My Mother-in-Law Drinks Read Online Free PDF

fuck were they all right now, why didn’t they come nosing around, prying into the sinister intentions of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo?
    Now Matrix was moving along the metal rail running along the front of the dairy and fresh pasta case with the step of a prison guard inspecting cells on death row during evening shakedown, scanning the yogurt section with particular severity.
    Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was little more than a yard away from him, but unlike Matrix, he had his back to the dairy products, because he’d pulled the remote control out of his jacket once again and was now pointing it at two other monitors with the nonchalance of a technician testing an electrical system.
    After the engineer had been playing around with the remote for a while, Matrix turned his head and looked him in the face (Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gave him a perfunctory smile, which he did not return); then Matrix looked down at the hand that was holding the remote control, and from there back up, at the two monitors, after which he made a sort of approving expression with his eyebrows (kind of like: “Oh, I see”), and then went back to hunting for yogurt.
    â€œYoung man, excuse me,” the little old lady had, so to speak, asked me, seeing as her ocular solicitations hadn’t had much effect. And she tipped her head in the direction of the cranberry beans, which were in fact on a shelf too high for her to reach, short as she was.
    That’s what old people always do when they need something: they mobilize you even before you realize what they want done. You have to make yourself useful without explicit guidance from them.
    â€œAh, certainly,” I replied, and I headed over to help her.
    It was just as I was on tiptoes trying to reach the jar of beans for her (how long could I have taken, five seconds?) that I recognized the nearby voice of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo as he said simply, in the calmest possible tone:
    â€œFreeze.”
    I turned around and saw, first, Matrix’s arms rising slowly over his head as if in response to a divine convocation, then his head with the ponytail, then a pistol aimed roughly at his temple, and then a hand gripping that pistol, in turn connected to an arm that ran straight into the side of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.
    That’s exactly how I saw it, step by step, working backward, the way it looks when you hit REWIND on a camcorder without first hitting STOP . It’s incredible how fear circumscribes and amplifies one’s perception of events (which is why many witnesses, even when testifying under oath, will insist that they never saw the one specific thing that the judge keeps asking them about, because at that moment, even though they were right in the middle of what was happening, fear had selected certain details for them while canceling out all the rest).
    In a situation like that, one thinks, who knows what speed the brain is operating at. How much instinctive philosophy it produces. What intelligent thoughts about the provisional nature of life, the discovery of what truly matters, and so on.
    But the only question that kept drilling into my head as I was standing there was this: “How the fuck does he keep his hand from shaking?”
    Get it? Not: “Where did he pull that gun out from? I didn’t notice any bulge in his jacket when we were talking before”; or else, following a slightly more paranoid line of argument (justified, I think, given the circumstances): “Now he’s going to shoot him and, while he’s at it, he’ll turn around and take me and the old woman out, too.”
    Just, you know.
    No: “How does he keep his hand so still?”
    That’s all.
    As if this were some tremendously important question. As if its answer would determine all further developments.
    Okay: it was bullshit. One of those senselessly obsessive thoughts that you cling to in extreme situations.
    But you should have seen Engineer