Life on the Preservation, US Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

finished half a cup of coffee. Sleep dragged at him like an irresistible tide. Zach nodded over his plate. “What a fucked up day,” he said.
    “Yeah.” Exhausted, a sense of alien exclusion overcame Ian. The café was crowded and noisy but he felt alone in the midst of it, as if it were a room full of barking dogs instead of human beings.
    “Let’s go,” Zach said.
    They pulled up to the curb in front of Ian’s building, the Gregory. Ian climbed out of the Bug and paused, hanging on the open door, feeling some muted urgency struggle to assert itself. The Gregory, which was slated to be bulldozed along with everything else on the block to make way for the new light rail station, loomed over them, its brick face soot-blackened by decades of neglect. Some local toy had slashed a tag on the glass of the entry door, total amateur bullshit. Ian looked back into the car. “Don’t do anything,” he said. “Don’t go back there without me.”
    Zach looked at him like he didn’t know what Ian was talking about. “Sure, whatever.”
    “Promise.”
    “Cross my fucking heart.”
     
     
    I AN COLLAPSED ON his unmade bed. Sleep ran through him in a sluggish current. He thrashed in the current but could not drown. Sunlight slipped over the ceiling, gleamed briefly on the Nihiljizum band poster thumb-tacked next to his bed. Smells came and went: cooking scents, brewed coffee. His palate enjoyed a fleeting smorgasbord of flavors. He heard traffic, no traffic, traffic. Once, he opened his gummy eyelids, face mashed into one of his notebooks, and the apartment was dark except for a light in the bathroom. The faucet was running, and then it shut off. Ian’s eyes started to close. Before he could fall back into the current he twisted himself off the edge of the bed. Morning light moved across the floor. Dust kittens drifted like tumbleweeds. He grabbed the broken barrel of a pencil, crawled to the nearest wall and squatted there – Paleolithic cave tagger, or Goya doing his Black pieces on the walls of his own house, trying to paint out his insanity.
    Ian pressed the pencil tip to the wall and made the letter W, focusing minutely, then made another letter, becoming absorbed. WHO tracks expanded in a spiral out of the pencil and Ian’s fevered brain, creating a mandala. The shadow and light show slowed down. Time began to behave. Ian became aware of the cramps in his legs. He tipped away from the wall, rolled onto his back, finger bones crabbed around the pencil stub.
    The WHO mandala was big as a pizza pan. Other WHOs flung off it in every style Ian knew, varying in size from insect feet iterations to fully shaded dynamic blocks a foot high. Staring at the wall, Ian could breathe.
    But he was tired. His head lolled over. The cheap digital clock on the bedside table read: 11:32 AM / Saturday / October 5.
    Less than an hour had elapsed. Which was impossible; it felt like days since Zach dropped him off.
    Sleep dragged at Ian but he drove his body to its feet and racked up the window blinds. The sun stood a few degrees off midday. Okay, got it. He grabbed his phone. Zach’s number went straight to voicemail. After a moment he killed the connection, thumbed out a text message. Waited. Nothing. He put the phone down. The apartment was safe – or at least safer than it had been. He could further improve on that, break out his markers, pull a full-scale Goya, make his apartment insane-proof.
    Or he could go find Zach.
     
     
    S TRADDLING THE CHIEF , Ian reached under the tank and turned on the petcocks. He closed the choke, cracked the throttle, stood on the kicker. Nada. He adjusted the choke, stood on the kicker some more. Cold starting the Chief was like throwing the prop of a World War One biplane on an icy winter morning. What was he forgetting this time? Oh, yeah. Retard the spark. Now he stood on the kicker and the engine lit up. It was a big sound, a window-rattling sound. Good morning, friends and neighbors.
    Wind stung