The Secret Society of Demolition Writers Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sunlit floor together, two people from ordinary eggs, two people taking first steps to some unnamed place. Where it was, I had no idea.

There Is No Palindrome of Palindrome
    HE HAD A SHARP-CHINNED HEAD that could split wood, a nose that was merely a smaller version of his head, an angular torso. His hands, too, his flat feet, were ax-shaped and sharp. In the silver light of morning, he looked like a many-bladed knife, with all of the blades pulled out for display. At night, in the dark, he looked merely amphibious. You would have thought he was a mortician or toymaker, his hands white and muscular, made for life’s hardest or gladdest work. He was a pharmacist. Of course. Look at him again, the spatulate fingers, the long limbs, the exuberant yet deadly serious mustache. Not a knife after all, not sea-life come to suck the rarefied oxygen at water’s surface. Halfway between a mortician and a toymaker: a pharmacist’s hands. Now he steadied a woman’s chin in the L of his right thumb and index finger. He had his other hand on the back of her neck. He was looking at her tonsils. They were both at a party.
    “Babe is examining tonsils again,” said Mal, the evening’s host. “Babe has a tonsil fetish.”
    “Yes?” said the woman’s Dutch husband. “This is very original.”
    The woman had the artificial, trustworthy, fiber-optic blond hair of a CNN foreign-policy pundit, lit up with Aqua Net. Her head was tipped back. Her eyes scanned the ceiling in an attempt to make the examination seem incidental: she was thinking great thoughts, she was multiplying great sums in her head. She tried, the way you always try when being examined in a room full of strangers, to look unworried. Besides, it was hard to look directly at Babe. His eyes didn’t exactly match. The left one was slightly smaller and lower than the right.
    “Pretty as an Arizona sunset,” he said, still peering.
    It wasn’t true, what Mal said. He didn’t have a fetish. He just liked looking down women’s throats, and when you put it that way, yes, it sounded terrible. But he felt he was performing a service. He admired women’s tonsils at the drugstore (he worked for a national chain), but he preferred parties. So yes, all right, yes. A fetish. He was a voyeur and an exhibitionist, both. Sometimes he sat a woman down in a chair, to look down her throat from above. Other times he targeted a tall woman and had her lean over. Every angle had its pleasures, and every pair of tonsils had its beauty. Jealous husbands gathered, waiting to catch him in the act. Did he look down her blouse or let a hand slide somewhere it shouldn’t? Maybe he was about to lean in for a kiss. No. He didn’t even glance at her tongue. If he was feeling naughty he might raise his oak eyes a fraction of a millimeter to the woman’s uvula. “Beautiful uvula,” he’d say.
    The woman with the blond hair was named Connie. She felt on her cheek twin spots of intermittent hot breath from his nose, warm and damp as her own tonsils but with a whiff of well-groomed mustache. She’d never seen her own tonsils face-to-face. Why was he so interested? She breathed in. She crossed her legs and kicked him in the shin, felt him wince, instinctively caressed the shin with the same toe that had done the kicking. He stood up.
    Her mouth still hung open. She raised her eyebrows and gave a quick nod to ask the diagnosis.
    Babe shrugged. His leg hurt. “I’m a pharmacist,” he explained apologetically. He reached over and closed her mouth for her. He could feel her jawbone under his thumb. When she got up to leave, he saw how badly put together she was—bow-legged and pigeon breasted and spraddle elbowed—and also how pretty. She looked like the sunniest, dopiest person he’d ever met. That kick, her toes. They were the thin edge of the wedge, he’d think later.
    BLACK-AND-WHITE film combined with murder makes any room look small and sordid. The corpse lowers the ceiling, the film and