Voice of Our Shadow Read Online Free PDF

arrange everything through her.
    You know what happens when you sell a story to someone: they push it and pull it and turn it inside out. When they’re done eviscerating it (“shaping it up,” they like to call it), they put it in front of the public with a line in the program that reads something like “Based on an original short story by Joseph Lennox.”
    The producer of the play, a tall man with bright-red hair named Phil Westberg, called me just after he’d bought the story and politely asked how I would approach it as a play. I didn’t know anything, so I said something dumb and forgettable, but he didn’t want to hear what I had to say anyway, because he had it all planned out. He began to tell me his plan, and at one point I took the telephone receiver away from my ear and looked at it as if it were an eggplant. He was talking about “Wooden Pajamas,” but they weren’t my pajamas. The short story began in a bathroom, the play at the big party, which instantly cut out about four thousand words of my work. The protagonist in the play was thrown in as an afterthought in the story. But Westberg knew what he wanted, and he sure didn’t want much of what I’d written. When I finally got that through my thick skull, I skulked away into the night, never to hear from “Phil” again — until he sent me one free ticket for opening night a year and a half later.
    Phil and his gang went on to use my story as the basis for the wildly successful (and depressing) play, The Voice of Our Shadow . Among other things, it is about sadness and the small dreams of the young, and besides running for two years on Broadway, where it won the Pulitzer Prize, it was made into a halfway-decent film. I retained a small but lucrative percentage of those subsidiary and world rights, thank God.
     
    The hoopla over the play began in my senior year in college. I thought it was great at the beginning and horrible from then on. People were convinced I had written the whole thing, and I spent most of the time explaining that my contribution had been little more than, well, microscopic. On opening night, I sat in the audience and stared at the young actors playing Ross and Bobby and those other guys and girls I had known so well a hundred years ago in my life. I watched them being changed and distorted, and when I walked out of the theater I ached with guilt at the death of my brother. But did I ache to tell anyone what had actually happened that day? No. Guilt can be molded. It is a funny kind of clay; if you know how to handle it right, you can twist and knead and form or place it anyway you want. I know that is a generalization, but it is what I did; and as I got older, I had less and less trouble rationalizing the fact that I had murdered my brother. It was an accident. I had never meant for it to happen. He was a monster and had deserved it. If he hadn’t brought up the subject of masturbation that day … It all helped me to punch the bare, ghastly fact that I had done it into the shape I wanted.
    Within a few months I had more money than King Tut. I was also exhausted and embittered by the same well-meant questions and the same disappointed looks on faces when I told them no, no, I didn’t write the play , you see …
    When I discovered that my university offered a six-week course in modern German literature in Vienna, I jumped at the chance. I had majored in German because it was hard and challenging and something I wanted to become very good at in my life. I was convinced I would be able to surface again all clean and absolved after a few months of sacher torte, outings on the Blue Danube, and Robert Musil. I arranged it so my six weeks there would come at the end of the school year, which would allow me to stay through the summer if I liked the town.
    I loved Vienna from the beginning. The Viennese are well fed, obedient, and a little behind the times in almost everything they do. Because of this, or because the city is exotic in