Read Online Rage Is Back (9781101606179) by Adam Mansbach - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t answer right away. He thought about it, weighed the options, saw he had none.
    â€œWho is he?” he said at last. “How’d he get here?”
    â€œI have no idea. He was here when I came. But he might be my father.”
    â€œWhat are
you
doing here?”
    Time traveling, dickface. “I had another drop-off in the building. Figured I’d see if you needed anything, long as I was in the neighborhood.”
    Patrick leaned into the hall. “
That’s
your father.”
    â€œLike I said. Maybe.”
    â€œYou were—”
    â€œI know what I was doing.”
    â€œYou’re not gonna hurt him any more, are you?”
    â€œI’m done. Come on.”
    I could have borne the weight myself, but I didn’t want Patrick alone in his apartment, growing the balls to lock or rat me out. We draped the dude’s arms over our shoulders, hustled him inside, and lowered him into the bathtub. His eyes fluttered open once when we lifted him, once when we set him down. Otherwise, he was dead to the world.
    â€œTurn it on, turn it on, save us,” Patrick shouted into the towel he’d wrapped around his face.
    â€œOkay, but I’m warning you, he might spaz out. No telling.”
    â€œI don’t care.
I’m
gonna pass out if I have to smell him any longer.”
    â€œYou got anything to eat? He could probably use some food.”
    â€œAll I’ve got is beer. But I can order something. There’s a new Thai place on Water Street that just opened. It’s supposed to be—”
    â€œDude!”
    Dude as a complete sentence is one of the best things I’ve learned from white people. It shut Patrick up, and I stared at him until he bumbled off to reconstruct his telephone and contemplate whether the fucked-and-filthy prefer prawns or chicken in their curry.
    I don’t know how long I sat on Patrick’s toilet, staring at the bum in the tub. The fact that I’d attacked him had become incomprehensible; finding that anger now was like searching the ocean for a broken wave. The fortitude to do what lay ahead—to touch this man, strip him of his rags, meet his naked body with my eyes—was unfathomable. My body begged for sleep, that most reliable of cop-outs, and I felt my eyelids dip to halfmast. Unbelievable. A lifetime of wheedling information and poring over blackbooks, and
this
is the moment I choose to decide nah, forget it, my daddy ain’t shit, I got nothing to say to dude, our business here is done? What kind of fucking punk was I, if I couldn’t man up for this?
    I stood, rifled through Patrick’s medicine cabinet until I found a pair of scissors, and cut from the waist to the neckline. Three layers of fabric gave with ease, so soft I could have torn them with my hands. I stepped back, realized I was holding my breath, exhaled. Took another one, and held that too.
    There was a travel-pouch strapped to his sunken, sunburned chest, the kind paranoid German tourists tote their passports around Times Square in. I crouched, sliced it off him, retreated to the toilet and tried to work the zipper. The metal was full of grit, so I just slit the whole thing open and shook the contents onto Patrick’s floor, covered in tiles so tiny and white they looked like baby’s teeth: a dozen miniature cut-glass bottles full of different-colored saps and powders, amber and pale-green and gold, and a Ziploc bag, the contents wrapped in a shred of checkered fabric.
    I stared down at all of it awhile, then forced myself back over to the tub. I tossed away the scraps of his shoes, grabbed the jeans by the cuffs, and yanked. They slid easily off his hips, and his tan came with them; below the waistline he was paler than Darth Vader’s head. I glimpsed the snarl of pubic hair, turned before I saw more. Spun both faucets until water chugged into the tub, opened a bottle of liquid hand soap sitting on Patrick’s sink and emptied