Read Online The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko - Free Book Online Page A

the back plate.
    â€œCan it be fixed?”
    â€œYour name?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI will need your name. For pickup.”
    â€œIt can be fixed then?”
    â€œYes. In just a few hours.”
    â€œTell me
your
name first.”
    â€œMy name?” He looks to her now.
    â€œYes. You asked for my name. I ask for yours.” There is defiance in her stance, her shoulders set square with a slight lean forward.
    â€œAustin Alexandrovich Voronkov,” he says, his eyes back to the radio.
    â€œYour name is as long as a Mexican’s.” She gives a little laugh.
    â€œIs that so? And you are?” he says, his eyes meeting hers, which are round and large, nearly black. She is very beautiful. Dark hair like the smooth gloss of a black Cadillac, the eyes intense and eager in their deep hollows.
    â€œAnarose Luisa de Soto.”
    â€œDone in an hour,” he says. Brusque. In no mood for pleasantries. The sting of the consulate’s rejection still so fresh. These past few days, he’d felt the world itself was closing in on him, his sight lines narrowing to his very feet—one foot in front of the other. These repairs, simply a trade by chance. He, falling through positions, stations in life—engineer, inventor, repairman. When he lines them up, thinks of the transitions from one to the next, it is enough to cause vertigo. But he can remember how easily all this began. A Kodak camera. Next a transistor radio. Then a fan. Several fans left overnight like offerings placed at an altar, though the altar was merely Austin’s boardinghouse room door—five to six fans lined up like retired airplanes, the steady cross breeze from the hallway windows enough to spur a lazy rotation of the opaque charcoal or iron blue propellers. He sets the radio to the side, writing
Anarose
on a piece of cardboard. When he looks up, she is gone.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    A T 2 P.M . HE PACKS up his work, folds the table, and places his tools into the metal box. He carries the table under one arm, toolbox cradled in the other. He enters his shop, open to the street, setting the table against the front wall before locking the door and walking two doors down to his boardinghouse. He takes the stairs up the three flights to his room. Ten years already that he’s been here. He never imagined he’d have such a place, need a somewhat permanent home in which to reside. Can he call it home? No. It is not home. Not that.
    He makes his way up to the third floor, counting the stairs out of habit. At the twenty-sixth step, he enters his hallway and counts the remaining ten, or sometimes twelve, paces to his door. His rooms are cooler, as if they’d taken a deep breath in the colder morning air and had been holding it in all afternoon just for him, just so that he can return to a cool, comfortable place, while outside is in its usual state of brightness and dust.
    He pours himself a glass of water from his still full jug and drinks half the glass in three gulps, the temperature lukewarm. He sits at his makeshift drafting table and opens the new package of paper he’d purchased earlier that morning. Once out of its brown wrapping, it has the same familiar scent of mothballs and freshly cut wood. He sweeps away the small dusting of eraser shavings that has congregated along one edge of his table. Next, he lays the paper down and it feels good beneath his hands—his palms across the cool white surface, admiring the flecks of brown pulp, some pink, as scattered and haphazard as the stars in the night sky.
    The paper, for Austin, is most important. The texture and feel, the way the pencil scratches slightly across the page. The paper holds on to the lead a bit. It doesn’t slip and slide so that his hand must struggle to keep the lines in place. If anyone knew precisely to what kind of lengths he goes to secure such paper—once erasing twenty pages of drafts of old ideas to