Random Winds Read Online Free PDF Page A

At the door he turned back. “Just one thingmore I want to say. Martin, I envy you, born in a time when you’ll learn things I couldn’t dream of! The answers to dark secrets will come as clear as day. Maybe even cancer in your lifetime. Well, I’ll see you downstairs.”
    Martin stood still in the center of the room. Point of departure. Yes, yes, he wanted to be a doctor! Yet he feared. What if he didn’t do well? Suppose he were to discover that it had been a mistake; that, after all, he wasn’t fitted for it! How then would he turn back? How would he face his father and face himself?
    Sunlight, moving westward now, stained the whole rug bright blue. The closet door stood open, revealing empty hangers swinging from the rod. A child-sized baseball bat lay on the floor, along with a photo of the Yankee team and a pair of old sneakers. He stood a moment in the doorway, touching these things gently with his eyes, before leaving them behind. It was like what they said about drowning: a rush of memory, a whole life up to the last minute. Did everyone, departing, feel like this? He knew they must, but also that they didn’t, exactly. For each one is unique. Each one’s thoughts belong to him alone, and the way he will take belongs to him alone.

Chapter 3
    In a copybook, between thick cardboard covers, Martin kept a diary. He liked to believe that when he was older, in more leisured hours, these pages written in the rapid hand that hardly anyone except himself could read with ease, would keep time from consuming him without a trace.
    Turning his pages, then, flipping and skipping at random, the searching eye perceives the intimations and the forecasts.
    My first week in New York is over. Pa stayed a day and a night, long enough to see me settled in. We had a very good dinner at Lüchow’s. I watched him counting out the bills. These years will be hard for him.
    I took him to Grand Central to catch “the cars.” (He still uses that old-fashioned expression.) I never realized until we stood there together how small he is compared with me. The only feature we have in common is the nose, a profile like the ones on Roman coins. It gives the face an ascetic look. He says our noses are the result of the Roman occupation of Britain!
    I waited until the train had left and all you could see was the taillight moving down the track. I shall miss him with his ragtag quotations, his stars and rocks and Greek mythology. There can’t be anything quite like him. Tender, feisty, absentminded little man!
    I am on my own.
    This was my first day in the dissecting room. I thought I would vomit and the humiliation scared me. Then I looked at my partner, Fernbach—we were assigned alphabetically to share a cadaver—and he looked sick, too. So we both began to laugh, a stupid, embarrassed laugh.
    I tried not to look at the face. You can make believethat the rest of the body is a machine: it has no individuality. But the face is the person.
    Maybe for the first time in my life I am really aware of man as a perishable thing. I guess I’ve just accepted without challenge what they taught in Sunday school—all those lofty, consoling words about man’s immortal soul. But the body of man can be crushed! It rots like any animal that has been run over and thrown to the side of the road. There is no dignity. All privacy is stripped away. The sphincters relax. I find a scar, a white rip across the shoulders. Was it from a childhood fall, a drunken scuffle or an accident while decently supporting a family? No matter now.
    How ugly the body, on the table under the strong lights, invaded and marauded by strangers like me! Yes, and beautiful, too, as an equation or a snowflake is beautiful. Design, evolving and altering with subtle patience, for a hundred thousand years.
    My floor is a league of nations. There are Napolitano, Rosenberg, Horvath, Gault and a fellow from Hong Kong, Wong Lee. His father owns a bank there. He doesn’t mention it, but