Read Online Eye Contact by Michael Craft - Free Book Online Page A

questions, just ask.”
    David glances over his shoulder into the apartment. There’s a quizzical look on his face. “Actually, Dora Lee, I’ve been sort of curious …”
    “Yeah, sweetie? What?”
    His glasses flash toward the bedroom. “It’s that, uh …”
    “Elvis?” She laughs, coughs. “Why, that’s my costume —for my act. See, I do this impersonation? And folks seem to think it’s pretty good, and I been workin’ a lot of church fund-raisers lately. Maybe you heard, the Christian Family Crusade is openin’ a fancy new hotel here in Chicago, the Gethsemane Arms, and I’m booked for a nightly show there next month.”
    “Really?” says Manning, struggling to appear interested. “We’ll try to catch it.”
    Dora Lee beams. “You just let me know when, and I’ll getcha a good table.”
    “Thanks,” the guys tell her. “We’ll let you know.”
    As they pass by her on their way through the door, she takes aim at David’s plump, muscular rear and gives it a hearty slap. He stops and turns to her, stunned. She leans, croaking into his ear, “Feel free to pop back up and see me anytime!” She breaks into laughter and thumps the door closed. Then the apartment reverberates with the explosive hack of another coughing jag.
    The two reporters retreat down the stairs, David trying not to laugh. Manning lags behind him by a couple of steps, immersed in his thoughts, sorting through what he has seen and heard. When they at last pass through the vestibule and emerge into the hot shade of the building’s canopy, David blurts, “She’s nuts !” He has found the whole experience uproarious, but he’s had to restrain himself till this moment. “Did you see that Elvis getup?”
    “That’s not all I saw.” Manning smiles, but he’s too preoccupied to fully appreciate David’s hilarity. “When Dora Lee opened that drawer for cigarettes, I noticed something peeking from a batch of old Christmas cards and other junk—it was the muzzle of a pistol.”

Friday, June 25
    I T’S A PLANET —not in theory, not in virtual reality, not in digitized projection—but in itself, in all its density and roundness, anchoring a rose-colored atmosphere that resembles the Day-Glo haze airbrushed on a psychedelic poster that a college roommate once taped to the cement-block walls of Manning’s dorm room.
    Manning grinds his feet in the Zarnikal dirt, ready to run. He breathes the strange vapor, filling his lungs with galactic fog. At first he attributes his light-headedness to the gas he has inhaled, but then he discovers that it is not his brain that has been buoyed, but his body. The mass of this distant world is so slight that it generates barely enough gravity to keep his feet in touch with the surface. The horizon before him arcs like a world in miniature, a dusty landscape through a fish-eye lens. The globe spins so rapidly—its day, he remembers, is equivalent to two Earth hours—that his hair is tousled by never-ending winds blown by coral-fingered clouds.
    He feels neither hot nor cold in the dim sunlight that radiates from a moving pinpoint in the farthest reaches of the sky. He is alone and without inhibition, so he bends to remove his running shorts. He kicks free of them and sends the ball of yellow nylon hurtling before him. It disappears beyond the horizon, and as he contemplates the laws of physics rewritten for this strange terrain, his shorts reappear—from behind, in the sky above him, fixed in an eternal orbit. The pink planet now has a little yellow moon. Dr. Zarnik got to name the planet he discovered, but Manning can take credit for its moon. “Eros,” he names it aloud.
    Intrigued by his newfound power to launch projectiles into space, he looks about for something else to fling into the cosmos. But there is nothing—no rocks, no plants, no birds or lizards—just the perfect, untrampled stretch of talc-fine dirt that surrounds him, the rosy tendrils of clouds that streak with geometric