Read Online The Strangers' Gallery by Paul Bowdring - Free Book Online

you.”
    Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. Tears were now running down his face. He got up suddenly, said “Désolé,” and ran out through the large stone gate. I turned over the newspaper, the
International Herald Tribune
, and read the stark headline: “John Lennon Shot.”

    I’ve found the card that Anton sent me the next Christmas, with a note and a small photograph enclosed. It’s the only correspondence from him that I can remember. As I said, I never throw anything away. In the photo, he is standing by the roadside with his bicycle. One hand rests on the handlebars, the other on his hip. He is wearing a blue plaid shirt, jeans, and his customary black shoes. Except for his traveller’s beard and the camping gear on the back of the bike, he looks as if he’s just out for a Sunday cycle, not a grueling trip across Europe. He’s wearing a broad white headband with black letters, and a red spot on the front that looks like a wound. Directly behind him is a cluster of old stone buildings, one with a bell tower and a terracotta roof. It looks like a monastery, half-hidden in a grove of thick green trees. Above the bell tower in the near distance are undulating pale brown hills, and beyond them a range of shadowy blue mountains.
    The note reads: “The thing I am wearing on my head is a gift from a Japanese friend I meet in Spain. Two Japanese girls I meet in Bremen told me that the letters mean, ‘I will do my best,’ and that is what I did this summer coming up through Europe. I hope that I will some time see you again.”

4. DR. WINS
    You can’t tell the mind of a gull.
    â€”Newfoundland proverb
    A nton doesn’t seem to sleep at all. When I got up tonight to use the bathroom, which I seem to do more and more these days, his light was on again and he was reading and smoking. Still, he doesn’t sleep in—he is always up before I am—and never naps. But I fear he’ll burn both of us to death in our beds.
    I have a great fear of fire, a childhood trauma, though the tragedy was another family’s and not my own. When I was ten years old, I watched our neighbour, Mrs. Foley, being restrained by two men twice her size, as she watched her two children, a four- and five-year-old, burn to death in her neighbour’s house. Mrs. Murphy’s darling boy, my friend Rodney, a veritable Harry Houdini at ten, who already in his short life had escaped death by drowning and electrocution, had poured a container of white gas into the wood stove, turning the kitchen into an instant inferno. The gas, a solvent, was being used by his father in renovating their bathroom, and had been stored under the kitchen sink. The house had literally exploded in flames.
    Mrs. Foley had left her children with Mrs. Murphy while she walked down the road to the grocery store. It was a cool and windy afternoon in late August. Fall was already in the air, as was talk of another school year. Mrs. Murphy had just lit the stove for supper, and was out in the garden taking her sheets off the line when she heard the noise and saw the smoke and fire. She called the volunteer fire department from Mrs. Foley’s, but they were slow in responding. Not that haste would have mattered, in any case.
    Rodney had miraculously escaped through the basement door, just as he had, the previous summer, miraculously avoided drowning after climbing and falling from the flagpole at the stern of the boat that was taking him to visit his grandmother on Fogo Island. “Landed on the back of a bluefin and he dropped me off on the beach,” Rodney used to say, when, years after the event, people were still asking him about it. Or, “Fucked a mermaid and she carried me ashore,” and other scurrilous variations. The truth was that he was a good swimmer, and a speedboat crossing right behind the ferry, driven perhaps by one of the same reckless kind as