Scissors Read Online Free PDF Page A

you. You’re wearing your sister’s sweater. Her navy blue sweater. You’re holding yourself as straight as the flame of a cigarette lighter. Your hair’s hiding your cheekbones. You’re rolling a few strands between your fingers. Are you still listening to the same song? I see a glass of something on the coffee table. Magazines all around, a lot of magazines. How can you read that, Marianne? How can you believe in astrology …? And then I see your eyes. Your eyes that catch everything, your wonderful gaze. You’re standing at the window, turning the answering machine around, on the lookout for a distant signal. I’d like to be that guy on the horizon signaling to you. Someone you’d be glad to go to. Describe him to me so I can try to be like him. Pick up and describe him to me.”
DOUGLAS
    What’s that? What does that mean, he doesn’t want to? Put him on. I’m telling you to put him on. Lorraine … Turn the receiver toward him. Ithaca, it’s Daddy. Daddy isn’t happy. Daddy has to stay at work, he won’t be home until late. Mommy’s going to have to read you “The Imp of the Perverse.” It’s going to be Mommy for a change. So you go to bed now, you hear me? Ithaca, stop that shit right now. If you don’t go to bed, Daddy’s going to come home and cut yourballs off. What, Lorraine? I can’t? I mustn’t? A three-year-old doesn’t have balls? My son has … Ithaca has … oh, all right, you’re the boss.
    I’ll be home by midnight. Midnight or maybe one. I’ve got three manuscripts to read, I should be there by … that’s going to depend on … on how much cutting I’ve got to do. No, I have to do it myself. They don’t know how. I do it myself. I love you too.
    *
    If it weren’t for Lorraine, I’d forget to go home. I’d spend my life in this office and not even remember that I have a family. Do I have a family? What’s it like? Like the magazines lined up on my shelves? Like the stacks of proofs I have to correct? People in my profession take words for flesh. We can hear their hearts beat. We discover a disconcerting kinship with them.
    The hour has come. The offices empty out, and I have no more enemies. My rose window switches off. My psoriasis calms down. It’s time for my tête-à-tête with the authors.
    Outside there’s darkness. And a thousand little lights in that darkness, trying to clear a way for themselves. I can’t bring them all on board. I’m the Captain of the Storytellers, not the Shipwrecked. You go to sea at your own risk.
    However, I’m standing watch. I’m reaching out.
    *
    I’ve taken Raymond out of the wastepaper basket. His first sentence has been making me itch since this morning. I don’t know why. It didn’t have much going for it. Or rather, it had just enough going for it to get stuck in my head.
    “Ambulance sirens, that’s what I bring home with me from my nights on duty.”
Sirens
 … 
I bring home sirens. From my nights. That’s what I br
 … 
I bring home sirens from my nights
. Why use more words? Raymond brings home sirens from his nights. That’s all. The reader understands.
    “From midnight to eight in the morning, the sirens follow one another, or sometimes blend together, on the two-lane road that circles …” Uh-oh.
They blend around the hospital
, period. “I can hear them from my night-watchman’s box, first far, then close, and finally not at all, when …” More itching. Pruritus. Pruritus between two commas. “… when the lights are still on but the sound is off and the ambulances park in the back, unburdened of an injured person or a corpse.” Don’t you see that “the back” equals “exile” equals “death”? Either you choose the back or you choose death. You have too much heart, Raymond.
When they park in the back, I can hear them from my night-watchman’s box
. “At the moment, my thoughts go no farther than that.” Why “at the moment”? You’re already there, in the moment. “To