The More You Ignore Me by Travis Nichols Read Free Book Online

acrack, shoulders thrust back, and then, with gusto, as if I were a Barnum of the Information Age, I pull back the curtain in front of my forehead to reveal my vision):
    After checking to make sure the oven is off, the toaster unplugged, and the back door to his “stylish” apartment locked (for you see his mania for control extends to the smallest detail!), Chris Novtalis will, on June 9, 2009, at 8:07AM, drive out to the suburbs to pick Nico up from their mother’s drab den of routine conformity.
    Together, then, they will start out for the country wedding.
    Nico will sleep in the backseat, snoring lightly, waking every hour or so to change the CD on the scuffed purple Discman his father gave him for his fifteenth birthday (choice detail!). Chris will have unrolled the windows as they drift outside of the city, letting the air wash over him. (We know that even in early June, the city still feels as if it could collapse under afreak snow, because everything there in that city, even the smell of the air, seems tentative, overly cautious, politically correct, does it not? Down here, in the country, everything feels as if it has been in bloom for months, yes? Confident! The air sashays! Let’s take a breath and fill our lungs with this purity before we continue.
    (       )
    Nico’s mop of dark curly hair will emerge from the comically filthy backseat of Chris’s Honda “Civic.”
    â€œI’ve been getting into Mingus lately,” Nico will say (see him clicking a new compact disc in place, snapping the lid shut!). “But you have to have generous ears to really, you know, get it.”
    (Of course we respect Nico for his interest in jazz, but we can only cringe at his manner of speaking about it—“you know,” “like,” “kind of,” and so forth. Oh, how his commentary clangs against my refined sensibility! Does it surprise you, community, that I would call my sensibility refined? Surely it does not, for my sentences contain musical phrases, my paragraphs obbligatos, my arguments tone poems! Do you doubt me? As I sit here typing, I hum and sway. Certainly you too, by your own will or no, hum and sway along with me? Cashed?!?!? never!!!!!)
    May 16, 2009 7:15AM
    Kate: omg! This guy is soooo out there?! Is he somebody’s uncle?
    May 16, 2009 7:17AM
    Cousin_Kevin: dnftt
    May 16, 2009 7:19AM
    Bob_A: What’s that you say, “Kate”? Out there? Space is the place, my dear! Maestro! Another scene! (The curtain, boys, the curtain! Unleash the forehead!):
    In the rearview, Chris will see Nico flash the broad, open-mouthed smile friends used to call “boyish” but now we know looks more like a Trans-Am that has been supplemented with Bondo. That is, rough. Why his parents never allowed him braces is beyond comprehension. That Charli Vistons wants to settle down with Nico surely baffles the best man, chafes his sense of self. But Chris has his plot laid out perfectly. Charli will marry Nico, but Chris will not be denied his due. He will **** her. Soon. Excited, Chris will mash the accelerator with his hoof.
    â€œNico, why don’t you get an iPod?” he will say, lashing out, conspicuous consumer, unwitting marketer for Steven P. Jobs that he is. “It’s not like these compact discs are high fidelity.”
    (Chris’s voice is as thin as his character. It is, I imagine, an insufferable baritone that somehow travels through his nose before his mouth, then comes out in a haughty hack. Sickening.)
    Nico, bless his heart, will make sea lion–like noises as he settles his bulk down in the backseat. He will (rightly!) dismiss Chris’s suggestion with a wave of his hand and begin a reverie.
    â€œ I saw a Mingus tribute once,” Nico will say in his characteristic mumble. “At the Drake Metro. Right before they played the encore, the saxophone player said, ‘This song goes out to the ladies . . . because