Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

Bremen described the week’s work at the farm—the subtle beauty of his Fourier equations across the chalkboard in his study and the sunlit satisfaction of planting a peach tree by the front drive. He shared memories of their ski trip to Aspen and the sudden shock of a searchlight reaching in to the beach from an unseen ship out at sea. He shared what little poetry he had memorized, but the words kept sliding into images and feelings.
    The night drew on, and Bremen shared the cold clarity of it with his wife, adding to each image the warm overlay of his love. He shared trivia and hopes for the future. From seventy-five miles away he reached out and touched her hand with his. When he drifted off to sleep for only a few minutes, he sent her his dreams.
    Gail died just before the false light of dawn touched the sky.
    The head of the mathematics department at Haverford urged Bremen to take a leave or a full sabbatical if he needed it. Bremen thanked him and resigned.
    Dorothy Parks in the psychology department spent a long evening explaining the mechanics of grief to Bremen. “You have to understand, Jeremy,” she said, “that moving is a common mistake made by people who have just suffered a serious loss. You may think that a new environment will help you forget, but it just postpones the inevitable confrontation with grief.”
    Bremen listed attentively and eventually nodded his agreement. The next day he put the farm up for sale, sold the Triumph to his mechanic on Conestoga Road, and took the bus to the airport. Once there, he went to the United Airlines counter and bought a ticket for the next departing flight.
    For a year Bremen worked in central Florida, loading produce at a shipping center near Tampa. The next year Bremen did not work at all. He fished his way north fromthe Everglades to the Chattooga River in northern Georgia. In March he was arrested as a vagrant in Charleston, South Carolina. In May he spent two weeks in Washington, during which he left his room only to go to liquor stores and the Congressional Library. He was robbed and badly beaten outside of the Baltimore bus station at 2 A.M . on a June night. Leaving the hospital the next day, he returned to the bus station and headed north to visit his sister in New York. His sister and her husband insisted that he stay several weeks, but he left early on the third morning, propping a note up against the salt shaker on the kitchen table. In Philadelphia he sat in Penn Station and read the help-wanted ads. His progress was as predictable as the elegant, ellipsoid mathematics of a yo-yo’s path.
    Robby was sixteen, weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds, and had been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. His mother’s drug addiction during pregnancy and a placental malfunction had shut off Robby’s senses as surely as a sinking ship condemns compartment after compartment to the sea by the shutting of watertight doors.
    Robby’s eyes were the sunken, darkened caverns of the irrevocably blind. The pupils, barely visible under drooping, mismatched lids, tracked separately in random movements. The boy’s lips were loose and blubbery, his teeth gapped and carious. At sixteen, he already had the dark down of a mustache on his upper lip. His black hair stood out in violent tufts, and his eyebrows met above the bridge of his broad nose.
    The child’s obese body was balanced precariously on grub-white, emaciated legs. Robby had learned how to walk at age eleven but still would stagger only a few paces before toppling over. He moved in a series of pigeon-toed lurches, pudgy arms pulled as tight as broken wings, wrists cocked at an improbable angle, fingers separate and extended. Like so many of the retarded blind, his favorite motion was a perpetual rocking with his hand fanning above his sunken eyes as if to cast shadows into the pit of darkness.
    He did not speak. His only sounds were occasional,meaningless giggles and a rare squeal of protest, which sounded