A Wild Sheep Chase Read Online Free PDF

nothing for the longest while. She seemed to be thinking of something else entirely. Five dishes lay empty on the table, a constellation of five extinct planets.
    “Listen,” she ended the silence. “I think we ought to become friends. That is, of course, if it’s all right with you.”
    “Of course it’s all right with me,” I said.
    “And I mean very close friends,” she said.
    I nodded.
    So it was we became very close friends. Not thirty minutes after we’d first met.
    “As a close friend, there’re a couple things I want to ask you,” I said.
    “Go right ahead.”
    “First of all, why is it you don’t show your ears? Second, have your ears ever exerted any special power over anyone besides me?”
    Without a word, she trained her eyes on her hands resting on the table.
    “Some, yes,” she said quietly.
    “Some?”
    “Sure. But to put it another way, I’m more accustomed to the self who doesn’t show her ears.”
    “Which is to say that the you when you show your ears is different from the you when you don’t show your ears.”
    “Right enough.”
    Two waiters cleared away our dishes and brought the soup.
    “Would you mind telling me about the you who shows her ears.”
    “That’s so long ago I doubt I can tell it very well. The truth is, I haven’t shown my ears once since I was twelve.”
    “But when you did that modeling job, you showed your ears, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” she said, “but not my real ears.”
    “Not your real ears?”
    “Those were blocked ears.”
    I had two spoonfuls of soup and looked up at her.
    “Tell me more about your ‘blocked ears.’”
    “Blocked ears are dead ears. I killed my own ears. That is, I consciously cut off the passageway…. Do you follow me?”
    No, I didn’t follow her.
    “Ask me, then,” she said.
    “By killing your ears, do you mean you made yourself deaf?”
    “No, I can hear quite fine. But even so, my ears are dead. You can probably do it too.”
    She set her soupspoon back down, straightened her back, raised her shoulders two inches, thrust her jaw full out, held that posture for all of ten seconds, and suddenly dropped her shoulders.
    “There. My ears are dead. Now you try.”
    Three times I repeated the movements she’d made. Slowly, carefully, but nothing left me with the impression that my ears had died. The wine was rapidly circulating through my system.
    “I do believe that my ears aren’t dying properly,” I said, disappointed.
    She shook her head. “That’s okay. If your ears don’t need to die, there’s nothing wrong with them not dying.”
    “May I ask you something else?”
    “Go right ahead.”
    “If I add up everything you’ve told me, it seems to come down to this: that up to age twelve you showed your ears. Then one day you hid your ears. And from that day on, not once have you shown your ears. But at such times that you must show your ears, you block off the passageway between your ears and your consciousness. Is that correct?”
    A winsome smile came to her face. “That is correct.”
    “What happened to your ears at age twelve?”
    “Don’t rush things,” she said, reaching her right hand across the table, lightly touching the fingers of my left hand. “Please.”
    I poured out the rest of the wine into our glasses and slowly drank mine.
    “First, I want to know more about you,” she started.
    “What about me?”
    “Everything. How you were brought up, how old you are, what you do for a living, stuff like that.”
    “It’s your ordinary story. So utterly ordinary, you’d probably doze off in the middle of it.”
    “I like ordinary stories.”
    “Mine is the kind of ordinary story no one could possibly enjoy.”
    “That’s okay, give me ten minutes’ worth.”
    “I was born in 1948, on December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve. Now Christmas Eve doesn’t make a very good birthday. I mean, you don’t get separate birthday and Christmas presents. Everyone figures they save money that