Losing It Read Online Free PDF

finally.
    She asked something else, too quickly to catch, and again Bob had to ask her to repeat herself.
    “Could you open your briefcase please?”
    “Oh, I, uh, I just have the one piece of luggage,” Bob said, turning to gesture to his suitcase behind him. She was staring at him so hard he finally looked – clown-like, he thought – down at the briefcase tucked under his arm. He’d been clutching it so hard he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh gosh, yes!” he said, smiling and blustering. He almost started to explain about absent-minded professors, how he could be walking down the street completely absorbed in some thought or other …
    “Your briefcase, sir,” she said, rather harshly. “Could you open it?”
    “Oh, this!” Bob said, still clutching it.
    Sienna was waiting for him now beyond the customs line. People of all stripes were turning to look at her as they filed past.
    “Here it is,” Bob said softly, and placed the briefcase on the inspection table, fiddled self-consciously with the lock. Finally, after too much effort, it fell open.
    Rebecca Williams flicked through several things. “What’s this?” she asked. She held up the special package.
    “That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I just threw it in there. It came in the mail today.”
    “What is it?” she asked slowly, enunciating every syllable, as if talking to a second-language learner.
    “It’s a tape of a famous lecture on Poe’s view of poetics and transcendence, in light of his struggles with the Transcendentalists,” Bob said. Then, meeting her blank expression, he added, “It’s an academic cassette.”
    “Value?” she asked finally.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “What’s the value?”
    “Oh, uh, it’s completely useless to almost anyone. But to me -” And then he stopped himself. She was looking at him with near-malice. “Twenty-five dollars,” Bob said.
    There was a terrible moment in which it looked as if she was going to open the package anyway. She’d hooked her sharp thumbnail under an edge, and at the same time was eyeing his suitcase. Bob willed himself to appear absolutely calm and innocent, despite his rising panic.
    “Could you open your other bag?” she asked, and closed the lid of the briefcase, leaving the special package unopened inside.
    Bob hoisted the suitcase onto the table. Sienna gave him a bright smile when he looked up, terror-stricken.
    The customs officer unzipped Bob’s bag and rummaged through his things: spare shirts, trousers, and socks, the Silverman biography of Poe, and an old copy of the complete tales and poems too bulky for his briefcase. Then she got to the padded black lace bra and panties, the nylons and purple silk slip and red satin corset at the bottom of the bag. She didn’t hold them up but simply fingered through them, pausing with each new discovery.
    “Those are, uh, some of my wife’s things,” he said, feebly. His face was flushed crimson and he was aware that his breath rattled in shallow, rapid little wheezes. He tried to calm himself but couldn’t.
    “Your wife?” Williams asked, deadpan.
    “She’s uh, she’s waiting for me. Over there,” Bob said. He pointed slightly in Sienna’s direction.
    Rebecca Williams – small, pasty-faced Rebecca Williams with the limp brown hair and washed-out eyes – looked at thestunning Sienna for what seemed to Bob like thirty or forty years. Finally she turned back to him.
    “All right. You can go,” she said. Not a flicker of light behind those eyes.
“Have a good stay.”
    Bob zipped up his bag, collected his briefcase, and wandered, dazed, to where Sienna was waiting.
    “Boy, she really put you through it,” Sienna said.
    “I need a drink,” he said.

    Bob had a moment of nausea right before liftoff. He let Sienna have the window seat and tried to study his hands and breathe deeply. A video screen two seats in front of them showed calm, responsible people in life jackets sliding down an inflated rescue chute