What We've Lost Is Nothing Read Online Free PDF

hallway were dimmed low. Detective Wasserman wore a light cotton golf shirt with a blazer. Arthur thought detectives were required to wear ties.
    â€œWhat I’m offering,” said Arthur to the circling detective, “is simply that the pumping of several arms through the air might suggest a professional outfit. Organization.”
    Detective Wasserman stopped. “It might, Mr. Gardenia.”
    Was Arthur being patronized? Who was this small man? He wasn’t even wearing a tie.
    Arthur was fairly sure of what he’d heard, and the noises had alarmed him, but he had been listening to the radio at the same time. Maybe there’d been no sound at all, just disturbed air, the sensing of a presence other than his own. Live alone for long enough and you get to know just how much oxygen one small person can take up. He’d been in his study, in an oversize rocking chair, eyes closed, bookshelf blocking any possible light from the window, listening. His back door was propped open to let in some fresh spring air. He had a fence around his yard and took for granted his isolation. He listened as he always had, headphones on, but with one side pushed back, behind his ear, so that the outside world wasn’t gone, exactly, but muffled. He knew the radio schedule by heart. He woke at noon with Worldview , then took a break for breakfast, and started up again with Fresh Air and then All Things Considered , and if he hadn’t tired out, he stayed around for Marketplace . It whittled away the time, gave his days a kind of shape and heft. But it also offered him a vast array of dialects and speech blueprints, which he sometimes wrote out using the linguistic pattern he’d developed over the years. Arthur believed that the way people spoke was as individual as a fingerprint. There were subtle differences, the hiss of an s . The softness of an f . A jarring ch . He’d noticed some years ago that so few Americans used the letter t when it came in the middle of a word.
    He’d heard something , though he could not identify what that something had been. He had no physical recourse against an intruder, against a threat of any kind, really. What could he do? Wave an angry bat toward a blur? Once he may have been able to fend off an intruder, when he was young, in his early thirties, just a few years after he’d finished his PhD. That was before the colors of the world had begun to fade, reds to pinks, pinks to grays, oranges and reds, purples and blues, blues and greens, all melting, washing into one another until they were a mass of nothing. Palimpsests of color, indiscernible as layers.
    â€œIt seems like it might be difficult to hear an arm pumping through air with headphones on,” Detective Wasserman said. Arthur didn’t tell him that he listened only through one side. He’d always done it, he reasoned, as a precautionary measure, a way not to be fully absent from the world. The irony was not lost on Arthur.
    The point of entry had been Arthur’s back screen door, wedged open with what Detective Wasserman suspected had been a screwdriver. Screwdrivers were the weapon of choice for break-ins.
    â€œIt was Terry Gross,” Arthur said. “On the radio.”
    He imagined the way she spoke in reconfigured language and punctuation. Sometimes she’d throw two or three words together so they sounded like one. Terrygross , for example. Arthur believed personal dialects and idiosyncrasies and idioms were reflected in our letters and e-mails, and he aimed to capture it, the individual language of every person on earth.
    â€œI’m Quite Sure I hearD twothreemaybemore arms. I’m guessinghere. At the arms. Twothreearms in The Air. Pumping intheair.” Arthur both said and envisioned these phrases. He peered at the detective’s thick, wiry hair. The man had pockmarks on his nose, thin lips, and high cheekbones, but mostly what Arthur saw was an indistinct