Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

cities, showing her what kind of art Americans like to look at.
    “How’s your mom?” I ask him.
    He shrugs and makes a flat-handed so-so motion.
    We read, smoke, drink coffee, and yawn. I decide to go home.
    “Good idea,” he says encouragingly.
    It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life. Before I leave I pick up the eraser and stand in front of the collie’s picture on the blackboard, thinking. I can feel him watching me, drinking his coffee. He’s wearing a gold shirt and blue jeans and a gray cardigan sweater. He is tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old. He has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter named Karcin, and a son named Goran. A dog named Mica. A mother named Ursula. A friend named me.
    I erase the X s.
    Down the hall, Linhua Shan feeds numbers into a computer and watches as a graph is formed. The computer screen is brilliant blue, and the lines appear in red and yellow and green. Four keystrokes and the green becomes purple. More keystrokes and the blue background fades to the azure of a summer sky. The wave lines arc over it, crossing against one another. He asks the computer to print, and while it chugs along he pulls up a golf game on the screen and tees off.
    One room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister in China. The study of physics is more and more disappointing , he tells her. Modern physics is self-delusion and all my life I have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything. Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few traveling companions to accompany me to the grave. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-caliber handgun and a .22-caliber revolver. They’re heavier than they look and weigh the pockets down. My beloved elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you.
    The collie’s eyes are almond-shaped; I draw them in with brown chalk and put a white bone next to her feet.
    “That’s better,” Chris says kindly.
    Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his coat. He doesn’t answer and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.
     
       
    Friday afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone explains something unexplainable at the head of the long table. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns and walks back up the stairs and enters the meeting room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then blue smoke. Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead, the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room.
    Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, dispelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office: the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes forward — Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouched over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking to him. From where he lies, Bob can see his best friend still sitting upright in a