Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall Read Online Free PDF

you hang up?” she asked.
    “I almost did. But then I pulled the phone back.”
    “I’ve got to go,” Tutti said. She hung up.
    ~
     
    He decides to go out for a bicycle ride. For a long while he rides along keeping his head down, not noticing anything. When he looks up, a strange thing has happened. He finds himself in a foreign country, possibly Italy. He thinks he recognizes the bridge he is crossing from a book his mother used to read to him as a child.

I T WAS the beginning of spring and all the girls were going around with bare legs, and there was a girl with bare legs on the subway and she was reading a magazine and I said to her, “What are you reading?” and without looking up at me she crossed her legs.
    ~
     
    The universe keeps striking the same note. I suddenly realize there has only ever been one note. The difference is, I used to wait to hear the other notes. They’re coming , I thought. There was this wonderful sense of possibility.
    I am saying, it was always only the one note. The cosmos has no imagination. Look at this macaroni dinner I am trying to eat.
    ~
     
    Once, I was camping in a trailer park and an old lady made me breakfast. She cooked it for me, but she couldn’t come out and give it to me. She was too old. There was something wrong with her legs.
    She sent her husband out. He handed me a paper plate with breakfast on it. There was a napkin with a plastic fork and knife tucked inside.
    “My wife made this for you,” the husband says. “She thinks you look lonely.”
    He went back to the trailer. He walked through the forest as though it were a cathedral, and it was going to take him the rest of his life to get back to the trailer. I could see the old lady’s face in the trailer window.
    ~
     
    Tutti and I were living in that apartment where you couldn’t put anything in the freezer because of all the ice forming on the freezer walls. I saw my whole life in that freezer. I saw a guy with hairy legs, living in a cave, eating frozen fish-sticks. I saw God in that freezer.
    ~
     
    I went out the door, into the heat. I stopped. I went back into the building. I saw Lisa. “It’s a wall of heat out there,” I said. Lisa looked at me. I imagined she was saying to herself, There, but for the grace of God, go I.
    I went back out into the heat.

I S THAT something you can do?” was one thing someone in class had said. Plus this: “We learned in our other class that you can’t do that.” Another thing people said was: “How will you be grading us?”
    I wanted to get at what was most important in my life. Cut to the quick, so to speak. Get to the point. Say what had to be said and be done with it. I didn’t want to fuck around too much anymore.
    I had a story already written down. It was about beans. I decided my project would be to cut out all the nonessential crap in my story about beans. Then I would have it. I would have what I was looking for, what I had been looking for all my life, more or less. No doubt people would want to read what I had written this time, since it represented the culmination of a lifetime of searching.
    But when I read it over, I saw that it represented nothing. It was just this story where a guy goes over to his uncle’s place and finds all these beans in the cupboard.
    You see what I was trying to do, though, don’t you? The beans were supposed to represent something. Having all those beans. More beans than you could ever consume.
    There was one moment where the uncle opens the cupboard and looks at all the beans and shakes his head in disbelief, as if he can’t understand how all those beans got in there, how this could be what his life had come to. You know the kind of moment I’m talking about. The epiphanic moment. The moment of revelation. The moment where some little, mundane thing shows us how little and mundane our lives have really been.
    Only I guess the uncle already knew how little and mundane his life was, and the revelation was not all