Super Flat Times Read Online Free PDF Page B

order to replicate this experience. I’m sure I was able to pull it off more than once, despite what my surviving memories show (hours and hours of nighttime stillness, him lying on his side, breathing delicately into the blue dark; the steamed ring his mug left on the common table; the sweat glistening on his forehead as the doctor slipped Philip’s purplish body into his arms for the first time), but I am certain it’s been a year or longer since I’ve seen anything resembling even the faintest degree of interest play itself out on his face. Either that or I’ve just been less and less capable of projecting an expression of interest into his recessed features.
    I cut myself shaving. Actually, it is not accurate to say that I cut myself shaving, because I had not yet begun to shave when I cut myself, and I did not cut my leg but the top of my finger. I had left the razor on the sink before stepping into the deep basin of the shower stall, and when I reached blindly for it from behind the opaque curtain, the top of my left middle finger came off like a pat of butter cleaved from the stick.
    I stood in the shower for a good while, holding the newly wounded hand in front of me, tapping with my thumb the lopsided hood of flesh that hung from the tip of my finger. I looked at my hand until it looked like someone else’s. Blood welled up in the wound quickly, streaming down my forearm in thin rivulets. The water in the tub went pink and sour. When the wound started to sting I got out and dressed it tightly with toilet paper.
    I put Philip in a bright orange snowmobile suit. This was difficult with only one good hand. Philip always wore the snow-mobile suit when we went out because it had handles, one on each arm and a big one that doubled as a shoulder strap across the back. We occasionally needed to handle Philip — there was no other way.
    “Will we have chocolates?” Philip asked.
    “We’ll see.” There was no difference, nutritionally, between chocolates and, say, broccoli anymore — the withholding of sweets had been stripped of its former power. Most parents persevered, however, believing that there was something instructional about the denial of pleasure. I stood on the fence, admonishing the boy one day and then treating him to heaping bowls of meat cream the next. When I denied Philip’s desire, I felt I was doing the right thing, but it also felt good to indulge him in his obsession. I wasn’t sure what lesson he was taught as a result, but it seemed to fit in nicely with everything I’d learned about the world in my own childhood.
    There were people outside, sitting on the stoop, huddled against one another for warmth. Some of them wore suits made of torn, soiled cardboard. They looked up uniformly as I drew back the screen into its fitted slot. We did not talk to the people, and they did not talk to us. Sometimes, after I’d put Philip on the bus for school, I would scatter hard crusts of bread out into the yard, and they would crouch there, gathering the bits in their gloved hands when they were convinced I was no longer looking.
    That day I had no bread. The bread had vanished. I showed them the empty sacks we were bringing to the meat towers. They nodded and made room for us to pass by.
    We came to the road, which was glazed over with ice. In its reflection we saw the clouds lurching heavily toward the center of town, noisily grazing the tops of buildings.
    “Put on your skates, chief,” I said.
    “I can run on ice.” The boy put forth a small, booted foot, making as if to dash across the slippery surface.
    “Philip.”
    “I can. I can run on ice.”
    “Do you want me to pick you up by the handle?”
    “No, Mother. Don’t pick me up by the handle.”
    “Then you should put on your skates.”
    The boy collapsed to the ground and lay there for a while, facedown. I turned away, tightening the buckle on my mittens. The left mitten strained against the toilet paper compress, within which