The Summer Without Men Read Online Free PDF

was not a superstition or a vague apprehension, but a felt conviction. Why had it returned? Ghosts, devils, and doubles. I remembered telling Boris about the waiting presence, invisible but dense, and his eyes had lit up with interest. That was back in the days when he liked me, before his eyes went dull, before Stefan died, the little brother, who leapt and crashed, so smart, O God, the young philosopher who knocked them out at Princeton, who made them quake, who loved to talk to me, to me, not just to Boris, who read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell. I hate you for what you did, Stefan. You knew he would find you. You must have known he would find you. And you must have known he would call me and that I would go to him. For half a second, I saw the pool of urine on the floor mixed with watery feces staining the floorboards. No.
    Stop thinking about that. Don’t think about that. Go back to the presence.
    Boris had told me about presences. Karl Jaspers, wunder Mensch, had called the phenomenon leibhaftige Bewusstheit and somebody else, a Frenchman, no doubt, hallucination du compagnon . Had I been crazy as a girl, too? Bats for a year? No, not a whole year, months, the months of the cruelties when I had felt the Thing waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Not necessarily crazy,” Boris had said to me in his voice, thickened by cigars, and then he had smiled. Presences, he said, have been felt by patients, both in the psych ward and those in neurology, as well as by just plain folks. Yes, hordes of undiagnosed innocents, just like you, Dear Reader, whose minds are not cracked or disorderly or shredded to bits, but merely subject to a quirk or two.
    I triedrd to remember then, as I lay on the sofa, presence-free, to unearth the distant cruelties of the sixth grade, “calmly and objectively,” as they say on television and in bad books. There had been a plot or several plots, a grandiose word for the doings of little girls, but does the age of the perpetrators or the location of intrigue really matter? Playground or royal court? Isn’t the human business the same?
    How had it started? At a slumber party. Just fragments. This is certain: I didn’t want to breathe in until I fainted, gulping in the air over and over to propel me forward flat onto the mattress. It was stupid, and I had been frightened by Lucy’s white face.
    “Don’t be chicken, Mia. Come on. Come on.” Whines of complicity.
    No. I wouldn’t do it. Why would anyone want to faint? I felt too vulnerable. I didn’t like to be dizzy.
    The girls whisper near me. Yes, I hear them but don’t understand. My sleeping bag was blue with a plaid lining. That I remember clearly. I’m tired, so tired. There is something about an aim, aiming at someone, then aiming a knife. A cryptic joke.
    I laugh with them, not wanting to be left out, and the girls laugh harder. My friend Julia laughs hardest of all. I fall asleep after that. Confused and ignorant little girl.
    The note in class: “AIM, dirty fingernails and greasy red hair. Wash yourself, piglet.” I saw my inverted name all at once. Mia in Aim.
    “My nails are clean and so is my hair.”
    Gales of laughter. High winds of cackling from the group, blowing me down into a hole. Don’t say anything. Pretend you hear, see nothing.
    The pinch on the stairs.
    “Stop pinching me.”
    No expression on Julia’s face. “What’s wrong with you? I didn’t touch you. You’re crazy.”
    More surreptitious pinches, my “imagination,” in the girls’ locker room.
    Tears in the toilet stall.
    Then, mostly, I don’t exist.
    To reject, exclude, ignore, excommunicate, exile, push out. The cold shoulder. The silent treatment. Solitary confinement. Time out.
    In Athens, they formalized ostracism to rid themselves of those suspected of having accumulated too much power, from ostrakon, the