Orange Suitcase Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgotten.
    2
    Some of the photographs we won’t recognize. Who was that? she’ll ask. I think that was Jensen, I’ll say. It was? I think so. See the red gloves?
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    When we die, we will be buried with the suitcase between us. We were the only ones with the right idea. The only ones who knew it all. It was easy, but no one else knew it. All our passwords were our birthdays.

“Something About My Blood And Yours”
    1
    I t’s late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window. A gravelly sound—tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor’s apartment in Chinatown. We’ve been drinking wine and bourbon; we’ve been playing with the ugly dog; we’ve been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor-in-chief, the professor, hates Franny and Zooey. Now he reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden center table. It spreads like an ink blot over old copies of the journal and the advanced pressing of my novel. I wonder where the dog went; he should come over and lick the wine. Everyone still awake laughs, but it’s a quiet and drunken laughter, and I watch the cheap cover of a Nine Stories wrinkle and turn purple; I watch my own book do the same. The room tilts and I close my eyes and rub my face. When I open them again the old man is rising; white hair shoots from around his red face like an exploded pillow. It’s all shit! he yells. He claws the purple Nine Stories and flings it across the room. It splats against the opposite wall. He roars: A book like that should break my fucking heart! I think he might cry. I sip my porcelain mug of bourbon and laugh with everyone else.
    The laughter settles and the professor stays standing. He rears up like a statue of Balzac. He looks around the room, slow, and settles on me. I think, He is ready to kill. We stare and stare and he doesn’t say anything. After a long while he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his own mug empty. He breathes. The ugly dog appears from nowhere and starts licking. I look around and think, This is being a writer, this is getting at the heart of it all. Then the old man’s voice: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. He gestures to the splattered wall, to my own bloody book before me; there’s more drunken laughter, the slurp of the dog’s tongue on the floor. The freezing-rain tintinnabulates the window. Then in one fast move he reaches and hurls my own book. The hard-glue spine slaps my mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt, and I can’t tell if I am bleeding or if it’s the wine. Something stings in my eyes. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and I close my eyes against the sting.
    2
    I must have passed out. In my dream I write:
    â€œI don’t know the drunk priest. Didn’t even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But then McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he’s the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I call over, wiping hot rain from my face with the front of my shirt. The summer thunderstorm outside booms and I rise fast to shake the slouching divinity’s empty hand. An image of my mother and her approving smile flashes through my head. I see her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about next week’s Sunday school curriculum and the Monsignor’s sermon. Yes, Joey is enjoying First Communion classes very much, she tells the deacon. I fidget and fuss at the bottom of the stairs; I watch her with the fat white-haired Deacon Mike. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and