The Broom of the System Read Online Free PDF Page B

symbolized by a ray of sunlight breaking through the heavy clouds that are in the sky that day and coming through the window of the doctor’s office and hitting the man, but and anyway he sees in this breakthrough that the most important thing is really his wonderful, lovely girlfriend and their love, and that that’s what really matters, and so he decides to call her and tell her everything and get her to come down and co-sign the withdrawal slip for his life savings so he can hop a flight to Switzerland that very day, and to hell with the horror of telling her, even though it will be unbelievably horrifying.”
    “Wow.”
    “And the way the story ends is with the man sitting at the doctor’s desk, with the phone in his mitten, listening to the phone ring in the apartment, and it’s ringing quite a few times, though not yet a ridiculous number of times, but enough so it’s just becoming by implication unclear whether the girlfriend is even still there or not, whether she’s taken off, maybe for good. And that’s how it ends, with the man there and the phone ringing in his mitten and the patch of sun on him through the doctor’s window.”
    “Good Lord. Are you going to use it?”
    “No. Too long. It’s a long story, over forty pages. Also poorly typed.”
    “....”
    “Stop that.”
    “....”
    “Lenore, stop it. Not even remotely funny.”
    “....”
    “....”
    “Except how did you know so much about it?”
    “Know about what?”
    “Second-order vanity. You were like really surprised I didn’t know about second-order vanity.”
    “What shall I say? Shall I simply say I’m a man of the world?”
    “....”
    “....”
    “Ginger ale?”
    “Not right now, thank you though.”

3
    1990

/a/
    A nurse’s aide threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble, which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, one of which, preparatory to flight, released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while the birds flew away, making sounds.
    Flowerbeds of pretend marble, the plastic sagging and pouty-lipped in places from the heat of the last month, flanked the smooth concrete ramp that ran up from the edge of the parking lot to the Home’s front doors, the late-summer flowers dry and grizzled in the deep beds of dry dirt and soft plastic, a few brown vines running weakly up the supports of the handrails that went along the ramp above the flowerbeds, the paint of the handrails bright yellow and looking soft and sticky even this early in the day. Dew glittered low in the crunchy August grass; light from the sun moved in the lawn as Lenore went up the ramp. Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun. Above the doors, along a narrow tympanum of sun-punched plastic again pretending to be igneous marble, ran the letters SHAKER HEIGHTS NURSING HOME. On either side of the doors, impressed into stone walls that reached curving away out of sight to become the building’s face, were entombed the likenesses of Tafts. Inside the doors, in the glass tank between outer and inner entries, languished three people in wheelchairs, blanket-lapped even in the greenhouse heat of the mid-moming glass, one with a neck drooping so badly to the side that her ear rested on her shoulder.
    “Hi,” Lenore Beadsman said as she hurried through an inner glass door frosted in the sunlight with old fingerprints. Lenore knew the prints were from the wheelchair patients, for whom the metal bar with the