The Dreadful Lemon Sky Read Online Free PDF

relationships. Travis, the gun was an abstraction, the bullet an abstraction. Death was an abstraction. A tiny movement of a finger. A cracking sound. A smell. I could not comprehend a gun, a bullet, and a death until the bird died. It became all too specific and too concrete. I had engineered this death, and it was dirty. I had given pain. I had blood on my hand. I did not know what to do with myself. I did not know how to escape from myself, to go back to what I had been before I had slain the bird. I wanted to get outside the new experience of being me. I was, in all truth, in all solemnity, filled with horror at the nature of reality. I have never killed another bird, nor will I ever, unless I should come upon one in some kind of hopeless agony. Now here is the meat of my analogy. Those young people in that boat have never killed their grackle. They have not been bloodied by reality. They have shed the make-believe blood of a West that never existed. They have gawped at the gore of the Godfather. They have seen the slow terminal dance of Bonnie and Clyde. They have seen the stain on the front of the shirt of the man who has fallen gracefully into the dust of Marshal Dillon's main street. It is as if… I had walked into those woods and seen a picture of a dead grackle. They do not yet know the nature of reality. They do not yet know, and may never learn, what a death is like. What an ugly thing it is. The sphincters let go and there is a rich sickening stink of fecal matter and urine. There is that ugly stillness, black blood caking and clotting and stinking. To them, that gun somebody took out of his fish box is an abstraction. They find no relationship between the movement of the index finger and the first stinking step into eternity. It is emotional poverty, with cause and effect in a taste of disassociation. And they… "
    He had become hesitant, the words coming more slowly, with less certainty. He smiled with strange shyness and shrugged and said, "But that doesn't work, does it?"
    "I think it works pretty well."
    "No. Because then they could only kill once. But some of them go on and on. Pointlessly."
    "Some of them. Weird ones. Whippy ones."
    "Theorizing is my disease, Travis. A friend of mine, Albert Eide Parr, has written, 'Whether you get an idea from looking into a sunset or into a beehive has nothing to do with its merits and possibilities.' I seem to get too many of my ideas by looking into my childhood."
    "They didn't nail either of us between the eyes this time."
    "Ever the realist."
    We cleaned up and sacked out early. I lay wakeful in the big bed, resentful of Meyer nearby in the guest stateroom, placidly asleep. When he had been involved in a government study in India, he had learned how to take his mind out of gear and go immediately to sleep. I had known how, without thinking about it, when I had been in the army, but in time I had lost the knack.
    Meyer had explained very carefully how he did it. "You imagine a black circle about two inches behind your eyes, and big enough to fill your skull from ear to ear, from crown to jaw hinges. You know that each intrusion of thought is going to make a pattern on that perfect blackness. So you merely concentrate on keeping the blackness perfect, unmarked, and mathematically round. As you do that, you breathe slowly and steadily, and with each exhalation, you feel yourself sinking a tiny bit further into the mattress. And in moments you are asleep."
    He was, but I wasn't. Once I had explained Meyer's system to a very jumpy restless lady, telling her it wouldn't work for me and it wouldn't work for her. I said, "Go ahead. Try it. It's just a lot of nonsense, Judy. Right, Judy? Hey! Judy? Judy!"
    Tonight I was too aware of all the world around me. I was a dot on the Waterway chart between the small islands. Above me starlight hit the deck after traveling for years and for trillions of miles. Under the hull, in the ooze and sand and grass of the bottom, small