Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Read Online Free PDF Page A

really have to get those feet looked at now.
    Mr. Geronimo was a down-to-earth man, and so it did not occur to him that a new age of the irrational had begun, in which the gravitational aberration to which he had fallen victim would be only one of many outré manifestations. Further bizarreries in his own narrative were beyond his comprehension. It did not enter his mind, for example, that in the near future he might make love to a fairy princess. Nor did the transformation of global reality preoccupy him. He drew no broader conclusions from his plight. He did not imagine the imminent reappearance in the oceans of sea-monsters large enough to swallow ships in a single gulp, or the emergence of men strong enough to lift fully grown elephants, or the appearance in the skies over the earth of wizards traveling through the air at super-speed on magically propelled flying urns. He did not surmise that he could have fallen under the spell of a mighty and malevolent jinn.
    However, he was methodical by nature, and so, undeniably concerned by his new condition, he reached into a pocket of his battered gardening jacket and found a folded sheet of paper, a bill from the power utility company. The power had been shut down but the bills continued to insist on prompt settlement. That was the natural order of things. He unfolded the bill and spread it out on the mud. Then he stood on it, stamped and jumped some more, tried to rub the document with his feet. It remained untouched. He reached down and tugged at it, and at once it slid out from beneath his feet. No trace of a footprint. He tried a second time, and was able to pass the utility bill cleanly under both boots. The gap between himself and the earth was tiny but unarguable. He was now permanently located at least a sheet of paper’s thickness above the planet’s surface. Mr. Geronimo straightened with the piece of paper in his hand. Giant trees lay dead around him, sinking into the mud. The Lady Philosopher, his employer the fodder heiress Miss Alexandra Bliss Fariña, was watching him through ground-floor French windows with tears streaming down her beautiful young face and something else flowing from her eyes that he couldn’t make out. It might have been fear or shock. It might even have been desire.
    Mr. Geronimo’s life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors’ peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own. He had been born Raphael Hieronymus Manezes in Bandra, Bombay, the illegitimate son of a firebrand Catholic priest, more than sixty summers before the events that concern us now, named on another continent in another age of the world by a man (long deceased) who had come to seem as alien to him as Martians or reptiles, but was also as close as blood could make him. His holy father, Father Jerry, the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza, was in his own words a “huge orson of a man,” a “whale-sized moby,” lacking earlobes but possessing, by way of compensation, the bellow of Stentor, the herald of the Greek army in the war against Troy, whose voice was as strong as fifty men. He was the neighborhood’s leading matchmaker and its benevolent tyrant, a conservative of the right type, everyone agreed. Aut Caesar aut nullus was his personal motto as it had been Cesare Borgia’s, either a Caesar or a nobody, and as Father Jerry was definitely not a nobody it followed that he must be Caesar, and in fact so complete was his authority that nobody made a fuss when he surreptitiously (meaning that everyone knew about it) made a match for himself with a grave-faced stenographer, a