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

chop charred in the brazier, a peaty single malt, a pipe, maybe an old radio for the dramas and sports scores. Where, Wes wondered, on that rocky volcanic plain would he find a steady supply of firewood? Or coffee, whiskey, tobacco, mutton? Helmholtz, because he was technically a ward of the state, would have all these delivered to him, free of charge, and maybe a girl every so often, because those people were so keen on the pacifying effects of extremely impersonal and uninhibited sexual encounters. But Wes would have to be realistic if he were to survive and work—after all, writers in the real world do not have the luxury of being exiled by benevolent dictatorships, they have to survive by their own wits. Either you find a way to live on the cheap, or you sell yourself into lifelong drudgery and compromise in advertising or academia. Wes planned to pull a Helmholtz, but he thought that it might be better to start off somewhere more temperate to begin with, until he had honed his survival skills. Somewhere like Newfoundland or the highlands of Scotland, maybe, where he could trap grouse and grow winter barley and drive into the village once a week for supplies and a pint of bitter, whatever that was, at the local pub. And where he could roam the scented gorse in rubber boots with a fowling piece on his hip and a brown lab at his heels. But even then, where was he to get the money for rent, the car, the dog, the shotgun, the boots? How long would he have to work in the fallen world so that he could escape it? His father, after all, had pandered his entire life to a similar dream, and just look at where that had gotten him: loveless marriage, indifferent kids, a job he hated, exile to the basement. He couldn’t even afford to live in a place of his own, which would have suited everybody. It was no wonder he was such a loser. Wes was absolutely determined to avoid his dad’s fate, to foreswear all the entanglements—partly because it wasn’t so hard to see himself behaving exactly as his father behaved if he were in the same predicament—but it all seemed so impossibly far away, impossible to imagine maintaining the necessary purity of soul and thought while he waited and plotted his getaway.
    It occurred to him that he should revisit
Brave New World
as an option for his paper, as it would be so much easier and faster than
War and Peace
, but he couldn’t bear the idea that someone might consider it an obvious choice, and anyway someone else in the class was bound to choose it. In any case, Helmholtz notwithstanding, Wes had truly disliked
Brave New World
as a novel; Mrs. Fielding would not appreciate the tone of snotty disdain that was sure to come through if he wrote about it. He turned his head towards the desk as if he might will
War and Peace
to float across the room to him, but it did not. The mere thought of getting up, retrieving the monstrous book, returning to bed, propping his back with pillows and proceeding to sort through 1,200 pages of highlights was disheartening in the extreme, and reminded him of everything that was wrong with his life, but it was precisely the outrage awakened by the unfairness of it all that gave him the energy to rise and do what had to be done. A few moments later, he was back settled beneath the covers with all the necessary paraphernalia spread in an arc about his lap: book, laptop, headphones, phone, legal pad, yellow highlighter and post-its.
    Wes had already done almost all the preliminary work; dozens of post-its rose like buoy flags from the pages where he had highlighted relevant passages as he had read, and several pages of crabbed notes were handwritten into the flyleaves at the back. All Wes had to do was connect the dots. The problem was, he had had some sort of thesis in mind when he was taking notes, but now he was sincerely incapable of recalling what it was. It didn’t matter much; he would have no trouble coming up with a new one. As a