Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh Read Free Book Online

everything. The lights in the front hall and the living room had burned out. Every once in a while I collected my father’s cans and bottles, his disordered newspapers which he read, or pretended to read, at the top of the stairs, letting page after page sail over the banister and drift down into the front hall. That night I snatched up a few pages—we got the
Post
—crushed them into tight balls, and threw them at his back while he stood at the sink.
    â€œHi, Dad,” I said.
    â€œSmart ass,” he said and turned and kicked the crumpled newspaper across the floor. In all my twenty-four years of knowing him, I don’t think he ever said “Hello” or asked how I was. But some nights when I looked particularly tired he might have asked me, “How are your boyfriends? How are all your boys?” I really only ever sat down at the kitchen table long enough to eat some peanuts and listen to him complain. We ate a lot of peanuts, Dad and I. I warmed my hands on the stove. I remember I wore these thin black gloves with green flowers stitched along the fingers. In my ridiculous self-denial I did not buy proper winter gloves for myself. But I liked those black ones with the flowers. Women still wore gloves then. I didn’t mind the custom. My hands were thin-skinned, sensitive, and always ice-cold anyway, and I didn’t like touching things.
    â€œAnyone new they drag in?” Dad asked that night. “Polk’s boy faring all right?” Polk had been in the news recently, anX-ville cop killed by his own son. My father had known him. They’d been on the force together.
    â€œPaying for his sins,” I replied.
    â€œGood riddance,” said my father, wiping his hands on his robe.
    The mail sat in a pile on the counter by the stove. The
National Geographic
was rather lackluster that month. Several years ago I found that same issue in a used book store—December 1964—and have it here somewhere between all my books and papers. I doubt a thing like that is valuable fifty years later, but to me that magazine feels sacred, a snapshot of the world before everything in it changed for me. It was nothing special. The cover shows two ugly white birds, doves maybe, sitting on a cast-iron fence. A holy cross looms out of focus above them. The issue includes profiles of Washington, D.C., and some exotic vacation destinations in Mexico and the Middle East. That night, when it was new and still smelled of glue and ink, I opened it briefly to a picture of a palm tree against a pink sunset, then slapped it down on the kitchen table, disappointed. I preferred to read about places like India, Belarus, the slums of Brazil, the starving children in Africa.
    I handed my father the letter of warning from Officer Laffey and sat down for a few peanuts. He waved the letter in front of his eyes and tossed it in the trash. “Just for show,” he said. The delusions he suffered from were the most effective kind—everyone played a role in his conspiracy theories. Nothing was as it appeared. He was haunted by visions, dark figures— “hoodlums,” he called them—that moved so fast, he said, hecould only see their shadows. They’d duck under porches and hide in dark spots and in bushes and up in trees, and they watched him and taunted him, he said. He’d thrown some snowballs out the window that day just to let on that he knew what they were up to, he explained. The police had to admonish him to make it look like there was nothing fishy going on—just an old man losing his mind.
    â€œThey’re in here, too,” he said about the hoodlums, waving his finger around at the house. “Must be getting in through the basement. Walk around like they own the place. I’ve heard them. Maybe they’re living in the walls, like rats,” he said. “They sound just like rats, in fact. Black ghosts.” He was tortured by them day and night, so his