Read Online Interference & Other Stories by Richard Hoffman - Free Book Online Page B

long lines for legs, stiltlike, resembling an insect, and with saw-toothed jaws depicted full front though the drawing was in profile. A creature horrific and improbable, protected on either side by purple mountains.
    â€œTiger!” Roger instructed them. Then he dropped his drawing and, leaning forward, arms locked at his sides and ending in fists, he roared at the both of them.

GUY GOES INTO A BARBERSHOP
    The barber looks up from his customer and nods. Guy touches his right eyebrow with his index finger in a little salute, hangs his jacket and hat on a hook, and turns to a stack of magazines: Agni, Hudson Review, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, The American Scholar. No Field & Stream? No Argosy, Popular Mechanics, Maxim, Esquire, GQ? But the barber’s shaking out the striped cape and it’s his turn in the chair.
    â€œHow goes it?” asks the barber.
    â€œCan’t complain,”says Guy.
    â€œAh! Never complain and never explain,” chirps the barber.
    Guy watches him in the mirror, his movements, his assured manner. He looks at the barber’s instruments on the marble counter and in various holsters hanging below it.
    â€œSo what’s it gonna be?”
    â€œJust trim the sides and back. Go easy on the top. There’s not a whole lot left up there, y’know?” He grins at the barber in the mirror.
    â€œHopes dance best on bald men’s hair!” says the barber.
    â€œCome again?”
    â€œHope. You know, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”
    â€œOh. Yeah. Yeah. And I could use a shave.”
    â€œThat’s an extra two bucks with the haircut. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy!”
    â€œThat’s reasonable.”
    â€œThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
    â€œI never quite thought about it that way,” Guy says and grows wary. Mostly he hopes this isn’t one of those barbers who doesn’t care if he gets those little hairs all down your neck so you itch the whole rest of the day. He closes his eyes and listens to the scissors do their work.
    â€œMind if I ask you something?” the barber says.
    â€œNo. Go ahead.”
    â€œWell, if there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wild seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?”
    â€œDamned if I know,” says Guy.
    Soon the barber is holding his jaw shut, scraping at his neck. “Every normal man,” the barber says, “must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
    With this, Guy sits up. “Are you nuts? Is that it? I’m not going to sit here scared half to death while you hold a razor to my throat.”
    â€œFear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning,” the barber says as he smacks Guy on the cheeks with something that stings and smells like lime. “Relax,” he says.
    â€œHow can I relax with you talking like that?”
    â€œLet people see in what I borrow whether I have known how to choose what would enhance my theme. For I make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the weakness of my understanding.”
    Then the barber holds up the hand mirror behind Guy’s head—a bogus lollipop, an all-day sucker, paddle of a clown. “Give me to know the measure of my days,” he says.
    Guy sees in the mirror before him the long approach of himself and he is afraid to meet his eyes for fear the whole train, on the thin, black, twin track of his pupils, will come