The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld Read Free Book Online Page B

all run in the same tongue-dangling-from-mouth manner, and they look past me, as if they aren’t interested in me at all, as if they are just having a little trot, a midmorning constitutional.
    Yet we are—I am—being hunted. Did coyotes begin hunting humans in broad daylight when they ran out of cats?
    When I turn back to the jogger, the coyote in front of me is gone and I see the jogger’s shapely posterior just a few strides ahead of me. I seem to have accelerated.
    I can pass the woman, leave her to her fate, but instead I decide to stop her and warn her of the situation. Perhaps we can trot to my house, or to my car, drive to have coffee, laugh about our moment in the food chain.
    But when I reach out to touch her arm, she jumps and slows down, removing her headphone from one ear.
    â€œCoyotes,” I say and jerk my thumb over my shoulder.
    She looks over her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”
    I look back again.
    The animals have vanished.
    I suddenly see the situation from her point of view: bedraggled, somewhat hairy and wild-looking pedestrian comes out of nowhere and accosts her, claiming a nocturnal animal is stalking her at eleven a.m.
    â€œDon’t you dare touch me,” she says, “or I’ll Mace your face.”
    Her right hand comes up with a pepper-spray bottle, which she fires at my head.
    I gag, cough, and sprint forward just to get out of the cloud of gas. “You said ‘OR,’” I gasp. “You said ‘OR I’ll Mace you.’ And I didn’t touch—”
    â€œFuck you, subprime,” she shouts and runs ahead.
    My face hurts, the inside of my nostrils, my throat, my esophagus, my larynx, my mouth, my tongue, everything is stinging, burning as if I have been submerged in Tabasco. And the more I breathe, the more I burn.
    I lie down on the grassy berm between the curb and the sidewalk, trying to take shallow breaths, trying not to breathe at all, waiting for the pain to subside.
    But it never really does.
    IN MY OFFICE THERE IS a metallic desk covered with paper that is itself coated with a layer of soot, the sediment left by the thick clouds of particulate smog that back up against our mountains, turning the sky its orange-brown, the leaves gray, even giving my snot a black tinge. The soot is piled so thick where the desk meets the wall that it has made a small filth dune. My corner office faces east and north, there is a cocktail sign for the bar downstairs on the outside where those two walls meet, a red neon cursive that blinks on at dusk. I have a metallic bookcaseand a metallic chair with a rust-colored seat, all of this furniture the surplus of a local tool-and-die company bought by the Chinese decades ago.
    I am surrounded by self-help professionals. There is a life coach next door, a blond woman of indeterminate age with an impressive bust who makes her visitors take off their shoes and leave them beneath a stool outside her office. There is an immense black woman next door to her who drives a dune buggy and practices some sort of aromatherapy. There is a woman who wears sandals and works in an office with a sign on the door that says “Creative Success Strategies.” I’m not sure what any of these people actually do, but there’s apparently a huge business in seeking to assuage the bad feelings of the many.
    I sometimes feel like stopping their clients and telling them that they feel bad because things are actually getting shittier. “It’s not you. It’s the whole world.” But I just walk past them to my office, where I drop my backpack and then go out to the men’s room to wash more pepper spray off my face.
    I have a career. Or had one. I am something of a fluke in that I make a living from writing: list articles, stories for longform fetishists, books every so often. I was fortunate in that I started when journalism was a vast and thriving field: I was a writer for Time and then