Martin and John Read Online Free PDF Page A

when I looked up I remember being able to see for the first time as far as one can see. There was truly nothing there, just a flatness that rolled away to the horizon, and the sky gaping like an open mouth. I walked with my head up, staring at the sky, until I heard Susan’s voice. “John,” she said, “look down.” A last bit of yellow grass hung like thatch over a rift in the earth, and below that was the bare red clay of the cliff, dropping away from us at a steep angle. At its base a dry streambed whose flow had once been powerful enough to create this rift in the earth now wandered aimlessly, as if in search of its water. “There’s only one way to do it,” Susan said. She stepped off the edge and coasted on her ass in a cloud of red dust. I tried to step off carefully, but I was immediately lost in the cloud, the sound, the fall. Susan waited for me at the bottom. It seemed immensely warm down there and I looked up, searching for the wind, until I realized that it blew far above us now. I looked down. Susan’s pants had red circles on the seat. “Did you bring a blanket?” she asked, and when she smiled her teeth were a reddish brown. Later, she screwed me with a passion and intensity that overwhelmed me: beneath her, I felt as useful as a newel post on a bed. I looked over her at the red wall of the cliff, at the invisible wall of the sky. Grit bit intomy back: I hadn’t brought a blanket. I remember thinking that I was some sort of freak because I felt no love, no lust even, no emotion for the girl straddling my hips. I remember thinking that I felt the same way about Susan that I did about my mother: I was trying to forget her while she was still there. And I remember trying to fit my father into it all, trying to blame him, and none of it worked, because these things had nothing to do with each other. I knew this, but not conflating them was impossible. Susan didn’t say anything after I lost my erection, just dressed and led me from the prairie, and the land swallowed the cliffs behind us. As I followed her strong silent back I remember I felt that the night had somehow pushed its way inside me, and that I had been left in darkness.
    ON THE NIGHT my mother finally died, while waiting in Penn Station for the train that would take me to the hospice, I met a man who made signs: the support columns of the platform had just been painted, and his signs read “blue wet-paint columns.” One caught my eye just as I descended the stairs, as much for its odd syntax as its cheap handmade feel. I looked down the platform from one sign to the next and I was struck by the uniformity of them all. The handwriting was a sloppy scrawl of red marker, a mix of capital and lowercase letters that was repeated exactly from sign to sign. My eye followed them down the platform until there were no more, and then I looked down and saw the sign maker, or his backanyway, a back as broad as a field. I walked to him slowly. The platform was deserted except for the two of us and a few mice gnawing candy wrappers between the tracks. When I reached him I stood silently behind him; a slight tension in his shoulders told me he was aware of my presence but he continued to work slowly, drawing his marker across the paper with his left hand and repeatedly glancing at a scrubby slip of paper held in his right. I knew without looking that the paper contained the words taped to the posts, and that they were written exactly as they were written on each sign. I cleared my throat and said, “Blue wet-paint columns.” The man looked up. The details of his face were lost in a thick black beard, but I could see confusion in his eyes. A single sound erupted from his mouth like a burp: “Huh?” That’s when I realized, suddenly and unexpectedly, that he couldn’t read, that he was simply copying the words in his right hand as if they were drawings, stick figures dancing meaninglessly across the paper. “Blue wet-paint columns,” I repeated,