Shiva and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

giving testimony, to change the face of the earth a little. All of us who would be artists, who would use the medium of words or paint or song, are driven by this need to alter, however slightly, that terrain upon which we have found ourselves. And my alteration, stacked floor to ceiling in the spackled, glowing binders that contain not only statistics but a kind of poetry . . . my alteration, it has to be understood, is very important to me ; it matters, it is not trivial. I must make this clear, this is not insignificant material, not hackwork but testimony. That seventh reason portends: to make a difference.
    And a difference has been made; my captured documents have given justification where such did not before exist. I have shifted the balance of popular opinion away from loathing, and I have the evidence to cite. But this is not a document of sheer exposition, as we would call it at the agency; this is a narrative of some dimension and dramatic weight. I come before you not only with a position to cite but a story to tell. And I come to explain not only Francine (although she has a part in this) but to explain much that goes past her, Francine being ultimately only a symbol. “I’m going to write to all of the newspapers,” she said toward the conclusion of the discussions to which I have already alluded. “Do you understand that? I’ll publish in the letters-to-the-editor columns, and I won’t stop there. I’ll write my congressman, I’ll send communications to action-news-drama centers. Someone will believe me. Someone will at last accept this bizarre truth: that there are roomfuls of little clerks like yourself making up captured documents to justify our disgusting adventures and equations, our rotten entrepreneuring. I’ll make them believe it, I swear I will, and it will never be the same for you again. Just you wait and see.”
    “Francine,” I said, “you are overreacting. It’s merely a job, Francine. It’s employment like any other, it can become as routine as those facets of anguish—melanoma, termination, helplessness, suffering—to which you are exposed every day in your own work. It is necessarily impersonal. You can get used to it, believe me.”
    “I’ll never become numb to it,” she said. “ I’m not a clerk, not a functionary. That’s why I got the master’s; I had to get off the floor. I couldn’t look at their eyes anymore, lie to the relatives, watch them as they stared out the windows at the sun in the late autumn. I had to indulge some separation, open up distance, stop lying, find a way to get away from it. But not you, you would be there at this moment, holding their hands and telling them that remissions were common in their situation.”
    I should explain—lest Francine seem unduly unsympathetic at this point, so reprehensible that a sensible reader might ask, “Why is a person like you even involved with her anymore?”—that it was not necessarily always this way.
    On our very first date, arranged by a video-computer service, Francine and I had sexual relations and enjoyed one another enormously, and it was only after some time (and after the initiation of conversation) that matters moved to this state of relative collapse. Francine, I learned, is one of those who rejects anonymous, sustaining relationships and wants real human contact. This is terrific for arguments but not so good for sex. Agency employee or not, I am a normal American male, heterosexual to the core, thirty-four years old, driven and necessitous, and I’d rather get laid (especially anonymously) than become involved in discussions like this. I feel justified, powerfully so.
    “This is unbelievable,” she said, pointing to the binders. This argument was taking place in the library. I had made the mistake of taking her into the library. “You save all of this stuff? You’re proud of it?”
    She reached up, took a binder, opened it, and stared at it. “This is full of French ,” she said,