Read Online Private Novelist by Nell Zink - Free Book Online

side and cried until I felt dizzy.
    I woke up in darkness. The lamb was with me in bed, but the room was gone, and I had a vision. I saw the world from space, and it was not blue, green, and white. It was black, yellow, and brown. So many people had died that there were only a million left, living like me in the cities, watching documentaries about the exodus to the poles and believing them. But we were doomed, like the great whales: So few were left, in so large a space, that we never encountered each other. Then I really woke up. The lamb was gone, and I was alone.
    I walked to the window and looked out at the street. It was blazing noontime. The man was sitting outside on a rock under an enormous chestnut tree with leaflets like dark green umbrellas that cast a deep, fragrant shade over my entire block. He was cleaning under his fingernails with a toothpick. The lamb was asleep on the bench seat of the mail truck.
    I opened the door and he looked up. “I recognize you now,” I said. “You’re the mailman.”
    â€œSometimes,” he said.
    â€œIs this Part Five?”
    â€œThis is actually Part Ten,” he said. “I was getting really impatient. Will you live with me in Austria?”
    â€œLet me get my coat,” I said. “It looked kind of snowy.”
    â€œYou can borrow mine,” he said, but I shook my head. I got my coat and hat, the diamond, and a violet from the basement. He tucked the violet into his pocket and we climbed into the truck. We drove thirty miles to Metroform without seeing another person or car. “What’s S.T.A.R.?” I asked.
    He put both hands on the steering wheel. “What do you know about freedom?”
    â€œIt’s when you get to do what you want. Like me, right now.”
    â€œBut you see, I already know what you want, because I articulated it for you myself. I’ve seduced you in the most wicked and shameless way, by telling you a story when you were alone and you couldn’t help listening.”
    â€œI don’t mind.”
    â€œS.T.A.R. is my family’s waste management company. I guess we’re best known for the secret tunnel from the Black Sea to the South Asian effluent containment bunker. Very rich, very evil.”
    â€œDo any of those places in the diamond still exist?”
    â€œThose shots were all taken on my family’s estate.”
    â€œIn Austria?”
    â€œNo, in Western Metro. It used to be a famous park.”
    â€œThen we’ll go to Austria. We’ll live there in your cave full of holograms or whatever it is.”
    He smiled and held my hand. The lamb woke up and stretched himself. The sun was rising behind us, making flashes of white run across the sky as the skyscrapers’ reactive armor fought off the solar wind. In a parking lot our ICBM was waiting.
    (End interlude)

    In Long Island City, addresses are assigned on a highly rational system. Anyone wishing to find 5-16 Forty-Seventh Road, for example, knows if he turns left off Fifth Avenue it will be the ninth house on the north side. Forty-Seventh Street is one block south, and runs the other way. The cold anonymity of the L.I.C. streets, where shopping bags blow like dead leaves past thousands of identical Greek superettes and shuttered Irish bars, and storm drains breathe an odor ofsewage as in the fictional work above, always seemed to me a portent of our common future. Through L.I.C. runs Queens Boulevard, eight lanes wide and arrow straight from Jamaica to the East River, lined with delis, lunch counters, and shops, with a stoplight on every block, so that never a pedestrian is run over but with his entire family, seven in one blow, and always by a driver whose license has been suspended 127 times. Really. Read the New York Post for a week and try counting the Queens Boulevard dead, keeping in mind that they report only accidents involving babies in strollers or vehicles that jump the curb.
    Yigal stood up,