Cubop City Blues Read Free

elephant, then. I was becoming annoyed by her criticisms. In truth, I had never seen a live elephant—only pictures in the encyclopedia and that stunning photograph in Hunting in Africa —at close range, so I had no sense of the true size of the animal. I continued. Wracked by grief, Miss Priscilla Gordon, née Winkley, moved to Calcutta and became a Hindu mystic and devotee of Ganesh.
    Cornelia pursued my queen. She was relentless.
    Is that your story? she asked.
    Yes, I said, leaning over the board to see what she’d done.
    There is no climax, no great revelation. A story is like love. It rises to a peak of intensity, then comes back down to a state of rest. You must give me more.
    I had no idea what Cornelia meant, but in time I learned she was right. Once upon a time you didn’t exist.
    Mate in three moves.
    Once upon a time someone tried to kill you.

A KNIFE ENTERING
THE BELLY
    H e hasn’t known anything like it. There is, first of all, the quick movement of the arm toward his midsection and the flash of metal that protrudes from the balled-up fist. It is the knife blade, of course, and almost simultaneously he knows he is powerless to stop it. He hears an almost inaudible tear as the blade rips through the cotton shirt he’s wearing, and then he feels it slice up into the belly through the three layers of skin and into the thoracic cavity. His instinctive reaction is to bend forward and stand on the tip of his toes to keep the blade from going farther. But it is too late for the maneuver. The knife is all the way to the handle, where it stays a moment, then withdraws through the peritoneum, the subcutaneous fat, the dermis, and the epidermis, leaving behind a space that is quickly filled with a burning sensation, like a hot fluid, like blood. There is no pain yet, just a sense of being violated and his head bursting with anger and in his mouth the salt of indignation. He raises his eyes to look at the man’s face, but he has already turned away and is fleeing down the street. What? he thinks. What?
    He starts walking in the direction of home, and after a few steps his legs grow heavy and unbalanced, his breathing short and insufficient. He doesn’t fall so much as float himself down to the sidewalk and sits leaning against a newspaper box. There is a fire in his belly and every breath he takes feeds the flames. He unbuttons his shirt, which is damp and heavy with blood. Each button is an ordeal; each movement of his fingers as they push the buttons through the holes contains all of the pain he has felt in his life to that moment. The wound’s small size surprises him, and even in the semidarkness of the city street he can see the blood puddling around the edges and a loop of blue intestine that is protruding through the opening. A wave of embarrassment comes over him and he pushes the intestine back into the stomach. It is not punctured and he is grateful for that. At the same time he thinks that if someone doesn’t help him soon he will die, here on the dirty street, the only illumination the copper light at the corner, the only solace the fact that he is dying in the city he loves.
    A figure walks by taking fast, loose steps. He mumbles something in the direction of the figure, but there is no response. After some time a couple stops and they bend over him. He can barely raise his eyelids over the balls of his eyes, and his lips and tongue are stuck together with a gummy substance that fills his mouth. The man looks into his face, which must be as pale as the moon right now, and says to the woman, Guy’s on some heavy-duty shit. He takes her by the arm and they move quickly away.
    He prepares himself to die by looking at the darkened liquor-store window in front of which he has fallen. In one corner of the display is a magnum bottle ofVeuve Clicquot, the champagne he once poured over Amanda while she lay in the bathtub. Amanda, the rat, whom he loved beyond expectation,