Stabs at Happiness by Todd Grimson Read Free Book Online Page B

not see where clouds end and sky begins. The boundaries between blue and gray have disappeared.
    Mark comes out of his office, deep within the brokerage. He wears a lemon-yellow shirt, a blue knit tie, gray slacks, brown oxfords and dark blue socks. He sees a young woman talking to Carol, the receptionist, evidently applying for a job. The young woman is blonde, with the kind of vaguely Slavic features Mark has previously imagined as sexually ideal. He lingers to get a better look. She has on black tights. Mark imagines the flesh of her thighs. She’d never understand him. It would never work.
    The belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than the surviving predatory culture. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of cause and effect and move events in an inscrutable manner.
    The car is ivory-colored, with shining chrome. Wire wheels. Wine-red leather seats. Note the distinctive hood ornament. The car’s left-turn signal comes on/goes off/comes on as the vehicle slows to a stop.
    A song goes through her mind. She can’t get to the end of it. How does that little part go? She hears singing, along with an amplified beat which threads its way, distant pulse from a faraway star. It fades out and picks up again, with only a semi-momentary glitch once more at the start.
    The children are digging, building riverbeds, setting up their little plastic figures. Thoroughly engrossed, they want everything to be perfect before the violent end of the world.
    Empty buildings. Concrete. Suspended black wires. Telephone poles. Gravel and weeds.
    Anna Mae Richmond, 83, has been evicted from a house 157 years old, so that a new on-ramp to the freeway may be built. Anna Mae turns on her call-light but no one comes. They’re not interested in walking down the hall. They’re talking about the break-up of someone’s romance.
    In all relations with the other, one’s behavior is at first exploratory, almost random… later contacts modifying and redefining variables until some kind of an interim crystallization can occur.
    A cobalt-blue elevator, not part of the structure, but a temporary external addition for the benefit of the workers, slides up the side of the building-in-construction. A man in a hard hat is looking at something. Hammering noises, then the giant echoing buzz of a machine. Layers of sound. Harmonics. Cars, trucks, buses passing by. Honk of a horn. The wind is blowing. The big noise stops. It starts again. Half-audible voices, words lost in the wind.
    James takes Mary into a room and asks her to sit down on a wooden chair. Mary suspects she is going to be criticized for her recent lack of enthusiasm. “Do you realize,” he says, “that through your attitude you have allowed Satan to come into this house?”
    The modern airport is beautiful and well-planned. Listen to the music in the long shining corridors. Look at the runway. Look at the brand-new pieces of luggage. The tower, with its arrows and lights. The runway. Here comes another jumbo jet.
    Sarah chooses the can of tomato sauce because of an attractive illustration on the label. She pushes the silver shopping cart onward up the aisle, past an old woman who is staring, seemingly abstracted, at the vast selection of canned soups. A man with a curly black beard walks past, humming to himself. Sarah’s mind goes blank. Should she buy some cheese?
    She doesn’t like his friends. He doesn’t make enough money.
    A rat is placed in a box with two compartments, one of which has
White
walls and a grid floor, the other
Black
walls and a wooden floor. The rat explores both parts and shows little preference between them. Then it is placed in the
White
compartment and given a strong electric shock through the grid