Killing Time in Crystal City by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

about it. It’s the fact that this time he is doing the puffs of smoke, the hymns in praise of his own evanescence, for the purpose of making me disappear.”
    He got up off the couch and walked toward me, and I only then realized I had walked and ranted, paced and panted, until I had taken up a kind of defense position in front of the TV screen.
    â€œNo,” I shouted at him. “Stay there, I mean it.” I believed they were fists I had created there at the far ends of my arms as Jasper advanced, breached my defenses, and gave me what I could only guess was a mighty fatherly hug.
    â€œIt was his fucking Robert Frost,” I said into Jasper’s shoulder.
    â€œOkay, pal,” he said patting my back with increasing firmness, which must have been the technique for bucking a guy up. “I don’t need to understand every damn thing you say in order to be supportive.”
    â€œ Home is the place where, when you have to go there/they have to take you in. Robert Frost. He gave me that, goddammit. He planted it right inside my skull, and right inside my rib cage. He knows.”
    â€œThough, in fairness,” Jasper said tentatively, “he did take you in.”
    â€œLike hell he did,” I growled, and simultaneously felt him go stiff and then loosen his grip.
    I turned just in time to see my father evanesce, out of the doorway, up the stairs.

GOOD IDEA
    M y uncle’s no-guests rule strikes me as a pretty decent cruel-funny joke since at this very moment the only active member of my invite-a-pal-over list would be him.
    So it’s natural enough that I am headlong on the path to rectifying the friendlessness situation. I feel the strangeness of the key in my pocket, withdraw it, then pause staring at the dangling brass beauty hanging off the end of the moose-head key chain. This constitutes one of the simple pleasures I plan to enjoy in the new life I’m composing for myself. It had been six months since I had had my own key, to let myself in if I was curfew transgressive. Not only do I not now ever have to sleep on the porch, I can come home to my own, empty place. Mine.
    As I stride the street I have a shiny black Montblanc in one pocket, a key in another, and something of a waddle to my walk because dammit, I ate every last bit of Syd’s beautiful beast breakfast and it feels like it will be with me for some time. Because Kiki Vandeweghe doesn’t skip the most important meal of the most important day.
    Crystal City indeed.
    I passed through a good bit of the city when I bumbled around trying to find Syd’s place, but I couldn’t really say I saw it. As I retrace much of it now it begins opening itself more fully and I begin entering it for real.
    It’s not quite as polished as the name might imply. There are lots of shiny parts, that’s for sure, with some blocks being completely unbroken strings of neon-and-video shopfront windows. I like the fact that some parts of the commercial zones are a complete jumble of different businesses like cheap electronics next to a tarot reader next to a shoe shop next to a holistic medicine and massage therapy shop. I like the fact that that district is followed immediately by another block that is all about motors—used cars, car repairs, car parts, motorcycles, and biker gear.
    I like the fact that the city is large enough to even have zones. Ass Bucket was just one zone.
    When I feel I’ve picked up enough of the city’s bars and restaurants and gyms and playgrounds full of guys like me just sprung loose for the summer, I catch a whiff of the river not far off. I follow my nose until I reach it. It’s a canal, actually, and I walk along the towpath between the water and the hip-high dry grass for a while. I feel like a big cat, all stealth and stalking, as I walk into the sun and toward the bus station.
    It is the only idea I have, other than to walk aimlessly and endlessly for the rest of my life