Read Online You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe - Free Book Online

By a black piano leg, from the bottom of the beige wainscoting, tiny mental Karl looked out at all he could see. He saw the distressed body of Karl, limned in angry electricity, that bruised, puffed, agonized face so astonishingly unsympathetic. He saw Jones in pressed leisurewear, stooped and ruddy, the fragile body incommensurate with the prodigious energy that ran through it whose provenance was a mystery to rat’s-eye Karl and to the one of full stature.
    The map was furled on the wall above Jones. He reached up the way old people reach up, their skeletons remade by time to reach only straight out or down without strain. From the top of the Tower of Pisa four hundred years before, Galileo Galilei had proved the earth’s gravitational field acted equally on objects of unequal size. It had perhaps not occurred to the great astronomer to investigate how gravity acted on the young animal versus the old: this was where gravity revealed its inherent bias. Rat’s-eye Karl, who was curious about the human species but did not participate in its cumbersome allegiances, detected on the face of real Karl a kind of impractical sympathy for the old man, a sadness on his behalf, a mourning for all those for whom reaching things a foot above their heads was onerous, which nonetheless did not neutralize his dislike of the man, ratcheted up now to hostility by events some of which were non-Jones-related. The map Jones pulled down with a groan startled Karl.
    “Have you read the Koran?”
    “Is this a quiz?”
    “I’ll take that as a no. Have you read the Bible? Cover to cover, I mean?”
    “God.”
    “That’s a fairly accurate one-word summary, yes, that’s a succinctly delivered book report. How about the Bhagavad Gita? I’m just saying I find these to be important and interesting texts, I like to have them around for easy reference. The indigenous Malaysians are largely Muslim, and if you know anything about migration patterns throughout history it’s not hard to imagine how that happened. I like in any case on my annual pilgrimage to Malaysia to stroll the factory floor and engage my subcontractors in a discussion of the finer points of Islamic law, known in Arabic as sharia , if I’m pronouncing that right, which means ‘path to the well,’ and is relevant for anyone doing business in that part of the world, since it presumably regulates aspects of life as diverse as banking and sex. There’s an old joke about banking and sex that I won’t tell right now since you’d have to know a fair amount about both to appreciate it. Now you look perturbed, that was not my intention. Here’s this map, in any case. Now, where’s Malaysia?”
    This was a different map than the one that had hung from the wall of this room in his youth. This was a cruel kind of map with no names or national borders inscribed on it, just a six-foot-wide picture of the world flattened out and seen from above, with the top of one’s head oriented northward, of course, and one’s genitals, knees, and feet off to the south.
    “The God’s-eye view of the world,” Jones went on—and rat’s-eye Karl would have contested this, had he a voice—“but not if you don’t know geography. Come on, you’re an educator, you’ve got to know this. You don’t know this? Do you really not know this?”
    Karl wished Jones ill.
    “Let’s narrow it down, let’s eliminate as many landmasses as we can that are not Malaysia. America you can presumably pick out. You know where Europe and Africa are. Can you point out all the places where Europe ends and Asia starts? China? Japan? Australia? India? Indonesia, for that matter? If you get Indonesia it’s a hop, skip, and jump to getting Malaysia. I’m just, look, this is fun, isn’t it? Geography is fun. Knowledge is fun and greater command of the facts might improve your self-esteem, you seem a little depressed lately, and by lately I mean since I met your mother a dozen years ago. This is humor, I say it