Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel by Donald Antrim Read Free Book Online Page A

adrenal glands, lung tissue, and genitals seemed momentous. To be sure, the Foot has its place in myth and legend; it carries psychohistoric weight. In our culture, the Foot as Symbol is not unimportant. Nevertheless, for me, at that point in time (hours, only, since Meredith’s initiatory ichthyomorphic trance experience with its insomnia-inducing implications concerning self-identity and marital compatibility—“It’s like sex, Pete. Once you’ve entered that other body, you’re always there, even when you’re not. I’m not a coelacanth, I’m a person and I’m here, this is where I am, this is who I am. I’m Meredith. But I’m a coelacanth, too.”
    “Can I become one, can I come with you?”
    “That’s the thing, Pete, you have to be there already, and you weren’t. I’m sorry, honey.”)—at that point in time, as I was saying, Jim’s frozen foot seemed perfect for an inaugural burial excursion. I could figure out how to do things right, and not rush. I could work out the funerary process, the digging and lowering into the earth and chanting of sacred texts, in a more relaxed way with a foot than with probably, say, a heart. Yes. With the foot I had an opportunity to get comfortable with the ritual aspect of nighttime burial. Later I could progress to Jim’s frozen hand and the more difficult (symbolically speaking) internal parts. The viscera.
    I figured I’d just chuck the slightly freezer-burned foot in a knapsack and walk around town until I came to a place that felt right for burial.
    I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and the bright purple knapsack containing Jim’s cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some fig bars for a snack. The darkness that night was total; clouds obscured the stars and moon; the only light descended from streetlamps spilling pools of white over damp leaves of roadside shrubs, shiny parked cars, and the road itself, where I walked alone over gravel that crunched underfoot.
    At Wisteria I turned left toward town. I passed a vacant lot, which I rejected because of a chain-link fence I’d have to scale, and because several lamplit windows in surrounding houses gave easy viewer access to that neglected, overgrown locale. After a while I came to the Chamber of Commerce. Here I turned right onto Water Street, which is where Meredith’s mother lives. No lights on at Helen’s bungalow. I hurried past Meredith’s mother’s Oldsmobile, and continued on to where Water dead-ends into Osprey. Right on Osprey would lead me to Jerry Henderson’s. I went left. A sea breeze was blowing up the road. Osprey Avenue runs all the way to the ocean, about a mile, but I didn’t want to go to the ocean; I desired dark soil for this virgin implantation, not grainy wet sand overrun with fiddler crabs. So at the next intersection I veered right off Osprey and walked along Pompano Place. Here were more and more elaborate pits; every householder along this moderately wealthy drive had installed one. And there were walls bordering Pompano too: cinder block, coral rock, and timbers solidly rising, garnished with barbed wire and alarm-system warning decals.
    At the end of the street sat the home of a former pupil, a boy named Ben Webster who, years before, had distinguished himself with a science fair essay on Annual Coastal Erosion Due to Global Temperature Shifts and Resultant Polar Ice Cap Meltdown Contributing to Rising Sea Levels.
    No light shone from the Websters’ palm-shrouded house girded in electric fencing. I passed by and entered the gumbo-limbo hammock known as Turtle Pond Park.
    But let me briefly pause. Let me take a moment before starting on what happened that night with the foot, the candles, and the book, to reflect on the many things that had brought me to this point, this