The Fugitives Read Online Free PDF

hero without a face; those hands the only unvarying things, from delivery room to deathbed, to mark the fact that what we witness is ours and not someone else’s. How can we live if we don’t make discrete chunks of that continuum? This basic unit, the proffered parcel of our days and nights alone: anecdote and memory; association and reminiscence; conjecture, desire, and regret; the bones of the lunchtime saga over a glass of wine.

4
    M ONDAY afternoon at four o’clock it began to snow. It was still snowing at midnight when I turned off the TV and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. It was snowing when I opened my eyes at seven thirty and went into the bathroom, the tile icy underfoot, to shower. Outside, the ragged sound of a snowplow scraping a path down the center of the street came through loud and clear. I listened to Interlochen Public Radio while I made coffee and the snow came down. Thick, abundant, lake effect snow, deep drifts wind-sculpted, joining with the mounded shapes of buried cars, mailboxes, fire hydrants, picket fences, to form spectacularly suggestive feats of architecture, Gehry igloos. I began to consider the task of dressing. It wasn’t especially cold, I had boots and a down parka, but the storm seemed to call for ceremony. The muffled streets were deserted, the only sign of humankind the fresh channel that the plow had scored in the roadway snow. I was excited about walking. Last-man-on-earth stuff, a fantasy since I was a kid. How would I survive while managing to retain every modern convenience? was the question, then as now. I imagined generators, water tanks with raincatchers, automatic weapons.
    A vehicle was out of the question. I have a new truck, a Japanese make that’s regarded with faint suspicion by my more elderly neighbors—native Michiganders, after all—although the younger residents have plenty of German sedans and Swedish station wagons among them, an armada of rebuke against the retirees up from Kalamazoo and Ypsilanti, Flint and Hamtramck. Whatever its sins against nativism, my buried truck was out, both as a matter of practicality and in spirit. I’d have a walk-in freezer. A pantry the size of a restaurant’s. A Kalashnikov (what would the Boyds say?). I dressed decorously: long underwear, woolen socks, BDU pants, a T-shirt, a turtleneck, a fleece pullover. My boots, glistening with synthetic mink oil, gloves, a cashmere watch cap, and over everything my down parka with its faux-fur-trimmed hood, “designed to withstand elements mirroring those found at the South Pole,” in the words of the absurdly thick User’s Manual that had come with it. As I fondled the coat admiringly, even affectionately, I found myself standing in the doorway of the rear bedroom I use as a study, gazing with annoyance at my desk my chair my printer my computer. All calling to me with nothing to say: story of my life. Saying something was always up to me. I had answered the call unfailingly since I was twenty-five years old; followed every line to its conclusion. There may have been people waiting—so Dylan told me, so Monte told me—but it wasn’t their call that I’d responded to, ever. Last man on earth: would he still write novels? was the question. I wondered if it was a kind of knowledge I was acquiring, this ability to ignore the call. Or maybe it was just Susannah I’d acquired.

    TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS. Eleven a.m. I set out through the snow in my polar-survivor outfit. SUVs and pickups trundled by occasionally. Down Locust Street I heard the whine of a snowblower, saw a man astride it, meticulously reinscribing the shape of the sidewalk before a house, not one superfluous inch cleared on either side: his neighbors were on their own. The man had a fixed look of concentration, as if he had spent his life either operating machinery or dreaming of operating machinery. My kids wear that look when they’re deep in the landscape of invented games. The goal is total immersion. A world is