Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter by Michael J. White Read Free Book Online

and how mathematicians have to be more responsible than regular people because mathematicians who make mistakes can accidentally blow up the world. Then all of a sudden a piano comes flying down and kills him and starts playing ‘One Is the Loneliest Number.’ ”
    “It’s not funny if you don’t know the song,” Katie protested, barely loud enough for me to hear.
    “I know the song,” I said, sliding to the center of the seat. “It’s Three Dog Night. My dad used to play their albums all the time, especially on the drive to my uncle’s place in Cedar Falls.”
    “You don’t keep any Band-Aids in your car?” Katie said, slapping the glove compartment shut. I noticed that the splotch marks on her neck had almost cleared.
    “Saa-haar-reee,” Emily said, heading south down 128th Street, obviously deciding it best to drop her sister off before me. But as soon as we reached University Avenue Katie started explaining what little homework she had, and how she thought she remembered running out of skin repair lotion, “the stuff that works like a miracle and that you’ll never find on your own because it comes in a small tube they usually hide in those big Walmart bins filled with a bunch of non- skin care products [ deep peasant sigh ], and the bottom line is that you might as well keep driving, I’m sure there’s a Walmart nearby wherever George Flynn lives.” Emily didn’t argue, even if she wasn’t exactly with us anymore when Katie started flipping through radio stations at a pace just slow enough to leave me believing that each turn of the dial was her last. After scanning the entire FM selection she turned it off, opening the glove compartment and dedicating the following minutes to tender compact disc massage, invoking a frozen quietness that she commanded like a general’s silence for his mutilated soldiers. After adjusting the bass, treble, and volume controls, she chose her track and was already lounging and perfectly relaxed when we heard the first twinkling notes of “Riders on the Storm,” in my opinion the greatest road tune of all time. Emily changed lanes, looking over her shoulder and meeting my eyes just long enough to let me know everything was all right. She reached over and pinched her sister’s thigh.
    “You sure aloe is the best thing for a cut like that?”
    Katie didn’t answer. She was busy feeling it with her eyes closed and the wind in her hair, playing Ray Manzarek on the keyboards, the bony fingers of her right hand dancing over the dashboard where I could see them perfectly timed, tapping the notes just right. I caught her checking my reaction in the side mirror, peering out behind thinned eyes and draped lashes. I had the feeling if I proved myself to Katie Schell, I’d never have to prove myself to anyone ever again.

Seven
    In the face of such an authorial tag team of feminine artists, armed with respective Old Soul wisdom and modern savagery, my first reaction was to eschew all sentimentalities in order to reinvent myself as an avant-garde realist, or at least a scientific-minded critic, both of which assumed a departure from my past as a quixotic bush leaguer always swinging for the fences. But I already sensed Emily’s faith in me—a gift uncommonly bestowed, especially in light of her recently battered sense of male trust—and yearning to bring me into the fold of her privacy, which at this point I imagined was real estate well lorded over by her younger sister. While I had little intention of according Katie more power than she already possessed, I admit a brief attempt to prove myself the sort of radical, older friend who’d never pull a punch for the sake of courtesy, the kind of guy who understood that people who described themselves as “physically challenged” were just gimps surrounded by obtuse, run-of-the-mill optimists. I spent a good deal of the following month attempting to arrange three-way dates for such edgy entertainments as underground thrash