Read Online Talking in Bed by Antonya Nelson - Free Book Online Page A

his next appointment, going through a neighborhood he shouldn't have been anywhere near. How had he wandered so far? Thinking and, more alarming, not thinking. It was the not-thinking that worried him, the lapse of consciousness—as if he'd taken a nap on his feet, to wake way down on Wabash, transported deep into the South Side. He'd come to with a squawk, reversed himself like a soldier, located the defaced street sign, and then hastened north until he could hail a taxi. He felt like a befuddled old man, exclaiming to his indifferent driver over the startling terrain.
    The last thing he'd had consciousness of was the word
bound.
Two of its meanings, he'd realized, were opposite: to progress and to be restrained. His legs had trekked forward while his mind went spiraling around an etymological corkscrew.
    Shouldn't a man wonder, after such an event, if he was qualified to oversee the mental health of others, even those whom society has deemed economically unfit and therefore expendable? Maybe all he should ever do was build wheelchair ramps and babysit preschoolers.
    Less disturbing was his current new habit of testing his emotional state, asking himself in many different daily situations how he felt. Angry? Happy? Contented? He found himself annoyed not only by the heightened consciousness this imposed on each and every moment of his day—as if he were his own biographer, narrating his life in order to find its point—but by the fact that most often he answered himself with
Nothing. The man walked aimlessly,
he told himself.
The man felt blank.
As if sedated. As if that scrim of significance that had previously sheltered him had been lifted, leaving him flat, without affect. As if the backdrop to his drama had disappeared. He'd wakened down in a neighborhood that had always scared him, one that he'd prohibited his sons from even thinking about entering, but, disallowing his anxiety about how he'd gotten there, he discovered himself not very concerned about actually standing there. His fear of getting shot or mugged or even heckled had evaporated.
    The man was asking for it,
he thought.
    "I don't care," Marcus had repeated like a mantra between the ages of three and four, to which Rachel had always responded: "You know what happens to boys who don't care? A lion eats them."
    Ev envisioned the open mouth, the big cat's ring of teeth like a sparkling ivory cage. Did the man care?
    Was it the fact of his father's death that left the man without meaning? Had he needed the example of his father's unhappiness to see the scale of his own happiness? Had his life been a sort of taunt directed at his father? Or was he imagining his own death, the point at which his sons would be glad to see the man go, would gladly press a pillow over his face? The probability profoundly depressed him. He felt the cycle of the generations, how his own place in the great turning wheel had been nudged that much closer to oblivion. His living was not giving him much pleasure—nor much pain, it had to be granted—and aside from the grief his demise would cause his sons and wife, he had little to keep him from simply lying in the street and letting something large and diesel-powered crush him, put him out of his not-misery.
    Was it his father's dark cruelty that had kept Ev a kind person? Had he lost his barometer? Had calibration so surprisingly left his life? And why didn't he want to tell Rachel about it? What preposterous self was he indulging, safeguarding?
    Thus Ev entertained himself between clients ail day this late spring Wednesday. Outside it thundered; the electricity kept trying to snuff itself. Lights flickered; the signal buzzer sounded erroneously and halfheartedly, like a misfiring synapse. His office was as familiar to him as his home; it held plenty of amenities for making him comfortable, for padding his behind, for soothing his senses, for bathing him in restful light. He had a stereo and a hotpot, a Persian rug and