Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page A

irresolute in my dissolution. Gazing up at blue from my island, I’d begun to wonder how near that sky was. Whether it was some ceiling, perhaps a tissue I could rend with my fingertips if I only reached up to try.
    Georgina Hawkmanaji and Richard Abneg sat side by side in the center of the largest and whitest of the couches, a kind of centerpiece around which we’d deferentially arrayed: Maud and Sharon Spencer and I bunched at one end of a facing couch, with Reggie Spencer asleep, face propped, curled knuckles indenting his sallow cheek, at the other; Thatcher coming and going from his terrific caramel-leather throne of a chaise longue, and Harriet Welk in another, smaller chaise, with Naomi Kandel camped out on the carpet at her feet—I spotted Naomi reaching casually to caress Harriet’s sheer-stockinged calf for emphasis at some point she was making, but this gesture was going absolutely nowhere, only being blithely tolerated by Harriet. (To be honest I was being similarly molested by Sharon Spencer, and it mattered as little.)
    It was Georgina’s and Abneg’s coming together that formed themain action here, a show we all consented to see slowed to a crawl by Georgina’s elegant jitters and Abneg’s distractibility. The show’s progress was slowed, too, even if sponsored, by the flow of Thatcher’s brandies. Our delight in the exhibition wasn’t unkind. It was simply a real pleasure to witness Georgina uncorked by Richard Abneg’s coarse, crazy appetite for her. In glimpses, between harangues on one subject or another, when he didn’t seem to notice Georgina at all, Abneg appeared not to believe his fortune. You’d have thought their sweet collision was Maud’s engineering—I envisioned her taking credit, with relish—only it became clear Maud couldn’t have known whom her new friend Harriet Welk would bring along to dinner.
    Abneg, somehow, had gotten onto the subject of a visit he’d made, some time ago, to Stonehenge. “You park in this little area, it’s across the road, and then you buy a ticket, just to be allowed to cross the street. There’s this underground tunnel, you mill through like sheep. And there’s nothing to do except trudge like that, all the way around the thing. They’ve got you in a kind of track, restrained from Stonehenge itself. You can’t go near the rocks. And that’s it. You trudge around single file in a circle, the thing looks a little smaller and less mysterious than you’d hoped, and you go back through the tunnel and maybe stop at the gift shop or the restroom, then back to your car.”
    “Unimpressive,” grunted Thatcher.
    “Well, sure,” said Abneg. “Totally unimpressive. I wanted to be like one of those apes in whatchamacallit, 2001 , by whatsisname, Kubrick, you know, kneeling in fear before those slabs, getting brain-zapped.”
    “I never saw 2001,” said Harriet. “It’s about apes?”
    “Ape -men,” said Thatcher helpfully.
    “They should change the name of that movie,” said Sharon Spencer beside me. “Since the real 2001 turned out so different.”
    “Listen,” said Abneg, with exasperation that we hadn’t caught his real drift. “I’m trying to tell you about the Stonehenge restroom. I had to piss, so I went in there, it was a completely modern men’s room, with all these floor-length ceramic urinals. They didn’t have the wit to arrange them in a circle, but the resemblance was obvious. And whereas everyone was jabbering when they walked around Stonehenge, all the moms bargaining with the whining children, in here the men were all silent, avoiding one another’s eyes. Each of us standing at a urinal or waiting our turn, and this profound truth comes over you, a feeling much bigger than anything available outside and across the road, which is that everyone in that restroom just did the exact same thing you did.”
    “Which is what?” said Naomi Kandel.
    “Looked at Stonehenge,” said Abneg. “And now you were taking a piss,