You Were Wrong Read Online Free PDF

were leaning into. There was a short ascending meadow of weeds between the woods and house. An open back porch with pale gray dirty concrete floor greeted them. Grass grew in its cracks. Bicycles, balls, garden tools, croquet mallets and stakes and hoops were strewn on it. There was a wheelbarrow and a green hose, and there were dead plants in small black plastic pots on the windowsills. Gray round poles rose up from the concrete floor and supported the back of the house. The second-story window frames had once been given a coat of green paint of which only fragments now were left.
    “What’s with all the green?”
    “That’s our color,” she said.
    “Whose?”
    “Ugh, you’re so literal.”
    Karl tried to imagine a perfect world in which one would always only be hugged by Sylvia Vetch, or in which all experience would have the tenor of a Vetch hug. Could “Ugh, you’re so literal” have been a verbal hug of the painful kind that liberated toxins from deep within him toward the ultimate goal of free energy flow through the body and extended pain-free living? Perhaps, if someone had not blundered.
    “Karl’s coming, everyone!” someone said from the screened-in deck above the back porch. He wasn’t sure this was the same house as last night. “Don’t look!” he was instructed as he went in through the screen door of the back porch and was led up a dark stair, but how could one not look? A pizza stain on the wall and a tube sock, once white, pasted to the banister with mold, were but two ocular sensations. And if one had somehow been able not to look, one would still have felt and heard underfoot the squishy nubs of basement carpet that denoted an undealt-with flood, and one would still have smelled—well, it was complicated, grim, and didn’t have a name he knew.
    “Don’t go in the kitchen!”
    He saw a shoe, a leg, heard a bracelet jangle in a hall. They scurried away from him like talking cartoon mice. And this was also the dream of a certain kind of person, that the meaning which animated the world was in constant flight just ahead of his arrival, leaving behind the mute and inchoate objects it had vacated, like the ones that covered the dining room table on which a grimy place had evidently been cleared for him. On both chair and light tan tabletop dust adhered to spots where syrup or other sticky gunk had not been fully wiped up. Nothing anywhere in this house had been fully wiped up. And here was that seemingly random cluster of objects on the table and adjacent chairs, the puzzle adequate time would not be given him to solve: newspapers and magazines and books, plastic trays of dried fruits, antacids, laxatives, and analgesics, a combination lock, pliers, water bottles, SPF 30, keys, a watch, a phone and its unsnapped holster, scissors, CDs, pens, a flashlight, half-full coffee cups topped with hieroglyphs of milk, someone’s calendar and checkbook, a canister of compressed air promising to “quickly blow harmful dust & dirt from delicate or hard-to-reach surfaces.” A hand placed the sealed styrofoam takeout tray before him, opened it, and retreated. There were his cold and solid scrambled eggs, there a cooled-down, hardened slice of toast. He looked up. No one was about and yet he felt peered at, a bad actor on a meticulously trashed stage set, performing a scene in which a confused solitary man eats takeout eggs, which had been and would be performed all morning and for days to come by men throughout the length and breadth of the landmass. The relation between the morning meal and the house it happened in, between house and land, land and meal, could be expressed in a formula consisting of numbers, letters, symbols, and a single equal sign; the lifespan of one man might simply not have been sufficient time to derive the formula. Perhaps he’d know it at ninety, were he unlucky enough to live to that age, though surely it would not matter to him then. Truths harder to bear than the ones he