The Hour of Bad Decisions Read Online Free PDF

copper bracelets some people wear to cure arthritis. But you only get a moment – it’s best to make it look like you’ve dropped something on the floor, something you can’t quite reach with the tips of your fingers.
    And those nights lead to hard mornings. In an empty house, there’s little to trip over on your way to the bathroom, few things you can smack into and start to bleed. The faucets, maybe, when you try to splash cold water on your face, and cruelly misjudge the distance between your head and the chrome. The doorframe, when you bang straight into it, starting to walk without properly opening your eyes – but there’s no shame in that. Any more than there’s someone to be embarrassed for you – or ashamed of you – when it takes nine or ten times to get your keys into the front door lock. Or when you drop the keys. Drop the keys, and just can’t seem to pick them up.
    And sometimes I’d be standing there with the keys finally back in my hand, head in sparkles with the sudden movement of standing upright again, and I’d have that crawling feeling between my shoulder blades, that feeling that someone was looking at me.
    Leaning on the fence on another weekend day, watching Brendan finish another beer and drop the empty brown bottle back into the box. Watching Mrs. Murphy, shuttling like a beetle, down to the bottom of her yard and back, watching her hang laundry on the line, staring across hard at us, challengingly, before she began to hang up the underwear and socks.
    â€œSo what happened?” I asked.
    â€œHusband broke her eyesocket wit’ his fist. She lost the eye.” There was something about his voice, then. The only time I had heard Brendan even remotely sympathetic for Mrs. Murphy, but only for the briefest moment.
    â€œMean drunk he was. Livin’ with her, you might unnerstand it.”
    The way Brendan told the story, Mrs. Murphy’s husband had worked at the dockyard, painting and sandblasting the big factory-freezer trawlers, until collapsing scaffolding had brought him suddenly and dramatically to earth. She’d nursed him for the months that he’d been left in bed, and then tolerated him for the months after, when he had started investing his disability checks in rye. Tiny though she was, Brendan said she could lug her husband up the stairs from the front door – at least until he woke up one night while she was taking off his socks, swung his fist once, and promptly passed out again while she lay bleeding on the floor.
    And that was when I realized, or at least I decided, that there wasn’t one single person left on the planet who actually cared what happened to me. Sure, I have brothers who moved to the mainland for work, and parents – old now – who live in Seattle and concentrate on their garden – but I can’t imagine a thing I could say to any of them that would get them angry enough to even think of hitting me. That’s a strange way to think of it, sure – but there it is. Nothing you do matters, because it doesn’t end up affecting anyone.
    That’s the centre of it, you know; you can watch other people spiral down, watch them on their flaming, smoking spins, their hard, definite intersection with solid ground, and ask yourself why they don’t do anything to save themselves. Why they don’t lift a finger. Why they refuse to swim, and seem to consciously decide to sink. And outside of it, you can shake your head and say that it’s sad, that they’re just self-destructing for meaningless reasons, just letting themselves go.
    Inside, it’s more complicated. I know I have the feeling that, away from the easy, slick surfaces of casual conversation, I’m of no more importance than a laboratory experiment, the equivalent of watching to see how fast bread molds. “Look, look, now he’s forgotten to shave. Better write that