Vertigo Read Online Free PDF Page B

contact?
    They’d already taken him out of his body. Sensible of him to get away too. I have no idea if he is still in there. Couldn’t they see he had already gone.
    I cannot make a body meet another body, not even to kill in thought. Try another story.
    When this person leaves my kitchen and arrives, armed with my fantasies, at the very door of my room, which of my children would I save first: the vulnerable youngest or the one able to run? A friend who worked a summer as a lifeguard told me how they do it: identify those most likely to survive and save them first; let the baby sink to the bottom. They are told, he said, to be “pragmatic.” We tell stories in which lifeguards heroically save the most hopeless people when all hope has gone. It seems that, all the time, we should have been telling a different story. I didn’t tell my friend at the time, but this seemed wrong. It would not do for my story. His story would be a bad story, whether about a lifeguard, or about the person downstairs.
    Can either of my children be saved? Could I, as saver, make a heroic decision that results in a positive outcome, or could I make a decision that results in a negative outcome but which remains heroic nonetheless? Or could I make a pragmatic decision that results in a positive but unheroic outcome, or a pragmatic decision that results in an optimum outcome and also makes a heroic story? What if the pragmatic decision turned out worse?
    In another story I walk along the hospital corridor of the children’s ward in which portholes wink at adult-eye level. The woman with the baby is in the parents’ room, where tea and instant coffee are “supplied by local freemasons.” The baby is not with her. She is crying or at least tears are coming out of her eyes but she is silent and also turning the pages of a gossip mag. I eat Rice Krispies from a plastic bowl with a cow on it, with a plastic spoon. I ask her if I can make her tea. She says no. One distress parallels the other. Or, no, how could it, or if it does, it is only for a moment, before each returns to the specifics of her own misery. I look out of the window, while the kettle takes its foreign time to boil, onto a central courtyard whose walls are white, and all down every wall are brown frames that answer only each other. At the bottom of this pit is a white roof. The tea I make tastes of soap.
    Back in the ward, the baby is there. It beeps. The woman has returned. She is watching television. She watches baby programs. It is too loud. Her baby is too small surely.
    I sit on the couch beside the bed. My legs dangle. Above the bed dangle a machine’s legs, waiting. The doors of the bedside cabinet look like saloon doors, but they do not swing open. Perhaps a troop of mice will come out, perhaps a miniature marching band. And I have stopped breathing neither on the in nor the out breath, either of which would have been a bit showy, but in the middle of a breath so nobody would notice, just to see if time might stop and the people in the room might stop too in the middle of their activities, and I didn’t even know I was doing it until I was about halfway to empty.
    Then Charlotte comes, and all across her apron kittens kiss.

ONLINE
    My husband met some women online and I found out.
    His women were young, witty, and charming, and they had good jobs—at least I ignored the women he had met online who were not young, witty, and charming, and who did not have good jobs—and so I fell more in love with my husband, reflected as he was, in the words of these universally young, witty, and charming women.
    I had neglected my husband.
    Now I wanted him back.
    So I tried to be as witty and charming as the women my husband had met online.
    I tried to take an interest.
    At breakfast, I said to him, “How is your breakfast?”
    He said to me, “Fine, thanks.”
    I said to him, “What do you like for breakfast?”
    (Having lived with him for a number of years, I already know what my