Forty Rooms Read Online Free PDF Page A

tree falling in the forest when no one is around. Rest assured, there are powers that see and hear everything happening in this world. And in any case, aren’t you reading it right now? Manuscripts do not burn, as another immortal once said—though you are probably too young to have read him just yet. How old are you, anyway?”
    The jazz music of my parents’ party is coming from somewhere very far away.
    “Thirteen.” I lick my dry lips. I realize that I never did get that cup of water. Battalions of smeared glasses have been abandonedin careless disorder near the sink, and from where I sit, an arm’s length away—everything in our kitchen is only an arm’s length away—I can smell the half-honeyed, half-acrid scent of unfinished wine. “The age of Juliet,” I nearly add, but say instead, “I’ll turn fourteen this summer.”
    “Oh, you have some time. Not too much time, mind you,” he says airily as he glances at the clock on the wall, and as if on cue the cuckoo creaks, bowing on its perch; it is three in the morning. “Time, you know, is the ultimate limitation placed on man, and you need to be supremely aware of your limitations if you desire to become a poet. Of all the different kinds of art, you see, poetry is the one most attuned to man’s condition, and therefore the most noble and the most demanding of them all. Just as men struggle to transcend the inherent limits of geography, history, and biology to find the meaning of life, so poets strive to transcend the inherent limits of language, meter, and structure to find beauty and truth. And just as life wouldn’t have meaning without death, so poetry wouldn’t have its sublime power outside the prison of its form.” He nods at the manuscript before me: “Which makes it even more powerful when you combine the limitations of language with the repressions of history. But the opposite is true as well. Poetry diminishes in times of plenty, loses its urgency and hunger, grows flabby. People of each age get just the poetry they deserve.”
    As he continues to talk, I begin to feel dizzy with the sense of utter strangeness and, at the same time, a kind of novel, intoxicating freedom. The kitchen has ceased to be the familiar place where I eat rushed breakfasts on school mornings while my motherwaters her windowsill herbs and my father fumes at the day’s headlines. In this new place, at this unearthly, in-between hour, the chilled, crisp sweetness of an April night enters through the cracked window like some barely audible promise, and souls of banished words are resurrected in guilt-ridden whispers, in paling print, in a stranger’s languid, knowing drawl, to hang in the air, dark and light and eternal, mixing with the heady smell of spring, swelling my chest with some immense, nameless longing.
    The man with the handsome face of a ruined god is watching me closely.
    “Do you want to be immortal?” he asks.
    “What?”
    “It’s a simple question and a simple matter. Do you want to be immortal?”
    I want to say: I don’t know what you mean. I open my mouth.
    “Yes.”
    He smiles again—a real, warm smile this time, though somehow cruel in spite of its warmth. All at once I think: If I lean forward ever so slightly, his breath will brush my face. I feel my skin growing hot. I do not lean forward.
    The man stands, his movements fluid with loose, predatory grace. I am shocked to see bare feet protruding from the frayed cuffs of his pants.
    “Well, time for a rude awakening,” he says. “I could take a dramatic leap off the windowsill, but something tells me you are not easily impressed with clichés, so let me make a more subtle exit. Time waits for no man, memento mori , and all that.”
    The clock creaks on the wall, and as I look up, I see the cuckootaking its three bows, one left, one right, one straight, which seems impossible, since it was three o’clock some ten minutes ago, unless the hands have started going backward, and then the