Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online Page B

spoke, his voice heavy with anticipatory dread.
    'Only when we fuck,' she said. 'And for the past few months, not even then all the time.'
    'See it through,' Conrad whispered to Aaron. 'This is the chance to get into all the closets that you've kept locked all these years. Let everything out, let us see you, and then you can see yourself. And stop being so hung-up on whether that chick wants to fuck somebody else besides your precious self/ He waited for several seconds and then added the appellation with full irony. 'Man/ he said.
    As though he had known it all along, as though he had been aware for years that he would be doing what he was about to do, with an air of mordant resignation, he brought his lips down and pulled the capsule off the palm of his hand and into his mouth. He had seen that in his profoundest part what he needed most was to take a single decisive step, to do something irrevocable. With a sense of rueful calm he picked up a glass of tea and cider and washed the drug into his stomach.
    Little Signs In Lava Flow
    They had been like a person in whom an infection was festering, but who was afraid to let himself be sick, to let the illness run its course so the body could rid itself of its poisons. They continued to shape their relationship into normative forms, wordlessly hoping that by assuming the social shapes of content they could bring their psychological states to heel. For Aaron, the need to identify himself with the image of success as defined by the worldview of his parents, warred with the impulse to break loose into some as yet unmapped territory of life. Like an explorer who follows a stream with desperate faith that it will lead him to an undiscovered realm, and yet fearful of luring himself into a savage place which holds nothing but a violent end, he navigated the cycles of his existence. Cynthia, whose origins lay in the sprawl of a large proletarian family whose children saw new clothing only at Easter, reached for the middle-class respectability her mother had held out as the greatest salvation she could aspire to in this lifetime. But she shared with Aaron the spark of rebellion, the sign that the truths born of exhaustion and struggle, the dim wisdom that the previous generation had fashioned out of its defeat, were not to be accepted, even if it meant years of wrestling with their total conditioning. Their move to Berkeley was the last effort to surrender to the patterns which had been programmed into them, a final attempt to escape the fierce worm of discontent that thrashed inside them.
    They took a place in an old wooden house, a handsome building which had once embraced a single family in gracious style. Over the years, with the growth of the university, it had been bought by a developer and subdivided into four erratically shaped flats, one having access to the attic, one with a bath and closet tacked on like two snails to the outside of the structure, and the two downstairs apartments facing one another through a wall as dramatically incongruous as the one which sections Berlin. With the more recent onslaught of what had come to be called Man-hattanisation, the building had been marked for destruction, to be replaced by a six-storey square concrete tomb whose sprawl would involve the destruction of the spacious back yard, and all the trees, bushes, flowers, grass, insects, worms, and microscopic life it supported. A neighbourhood effort had, four years earlier, won a zoning regulation which temporarily delayed the victory of the bulldozer, but the owners still champed at the bit, pouring time and money into a constant corrosive effort against the status quo, knowing that sooner or later the people would drop their vigilance, and the proper city officials be persuaded; then the venerable home could be destroyed.
    Their neighbours ranged from the very old to students; oddly, there were no children on the block. Bank tellers and radicals shared facing views of the street. Aaron and