of the O’Hare terminal, which was surrounded by runways, so I took the subway to Rosemont, then picked my way between office blocks to the banks of a cold and polluted river.
The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor – I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements – massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.
The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across onedoorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.
That sophism was taken for fate in disguise
... I didn’t like her tone, although I knew it was nothing personal. Anyway, my tics had returned and what time I could grapple from the repetitive operations messing up my head was assigned to the flesh-coloured foam rubber between the brace and her bent wrist.
Fantastic materials, glass terrycloth, plastic
...
Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning:
‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem
that
cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop windowread ‘N–Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were
taquerías
, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.
My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone – stylized as a minuet – and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.
‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.
‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.
‘Deep-vein thrombosis – they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’
‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’
‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’
5.0625
Rat Poison
Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading
The Tatler
.
‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And
he
’ – a significant lash of a drip – ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you ...’
He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her
The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor – I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements – massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.
The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across onedoorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.
That sophism was taken for fate in disguise
... I didn’t like her tone, although I knew it was nothing personal. Anyway, my tics had returned and what time I could grapple from the repetitive operations messing up my head was assigned to the flesh-coloured foam rubber between the brace and her bent wrist.
Fantastic materials, glass terrycloth, plastic
...
Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning:
‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem
that
cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop windowread ‘N–Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were
taquerías
, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.
My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone – stylized as a minuet – and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.
‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.
‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.
‘Deep-vein thrombosis – they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’
‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’
‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’
5.0625
Rat Poison
Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading
The Tatler
.
‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And
he
’ – a significant lash of a drip – ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you ...’
He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her
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