The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin Read Free Book Online Page B

hedges, under a street lamp, at seven thirty in the evening. I left him alone. I admired his gumption. The rest: I find out where they work and let their bosses know. I find out where they live and tell their wives. This, if not all things, is possible if you do your research and commit the time.

    This is my sphere of influence. I have drawn a circle around the homes, making a fine subset for my purposes. In its center, I have drawn a circle around myself. I cover myself with clothes. Somewhere, I am inside the circles, inside my clothes,
seeing with none but the relevant eye, the eye that sees within my worldview. Irrelevant eyes are elsewhere, living in forms of sight I’ve rejected. Outside are the larger circles of the housing development, the earth, the orbits of other planets, and who-knows-what. If God appeared, He would be a circle.
    When Spliff sneaks across my yard to have sex with Goody, I throw stones at him until he goes home, baying in circles. When Vivian’s mute daughter falls from her bicycle, I set her on the porch, ring the bell, and run away, the bike’s wheels still spinning. When Jeff and Amie ding the car, I spray paint a circle around it, so it can’t be missed. When the homosexuals begin to romance with the lights on, I close my shades so that they may have privacy, although, when I’ve had my nightcap already, I do allow myself to peek. Sometimes I spend the day making things for my house. I cut the bodice off an old sun-dress and sew curtains for the kitchen. I scrub the living room floor with sandpaper and paint it blue.
    I am twenty-seven and I have been crotchety for a good three years. I moved here when I felt it coming on, a fear that began with other people’s genitals, which are taking over the world. The fear filled me; a city of fear grew inside me, unarticulated, a mess of fear with outdated maps. I was, in fact, living in a city when I articulated the fear for the first time. It was all the people, trying to organize themselves into buildings but spilling into the streets, stepping all over one another, erecting and imploding, and worst of all, when they felt their humanity at its height, humanity in the form of lust or sentiment, extracting their sex organs and producing more of themselves.
    When it comes to genitals and humanity, I give the homosexuals a break, because I think they have promise. But I do
not give my parents a break, and I do not give myself a break, either. My parents have moved from this, my childhood home, to an identical house in another development, another cul-de-sac, another state. I think they had nothing to do without a mortgage. Three years I’ve come to this and remained. My parents send me money because I hate them so much. I tried—I have—to believe that it’s time for something new to happen to me, some new idea. But I have already heard all the ideas. They’re towered in the city of my fear. And I swear, I never get over it, the prospect of cleaner space, wider spheres, consequent mass widenings of individual existences. It gets me gaga, floats my boats, recharges my engines when I imagine it, so I work on my scheme for reduction, which comes down, plainly, to people. It’s not the genitals as such that I mind, so much as the minds behind them, and what is done. A gun is not really a gun unless it’s shot, you know.
    Jonathan Swift thought of this, more or less, when he proposed feeding the destitute with sick and starving children. People thought he was serious, but then smarter people caught up with his irony. Smarter people still, like me, know exactly what was going on. Swift knew he was right, and he knew the futility created by the condition of the biologic human heart: the heart says, “You can’t kill people,” and the mind says, “It sure would be good for those alive.” I mean, it was a good idea .
    So I work on my scheme, which involves the identification of pressure points on fault lines, the poisoning of potato chips, the