Read Online The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw - Free Book Online Page B

he seemed to have discovered some peace in the idea that there was nothing left to achieve, only the maintenance of daily ritual. He must have smothered his fantasies of what his life should be, of what it could have been; there was only what it was, and that would have to be enough.
    His father was saying that what had happened to Chatham was now happening to everybody else, but for even stupider, greedier reasons and on a scale beyond anybody’s comprehension. He filled the tumblers.
    â€œRest in peace, Lehman Brothers,” he said, tossing the whiskey back.
    Simon looked at his own glass, then drank it down.
    Michael refilled the tumblers: “Rest in peace, Bear Stearns.”
    Down went the whiskey.
    â€œRest in peace, Merrill Lynch.”
    Only after the third toast did Michael allow himself a smile, and then Simon knew what this was all about. Let others suffer what Michael had suffered. This was a wake, but like all good wakes, it was also a celebration.
    Sometime later, the whiskey bottle nearly empty, Simon stood up to leave. The kitchen tilted and pitched; he hadn’t realized how drunk he was. It was exhausting to think of trudging to the subway, of sitting through the endless ride back to Roosevelt Island.
    â€œYou can spend the night if you’d like,” Michael said, as if reading his thoughts.
    â€œI have class tomorrow.” The lie slipped easily out of his mouth.
    â€œI’ll drive you to Manhattan in the morning,” Michael said. “I have a few things I need to do in the city anyway. How does that sound?”
    Simon was too drunk and tired to object. The linen closet smelled as though it hadn’t been opened in years, and perhaps it hadn’t. Upstairs a layer of dust coated the hallway’s floorboards. In Simon’s old room, his bed had been pushed into the far corner, the mattress bare and yellowed. His desk was in its old position, but on it sat a new desktop computer and three large ring binders labeled “RECEIPTS,” “MORTGAGE,” and “BANK.” A metal filing cabinet that looked as though it had been salvaged from the street was wedged against the desk, and a rectangle of corkboard had been tacked to the wall.
    But the conversion to an office had been abandoned halfway through. The bed was still there, and also Simon’s bookshelves, lined with the spines of thirteen years’ worth of a progressive Catholic education:
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
, Aristotle’s
Poetics
, Caesar’s
Commentaries on the Gallic War
,
Ethan Frome
,
1984
, as well as the usual lineup of battered science and math and Spanish textbooks, purchased thirdhand at the annual St. Edmund’s book fair. Michael lurched over to the bed, onto which he dropped the stack of sheets and pillows, a cloud of dust billowing into the air.
    Coughing, he thumped Simon on the shoulder. “Sorry about the clutter. Sleep tight.” He closed the door behind him, his hacking following him down the stairs.
    Simon made up the bed and pulled down the window shades. He turned on the desk lamp and turned off the ceiling light, and then he sat there, on the bed, in the half dark. His body was tired but his mind suddenly awake. The whiskey made it a useless, chaotic awareness, a head full of randomness. He took a book off the shelves and could make no sense of the words. He gave up, turned off the desk lamp, and lay back on the bed.
    After a sleepless hour, he turned on the lamp again and looked around the room for some way to pass the time. He’d learned long ago that he couldn’t force sleep, couldn’t trick or trap it. He got out of bed and sat at the desk. He stared at his bulbous reflection in the computer’s convex screen. He turned the machine on. There were no icons on the desktop. No files, no programs whatsoever. Simon searched the Start menu and found that his father hadn’t even installed an internet browser. It seemed the