Super Flat Times Read Online Free PDF

huddled there, shivering in the fur suit, while the passing clouds gently rocked the building.
    My husband was a face attendant, unemployed. When he was working, his job was to stand next to his employer all day, emphasizing with slender, fluted face wands the four or five expressions that most clearly brought out the emotional state of the particular person. It was an exhausting practice, and one that had taken years to learn. He was, at the time, five months into his unemployment. Mostly, he stayed in bed.
    It was morning.
    “I’m hungry,” Philip said. He was standing next to the bed, clutching his belly theatrically.
    “Go down and pour yourself some puffs, chief.”
    “The puffs are gone.”
    “I’ll make you something later.”
    “But the food is going away,” he said. “There might not be any left later.”
    “Get dressed,” I called out, still half blind from sleep, striking at the air.
    “Mother, the food.”
    I went downstairs. The food was, indeed, going away. The shelves were largely bare — the only indication that food had ever been stored there at all was the mottled, angular stains left by the feet of the plastic containers in which the food was packed. The food that was left was just barely there, dim and shadowy, nearly impossible to hold.
    We had been warned about the half-life of food. The Fud Bellows were blamed; we accepted this and forged ahead.
    I told my husband that the food was disappearing. I adjusted the pillow under his head and told him that we would be back soon with more. He looked up at me, put a cool hand on my thigh. You need to shave, he said. Please shave before you go.
    “You’re not going to try it today, are you?”
    He said no. He would not try it.
    “I put everything away. All the sharp things, the colorful things. Anything that would tempt you.”
    He said that, yes, he knew. He said he felt safe just curled up in the big bed.
    I gathered the razor, gels, limb towelettes, and the coral exfoliant mitt from the low dresser at the opposite end of the bedroom. At the entrance to the water closet I glanced back at him. His head looked small, couched in the center of the quilted orange pillow. He had an expression of false restfulness on his face, the guarded look of someone in the process of constructing an intricate, densely populated society deep inside his body. I try to be careful when I say that this is not the man I knew when we met. I wasn’t entirely sure how significantly the person I knew then differed from the other man I found myself next to at the end of each day, the one who remained awake as I slept, slowly chewing dozens of highly involved, conical designs into the bedclothes. He
seemed
different, but sometimes it is the thing that remains most constant that, one day, reveals itself in a strange and terrifying new perspective.
    It is difficult to remember with any clarity the time in which we met, partially because I sold a great deal of those memories to buy cloth for Philip’s bassinet. We were both young enough to work for Corporation Three, preparing bolts of data-rich burlap for the Hall of the Life Architects. The only memory I can bring up now about those days is the faint image of a man, most likely my husband, moving toward me from across the workshop floor, just a tiny grain of a figure, more than a hundred meters away, bolt scissors slung over his shoulder, kicking up a fine dust. As the man comes closer — I still cannot make out the specifics of his face — his body begins, with each advancing step, to slacken, to fit itself more comfortably into the airspace through which it moves. What at first seems a fleeting, misguided impression gradually gives way to a more fundamental understanding — here is a person undeniably calmed by my presence. It is as close to the idea of an invitation as I have ever seen. Whether or not the man in this memory is my husband, I know that I situated myself in his life throughout the successive years in