The Animal Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

again through the low gate, through the reception area. With everyone behind her, everyone staring at her, watching her go.
    What …? she kept thinking, as she hurried to the elevator, as she stared at the floor in front of her, as she clutched her purse. What …? What …?
    Mr. Goldstein pressed the elevator button for her. She stood in front of the door, clutching her purse, her head bowed, like a supplicant with hat in hand. It took an unbearably long time for the elevator to arrive, and she thought, What …? What is it? What is happening here?
    When the door finally slipped open, Nancy charged inside. She spun around, her back against the steel wall. They were all still there, just through the elevator door. They were all in the reception area and beyond it, behind the low gate. Goldstein and Albert and Martha in her red dress. They were all gazing at her as she cowered in her box. Those empty waxwork gazes fixed her. And she clutched her purse, praying that the door would close.
    Then the door closed. Clapped shut. And Nancy’s knees buckled. She sagged, sticking her tongue out as her stomach roiled. She slid halfway to the floor. Then she crouched there, grimacing, staring into space and gritting her teeth as her eyes brimmed over with tears.
    The elevator started down to the ground.
    â€œWhat?” she whispered.
    Then she coughed once, and started to cry.

    P erkins staggered to the toilet. He grabbed the light-string next to him and yanked it. The bathroom’s bare bulb went on. Naked, Perkins stood above the toilet bowl. He squinted sleepily at his penis, waiting for the piss.
    The bottom of the toilet bowl was covered with some sort of brown crud. It darkened the toilet water, so he could see his face reflected in it. The light from the bulb behind his head threw the reflected face into silhouette. Beams of light-bulb light radiated from the silhouette in a golden halo. His reflection looked Christlike, the beams fanning out from his shaggy hair.
    Look, Ma , Perkins thought, I’m a demigod.
    Then the piss broke from him. It splattered in the toilet water. The reflection was obliterated.
    Perkins gave a soft snort as the stream of piss ran. He smiled with one corner of his mouth. Even through the haze of his hangover, he could see the poem in this: the reflected Christ-self pissed into oblivion. Even though his brain had turned to sand, he could tell the poem was good. He could feel it rising in him as he stared down into the bowl. Just a wordless rhythm, at first. Not a poem yet, just the sound, the beat of a poem. He felt it mushrooming up out of his chest as he pissed. He felt how white it was. He felt how it was spreading itself within him, spreading like wings, rising up out of him. He felt the words starting to clamber aboard, the rhythms becoming syllables.
    There … he thought. There …
    But already, the poem had begun to falter. It was dissolving. The wings were atomizing. The solid white of it was melting away.
    And the stream of piss was faltering too. It pattered in the water loudly. Perkins tried to hold on to his poem, but it was no good. It plummeted. Dropped off the edge of him into nothingness. All of a sudden, it was just gone. He was empty inside. He sprayed the toilet water with a few last squirts.
    Oh well , he thought casually. No more good poems for you, sonny boy.
    But the truth was, it made him feel black and lonesome. Standing there naked on the mossy bathroom tile, his poem gone. It made him feel a huge, yearning, vasty lonesomeness. As if he were standing at the bottom of a canyon, searching amid the rocks for another soul on earth.
    He took his dick in his hand and waggled a drop off it. From behind, he released some of the hangover gas twisting in his gut.
    There had been no good poems for two years now, he thought. Two full years this month. There had been nothing worth publishing since the river house. Since Julia and the October evenings.
    He