As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

got some other story.”

IN THE NIGHT
    H e could hear a heated conversation in hushed voices. Ry couldn’t make out the words, but the sound of it was vehement. And interrupted here and there by clattering mechanical cascades of…of what?
    Straining to hear, he woke himself halfway. His eyes were still closed, but he could sense light through his eyelids. He felt the cushion his back was pressed against, his cramped position, how his bent knees cantilevered out over open air, and he thought he must be lying on a couch, and that the couch was not long enough. His shoulder was cold; pulling the something that covered him up higher, to his chin, he could tell that it was an afghan-y something, textured like that, and with places his finger poked through. It was still warm, though, even with the little holes.
    The people were arguing again. They were in theroom, whatever room it was, with him. But not right next to him, maybe across the room. Ry cracked open his left eye, the uninjured one that was closer to the couch, hidden in the recesses of a pillow. A couch-y pillow.
    His part of the room was in darkness, but a few yards beyond his feet was an alcove where a shaded lamp hung low over a small table. A man was sitting at the table typing on an old-fashioned typewriter. He paused in his typing and rolled the paper up in the machine to read it.
    Glasses rested midway down his nose, which in profile was mildly beaklike. Wisps of hair, catching the lamplight, glowed golden. Ry knew the man from somewhere, but could not think, in his grogginess, from where. It came to him that the man’s name was Del. He was making a hazy connection between the clattering sound and the old typewriter when the guy named Del erupted into a quiet but fierce argument. With…himself? He held his hands out, palms up, a plea for understanding. Then stubbornly folded his arms and sat back, defiant in his chair. Speaking to the air. In the tone you would use if you knew someone was sleeping nearby, but you really had to make your point. The person you were talking to would have to be right in front of you, trying to read your lips and string together the t ’s and p ’s and k ’s as you toldhim (or her) the urgent thing that couldn’t wait, that had to be said now . But the other person wasn’t there.
    Then somehow, without moving from his chair, Del was the other person, arguing back. Patiently explaining. Ry watched from the darkness of the living room. Not moving. At all. Wanting Del not to be nuts. Something else could be happening. Del could just be going over something that had happened, some conversation. Ry had done that, where you come up, hours or days later, with what you should have said, and you say it aloud. He usually said it to the bathroom mirror. In the daytime. With no one around. But everyone is different.
    Or maybe what Del was typing was a play, maybe he was acting out the parts. But in the strangeness of night and the blurriness of being only half awake, Ry didn’t want to think it out; he just wanted it not to be happening. He was about to pull the afghan up over his head when Del abruptly stood up, threw his hands in the air in exasperation, turned off the light, and walked out of the room. For some moments, light and muttering came from further off, then it was silent and dark and Ry would have thought about it some more, tried to figure it out, but with all the silence and darkness, it wasn’t long before he slipped back into sleep.

EVERYTHING SEEMS MORE NORMAL IN THE MORNING
    W hen Ry woke again, it was to the muffled sound of snoring, and the air in the room was a dim gray. He lay there as the light gathered, taking in his surroundings. The events of the day before gathered, too, in his mind. They seemed too unlikely to be true. But here he was. Which was where, exactly?
    His eyes fell on an old typewriter, and it stirred something, but it was an elusive something, like a dream you can’t catch before it slips away.