The Great Perhaps Read Online Free PDF

of steel and glass—is really only a rectangle of a few blocks, extending from Fifty-first Street to Fifty-ninth Street, from the lake to Cottage Grove Avenue. Beyond the rectangle, everything is run-down, depressed, a blight of black-populated subsidized housing—dollar stores with cracked windows, ubiquitous liquor ads, an El train station that looks heartsick, trash-filled street corners, and sad, windowless buildings. Guiding the Volvo down the street, glancing over her shoulder at her two daughters, speeding toward the girls’ school, Madeline considers this—how the university happens to have one of the largest private police forces anywhere in the world, how a venerable institution of thought, of higher learning, peopled with some of the most intelligent, most privileged young students in the world, could exist, blindly, in the heart of one of the poorest parts of the city. What lesson are these young college students learning, or Amelia or Thisbe, for that matter? Before the question can be answered, Madeline is at the corner and her girls are hurrying out, slamming the doors closed, neither one of them mumbling a goodbye or even a thanks. She wonders if she and Jonathan have messed them up by talking to them like adults, by always being honest, by not letting them watch more television. She stares at them as they cross the sidewalk, hurrying into school, both of them now nearly as tall as she is.
     
     
    E. Madeline always feels like something terrible is about to happen. Driving down Lake Shore Drive, she always takes the slow lane, the right lane. She puts on a CD by Bob Dylan or the Beatles and sings along. When the traffic is lousy, she will turn and sing to the people in the cars around her. Today she is listening to NPR. “A Washington Post story revealed a secret report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that blames setbacks in Iraq on a flawed war-planning process that limited the time spent preparing for post–Saddam Hussein operations. The report also shows that President Bush approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August 2002, eight months before the first bomb was dropped and six months before he asked the U.N. Security Council for a war mandate that he never received.” Madeline passes car after car, stalled in traffic, staring at their bumper stickers, many of them touting BUSH⁄ CHENEY ’ 04. The Volvo exits the expressway, then speeds down Roosevelt, passing several newly constructed townhomes and high-rises, many with Bush/Cheney signs positioned in their windows. Seeing them, she sneers, shaking her head. She turns down a grim-looking side street and then parks in front of the enormous rectangular research facility.
     
     
    F. At work, Madeline does not know what to think when she finds three more pigeons murdered in her experimental coop. She is even more disturbed to discover that the three dead birds are all female. She shoos the rest of the pigeons toward the back of their enclosure to further inspect the dead animals. They have been pecked to death, their throats slit by the reptilian claws of some other pigeon. She turns and stares at the rest of the birds scurrying about the wire cage.
     
     
    G. Madeline does not know why, but she is fascinated by the hierarchy of dominance among these birds. In a very real way, they are a miniature version of the human world, complete with males and females that mate for life, a kind of ruling class, and now, unfortunately, murder. Her experiment with the pigeons is pretty simple, really: she has closely studied their social interactions, and has noted the rank of each male bird within the dominance hierarchy. In her notebook, Madeline has assigned the color red for the dominant males. After observing their social interactions for nearly a month, she has determined that there are three males of this strata and each has been banded with a red plastic cuff along its left leg. These dominant males, marked by the red plastic bands, are easy to