the words he’d used with Amy. Necessary.
    “Necessary?” Amy had said, incredulous, irate, packing her bags for a trip to Central America, to Guatemala and Honduras and Belize. Hunting the Palm’s Heart: A Hundred Recipes, her next book was to be called. She’d told him the names of the different trees: the cohune, the waree, the jipijapa, the pokenoboy. She’d told him that each had a different heart. The names had