Shadow Man: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

glorious, intricate, and strong, a wonder of God conspiring with nature, but really we are as fragile as rice paper, ruined over time by imperceptible rips and tears.
    I search for clues on a color-coded poster of the brain in profile I kept from nursing school. It strikes me that the most ingenious thing about us humans — not counting the soul — looks like a boxing glove. Atop which, to borrow a metaphor from James’s curly haired doctor, the cerebral cortex hovers like a trapped cloud. Where are the answers? I study the science and anatomy of James, his blood pressure, reflexes, temperature, the dose of his cholinesterase inhibitors, but I don’t know him, not even on my late shift, when all the doctors are home and I hold his CAT scans to the light and he floats before me, fleshless, a silver-gray apparition, yielding little. His hip bones resemble folded wings, his forearms flutes, his legs strange spindly reeds. He has five fillings, a broken rib that must have been untended when he was a boy, healing poorly, leaving the thread of disjointed marrow. This is what the pictures of science and technology bare. This is what I see. It is not enough. I need him to come back.

four
    The marshlands south of Philly stretch to Wilmington and to beaches beyond; they glisten brown and green in the wind and make you think of another time. We skated by them in Kurt’s Impala, the windows down, our hair flying and me wedged between Vera and Kurt in the front seat. The radio played so loud that it was a cacophony (I had my dictionary on the trip) of static and breeze, although every now and then a recognizable tune burst through, like the guitar lick in “Signs” by the Five Man Electrical Band or the chords of the great wa-wa opening of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
    We came around a bend and drove over a small bridge, the Impala bouncing along as if racing across a surface made of stretched rubber bands. I thought I heard “Tiny Dancer,” and when I looked over I swore Vera was mouthing the words, but I couldn’t be sure because her hair was a black sea tossing around her. Kurt stopped for coffee at a shack with a sandy parking lot. Vera got out and pointed her face toward the sun, leaning on the car and asking Kurt to buy her lemons. Kurt walked through a screen door and flies scattered and I saw an old black man with a tilted hat peek up from behind the counter as if he had been awakened; he smiled the colors of stained ivory and broken gold.
    “I love a car trip, don’t you, Jim?”
    “Sometimes they get too long.”
    “Can you read a map?”
    “Not too well.”
    “Unfolding them is like opening a mystery. New worlds stretching before you in circuitous lines. There’s a word for you, Jim. Circuitous.You can run your fingers along roads and mountains and coasts. I wish I’d have lived centuries ago. I would have been an explorer. But you know something? I’m tired after a car trip. I think that’s funny, don’t you? You’re just sitting for hours, listening to music and wind, but it takes it out of you, you know? Maybe, it’s the sun, and the distance, and your body having to re-gather in a new place.”
    I looked out the window to Vera. She had on shorts and a white halter top with a collar and black buttons on the front. She pulled back her hair and tied it with ribbon. I still couldn’t tell how old she was. She was hard to read that way; she could be young, like that night a week or so ago when she was hitting tennis balls in the alley, or she could be older, like now with the sun and no shadows on her face. I heard the flat rubber sounds of cars passing in the distance and the bark of a boat horn coming from the ocean beyond the marshes. Kurt came out and handed me a Sprite and gave Vera a knife and a bag of lemons. Kurt sat on the hood, sipping his coffee, and Vera cut lemons, squeezing the juice in her mouth and not even wincing like most people do.
    “Juiciest lemon I ever had was in