Envy Read Online Free PDF Page A

his friends’, the love and longing of so many people for this one child—when Luke began to look his way, another boy stopped him, a boy taller and older than his son, a boy Will didn’t recognize. The boy put his hand out and touched Luke’s cheek to prevent him from turning in the direction of Will’s voice.
    You must not look at him,
the older boy said.
    And Luke answered,
But it’s my father.
    Luke struggled against the older boy, who Will understood had been assigned to show his son the ropes and prevent such mishaps as the one that had occurred. Because Luke did see Will, just for a moment. Still, it was long enough that his face registered horror.
    The older boy said accusingly,
See!
    And Luke asked,
What’s happened to him! What’s happened to him!
    Nothing,
the older boy said.
It’s just that that’s the way he looks to you
now, because he is only mortal.
    Luke sobbed, his face in his hands, and the older boy bent to comfort him.
    And Will fell from heaven back to his bed, not down the stairs he ascended, but falling as a man falls from a plane, without a parachute, dropping through space at fatal speed, yet with time to see, and the vision of a god.
    At first the city appeared as it would through the window of a jet approaching La Guardia, a tidy arrangement of lives, block after block, with an occasional landmark by which it was possible to orient himself. But then he was closer; he could find his own neighborhood and then his roof among the others on his block, the particular house toward which he was plummeting. What a mess it was in! Cracked façade and derelict rain gutter, two missing storm windows and an inadequately patched leak, broken satellite dish, snarls of TV cable and a useless antenna, its arms askew, like the ribs of a broken, stripped umbrella. Could this really be his house? How was it that Will had allowed it to crumble into such a state of disrepair?
    Fast though he fell, Will could see into the rooms of his home as if peering into lidless boxes. There was his wife, and with Carole was Samantha. His mother, his father, and his brother. Neighbors and patients, current acquaintances and people he hadn’t seen for decades, even children with whom he’d gone to elementary school—faces he couldn’t summon when awake. How small everyone appeared and, like slides from a holiday long past, how nearly transparent. Worse than their smallness was the tiny warmth and throb of them, the insectlike brevity of human life. Unbearable—unspeakable and obscene to be spirit trapped in matter, the bodies we worship and fear, exalt and punish, the flesh that grants every pleasure and ushers in our grief. How awful to be given these sublime and flimsy houses for our souls and then to witness their decay. How monstrous.
    The idea of it—flesh—gathered into a fist, or a blow, something that struck him hard on the chest, hard enough that he woke facedown and mouth open, unable even to gasp. As if, in truth, he had fallen from a great height back to earth and hit with a wallop, the dream knocked the breath out of him.
    All you,
he would have said, were he speaking with a patient about that patient’s dream: fragments of you, aspects of you, possible yous, impossible yous, incarnations of you, the you you were, the you you may become, your wishes, your fears, your . . .
    But the people he saw as he fell didn’t feel like him. And he didn’t want the dream Luke to be taken away. He didn’t want to have to make his son into, say, a part of himself that looked aghast at another part of him.
    What had Luke seen? What did his son see in his face that so frightened and repelled him?
    The blue numbers of the digital clock shift from 11:08 to 11:09. He’s slept much later than usual, and his body feels stiff and achy, as if in the aftermath of a fever. Will considers the coffeemaker on the dresser, a little basket beside it filled with