Don't Move Read Online Free PDF

face against the first in a row of identical volumes, one of those general encyclopedias you can buy in installments. The dreariness was all of a piece, well cared for, honorable. I looked at the woman, who was coming toward me with a tray in her hands. Considered against the background of her house, she seemed less lively; she took on a shabby decency that was perfectly in keeping with her surroundings. They depressed me. For one thing, there was that collection of knickknacks next to my arm. I hate furniture cluttered with trinkets, Angela, as you well know. I like an unencumbered surface, with maybe a lamp in one corner and a book or two, nothing more. My shoulder twitched with a sudden impulse to fling out my arm and knock all that trash to the floor. She served me the coffee. “How much sugar?”
    I attached my lips to the cup and took a sip. The coffee was good, but my mouth was deadened by fatigue and ill humor, and so the liquid left a coating of bitterness on my tongue. The woman came and sat at some little distance from me on the sofa. The light was behind her, but her frayed bangs failed to hide her high forehead. It was too high, too prominent for the rest of her face, which gathered around the furrow between her nose and her heavily painted mouth in a single fixed grimace. I looked at the hand she was holding the espresso cup with. The flesh around her short fingernails, which she no doubt chewed, was red and swollen. I thought about the smell of stale saliva on those fingertips and shuddered. As I did so, she bent forward. I saw a dog’s muzzle appear from under the sofa. A sleepy middle-sized dog with a dark, wavy coat and long amber ears. He licked her hand, including those nibbled nails, as happy as though he’d received a reward.
    “Heartbreaker,” she whispered, rubbing her big forehead against the dog’s. He noticed me, but he seemed to look at me without interest, and I saw that his eyes were strangely clouded. She gathered up the tray and the dirty cups. “He’s blind,” she said in a lowered voice, as though she didn’t want the beast to hear her.
    “Would you give me a glass of water?”
    “Do you feel all right?”
    “No, I’m hot.”
    She turned around. As she walked to the kitchen, I observed her buttocks. They were as thin as a man’s. My gaze slid over her entire retreating body: her narrow, curved back, the empty space between her legs where her thighs should have met. This was not a desirable body. Indeed, it looked downright inhospitable. Swaying on her high heels, she came back to where I was sitting and handed me a glass of water, then stood there and waited for me to give her back the glass. “Do you feel better?”
    Yes, I did; the water had cleaned my mouth.
    She didn’t accompany me to the door. “Well then, thank you,” I said.
    “Don’t mention it.”
    The heat was still there, hanging heavy in the air, imperceptibly shifting things. The asphalt felt soft under my feet. I took up a position next to the closed shutter and started waiting for the shop to reopen. I was sweating again, and I was thirsty again. I went back to the bar. I asked for a glass of water, but when the young bartender with the pimply face stepped aside, I got a good view of the row of bottles behind his head, changed my mind, and ordered a vodka. I had him pour it into a tall glass and requested some ice, which he doled out from the bottom of an aluminum container. Maybe as it melts, I thought, it’ll give off the same smell as the rest of the place, rancid mayonnaise and sour floor cloths. I walked over to the far side of the barroom and sat down next to the jukebox. I took a long, noisy swallow; the alcohol penetrated me like a sharp pain, like a hot flash that turns at once into an intense, protracted chill. I looked at my watch—I still had more than an hour to wait.
    I wasn’t used to intervals, Angela. I was barely forty, and already I’d been a chief surgeon for five years, the youngest