Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF

herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this Without saying anything because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.
    Bob blows his smoke discreetly in my direction and waits for Chris to finish talking to Gang Lu, who is answering questions in a monotone — yes or no, or I don’t know. Another Chinese student named Shan lets himself in after knocking lightly. He nods and smiles at me and then stands at a respectful distance, waiting to ask Chris a question.
    It’s like a physics conference in here. I wish they’d all leave so I could make my usual midafternoon spate of personal calls. I begin thumbing through papers in a businesslike way.
    Bob pokes at his pipe with a bent paper clip. Shan yawns hugely and then looks embarrassed. Chris erases what he put on the blackboard and tries unsuccessfully to redraw my pecking parakeet. “I don’t know how it goes,” he says to me.
    Gang Lu looks around the room idly with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob who talks to him like he is a dog; the student Shan whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter. Clint Eastwood as a rocket scientist.
    He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough.
     
       
    The collie fell down the basement stairs. I don’t know if she was disoriented and looking for me or what. But when I was at work she used her long nose like a lever and got the door to the basement open and tried to go down there except her legs wouldn’t do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on the concrete floor in an unnatural position, one leg still awkwardly resting on the last step. I repositioned the leg and sat down next to her and petted her. We used to play a game called Maserati, where I’d grab her nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears, first second third fourth, until we were going a hundred miles an hour through town. She thought it was funny.
    Now I’m at work but this morning there’s nothing to do, and every time I turn around I see her sprawled, eyes mute, leg bent upward. We’re breaking each other’s hearts. I draw a picture of her on the blackboard using brown chalk. I make X s where her eyes should be. Chris walks in with the morning paper and a cup of coffee. He looks around the clean office.
    “Why are you here when there’s no work to do?” he asks.
    “I’m hiding from my life, what else,” I tell him. This sounds perfectly reasonable to him. He gives me part of the paper.
    His mother is visiting from Germany, a robust woman of eighty who is depressed and hoping to be cheered up. In the last year she has lost her one-hundred-year-old mother and her husband of sixty years. She mostly can’t be cheered up, but she likes going to art galleries so Chris has been driving her around the Midwest, to our best