Panorama City Read Online Free PDF

of sketches and notes and diagrams. I had no way of knowing where he had boarded, but judging from the pleasure the bus driver took in asking him to collect his papers and make room for me he had been making a mess of his papers for many miles. He managed to stuff into what he called his briefcase, which was actually a flat cardboard box, he stuffed into that box the whole pile of papers that had been the mess on my seat, somehow that briefcase was bigger on the inside than on the outside, and then he asked the bus driver if he was happy now. The driver stated that he was. We started down the road and the little man looked straight ahead. By way of introduction I told him my name, my age, where I was from, and where I was going. He did not respond, I looked at the landscape. The front windshield was enormous, the bus ate up the road, if I let my vision narrow it felt like riding a very fast bicycle, except without the wind. All I could think about were all the bugs and birds I couldn’t see, all of the plants whizzing by in a blur. I missed my bicycle already, bicycle travel was the perfect speed, traveling at this speed was pointless, you missed everything. But then I figured that if I was going to be a man of the world, I should learn to appreciate other modes of transport, I should give the bus a fair shake, and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.
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    The next thing I knew I was watching the Alvarez brothers and Greg Yerkovich driving down a country road like the one that led to our patch of wilderness, and they saw someone riding a bicycle, coming the other direction, it wasn’t me, it was someone else riding a bicycle, someone nobody had ever seen before, a stranger. They drove their truck straight at the stranger, he saw them, he saw them coming at him, but he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know he was supposed to dive into the ditch.
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    I jerked awake and the man next to me asked if I was okay, I said yes, it was just a dream. He seemed to be in a receptive mood now, so again I told him my name, my age, where I was from, and where I was going. Because we were in the first row, the one with the steps in front of it, if I didn’t sit up straight my knees hit the metal bar separating us from the steps. He was small enough that he didn’t have to sit up straight, he had room to move, he was short and narrow, he wore a tan sport jacket over a plaid shirt with a dark blue oval at the bottom of the front pocket, there was a pen in the pocket, I couldn’t tell if it had exploded there or if another pen had exploded there before and this was a new pen. I was ignorant enough then not to recognize a true man of the world when I saw one. He told me he was heading down to L.A. to pick up a shipment of antioxidant cream, he engaged in a sort of rude commerce, his words, now and then, to support himself, to buy himself time for advanced thinking, his words. He explained that by using this cream several times a day, on your face, in conjunction with a special handheld light, sold separately, you could reverse the effects of aging, you could look five years younger in as little as two weeks, and if you didn’t, he said, he would refund your money completely, he was offering a one hundred percent money-back guarantee. He asked me whether I found that impressive. I said that of course I did. Then he asked me if I’d like to order some. I told him I didn’t want to look younger, I’ve never wanted to look younger. He said I was in the minority on that one. I pointed out that when you look younger, people treat you like a child. That’s when he said, his words, You’re a