Read Online Bucky F*cking Dent by David Duchovny - Free Book Online

old fucks. By the way, if I ever talk about getting one of those elevators for old fucks seriously, shoot me in the head.” Slowly they made their way to Ted’s old room, the room he’d had as a child. Ted didn’t want to walk faster than his father. Their progress was so halting, he wasn’t sure if he was walking or standing still. He let Marty open the door to his old room. “The honeymoon suite,” he said, and held out his hand as if for a tip.
    â€œYes. Yes. This is where the magic never happened,” Ted said, and he walked into the small rectangle that was the world he had grown up in.

 
    13.
    The cliché of the unchanged childhood bedroom in movies and TV is usually shorthand for a parent who does not want to let the child grow up, or the child who refuses to grow up, or the parent in mourning for the dead child. A Miss Havisham thing without the sexual politics. If Ted had wanted to be extra hard on himself, he might’ve said that his room was pretty much as he had left it for Columbia because his father was mourning the death of what he thought Ted could have been. But that might be ascribing too much sentimentality to Marty; it was more like Marty was lazy as shit and a bad housekeeper. Seemed all four floors of the house were basically unchanged over the last ten or fifteen years, as the life that Marty had been living was collapsing in upon itself geographically, and the space he actually inhabited had shrunken more and more, until he really existed only in the living room downstairs, and in the kitchen and the bathroom. If the universe was constantly expanding, Marty’s universe was constantly contracting, its central sun losing touch with its outer planets and outer rooms, on its way to collapsing into one room, a small dot, a black hole, death.
    â€œYou should go take a shower or something, Marty, you reek.”
    â€œThanks for the tip, son. I’ll leave you to commune with memories of your salad days,” Marty said. “Ah, if these walls could talk.”
    â€œI’d tell them to shut the fuck up.”
    Marty shuffled off, leaving Ted alone. Ted stood frozen, looking at his single bed and its New York Yankee sheets, pillowcases, and blanket. Vinyl albums lining the walls—LPs and 45s. He picked up a 45—“(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” Elvis. Elvis, America’s uncrowned king, had died just last summer. His death had felt like the end of something, but Ted didn’t know what. He wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Elvis these days, but he understood his presence in the room. There were a couple of Pat Boone albums. “Love Letters in the Sand.” Holy shit, that was embarrassing. Perry Como. Johnny Mathis. Gogi Grant? What’s a Gogi Grant? There was a Sam Cooke album. That was acceptable. On the wall above his bed was a Technicolor poster from the 1955 sci-fi nonclassic This Island Earth. He couldn’t remember if he’d put that up there ironically or if he really dug the kitsch of its tagline: “ TWO MORTALS TRAPPED IN OUTER SPACE … CHALLENGING THE UNEARTHLY FURIES OF AN OUTLAW PLANET GONE MAD! ” Two mortals trapped in an outer borough. Looking around his room at these artifacts, Ted had the feeling he was trying to decipher hieroglyphics. He grew up in the ’50s, which were really the ’40s, he’d have to give himself a break.
    Ted hated memory lane, so he walked to the dresser, tossed in some of his clothes from the plastic bags, and dumped his toiletries in the bathroom. He ran the water from the tap until it flowed from dark brown to light brown to New York City clear. He put his head down to swallow some and laughed as he remembered he’d read that Kosher Jews had to get special permission from the rabbi to drink tap water in the city because it contained microscopic crustaceans, undercover shrimpy shrimp, treif on tap.
    He walked over to the closet to hang up his