Inner Tube: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t interest him. He did airbrush paintings of office equipment and kitchen appliances. He wanted to be a lounge lizard, bitter and languid, but he was too excitable and no lounge would hold him. How close were we? Chris is the only man I’ve ever wanted to sleep with.
    It was a long time ago. He called me on Christmas Eve from his parents’ apartment across town. He was just back from camping in Trinidad and very excited about music he’d heard there, fruit bats and clownfish he’d seen. We talked a long time, promised to meet the next day and eat oysters.
    Just about one hour later Chris went sailing off his snowy balcony thirteen stories onto Fifth Avenue.
    Wham.
    A tragic suicide, his family announced. The guilty lamentation seemed so important to them that I withheld the more terrible truth: Woozy with goose and cognac, Chris had gone out to plot the stars over Central Park and, simply, slipped.
    When his sister called me in the morning, I thought at first it was a joke. But the quaver in her voice turned harsh and she cursed my stupidity. I threw the phone into the wall. And then I sat for a long time on my bed waiting for something to come out or come up, for some physical sensation, but it was as though I were inside a test tunnel with everything unnaturally still. I went in the next room, turned on the television, lay naked in front of it. There was an electronic living-room show, a man in pinstripes being interviewed about group therapy. I thought how thin Chris looked in pinstripes, then stopped thinking at all.
    For days, stuporous and inured, I lived there on that floor. The flickering blue screen was the only light in the room when night came down, and it was like lying at the bottom of a lake with people calling down to me, faces blurred and words indistinct. Now and then I closed my eyes to rest them, but never really slept. I absorbed loose time while stimuli bypassed my brain. Ashtrays overflowed, fur grew in the empty food cans, and the drone of noise and light went into me like an intravenous drip.
    At the same time that I began to distinguish intervals in programming, I began to recognize, if not to comprehend, my pain. I wept at a hockey game, at a Petula Clark variety special. I slept dreamlessly, holding to me like some stuffed fuzzy toy a great armful of hissing air. On waking, my skin seemed unfamiliar, a stolen envelope. Not quite dawn and the sky was a test pattern. I groped in muffled ignorance and found, horribly, the nub. Chris died.
    I showered, put clothes on, watched warships crisscross a billowing flag for the sign-on anthem, then a tornado of identical cartoon mice engulfing Farmer Gray. Regaining volition now, I could pick and choose my channels. I knew right where I was and I didn’t care. Chris died, but here was Bill Cullen to numb me.
    It was January by the time I went outside. The streets were iced and I sprawled forward inside two blocks. No hurry to get up, now it was safe, safe to picture everything—Chris still smiling as he toppled, gracefully taut in his fast dive, landing, no bounce, with a sound like planks clapping, the bright blood, the taxis pulsing yellow at the corner.
    I limped to a steamy restaurant and ate two portions of shredded beef with oyster sauce. “A poor workman always finds fault with his tools,” my fortune cookie said irrelevantly. I phoned Chris’s sister from a booth. She said come on over, there’s plenty to drink. The TV was on when I got there. It was on loud.
    Richard Conte said: “Ease off, buster. I’ve had about all I can take.”
    We drank rum highballs and glanced at each other.
    Lisa said: “He had nothing to be angry about. Not one fucking thing.”
    I said: “He wasn’t angry.”
    We stopped talking once the bottle was empty. We slept in one bed, touching, but fully dressed. I woke energized, without a hangover, and thinking widely: This could be easy. I could leave my whole sorry life behind like a pile of bloody clothes.