10 by Ben Lerner Read Free Book Online Page B

mornings Alex, who tended to get out of bed before she was fully awake, would be halfway to the kitchen to put on the water for her tea before she remembered that Candice was dead. (I don’t know how I knew she briefly didn’t know, or how I could tell when the fact returned to her consciousness.) If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight—a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.
    â€œGround speed”—I sat, my back to the park, waiting for the city to reabsorb me, holding my breath until the exhaust from a passing bus dissipated. The beeping of a reversing FedEx truck became Bernard’s heart monitor. I began to say the words aloud, joining the thousands of people in the city talking to themselves at that moment, repeating the phrase until ground began to sound like the past participle of grind —as if velocity could be powdered, pulverized. It made me think of instant coffee.
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    There were still piles of books on my apartment floor when the protester arrived the following week to use my shower. He was a few years younger than I and taller, so much taller—easily six-foot-three—that he made the building feel smaller; he had to duck so as not to hit his head on the landing as he followed me up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. Was he Marfanoid? He set his oversized climbing backpack beside the door and sat on the top stair to take his shoes off before entering although I told him it wasn’t necessary, and while he did so I could smell a variety of odors: sweat, tobacco, dog, the must of his socks. I asked him how long he had been sleeping in the park and he said a week, but that he’d been at one encampment or another across the country for more than six weeks. He’d been picked up at his door in Akron—he had been living in his parents’ basement—by a caravan of protesters he’d made contact with on craigslist, just as craigslist was being used to connect protesters with people in the city who would let them use their bathrooms. He smiled his disarming smile without interruption. Did I go to Zuccotti a lot? he asked me.
    It was eight or so, the time I normally had dinner, and I asked if he was hungry, explained that I couldn’t really cook, but was going to make some sort of stir-fry, and he said sure. It was only when I got the towels that I’d washed for him out of the dryer—my apartment had a small washer-and-dryer unit in the closet—that I thought to ask, a little embarrassed by the luxury, if he wanted to wash any clothes. Definitely, he said, and I showed him how it worked; he got his backpack and emptied the clothes it contained into the washer, but wore what he had on into the bathroom.
    When I started chopping vegetables I realized I wasn’t really hungry, had probably thought to cook just to have something to offer and because I wanted some activity to undertake while my bathroom was occupied. I opened a bottle of the lawyer’s wine; Alex had given me several. I put on red quinoa to boil and found some tofu in the back of the fridge that looked okay and added it to the broccoli and squash while the garlic and onions simmered in the oil. From the kitchen I could see steam escaping from the bathroom door. I put my phone into the little speaker dock and instructed it to play The Very Best of Nina Simone —I wanted to drown out any sounds he might make before showering that could embarrass us.
    While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person—I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so. I’d cooked with