The Same River Twice Read Online Free PDF

asked a stranger’s opinion of my eyes. Soon she had him leaning close to inspect my face. He agreed that my eyes were slightly crossed, especially the left one. “Yes,” she said. “That one has got to go. Do you have a knife? You take it out. You, you, you!”
    We rode the subway for hours per day, Jahi’s method of rehearsing for her stage career with myriad strangers as her audience. She considered her antics a necessary corrective to my rural background. In the middle of mischief, she’d grin my way, eager for approval. She once stole a ream of paper and opened the bundle on a windy sidewalk. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “My manuscript!” We watched twelve Samaritans chase blank pages down the avenue. At a topless bar she removed her shirt to bus tables, piling empty glasses on the lap of a drunk who’d been pawing the dancers. A bouncer with shoulders like a picnic table came our way. I stayed in my chair, aware that standing would get my head thumped, trusting Jahi to avert trouble.
    â€œHey, sugar,” the bouncer said to her. “You need a job? We could use your kind of spunk.”
    â€œI got a job,” she said, pointing to me. “I watch out for him. He’s a famous actor.”
    The bouncer helped Jahi with her coat, then turned to me. “You’re a lucky man, my friend.”
    That evening we lounged in her apartment while twilight pollution streaked orange across the sky. Construction noise had ceased at the nearby condo site where future dwellers would pay extra for the fetid river breeze. Jahi had spent the day trying unsuccessfully to make me jealous on the street. Angry at herself, she told me my acting career was a joke. I spent too much time merely watching, writing in my journal.
    I’d never told her about my single audition, crammed into a hot room with sixty guys, each of whom clutched a satchel of résumés. Everyone seemed to know each other, like members of a club. They sparred and parried in dirty verbal fighting until a slow response brought on a death jab. The winner smiled and wished the loser luck.
    When my name was called, I stepped through a door and crossed the dark stage to an oval swatch of light. Someone thrust a typed page into my hand. A nasal voice whined from the darkness: “Start at the red arrow.”
    Twenty seconds later the same voice interrupted to thank me. Confused, I nodded and continued reading.
    â€œI said thank you,” the voice said. “Can someone please . . .”
    A hand took my arm while another retrieved the script. They led me away like an entry at the county fair, a recalcitrant steer who’d balked before the judging stand. I decided to become a movie actor, and skip fooling around with the legitimate theater.
    Jahi had surreptitiously removed her underwear from beneath her dress. The thin cloth dangled from her foot. She kicked and her panties arched neatly onto my head.
    â€œDo you write about me?” she said.
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œYou should.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I’m alive.”
    â€œSo am I, Jahi.”
    â€œWithout me, you weren’t. You were young, dumb, and full of come. Now you’re just young.”
    â€œI’m glad you don’t think I’m dumb anymore.”
    â€œOh you are, Chris. I made you smart enough to know you are, that’s all. Write that in your little notebook.”
    The journal was my combat arena, the final refuge of privacy in a city of eight million. Each day I saw perhaps two thousand different faces, an enjoyable fact until I realized that my face was one of the two thousand each of them saw too. My math collapsed from the exponential strain. Jahi wasn’t in my journal. Those pages were filled with me. Some of the pages held my full name and place of birth on every line to remind me that I lived.
    â€œWrite down everything I say,” she said. “Make me live