Read Online Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner - Free Book Online Page A

text message, a voice message and an email. The text—“pls call”—was from Lucy. The email was from James: “Today you are a man, my son.” The voice mail was from Delia; her cell number was programmed into the phone, the call-back button said “Delia.” As Wes stared at the name his heart began to race and he felt his cheeks grow hot, and the letters on the display seemed to ripple and pulse. He pressed the delete button and dropped the phone to the floor.
    Like the kitchen, the bedroom was now flooded with light that felt like a thin, noxious vapor. It was a wintery light, but it was a long way to winter; the days were still too long, too warm, too inviting. Wes longed for the winter, when it was safe to shut oneself away. He loved waking up and going to school and coming home in the dark, the privacy of walking alone in a twilit street in the cold, the lonely romance of winter sounds—wind whisking at the bare tree branches, dry leaves scudding along an unswept sidewalk, the muffling that descends before a snowfall. What he hated was the summer, things that were bright and open and shadowless. He hated waking up in the sunlight, the skimpy clothes, the endless hazy twilights that somehow made you feel less than wholesome if you wanted to crawl into bed with a book while there was still a warm, pastel glow in the sky. He hated the way the Village streets remained crowded deep into the evening with people wandering around aimlessly in cargo shorts and sports bras, joylessly anticipating their first drink, a walk along the river with the fam, some stupid night on the town, any number of dismal prefabricated pleasures. Summer turned every New Yorker into a Disneyland vacationer; unforgivably, it blurred the distinctions between city-dwellers and suburbanites—distinctions which Wes felt should be maintained crisp and unmistakable at all times.
    Wes thought of
Brave New World
, a back-up candidate for his European lit paper, and the deep sense of kinship he’d felt with Helmholtz Watson as he rejoiced at being exiled to the Falklands. Helmholtz had been offered his choice of any island in the world—Hawaii, Tahiti, the Caribbean—but he asked to be sent somewhere with bad weather, somewhere with lots of wind and storms, just as Wes would have. Until that moment,
Brave New World
, even with its abundance of casual sex for people of all ages, had seemed to Wes to be the most idiotic of books. But it had been almost redeemed by Helmholtz’s request. A place where you could spend all winter holed up with your books, your notebooks, your thoughts. Wes suspected that this was not a normal desire for a seventeen-year old, but he couldn’t help himself. All he wanted was to be boxed in by howling winds and lowering skies in every shade of grey. For the same reason, whenever he played Risk with Nora he always made Kamchatka his home base and defended it to the end. It would help, he supposed, to have somebody, some body, pale-skinned and red-haired like Delia, to have sex with at odd hours, but then again that could just as easily be a liability, in the event that such a body turned out to have needs of its own. If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes reasoned, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence, though he did not suppose that he would suffer from loneliness. All he’d ever wanted, as far back as he could remember, was to be left alone, like Helmholtz, where the mind can expand to fill the vast silence, where a man can find peace from chatter and temptation and opinion—a one-room stone cottage with small leaded windows and a large fireplace, glacial run-off to bathe in, unpolluted, unobstructed views for the eye to linger upon in those blank moments before inspiration strikes. In the morning, black coffee from a moka pot, and a solid wedge of black bread spread thick with creamery butter and lingonberry jam. At night, a roaring fire, a mutton