Four New Messages by Joshua Cohen Read Free Book Online

Chancellor for a coffee. Did she want it iced? Indubitably. Anything to go with that? No that will be all. It was like a phrasebook come to life. What a terrifically executed textbook exchange, why thank you.
    Emmanuelle wore mosquitoeye sunglasses, a tshirt whose logo read Brand, her skirt never showed lines, no underwear map.
    While she waited for change her phone rang, she took the call (from friend R., poli sci major, public health minor, in the midst of a shaming crawl back from a date the night before with a 33 year old iBanker in the city), skimmed milk into her coffee and half a packet of artificial sweetener without bothering to stir.
    At the testudinal traffic light she crossed.
    College students driving adult cars, vehicles actually too fancy for any adult and perhaps better never driven. They drove them impulsively, alternately absent then reckless as if they already had jobs to get to.
    Nassau Street laid the boundary of campus.
    Em caffeinated while walking, hollowing her cheeks, pursing for suction then chatty again. Such oversize overactive labials. Let’s imagine the waves radiating from her phone—what if they were visible? what if they were colored by her mood? Rainbows, refractive rainbows. Wavelets of talk coursing through the air, coursing daily through our own ears and mouths and minds—yet we’re never privy to that talk. Or we’ll become privy only when it develops into tumors on the brain.
    Retail gave purchase to the quieter suburban.
    At a corner with a receptacle she stopped, sipped her last, tossed the coffee inside—not a trashcan but an empty newspaper vending machine.
    The day was warming, still not warm enough for flipflops—Em’s thongs to soles athwack.
    She took two more blocks then rounded the corner: Victorians—two floors, three floors—windows that hadn’t been cleaned in failed semesters, porches in a slump. Stoops stooped. The lawns diseased.
    Em stopped to tuck phone between ear and shoulder, scratched in her handbag for keys.
    Enver crossed the street and waited at the bottom of the stoop until Em turned the key in the lock then he took the stoop in two steps and once on the porch gave her a smile of glittering fillings.
    She kept the door open for him with a flipflop. Thinking he was the roofer?
    She was still on the phone but on hold. (Her friend’s banker date had called, the slut beeped over.)
    Enver entered, held the door.
    She had a teensy stud in the left naris, a diamond pimple.
    He waited for her to check mail.
    Yes? Em turned to say, flicking hair into a quote behind the uphoned ear.
    Enver closed his eyes.
    He couldn’t talk while looking at her sunglasses.
    What do you want?
    She flipped shut her phone.
    He said, I want you to change your blogs—opening his eyes only after remembering what Marjorie had told him—I want you to take what you say on your blogs about Mono Man down.
    Excuse me?
    She dropped the coupons received to the vestibular rug.
    And then, he said, to send email saying this was wrong and made up by you to everywhere also.
    Also?
    Linked, he was straining, posted.
    That’s impossible! flipping open the maw of her phone, with hardbitten pink polish pressing three buttons then the most commodious, Send—and when she repeated, I want you to know how impossible that is! Enver knew she was stalling, for time, to call, the police.
    He swiped at her phone, knocking it to fade its ring through the air as she kicked him with a flipper all gawky, sending her off balance—tricky this kicking in a skirt—and though he put out a hand and caught her before she fell, which must’ve been his attraction to her, which must’ve been his, he knew the word from the only other language he knew besides this minimal language and Albanian, tendresse (there was so much his brother didn’t know that came to light in court: he’d labored a full year in Marseille), with his other hand he made a fist and punched her, driving his knucks into her skull cradled by