The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF

Mark—who called himself “a prolapsed Catholic”—had given everybody those WWJD bracelets, explaining that they stood for “Who Would Jesus Do?” What happens this Christmas, Billy can’t imagine.
    His mother died at the end of February. His father had died nine years before, the quintessential family man’s death: heart attack after shoveling snow. That was in February, too; Billy flirted with seeing it as noncoincidental, but the dates (the seventh and the twenty-third) didn’t resonate. Mark saw Billythrough the vigil at the hospital and the funeral, then, two weeks later, made his announcement. Two weeks to the day. They could, and should, still share the apartment, but Mark had decided to make the thing he was having with Garrett—which he’d been calling a “friendship”—be his real thing. In fairness, Billy had to admit (to himself) that he had a “friendship,” too. For the past few months he’d been thinking up nighttime errands—he’d turned super-responsible about the cats’ litter—and calling Dennis, who always worked late, from pay phones. Dennis was living with Giuliano—who Dennis suspected was seeing somebody else. And they all more or less knew one another. It was like some daisy-chain soap opera out of the Age of Disco, with a certain “I Love Lucy” quality, if you stepped back far enough. Billy, finally, stepped way, way back.
    During spring break he went to Key West: sat in the sun, drank gin and tonic. And after a couple of days, he called and added a connecting flight from LaGuardia to Albany to his return ticket. There was an empty, mortgage-free house where he could live for the cost of the property taxes and utility bills. He could take the train down twice a week to finish out the semester, and meanwhile look for a used car and a job. A job a regular person might have. The day he mailed in his students’ grades, he bought a ’95 Honda Civic with forty-three thousand miles on it; two weeks later he started work at a company that did tech support under contract to Microsoft. Billy liked computers, and he was a quick study; he had no experience, but neither did half the employees. He’d worked up a little song-and-dance for the interview to explain a career change at thirty-two: he grew up here, liked the area, was burned out on New York City. If that didn’t play in Albany, he didn’t know Albany. But he never got to say his piece. They were hiring: end of story. If he didn’t work out, somebody else would.
    Cassie had worked on him about moving to Boston, but that would’ve been settling for the merely second-rate. Choosingthe suburbs of Albany and your own childhood home had a perverse grandeur, like an episode in the lives of the great Proustian-Jamesian queer recluses. (Mark’s name for Albany was “Ulan Bator.”) And taking a job in tech support seemed, to Billy, a little like Rimbaud giving up poetry for gunrunning or whatever it was. A very little.
    He didn’t bring much from 75th Street besides his clothes, his tapes and CDs, his books—most of them are still in boxes—and his computer. He spread his one decent kilim on the wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, but the colors clashed; after a week he rolled it up and stuck it in the hall closet. He’s learned to live with wallpaper, and while he took down the intolerable shorescape (lighthouse, dunes, gull on post of jetty) in the master bedroom, he left the snow scene (covered bridge, icy brook, hemlocks) as a tip of the hat to the old man. He also left the denim-and-gingham square dancers in the kitchen, painted on varnished plywood in a Chuck Jones-meets-Thomas Hart Benton manner.
    Deke’s been here since Labor Day weekend. That Sunday morning, Cassie’s Porsche-driving druggie boyfriend called in a panic—looking for Mom, actually, forgetting she was dead. If he’d ever known. He said they’d gone to his beach house in Wellfleet, where Cassie, already up for three days on coke and crank,