Monterey Bay Read Online Free PDF

canneries’ rattling seeming to both solidify the enclosure and erode it.
    â€œIt’s all my fault,” he said.
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œWe were really starting to get along, but then I pushed too hard. And you told me too much.”
    â€œI don’t require careful handling.”
    â€œBut you do require something. A balancing of the confessional scales, I think.”
    He stood and scanned the room in what looked like desperation. Then he went over to the bookshelf, retrieved the manuscript, and dropped it onto her lap.
    â€œI wrote it,” he explained.
    He sat down next to her again. She looked at the first page, which was blank except for a title.
Breaking Through.
    â€œYou showed me yours,” he continued. “And now I’m showing you mine.”
    She flipped to the second page, expecting to be disappointed.But from the very first sentence, she couldn’t look away. It was like reading the transcript of something she had dreamed and then lived and then dreamed all over again. There was almost nothing in the way of economy, even less in the way of design, the hand-scrawled edits in the margins nearly equal in volume to the typewritten text. The images created by his words, however, were indelible: the ghetto inferno, the split-open head,
the tragedy
, he wrote that someone else had written,
that breaks a man’s face and a white fire flies out of it
. A trinity, but not necessarily the Christian one, opposing forces meeting in honesty and a new magic birthing itself in the juncture. Most of all, there was his description of the aftermath. She had felt it before, and in otherwise disparate parts of the world: how communities acquired harder outlines following near erasure; how individuals, in moments of shock, catapulted themselves into unearned clarity. She had felt it, but she had never voiced it, and seeing it on the page was like seeing her own reflection in the harshest possible light.
    When there were just a few paragraphs left, most of which praised the trade unions in a way her father would have derided, she stopped reading.
    â€œSo?” he asked.
    She returned the manuscript to him. Her brain didn’t feel right anymore. The synapses were firing a bit too fast, the ideas too big and loud.
    â€œYou’re wrong,” she said.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œTragedy doesn’t always clarify. And pain doesn’t always produce.”
    â€œYou must have misread me, then, because I never said it did.”
    She took another swig from the jug. And because she was feeling particularly righteous, abnormally eloquent—the drink and his essay and their pulpy fusion making her tongue warmer and her mind looser than ever before—she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to expand her argument. She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to begin even earlier than the Philippines, even earlier than her own birth. Her grandfather’s exodus from Sweden, his relocation to New York City’s most squalid tenement, the amputation of his surname—
Filtzkog
—into the leaner, more American-sounding
Fiske
. Then, the birth of her father, Anders, and the onset of his precocious entrepreneurship, his knack for using known infrastructures to exploit unknown sources of income: mining zinc in the British uplands instead of copper, farming ostriches in South Africa instead of goats, distilling vodka in the Spey River Valley instead of Scotch. All of this emerged from her fluently and in a way that seemed to prove her point. It was only when she reached the part about her mother that her confidence flagged and another drink was taken. As for this tale, she had heard it only once, so it was easy to feel unsure. New Orleans, she told the biologist. The Babineaux family, Louisiana’s mostviciously aloof clan of French transplants, their longing for the homeland fierce enough to present itself as a genuine psychological disorder. Marcelle Babineaux, seventeen years old: a