Read Online Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joe Dunthorne
Tags: Contemporary
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auto-self. Eventually, after weeks of struggle, Don was ableto kiss and receive kisses without making preemptive smoochies.
Except something of it remained: a ghost of the sound, the impulse but without its audible counterpart. She became attuned to Don’s repression of the noise and, lying in bed in the dark, knew with just as much clarity when she was about to feel his lips and the swish of his beard against her. In many ways, this was more distressing than the original kiss-kiss noise. The sound was gone but the idea lived on, made bigger, more upsettingly complex; a process between them.
She read the same line in her poem again and again. The line was “That is the way with amputations.” Recently, she’d been finding that if Don got to sleep before her, then she stayed awake, preoccupied by the light pan-pipe moods that whistled from his nostrils. She used to say how much she liked the chords his sinuses played, but not now that they kept her awake. When she was not sleeping she worried about her son.
More and more, she was seeing Albert skulk off to the workshop or pottery shed, both of which were far enough away to make it difficult for Freya to casually pop by to check on him without having some genuine reason for doing so. It had been Don’s idea to take Marina and Isaac out of the big house (since Janet was shortly to reclaim her room) and put them into the workshop’s spare room. Publicly, he said it would give them independence—“You can be your own family unit”—while remaining within the communal fold. In truth, he wanted to keep Marina at a distance. Don complained she was “too intense,” but what felt likeoverintensity to an adult felt to a child like that person was actually listening.
Although it was tempting to casually dismiss, as Don had, all her talk of a galactic eclipse, Freya preferred to understand the idea first and then be able to reject it definitively. A
know your enemy
sort of thing. Her online research showed that supermassive black holes did exist and that our spiral galaxy did indeed have one at its center: Sagittarius A*. It was invisible; dramatic photos from the Chandra satellite observatory showed where it wasn’t. An article on the NASA blog, written with, she assumed, preteen astronomers in mind, said the “SMBH” was “hungry” and “gobbling up all-comers” and that “beasts of its kind” had the power to “bend the space-time continuum.” NASA didn’t go as far as mentioning the end of days, but Freya wouldn’t have been totally surprised if they had. This was science trying to compete for the attention of the young imagination. But when she searched for “galactic eclipse,” that’s when the real nutters emerged: GaiaMind.org and ProphetsManual.com.
The communal desktop computer was in the attic and had a button next to it that allowed thirty minutes of access to the Internet at a time. For Albert, this meant that he took his access seriously, going up there with a list:
solar flares (12 mins), galactic equator (10 mins), knife-vest (8 mins)
. Freya’s concern was not just that he believed in the same things as Marina but that her beliefs were gateway beliefs into the vast, unquenchable fruitiness of cyberspace.
All this had come together to convince Freya that she ought to remove Albert from the community for a time.That she also needed a break from Don was just a lucky symmetry. The simplest and cheapest solution was to go to the roundhouse, a twenty-minute walk away through the woods; not much of a holiday destination, but it would give him (them) a little breathing space. The roundhouse was made of cob, which was, put simply, mud. It had originally been built as an educational tool: a group of visiting undergraduates on a Sustainable Built Environment degree had assembled it over four days, spent two nights in it, then tried to take it apart again. It was a testament to the hardiness of cob housing that destroying it was more hassle than
Except something of it remained: a ghost of the sound, the impulse but without its audible counterpart. She became attuned to Don’s repression of the noise and, lying in bed in the dark, knew with just as much clarity when she was about to feel his lips and the swish of his beard against her. In many ways, this was more distressing than the original kiss-kiss noise. The sound was gone but the idea lived on, made bigger, more upsettingly complex; a process between them.
She read the same line in her poem again and again. The line was “That is the way with amputations.” Recently, she’d been finding that if Don got to sleep before her, then she stayed awake, preoccupied by the light pan-pipe moods that whistled from his nostrils. She used to say how much she liked the chords his sinuses played, but not now that they kept her awake. When she was not sleeping she worried about her son.
More and more, she was seeing Albert skulk off to the workshop or pottery shed, both of which were far enough away to make it difficult for Freya to casually pop by to check on him without having some genuine reason for doing so. It had been Don’s idea to take Marina and Isaac out of the big house (since Janet was shortly to reclaim her room) and put them into the workshop’s spare room. Publicly, he said it would give them independence—“You can be your own family unit”—while remaining within the communal fold. In truth, he wanted to keep Marina at a distance. Don complained she was “too intense,” but what felt likeoverintensity to an adult felt to a child like that person was actually listening.
Although it was tempting to casually dismiss, as Don had, all her talk of a galactic eclipse, Freya preferred to understand the idea first and then be able to reject it definitively. A
know your enemy
sort of thing. Her online research showed that supermassive black holes did exist and that our spiral galaxy did indeed have one at its center: Sagittarius A*. It was invisible; dramatic photos from the Chandra satellite observatory showed where it wasn’t. An article on the NASA blog, written with, she assumed, preteen astronomers in mind, said the “SMBH” was “hungry” and “gobbling up all-comers” and that “beasts of its kind” had the power to “bend the space-time continuum.” NASA didn’t go as far as mentioning the end of days, but Freya wouldn’t have been totally surprised if they had. This was science trying to compete for the attention of the young imagination. But when she searched for “galactic eclipse,” that’s when the real nutters emerged: GaiaMind.org and ProphetsManual.com.
The communal desktop computer was in the attic and had a button next to it that allowed thirty minutes of access to the Internet at a time. For Albert, this meant that he took his access seriously, going up there with a list:
solar flares (12 mins), galactic equator (10 mins), knife-vest (8 mins)
. Freya’s concern was not just that he believed in the same things as Marina but that her beliefs were gateway beliefs into the vast, unquenchable fruitiness of cyberspace.
All this had come together to convince Freya that she ought to remove Albert from the community for a time.That she also needed a break from Don was just a lucky symmetry. The simplest and cheapest solution was to go to the roundhouse, a twenty-minute walk away through the woods; not much of a holiday destination, but it would give him (them) a little breathing space. The roundhouse was made of cob, which was, put simply, mud. It had originally been built as an educational tool: a group of visiting undergraduates on a Sustainable Built Environment degree had assembled it over four days, spent two nights in it, then tried to take it apart again. It was a testament to the hardiness of cob housing that destroying it was more hassle than
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