New World Monkeys Read Online Free PDF Page A

summer without the hovering, waxen faces of academics, their heads evolved beyond the need for a body. Somewhere along the way, all doctoral students acquire the pallor of sour milk, a twitch and eccentricity proportionate to the obscurity of their academic program. Just last week she watched a Cambodian student of eleventh-century Hispano-Moresque ivory carvings pound the shit out of a vending machine. She doesn’t fully understand this tendency toward becoming curious and consumed. Though the university
is
flypaper for the susceptible mind. Full of String theorists and Bolsheviks and AM radio prophets obsessing over the hypothetical stretch effect of black holes on the human body. Not the danger of black holes. But the theory of danger. She’s seen it in her own dissertation adviser, that gleam of madness when the woman’s lectures turn to Byzantine iconography.
    In the Osterhagen library Lily stands among the popular fiction thinking she has spanked the broadside of enough vending machines to know that at some point educational institutes are irrelevant to her own life. Who’s taking out the garbage, who’s signing the doorman’s Christmas check—these are the basic requisites of man that need to be sorted first.
    She passes under the library’s cupola roof and notices where the flux of seasons has stained the joints of the domed structure. Would she have made a better engineer than historian? She could take a parallax view of the situation: get the cathedral standing, after that you can make it beautiful. But at a time when she was searching for a direction to give her life, the innovation of the pointed arch popped something open insideher. Like a tracheotomy with the barrel of a Bic pen. In builder’s terms, the tension of a pointed arch allowed for taller windows and doorways, less wall, more light to enter the church—it was bullshit what people associated with Gothic, it was really a period of great light, the piercing of dark and brooding structures.
    But beyond this? The art of it? Lately it feels that critical analysis is a luxury. First man gets water and food and shelter. Only then does he remember he has no clue how he got here. He starts asking existential questions that’ll never get answered. And it frightens Lily to think that she just doesn’t care.
    By late afternoon the house pushes him outdoors away from work and onto the buffer of seed lawn. With the lacing of modern irrigation systems, the land has been divided and subdivided away from the river so that a neighboring field of stubble separates the property from the Amtrak line and the banks of the Hudson. Behind the house a vegetable patch has grown fallow but holds the lapping barley at bay.
    Duncan stands on the lawn and reaches for a fist of the grain that has shot chest high. He gives it a tug and feels the resistance of the ground sucking back on the roots. That’s the tenacity of the soil, he thinks, impressed by the industry of the land. Yes, it would be much easier to back machinery out of a barn than to try capturing the nuances of flare-legged denim. If only his job were a matter of baling a windrow of hay or haggling over the price of feed. He takes his phone out of his pocket and dials Leetower.
    “I’m staring at amber waves of grain,” he tells the art director.
    “I’m staring at a dead midget.”
    “You mean dead dwarf. Not funny.”
    “Bad news, Duncan. One of the Laundry Elves is dead. The Tide shoot is cancelled.”
    “What?”
    “Cardiac arrest. Apparently midgets don’t live that long. Their hearts have to work too hard—like Great Danes.”
    “One of the dwarves died?”
    “You’d probably get seven years out of a Great Dane. Which is like, what, forty-nine human years?” Leetower sighs heavily. “We got fleeced on the midget, Duncan.”
    “I can’t believe this. Which one?”
    “The one in the green velvet suit.”
    “Fuck, I loved that guy.” Duncan skims his hand along the awn of the