The Fugitives Read Online Free PDF Page A

pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint.
    The books themselves are smart; terminologically accurate expositions of systems, grouped data, specialized knowledge, inhabited by ghosts chanting the facts. And that’s just the fiction. Who even knows why there are still books? Odd, strange, falseheartedly mandarin; amazing that someone who would never dream of adding something up on an abacus or even of sending a letter by U.S. Mail demands his yearly hardcover, his vacation page-turner. But they’re here, the books, and so are the people who do read them. And it makes sense, too, that it was in the library that an attempt would be made to reach back further, to the oral tradition (I literally thought these words, “the oral tradition”). A museum for this, too: why not? The old foxed reference texts, the framed display of typewritten and hand-annotated cards from the original library (a Victorian brick building now boarded up and awaiting renovation), and John Salteau.

    SOMETIMES I WONDER if it’s primarily envy that draws me to Salteau. It seems, not easy, but natural, what he has; a tap drawing from deep in the lizard brain. He speaks and the encrustations upon the world fall away as he brings a more essential one into being. It’s like watching the glass from which you are about to drink being blown, annealed, cooled; emerging brimming and beaded with sweat in some suggestive yet wholly new shape. I used to ascribe the same natural facility to painters and musicians, until I got to know some of them and realized that like me they’d been blessed with the dubious and vindictive gift of making it look easy. Going through an old manuscript one day I came across a (typical) page that looked like a knife fight had happened on it. Scissored passages, blood-red interlinear and marginal notes and corrections, a whole paragraph eliminated with slashing violence, six different page numbers in the upper right corner. In the finished book it nestled perfectly in context; read like a series of offhand remarks I’d thrown away with my feet up on the coffee table, a drink in my hand. Who would see the struggle? Who could? Some scholar-fanatic, a fawning hagiographer, an archivist accustomed to assessing things solely in terms of linear feet? Who could recognize that the provisional success had only meant moving on to the next failure? But Salteau never fails. Never hesitates. Never stammers when called upon to improvise, or to respond to the budding hecklers in his audiences. Salteau’s powers of invention, working within the constraints of polished legend, are constant.
    Think of the story as a basic unit. Stand at the counter in the kitchen in the morning, shoveling in yogurt and bran, the old story of trying to live forever, why do you eat bran, well, I want to live. That’s one story. Or you say, dropping the spoon into the bowl to finger your jawline, I cut myself shaving, and the Mrs. says, with, I’ll grant you, an extraordinary level of awareness, wasn’t that a new blade? And the story wends its way through all the satisfying twists and false conclusions: the way it used to be, how I learned to shave, the corporate misfeasance of Gillette, ending Zen-like on the decision to grow a beard. This is how everyone lives; the traffic and lines, the rude clerks and precocious children, the price hikes and small happy surprises; times without number, continuous, and one day we look down to see our hands doing whatever it is they happen to be doing—chopping vegetables, typing, jerking off—and we finally recognize the truncation in that perpetual view, the necessity of a mind’s eye in order to see all of ourselves at all; we realize that we have been stuck staring at those hands for as long as our lives, our selves accruing and forming from the imperceptible blending of each moment into the indistinguishable modules of a whole, the unending stream narrated entirely by a