Panorama City Read Online Free PDF Page A

trust, because my philosophy is, my philosophy has always been, that most problems can be solved by waiting.

PART TWO
TAPE 2, SIDES A & B;
TAPE 3, SIDES A & B

A MAN OF THE WORLD
    C: You’re not dying.
    O: It’s just in case, I’m recording this for Juan-George just in case, just in case I die, you never know, Carmen, you never know what might happen once you get inside a hospital.
    C: You’re healing up.
    O: My father used to point at this building and say that if you were in there, you were either coming or going.
    C:
Dios mio.
So dramatic.
    O: I’m wrapped in plaster and bolted together, I can’t move.
    C: Just don’t go on and on about dying, I can’t bear it. When they called me, when they told me you’d been in an accident, I nearly died myself.
    O: Now that sounds dramatic.
    C: I did. I felt a tightness in my chest, Oppen, I pictured my whole life without you in it, and little Juan-George, and I felt my chest go tight. I told God that if he let you live I wouldn’t let you out of my sight ever again.
    O: And what did God say?
    C: You’re here, aren’t you?
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    If you had seen me boarding that bus to Panorama City, Juan-George, if you had been able to witness me handing over my ticket to the meticulous driver, with his meticulous mustache, handing it to him with confidence, dressed not in my usual Mayor clothes, which were work jeans and a T-shirt from a business in Madera, I wore them in rotation, people used to say that on my bicycle I was a rolling billboard, if you could have seen me wearing your grandfather’s brown corduroy suit and excused the fact that it was too warm to be wearing a corduroy suit, and excused the fact that I had taken out the tailoring at the ankles and wrists so it would better fit me, which left frayed fabric there and a band of dark where the fabric hadn’t for a long time been exposed, if you could have seen me and excused those facts and noticed the handsome leather suitcase I handed to the driver nonchalantly, and the fact that I’d polished my boots until they looked almost like dress shoes, and saw too that I was carrying an elegant carry-on bag, actually your grandfather’s old shaving kit, containing various papers, money, and my compact binoculars, carrying it under my arm as if gravity did not apply to it, and if you’d admired the hat upon my head, which had been your grandfather’s and was a real hat, not a baseball cap or fishing hat but a real proper hat, if you had seen my watch, my Rotary Club tie, my tie clip, if you had watched me say to the meticulous bus driver that I was headed to Panorama City, as if I’d been there and back a million times, if you’d seen how I bowed my head when I thanked Officer Mary for everything and shook her hand, and the way I removed my hat at precisely the moment my head entered the bus itself, you might have said, you couldn’t be blamed for saying, There goes a man of the world.
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    Now, I’m not a small person, I’m six and a half feet tall, and so I was shocked to see how small, despite the size of the bus, how small the seats were. I scanned the rows looking for somewhere to sit, I scanned past all kinds of people, no row was empty. I sought out the littlest person, a teenage girl, and attempted to slide in next to her, but folding myself into that seat without injury would have been impossible. The driver suggested the front row, but a scrawny old man was taking up both seats. He had the look, I don’t know how else to put it, his face looked like that of a newly hatched crocodile. His eyes were alive and penetrating at the same time, and his mouth seemed wider and flatter than most, he didn’t have much in the way of lips, his mouth was like a straight line across his whole face, and yet you couldn’t shake the sense that he was, at the very corners, smiling. Papers were spread all over the seat beside him, a disorganized pile