Mr. Potter Read Online Free PDF Page A

teeming with cream and then none of that, and conversations about the possibility of the end of the world
and then days of the world ending again and again, and within the very days themselves were ends, as if the day did not constitute and define a limitation. And his wife said his name again, “Zoltan,” she said, but he heard her say “Samuel” and before him he saw the miracle that he had been, Samuel, a boy whose hair was a pleasing color (it was black), a boy whose eyes had been a pleasing color (they were black), a boy whose presence had made his mother and father happy, but just now he could not remember their faces, the faces of his mother and father, he could only remember their presence, he had had them, that thing, a mother and a father, only now they were lost, like a turn in the road (only the road was his own life), or like a horizon (only the horizon was his own life), they had just vanished, as if they had never been there at all, as if they had not given him that name, Samuel, as if he had not been their only child, they had just vanished into darkness, yes darkness! a vast darkness had descended over many things he had known, not a darkness like the night, and not a darkness that was the opposite of the light in which he was now standing, not a darkness that was the opposite of the light into which Mr. Potter had temporarily disappeared, more like the darkness from which Mr. Potter and all he came from had originated.
    Into the middle of the bright sunlight at midday Mr. Potter drove Mr. Shoul’s car, leaving Dr.
Weizenger and his wife behind, and when they were no longer in his sight, when he had come some distance from them (a mile or so and a mile was quite a distance to Mr. Potter) they vanished entirely from his thoughts and he became absorbed by the uneven road; its surface was coarse, the thick coating of asphalt no longer lay smooth like the icing on a cake (or something like that), and the road itself was a series of twists and turns and every inch of this road, every foot, every yard, every mile held a danger of the sudden drop off a precipice, a turn in the road so sharply rounded that it might not be a turn at all, it might be the end of the road itself. And Mr. Potter held the steering wheel in his hands, sometimes even caressing it as if it were something to which he could administer pleasure, and the steering wheel itself, from the look of it, from the feel of it, was meant to recall the hard protective shell that was the back of a turtle, but Mr. Potter only held the steering wheel in his two hands and the feel of it was familiar and then again the feel of it was not familiar and it remained a steering wheel; and the Weizengers with their complications involving the world that was beyond the horizon did not now exist, and he drove along the road almost in a stupor and said nothing to himself and sang nothing to himself and thought nothing to himself. Mr. Potter drove along and nothing crossed his mind and the world was blank and the world remained blank.

    Mr. Potter, while driving Mr. Shoul’s car, was passing through villages named John Hughes, Urlings, Newfield, Barnes Hill, Seatons, Swetes, Freetown, and each village was an entire history unto itself, each village a mouthful of pain, each village inhabited by individual human beings with stories so similar and stories so different; and Mr. Potter, while driving Mr. Shoul’s car through these villages, each with their scene after scene of pain, withheld himself from the world around him; some of these villages were in the Parish of St. Paul, the parish in which he was born on the seventh of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and as he drove through the parish in which he was born he withheld himself from the world around him. And through the village of Bolans he entered the Parish of St. Mary and he left the Parish of St. Mary through the village of Emanuel and he made his way up Market Street to Mr.